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Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done (theregister.co.uk)
Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that. It's meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work. "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
"Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." - Thomas Edison
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/genius-ratio/
Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.
And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.
Available to you. Mainframes have made extensive use of both since the early 80s, at least. The hard work was done, it was just done in an environment that relatively few people interacted with directly.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
386BSD initial release: March 12, 1992 Linux initial release: September 17, 1991 Unless you're suggesting Linux wasn't bootable for about half a year after it was released, your claim is false.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
No, ideas are a dime a dozen. You probably come up with a dozen ideas every hour, from the mundane to fantasy.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, but great ideas are rare.
No idea is great, until you've actually built something and put it out in the world. Moreover, 'great' is a subjective, hand-wavy term, so it lacks analytical usefulness.