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Linus Named in Upside's Elite 100
Gary Franczyk
writes "Apparently Linus Torvalds was named one of the
top visionaries in Upside's Elite 100 list
of most influential people in the computer industry."
He's the only "Visionary" that didn't get his picture on that
page. So sad.
Microsoft, be afraid.
Agreed. With all due respect, Linus alone could never have made Linux what it is. He himself readily admits that Linux was a personal project that caught on among the Internet community...with no preplanned "vision" on his part.
Linus deserves credit and respect for the hard work he's put into Linux. Although I believe myself to be technically capable of the same feat, I don't believe I
would ever expend the effort he has without some sort of financial compensation. Kudos to Linus.
BUT, he *is* a minor part of the OpenSource movement, and OpenSource would have definitely flourished regardless of the popularity of Linux; there would have been alternative OS's. For example, there may have been a larger interest in the GNU's HURD that would have accelerated it's development. I could also invoke FreeBSD as a platform for OpenSource development, but zealots don't like FreeBSD's
license very much. Who knows, in another year I may take Linux off my system in
favor of BeOS. In any case, GNU is a superior contributor to OpenSource development. I will even go so far as to say that the success of Linux is largely based on the availability of GNU products.
He's a figurehead in an industry that loves to talk about buzzwords (last year=java, this year=linux) that they don't even know what they mean.
Remeber when people were saying that Java would kill Microsoft? Now Windows is the most popular platform for creating and running Java apps. A strange world.
Don't worry about Linus getting #9. Upside magizine is to silicon vally entrepreneur wannabes and daytime traders as Bop magazine is to preteenage girls (assuming equivalence between their knowledge of technology and the girls' knowledge of music). It sucks more than Wired.
l
The open-source movement is cool, but Unix and clones are 1960's technology. The API is so ugly it's not even funny. Plus look at all the security holes that keep appearing. Windows is worse, but so what.
I wish all the linux zealots would invest their energies in some modern, open-source operating system instead.
Uh, hardly.
:)
Unix has been recoded, changed, updated, etc etc so many times. Linux was built from scratch, and isnt much like any *nix out there.
Its APIs are somewhat similar to most other Unices out there. All of which happen to beat NT hands down.
NT isnt a leader because its a better product, its a leader because its simply marketed better/microsoft's position.
I know several people who want to change there WindowsNT LAN to "60s technology Linux" but can't, due to the fact that Microsoft has brain washed the corperate gearheads, into thinking if you dont have NT, you are not functionable.
Unix technology, its an oldie, but a goodie. And its changed so much. I have an old copy of AT&T Unix System V R3.2 for the 3b2. It is NOTHING like the modern ones. Mostly everything has either been reworked from scratched, or modified sevearly.
PS: Microsoft Windows98 still has its root in good old MS-DOS, which has been around since the early 80s. And, Windows is more like DOS, then Linux is like Unix from the 1960s (infact, linux is NOTHING like unix from the 60s).
If you don't believe me, i can have thousands of people tell you your wrong. I'm suprised nobody has flamed you yet
Your ignore my points with unrelated topics. I already said that I thought Windows sucks. That is irrelevant though. We were discussing linux, not Windoze.
Sure linux performs well, but the API sucks. Maybe linux is a 90's OS under the hood, but it has a 60's API.
Modern OS's? Something like JavaOS?
No, something along the lines of Plan9 or better. Even the creator of Unix admits that Unix is not the end all of OS's. That is why he works on developing new operating systems.
Antibiotics are, what, an 1890's technology?
Old doesn't mean bad, even for computer technology.
>look at all the security holes that keep appearing. Windows is worse, but so what.
Yes, windows is really bad when it comes to security, but lots of security problems reported does not automatically mean a system is insecure. This is a common misunderstanding. Sure there are lots of reports of security problems in Linux as a consequense, but that can actually be a Good Sign. The very open development model of Linux makes it very easy to find and correct security holes. Linux is presently the most widely used free OS. Sure there are a lot of holes found and corrected, but all OS's have approximately the same "security hole density" in new code, but the final result depends on how the developers handles the problem.
The difference is that it is difficult (or at least expensive) for the Good People to get hold of the source code for non-free OS's and it is much, much harder to look for security holes in binaries. Ofcourse, crackers are often experts in reading dissassembled binary code (if not for any other reason, they also need to be able to crack various copy protected games). Most other people including probably most developers never care to learn howto read dissassembled binaries at all, and of those who really do, most are either crackers or hackers and most people (except crackers and some hackers) avoid reading dissasembeled code at all costs if possible.
So, if the source is free, sure, there will be a lot of securityholes found and corrected, fast. If source isn't free, no one except crackers will find the holes (and they will keep that knowledge secret as long as possible, secrect knowledge is power to them, something they can use to buy more knowledge from other crackers). Eventually ofcourse someone of the few Good People that can read dissassembled code, discovers that crackers have broken in and tries to find the hole, but then it's often too late.
And even if they find the hole, the company that wrote that buggy OS often tries to keep that knowledge from it's users. The company could loose money if it became known that their system has security holes. Further, companies generally need much more time to correct problems than does free software developers. Some holes in proprietary OS's are ofcourse too serious to keep secret and will be published anyway but far from all.
That is probably the main reasons why there seem to be much fewer security holes in proprietary OS's. There are holes ofcorse, but no one except the crackers (and sometimes the developers of the OS) knows about them. Lots of security fixes doesn't mean free software is less secure, it means that it is probably more secure.
Ask any security expert (almost) and they will tell you that the only way to solve the problems with bad security is to keep reporting the problems and to do it openly. Ofcourse it can be good to keep the details on howto exploit the hole secret from the broader public, at least until a patch is available and people have had resonable time to patch their systems. Linux is probably more secure than most systems out there, thanks to the many developers that are studying the sources and patches every week. All systems have security problems. Choose the one that has the most open peer review process so that the holes will be found fast by the Good People and not by crackers.
And whatever system you choose, always subscripe to the security advisories and always update and patch insecure programs on your system when needed if security at all matters on your system. When it comes to computer security, always remember: Be afraid, be very afraid.
Math is cool, but calculus is 1600's technology. Time to come up with something new.
Then quit whining and write one. Until you do, simply use what's available, have a Coke and a smile, and chill...:-)
Yeah, but the mathematicians have to learn
calculus first and everything they discover
later will probably be based somehow on that
knowledge
Yes, cars were invented before then, but cars as we know it really date back to the 1920's, with a few innovations tacked on in the 50's and 60's.
What's the point of griping that something is based on old technology? Old means that it has time to evolve, mature, and be tested. Linux is certainly many times more robust and powerful than the Unix of the 60's, just like even the cheap cars today are many times more safe and powerful than the cars of the 20's.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Well, that hopefully cleared things up a bit. Chaffing and winnowing, is of course, free to export under current US laws. It just goes to show you how stupid the crypto export controls are...
F0 07 C7 C8
There are some very interesting parallels
between the rise of the scientific community
back in the 17th century.
I expect we'll see more and more of these sorts
of lists populated by people of the Free Software
Movement. Yay!
---
Join The Altima Project: The free multiplayer online RPG development team.
Isn't that a female in the picture of Bill Joy?
Just out of curiosity... I am a CS person, and I would love to know what these "research" operating systems are... I would love to donate my time to them!
where is RMS? Sure Linus helped create the whole surge in the open source popularity...but RMS had the "vision" to start the the FSF, GPL...
I'd say he deserves the award more than Linus...
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
Oh no...someone from Microsoft was above Linus...let the flames begin!
Juiced? Or Not?
Why do these security holes keep showing up in unixes? Because Unix's security model is poor.
I'd be interested to hear exactly why you think this is true. Applications sit in user space, unable to do anything directly to the underlying system; they run under a given uid/gid with certain permissions to restrict what it is they can do. Sure, it might be nice in some cases to have something more akin to the Java sandbox - but at what performance cost - and what, really, do you gain? There are few security improvements you'd get from that, if any.
Also the API is fraught with problems. Just read through the man pages.... you'll often see stuff like "using this function is not recommended because it is insecure".
In which cases there are alternative ways of doing things. These calls exist for backward compatibility reasons - there are some useful programs out there that you might want to run. If you want to get a warning each time these get used, either check the source for those programs, or check a dynamically linked binary to see whether it calls any of them. Simply because there are calls which are inadvisable to use because they are unsafe does not cast doubt on the entire system - if anything, it reassures about its security-conscious facet.
Jeff Bazos, founder of Amazon, is the #1 most influential man in computing? Hmmm...the only thing noteworthy about Amazon is that they think it is okay to spam to peddle their books.
OK, they know a little...
However another entry in their list (#7) is
Ronald Rivest. According to their blurb:
"Also known as "chaffing and winnowing," RSA's method has been called the final answer on cryptography"
What has 'chaffing and winnowing' to do with RSA? Or did I miss something? Or do they not believe that someone can have two great ideas?
Slashdot is getting stale. This came out what, like a month and a half ago? Come on ppl.
First, a summary:
To learn about Unix, I suggest a look at the UNIX98 standard, available at http://www.opengroup.org/regproducts/xxm0.htm
To learn about the history of microcomputers and their operating systems, I suggest a look at:
http://web.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/comphist.htm
Now, my response to the post:
Hmmm...(looking at my car)... pneumatic tires, internal combustion engine... it seems to me these are pretty old inventions. These may not be precisely "1920's" technologies, but certainly much older than I am.
I must admit I am amazed by the assertion that automobiles are "easy to redesign from scratch and most manufacturers do so every few years." I further admit I am amazed by the implication that automobile development is not "saddled with backwards compatibility concerns."
This is simply untrue. The reason automobiles can be and are frequently redesigned is that most of the core technologies in existing products are refined and reused versions of existing technologies which have not been fundamentally altered. (This, by the way, creates a multitude of backward compatibility concerns.) While it is true that this process of refinement and reuse makes the development cycle of an automobile quite efficient, it is also true that this does not constitute "redesign from scratch."
Perhaps we should consider the words of Alexander Pope, whose ideas have not become obsolete with age:
"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange surprise
New, distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the tow'ring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;
Th' eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthen'd way,
Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!"