Slashdot Mirror
On-line Chat with Linus Torvalds
Scott Johnson writes "This Wednesday at 2pm, EDT, ABC News will be having an
online chat with Linus Torvalds. This should be very interesting compared to some of their previous guests... :-)
"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
That's not the way it works. Read the instructions. You get to ask all the questions you want any time you want, but they'll select the best 50 and ask him those questions at 2PM Wed.
The time was chosen carefully to be availoable to a large audience. ABCNEWS.com is trafficked much more heavily during the day (while people are at work, with high-speed internet connections) than in the evenings. The chosen time will be have the largest market penetration across the North American time zones.
-someone in Web Operations, Infoseek Corp.
hosts/producers of ABCNEWS.com
(and not a spokesperson for my company, so I'll
remain anonymous)
Welcome to reality. That's how the rest of the world sees Linux. It's just more techno-hype to most people. No marketing, only geeks. Would you listen?
oh, Linus...what kind of car do you drive?
oh, Linus...what's your favorite color?
oh, Linus...what sort of food do you eat?
...remember the MSNBC chat from a few months back?
heh.
**** DALLAS COWBOYS **** !!!!!
So everyone understood computers before iMacs came out? What are you smoking?
That could be a problem. I don't think the end result would be disastrous if everyone thought Linus designed every deb, rpm, etc etc himself sitting at college in Finland.
Maybe the hero-figure idea will be popular and misinformed people will go out and buy RedHat 6.0 at CompUSA and turn into Linux (considering it the whole OS: ``I love Linux's screensavers!'') advocates, which could be a better thing than having a fight among current users as how to give credit to certain groups or people.
One wonders if Linus' choice to offer Linux under the GPL was deliberately designed to prevent use of the innovations in the Linux code base by any but the GPL-side of the free software community. Not even the FreeBSD team has been able to take advantage of innovations in Linux's driver library because the license is so restrictive.
Why not transition to a freer license so that everyone can benefit from Linux and not just those from the GPL camp of the free software community.
Of course, that's 9pm for me since I live in Europe.. Goodie.. :)
I got the feeling that Chris Donohue tried to keep the interview at the reading level of a 3th grader (most news paper articles never exceed the reading level of a 6th grader). I, among several others, asked technical (but not overly technical) and kernel specific questions that Chris Donohue flat out refused to pass on.
I am glad that I got to see Linus at Comdex where Chris Donohue wasn't passing on questions about what car Linus drives and we got to actually ask questions that the Linux community would care about hearing the answer too.
In my opinion, ABC is a little bit of a higher class act than NBC and Chris Donohue. It is unlikely that ABC will also treat Linus like one of the Power Rangers. Don't be surprised if ABC doesn't encourage Linus to go into the details of writting SMP support.
Maybe he wants people other than Linux advocates to hear what he has to say, rather than preaching to the choir.
If Linus were a hero, I'd agree. But, he's not. Actually, he can sometimes be quite arrogant. :)
I'd prefer to find my hero-figure elsewhere. I do admire his work ethic though. Many, many, many CS students (perhaps many non-CS students) have the *ability* to do what Linus did. However, only a very, very, very small minority actually put in the effort. But even given the effort he put in, I find it laughable that he's being turned into a celeb. I vowed to remove Linux from my HD if Linus every makes an appearance on Letterman
I personally think the idea of many geeks banning together to make Linux is a more inspiring thought than one geek getting credit for what is (for the most part) other people's work. Linux as created by only Linus himself (without other kernel dev's support, app support from GNU, Xfree, etc) is not very awe-inducing. In fact, it would be useless. I would hate to see the hard work put in by other people get overlooked.
ref: hhtp://computer.org/computer/thompson.htm
He doesn't think Linux is stable, written very well, or will be around in the future.
"He doesn't think Linux is stable, written very well, or will be around in the future".
Kind of like Inferno...
Main points:
*thinks Linux is MS backlash.
Those of us that use (and in particular those of us that develope for) linux know better. MS-bashing is a part of the linux culture, but it's not the end-all and be-all of Linux. It's certainly not the reason why Linux exists today.
I couldn't care to persue the point further. Mr. Thompson (ooops, Dr. Thompson's) views on the matter are obviously unlearned.
* doesn't think it'll be successfull in the long run
If it works, people will use it. Bottom line.
* commented on source code, saying some parts good, some parts bad. Contributions by "random people" contribute to large variance in quality of code.
He's probably speaking about asthetic quality of code here. Simplicities of some algo's might make his academic mind cough. Other than that, I don't think he seriously studied the quality (functionally speaking) of the kernel. It *works* damn fine. If Dr. Thompson has found bugs, limitations, weaknesses in the code base, then he should bring them to light. Otherwise, his charges could be laid against any large system.
Linux quality is determined strictly by how it functions. No one cares about how the code is organized, documented, etc. That might be a very big issue for commercial organizations, but not for the open source community. They do a good enough job.
* Stated that Linux is unreliable, even less so than Windows. Linux is not ready for non-standalone machines: won't be good in firewall's, gateway's, embedded systems, etc.
Perhaps Linux is a bit too broad-scoped and immature to be used in his suggested applications. However, I have no idea how he determined Linux to be less reliable than Windows (let us assume he's talking about WindowsNT, otherwise let us all e-mail Lucent and implore them to send the man to a looney-bin). Then again, he never defined what it is for an OS to be reliable.. In general, Linux is on par with some commercial Unix variants, and most definitely with Windows.
Of all people, why is Linus doing one of those extremely annoying Java webchats? I can forgive this offense for computer-illiterate musicians who cannot figure out what IRC is, but I'm sure Linus knows how to work an IRC client.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by Mike@ABC:
OK, guys. I've read your complaints, comments, hopes and dreams for this chat, and I'm prepped to answer a few of your questions and hopefully ease your minds a bit, since I'll be the guy moderating the chat.
1) I will NOT post questions like "what kind of car do you drive?" or "do you like cheese?" I might throw in one personal-type question, but I'll make it as relevant and interesting as possible.
2) On the other hand, I won't post questions like "why did you hack the kernel this way when you could've done it this way?" followed by a stream of code incomprehensible to 99 percent of our readers. We're ABCNEWS.com, not a developers' forum. We want the chat to apply to as many people as possible, while remaining informative and on-topic.
3) We'll handle as many questions as Linus can answer. Our chat with Bob Young was indeed slower than I would've liked. Unfortunately, while Bob is a very nice guy and a savvy businessman, he doesn't type very fast.
Those are all the promises I can make, folks. We do, however, want this to be a solid, informative chat for not only you guys, but for the general public. The masses are starting to get clued in -- I had a doorman at the San Jose Hyatt ask me about Linux a few months ago -- and this is a chance for them to hear it from Linus himself.
So stop on by tomorrow and check it out. Or come back later that day -- we'll post a transcript. Thanks, folks.
Ahh, I see. Figured it was something small like that. Now it's time to go figure out why I got a 0 for my comment. hrm.
noooo!
here goes the old Linux vs GNU/Linux flamewar again...
0 1 - just my two bits
If I understand correctly, this is because Microsoft's browser and web page design software disagree with the rest of the world over how to encode backquotes. The result is that these show up as question marks on other browsers.
That, or else what everyone else sees as backquotes show up as question marks on Microsoft browsers. It's been a long time since I read the article that discussed this, so I'm hazy on the details.
Ask the above to most people these days and they now understand that it's what makes the computer work which is better than 5 years ago. Ask them "what's a kernel" and you'll get a blank stare. I'm assuming they need to dumb it down as to not scare people away. I agree that nit-picking shouldn't be initiated in the form of a GNU/Linux argument.
AC
Maybe the problem is that it was pushed before it was really good enough to let an idiot use it. You don't take a beginner skier on the big hills right away. You put them on the bunny hill, and have them slowly build up to the big hills. With Windows you are stuck on the bunny hill.
The basic lack of understanding about computers comes from the iMac. Those commericals with Jeff Goldblum say you use your computer just for e-mail and the net. And basically that is was most people do. You can use an Amiga to do that, if you wanted to. People don't care. I am starting to care. I want to delete Windows so badly.
Ebay went out for a few hours, and the world goes to hell for some people. Okay, Windows crashes stuff randomly and with more annoyances on average. This is the first time I've heard that Ebay had problems. Have you heard anyone ever say that about Windows?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - F. Voltaire.
I sat in on their interview/chat w/ Rob Young of RedHat last week...what a waste of time.... 9 questions in a 1 hour period.... and you have to keep hitting reload, etc._ bobyoung
You can see the interview at http://chat.abcnews.go.com/chat/chat.dll?room=abc
However, I find the basic lack of understanding among pop culture icons a bit alarming. Just as Linux bigots have "unix goggles" and can not comprehend the utility of a Windowz box; all to often the people on the street I talk to have little comprehension of any issue that does not involve their email.
Lately, I find most of the attention paid to Linux is on the novel side. As in, "Gee! A new flashy, shiny toy! Let's run a couple pieces, cuz everyone else is."
Not to downplay the fact that a pretty cool Uber Geek will be taking part of ABC's online forum, but I hope that it is approached with a sense of seriousness and professionalism...
Not reduced to
They call Linus the creator of the "Linux OS" when clearly he is only the creator of the kernel. People are going to get this idea that one single college student sat down and wrote the (original version) of the entire OS. What about GNU, XFree86, BSD, etc.?
Microsoft decided to impliment some "unused" characters in the iso-XXXX text standard. So while everyone else uses ', they use a different asc-ii-esque code. Because no one except microsoft knows what these other codes mean, they put in a question mark.
There's a perl script called "demoroniser" that cleans up microsoft?s (joke!) bad html.
I'm going to get the chance to meet him. Hell, he lives less than 50 miles from me. More like 30. Well, 30 strait, 50 to drive, whatever. He has already agreed to make apperences at the UCSC Linux user group, so hey, I don't even have to care about talking to him online. Sorry, I hate to gloat. I just couldn't resist. It will be very cool, though.
As an educator I can say that yes, we do indeed want them to get interested in actually learning to use their computers.
How long will we hold to this idea that the "Linux Community" is geek stuff? After all, people, my BA is in English, and I use Linux every day (and as someone above me stated, I want to delete Windows so badly I can't stand it). One need not be a programmer (I'm not) or a dedicated geek (again, I'm not) to appreciate what is gained by using a reliable, consistent, robust operating system (not to mention all those cool windowmaker themes I've got).
Nevertheless, if we want more cool commercial products for Linux, if we want support for more hardware (and the cooperation from manufacturers necessary to get it), if we want more commercial software for Linux (i.e. games), it is the people in the Compaq commercials, those grandparents, and kids, and swtthang99@hotmail.com's that we have to win over. If we don't have them, the people in the corporate sector, people who care (and rightly so!) about making money, won't come on board.
Which brings me to where I started: education. With a Windows machine you _are_ stuck on the bunny hill. With Linux, you currently have to start on the intermediate hill (which is better than when I started using it a couple of years ago). The bunny hill is coming, though (GNOME, Lothar), and unlike Windows, the coming of the bunny hill doesn't mean that the other hills are closed. Linux can (and soon will) allow Joe Idiot to start computing in an environment that allows him to learn how his computer actually works, to affect how it works, to get into the guts of it--or not. Meet Joe Geek.
You Can't Do That With Windows.
Linus knows this.
I'll be looking forward to hearing what he has to say.
DoktorMel
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
2pm EDT? Come on, I wont be able to make that. They could've scheduled a easier time where more people could be present. Some of us will be at work, or in my situation school.