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Time's Man of the Century: Linus Torvalds?
Mr H writes "According to Time's Person of the Century Poll
Linus Torvalds is #15 out of 100." When I looked, Linus -- at #15 -- was ranked right below Madonna (#14), and right above Pope Paul VI (#16). Yitzhak Rabin was #1, Elvis Presley was #2, and Adolph Hitler was #3. Bill Gates, FYI, was ranked #17, Billy Graham was #4, and Albert Einstein was #5.
I really believe that Open Source software will empower more people to use the internet for communication and level the technological playing field for many people.
:) )
However, having said that, the acomplishments of Linus, Linux, RMS, GNU or any other Open Source phenomenon or personality pales in comparison to the incredible scientific acheivments by Einstein, or the amazing non-violent resistance movement headed by Gandhi. These are truly great people when measured by the yardstick of the average person. Especially Gandhi. This man, through total peacefull resistance, gained sovereignty for India from the British Empire. If you've never seen the movie, go see it. It's a great story, and shows the philosophy that Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted in the civil rights movement in the US. (how then King is listed above Gandhi is unknown to me..
I'm a big Linux fan, but putting your life on the line for others, and creating software just aren't in the same boat, IMHO.
Which helps the world more: Keeping starving poor people in 3rd world countries alive so they can breed and produce more starving poor people. Producing somthing that actively challenges the theory that in a capitolist society everthing MUST be done for the maximum possible profit, somthing that directly helps everyone have access to the "Information Revolution" - probably the most important thing since the enlightenment in the 1700s and 1800s. (That's the Information Revolution that I refer to) Yea, I pick "#2: Promoting the spread of knowledge" over "#1: Keeping alive starving poor people to breed"
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Let's have a poll! How many of us here in the Internet user community use computers? :)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The great thing about Linus is he IS an average joe. He's just another cool friendly approachable guy. He did something really cool, which admittedly others among us could have done. But Linus chose to remain an "average joe," who is still the driving force in Linux without signifigant personal gain. In the century which has seen computing become one of its driving forces, I think that is truly visionary.
Well, it's not the same person for all of us, but maybe the generality of it could be placed here... My dad impacted my life far more than any of these...
Vote early, vote often, geeks.
No, he was first to get a high profile project widely accepted. And, he made use of one of the most powerful abilities we humans have, the ability to build on the work of others.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Linus did not do anything significant this century. Look at Kernighan. Torvalds would be a nobody without him today. The creation of Unix was a far more signifcan event in the history of the computing industry than the creation of Linux was.
Further, it is shown by the poll results how clueless the voters are. Rabin and Elvis before Hitler? Hitler affected far more this century than anyone (possibly excluding Lenin).
Ok, some may think this is a troll, but the truth is, at this point in the century, Bill Gates has had far more influence on the computer industry than Torvalds.
(TIME's Person of the Century is that person who, for better or worse, most influenced the course of history over the past 100 years.)
Now personally I think that this is something that ought to change, but I don't think that's gonna happen in five months.
Now let's all hope that Gates gets wedged between Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Perhaps then people will get a clue...
The cake is a pie
More like "The 100 Worst Ideas of the Latter Half of the 1900s, with a Concentration on American Culture." What a waste of electrons.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I was thinking more along geographical lines than political lines. Politically speaking, lots changed, which was the point of my argument.
Regards
Mark
I dont think I would lump Linus anywhere near some our century's greatest leaders the few above included. Priorties people.
Martin Luther King Jr. - effected a social revolution in this country peacefully
Yithzak Rabin - was the equivalent of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln to the people of Israel in creation of the Jewish state
Gahndi - effected a social revolution that ultimately ended English colonialism and effectively ended all colonialism around the world
Linus Tovalds - made a snappy OS, and started a movement to make source code free
In the big picture the people above and COUNTLESS others brought more to our century then Linus did. Sorry but I think I will cast my vote for someone else.
Saddly it worked for Carnegie. When you hear "Carnegie" what do you think of? Answer: Carnegie Hall. If you were forced to come up with a second answer it would undoubtly be, the Carnegie Foundation, if for no other reason than PBS. You don't think about the blood of the working class. He successfully bought himself a new image in history. Even when you read the history books (i'm talking school books, not REAL books) his entry is basically, "He got rich with oil. Became a monopolist. Hung out with Rockerfeller. Oh yeah and he built a bunch of libraries, and concert halls, and all sorts of nice things for the community. He really gave back to society in the end, we salute him."
Damn.
hehe, no someone is definately not playing fair.
but as far as scientists go, wheres Tesla?? does anyone know ANYTHING about tesla?!
him S-M-R-T!!!
Ok. Where's your kernel, if any joe coder could write one?
James
...the descussion board there espesically the one about Optimus Prime for man of the century.
Although quite cool, I have to admit, I would have to be pissed of if Linus Torvalds got this award. Yes, Linux is cool, yes Linus is cool, yes the Open Source (or Free Software, take your pick) movement is amazing... but let's not get lost in our own sociological importance! Has the movement done great things? Yes. Is it such that from a socio-political point of view, one of the more visible figureheads needs to be dubbed person of the year? Absolutely not.
That's why I think Time should do a report after "Person of the Century" called "People to watch in the next century" Linus could be there.
Yah, there were.
But linus is on the list for the same reason
that adof hiltler is there instead of whoever
the original head of the nazi party was.
Hitler made things happen. He took a backward
semi-broken politcal party, used it to take over
a broken and indebted nation, and turned that
into an earth shattering machine.
Technically Franko and Mousalini did it first.
but who do we remember?
Raymond and Stallman may have been around first
but they're projects did bring anywhere near
the kind of strength and activisim to the
community that linus' has had.
And linux, because of it's philosophy, not its
technoligy, or its age, belongs there.
But an OS can't be person of the year.
why not Linus?
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Damn, they misbehave like a bunch of slashdotters :)
I look at that list, and I see all of these terribly famous/infamous people, and there's Linus' name right there in the midst of 'em, and somehow it just feels so strange to have seen this occur over the years.
There is something almost incongruous about it, yet its so right at the same time... hard to place it.
Linux has come a long way since I got my first Yggdrasil CD-bootable distribution back in 93/94 and turned a useless 486 into my first own super Unix workstation! Well done Linus, and well done the rest of the global Linux team, for producing a truly excellent product.
Linux is one of those projects that truly demonstrates that human beings working together, given peace and prosperity, are capable of overcoming insurmountable odds to achieve new heights.
I'm really happy to have witnessed it, and played my small part in the process.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Many of the other comments bring up good points about other people (ie the inventors of the transistor) that had much more of an impact. Sure, I love seeing Linus on this list, and esp. higher than Bill. But logically? I read this list and wonder exactly how much of the vistors who voted really have a grasp of History?
:) ). Almost all the answers have to do with politics & government. Picasso, Dali, Calder, I.M. Pei, and the like should be remembered. I'd be curious to see much more than the top 20 list. Personally? I voted for Georgia O'Keeffe. But I'd like to see more people remember those creative souls who contributed to the arts in the past century.
As I look at the list, most are from *MY* lifetime (I'm 27). How many of those do you think our kids will be reading about in history books in a few decades? Madonna? Elvis? Billy Graham? I'd really be surprised. Many of these seem like modern culture icons, but not a "Person of the Century".
Being an artist, I'm surprised not to see artists and musicians (and no, I don't count Madonna & Elvis
I like Linus and all (who doesn't) but as being worthy of Time's Man of the Century? I don't think so. There were lots of other influential people that should be placed above that. JFK (Cuban Missle Crisis), FDR (The New Deal), Mao (Red China), and others. These are some truely great people that deserve recognition before Linus does.
On the other hand, Linux has affected millions of people, whether they know it or not!
gordon
In terms of Important Computer Geeks, I think Von Neumann or Turing would have to be considered WAY more influential than Bill or Linus, since they both fairly key to getting the whole ball rolling.
(I decided to vote for Von Neumann since he was also deeply involved in the US's atomic weapons program in WW2)
-dl
That's a very compelling argument and it got me thinking along different lines than I had before. I'm thinking about the space program, and how it has had a major lasting effect on the latter third of the century. My understanding is that because of the push to get to the moon in the '60s, much of the technology that runs our information society was either created from, or resulted in some way, from the space program.
The problem I have in this arguement is pinning it down to specific individuals. Sure, Hitler changed the course of history, but he didn't do it alone, he was certainly the visible figurehead of the facist axis alliance, but he had help.
Same with Ford. Sure he is credited with inventing mass production which was the key to industrialization of the western world. But, did he do it all by himself? I'm pretty sure he had the vision and all but I'm also sure he had a lot of help.
And Torvalds. You see where this is going? He is the visible leader, is credited with the invention and the vision, and I certainly don't try to diminish that. But GNU and Linux are as powerful as they are because of the efforts of people other than Linus.
Back to the space program. So was it Kennedy who was responsible for getting us to the moon which in turn led to our information age? Hardly. He made a famous speech committing the US to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. He set a course and a goal that others fought for. Who were the real heroes behind the space program? The Astronauts? Certainly they made a significant contribution. The engineers who built the spacecrafts' systems? The astrophysicists who were responsible for formulating the mission profiles? The german rocket scientists who perfected the booster technology that got us off the surface of the earth and into space?
Answer: all of the above of course.
So what exactly is the point of naming a specific individual as the "person of the century"? Sells magazines, I guess.
Elvis, John Lennon, Madonna, and Princess Diana in the top twenty in a vote for the 'Person of the Century'? Where are the truly important figures of the last hundred years - Alf, Yahoo Serious, and Bob Saget?
Seriously, though - the only thing that polls show us is how the media shapes truly meaningless information into 'news.' I guess they need something to do when the feed of corporate press releases they regurgitate begins to slow down.
You can't make an argument for Henry Ford, or anyone else really using that logic.
Henry's creations where amalgamations of other peoples ideas sure with his own twist, but how about we give the guy who invented the internal combustion engine the award for maing something for henry ford to produce.
Why don't we just vote adam&eve or romulus and ramus or austrolophitacine or whatever man/woman of the universe for just plain started the whole mess.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
I reckon if we all pitch in we can knock him up a rank or two.
Don't forget that the century doesn't end until December 31, 2000! We've still got a year (maybe not on the poll, though) to prove what we're made of.
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
As many others have said, It was who had the most impact, not who was the nicest.. Seriously, Hitler can be considered the catalyst for WWII, and WWII wrought significant social change here in the states (women in the workplace etc), we came into our own as a world military and economic power. Plus, if Hitler had never been born the History Channel would be out of business. :-)
Can't sleep, clowns will eat me....
Having said that, I hope we all realize that for either of these gentlemen to win this award would not say pretty things about where we put our priorities.
Saddam Hussein is #20? And Hitler is #3? Something tells me not all the votes were exactly heartfelt...
I never said I particularly liked him or his invention... But, you'd be hard pressed to come up with something that has had a more direct impact on the lives of just about everyone in the world.
I truly dislike TV, but again, think of the influence that TV has had on the last century.
Time magazine has an excellent tradition of not necessarily recognizing 'good' people. The point is to recognize the person who had the most profound effect on peoples lives. It's hard to argue that ford is at least not high on the list. (But, I've not cast my vote, & I'm very much open to suggestions...)
True, Benz invented the automobile, but Ford moved it from a toy for the rich to a tool for the masses. While Benz certainly deserves credit, he wouldn't get my vote.
Actually, Time has been known to choose inanimate objects as it's Man of the Year, so perhaps teh automobile is really the best choice by itself...
Yea, linus is cool, but he isn't the man of the century! Even if you are obsessed with linux, he didn't make it all, he just made a kernel (much more than I have ever done though). Seriously, think of the others, my personal vote is going to Albert Einstein, his ideas were revolutionary, and showed people that even in the newier age, you can make so many amazing new discoveries. Einstein is the man, but then again it is just a magazine. I say we find the average joe somewhere and all vote for him, imagine, "man of the year, bob johnson of delaware!"
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Well, perusing the list of current votes, I can honestly say that, of the top 20, fully eight are total bullshit. The Person of the Year/Century/Decade/whatever awards are meant to be the most influential - whether good or bad. Repeat - the MOST influential. Elvis? Bull. Just because a lot of people can't believe that their beloved Elvis isn't eating nuggets at a BK somewhere doesn't make him influential. And no, I don't think he had a large impact on the music industry, and no, I don't care how many Elvis impersonators there are. Same with Madonna. She's done nothing but be popular. Maybe you could say she influenced a few people, but she has not changed the world.
Skip to Billy Graham. What? He's a TV preacher. What has he influenced? A few people who already believed in God to believe more? Good work. Ronald Reagan? Nothing against Ronny, personally, but he was a pretty mediocre President. Hell, IMHO, we haven't had a non-mediocre President since Truman. One could argue that JFK was non-mediocre, thanks to his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I might buy that.
Speaking of that, where is Truman? Truman ended the Pacific War of WWII with one swift, brutal decisive move. He probably saved millions of lives with those two bombs, and ended the war earlier and with less bloodshed then predicted, but apparently, ending this century's greatest war is less important then singing "Imagine"(John Lennon) or marrying a rich guy(Princess Diana). By the way, people - that's all Diana did. She married a rich guy. Forget thos "touching" photos of her holding poor childrens who have been harmed by land mines.
Remember Mother Theresa, who gave all she could and more, and worked herself to the bone to help the poor. Diana did some nice shit, yeah, but she could afford to. Mother Theresa couldn't, but did so anyhow.
Toss out Linus, definetly. Nice OS and everything, and I use it and love it, but in the grand scheme of things, he wasn't that influential. I'd much rather put Gates on that list, because he's been part of computing for much, much longer. However, I don't believe that Gates is that influential in the grand, worldwide scheme of things, so I'd toss him off too.
Move up FDR, Truman, Neville Chamberlain...Heck, I'd probably move Shimon Peres up some. In addition, the problem with polls like this is that people are fixated on the last ten-twenty years. Arguably, WWI and WWII changed the world more this century then ANY other events...but only Hitler and Churchill are mentioned. Not Yamamoto or Hirohito, no Mussolini, no Goehring, no FDR, no Truman, no Harding, nothing.
Toss out those pop-culture knee-jerk answers, and let's get this Linus bullshit out of there - let's pick people who really changed the world.
Without meaning any disrespect to FreeBSD or any other OS's out there, my point really was directed at what Linux has become. I actually don't belong to the Linus Religion. I think he deserves much credit, but I know that he isn't Linux.
But, he is directly responsible (with others) for what Linux has become. He's the figurehead behind which this movement has sprung up. For the first time in many years, there's a true threat to Microsoft's dominance (admittedly, it might not topple MS, but you've got to admit that MS is scared). I know that BSD is arguably better, but BSD will not topple Microsoft, not even in the server marketplace, let alone on the desktop.
Again, Linus as man of the Century is absurd. Linus as Man of the Year on the otherhand... He'd probably have my vote. Either him or Larry Flynt (Who'd've thought that a porn king could have such a direct & dramatic effect on the American political landscape?)
Maybe I've been spending too much time with my computer, but who is Yitzhak Rabin and why is he so important?
James
Well, I'm happy to see that /. is not the only place where the poll questions are absurd (only this one is probably not on purpose). Still, there is a kind of geeky pleasure in answering an absurd question, and the more absurd the question the geekier the pleasure.
To say that someone had a great influence on the century can mean two different things. What we would really like to say is that, had s?he not been there, future history would have been quite different. This is quite evidently the case of someone like Lenin: had he not been there (or even, had the Germans not let him return to Russia), the first Russian revolution would have been the Russian revolution, the socio-democrats would have taken power in Russia, and communism would probably never have been anything else than a theoretical philosophy. Probably the same could be said of Hitler.
On the other hand, some great people did great things that would certainly have been done anyway (only later) had they not been there. (This does not necessarily diminish their credit, btw.) If Einstein had not discovered relativity, Poincaré or someone else would have done so (and indeed, there is reason to claim that Poincaré did discover relativity).
So there are two different meanings to ``having a great influence on the century'': one can actually bring about things that would not have been brought about otherwise, or one can be the instrument of a great event that would probably have taken place in any case. I tend to think that most ``bad guys'' are in the first case whereas ``good guys'' are in the second. That is, Good is necessary whereas Evil is contingent. (Maybe this is my Hegelian way of seeing history.)
Let us recapitulate. This century has seen two world wars (not one, but two) and one Cold War; it has seen the rise and fall of communism; the invention and first use of the atom bomb; the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics, and such advance in medicine as had never been dreamt before (remember how deadly tuberculosis used to be); the fall of such once mighty empires as those of Germany, Austria, Russia, China and (in a way) Japan; the end of colonialism (and the Bandoeng conference); the appearance and disappearance of the League of Nations, and the foundation of the United Nations; the beginning of the conquest of space (and man's first step on the moon); the widespread use of the telephone and the automobile; and the invention of the computer. That makes a lot for just one century, and to each of these events is associated one or several names (some might not be widely known but that is beside the point: we are not concerned with fame but with importance). So the list is crowded indeed.
Pardon me for being rude, but the idea that in all this the most important person might be the author of a piece of software seems patently ridiculous. Even if Linus had not started Linux, we would probably still have a BSD kernel with the GNU project on top, so even a free OS would be available. And if it is the concept of freedom itself which we find important, then put the credit with such people as RMS, not Torvalds.
Why, as another poster pointed out, the entire field of computer science appeared in this century. Turing is the important name there, and, possibly even more than Turing, John von Neumann (who was also in some ways responsible for quantum mechanics). To insisist in giving too much importance to people much nearer us is a case of temporal myopia. (I don't dare imagine what would happen if somebody asked for the most important person in the millenium! I think it would be much more interesting to ask for the most important person in the XIXth century, now that we have some distance.)
Even if we want to be so near-sighted, and even if we insist on being geeks and giving computer science the importance it deserves, please remember what the most important phenomenon in computer science of these recent years is: it is not Windows, and it is not Linux. It is, obviously, the Internet. So I would name the man who invented the Internet, that is, Vinton Cerf.
'nough said
I used to work for him too.
TedC
If Linux is the best thing to come out of the net century, I'll be pretty disappointed. I wanna plug a wireless receiver into my head and download the Library of Congress on demand. Screw this personal computer stuff, let's think big. I want total connectivity. I want video vmail in my head, projected onto my visual cortex. Give me eyes with telephoto zoom, infrared vision, light amplification, and ultraviolet spectrophotometry. I want a built-in GPS wirelessy linked up to all the maps in the world. Think big! The pwrson who gives us these things will be the man (or woman) of the next century. Total empowerment! Not the one that made an evolutionary advance to our desktop PCs.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Hussein, tho'? Really? I'm not convinced Hussein (Saddam, that is) had much impact on the century -- compared to other dictators or near-dictators, such as:
* Pol Pot.
* Ho Chi Minh.
* Heck, how about Assad? The former Ayatollah Khomeini, and the entire Iranian Islamic Revolution? How about Carter/Begin/Sadat? If you're looking at the Mideast, all those -- plus Hitler -- had more effect than Hussein, methinks. The only reason Hussein can be on the list is that his war w/ the US was recently televised; most of those voting him probably don't remember the Iran-Iraq war/stalemate.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I think the Linus T. inclusion in this poll is utter BS.
Mention anything about Linux anywhere and you'll see a flock of dedicated Linux users/developers just voting to make their cause more visible. I can relate to this because I used to flock around to "help Apple" in those polls.
This reminds me of all the other open polls. It doesn't serve a value. Object World recently had a poll to determine the best web application server. There were Apple folks on the Mac OS X-Talk mailing list asking people to go vote for WebObject (still a damn good product, but the award it won makes it artificial).
Torvald didn't do squat to "influence the course of history over the past 100 years". Nor has Gates. Nor has Jobs.
People who shook the world for good were those who caused major shifts in society. John Lenon didn't do that either. He merely represented a free-form movement that started out of the will of the mass to change things. I guess HE can relate to Torvald. But neither really MADE the movements (BSD started out years before Linux, and is still used in more places than Linux).
But you can bet that Hitler did change the course of hystory. He changed how societies collided each other. More so than Napoleon did. He defined what war is today. He defined how a society can be manipulated into beleiving a cause, either good or bad. None can really like what he did. But nobody can ignore what he did, and still reflects today, 50+ years later, when we are still going against war criminals, picking up debries and rebuilding nations from that war.
However, Hitler couldn't have gone this far without the simplicity and genius of another man. And that's Henry Ford. Ford redefined (and basically invented) mass manufacturing, without which no U-Boats or Sherman thanks or rifles, bombs, amunitions, boots, hats, medals and tombs could have been produced in great-enough numbers to have ever made a difference. Ford didn't only shift society--he moved it, literally, by making possible (and afordable) the trade routes that constitutes today's world economies. His mass-produced cars, and the manufacturing lines that made them possible,is at the core of current human activities. Throughout this planet, right up to the moon. Apollo 11 wouldn't have made it in time for the Kenedy deadline ("before this decade is over") if it wouldn't have been for countless mass-produced parts like metal plates, wires, electronic components, bolts and paint buckets.
Ford made it possible for the Jobs, Gates, Torvalds, Lenons to have their medium to publicise their cause. Imagine Lennon without mass-produced records or radios. Jobs without mass-produced Apple I parts. Gates without mass-produced Macs to copy from. Torvalds without mass-produced internet connection apartus: modems, phone lines, hubs. Imagine a great movie without Soilent Green.
Henry got my vote.
Considering that Communism demands complete abdication of property rights, and replaces the whole concept of "just desserts" with "needs", thus requiring totalitarian enforcement to actually get people to produce a mere fraction of what they would normally do so, yes it *can* be considered as evil. When you take away people's motivations to actually be productive, in their own name, and require a state to implement a supposedly state-less system -- yes, that's wrong-headed, non-functional and evil.
Then again, the world has never seen a true Marxist revolution *ever* take control of a significant nation, since we've never seen the industrial capitalism-out-of-control -> implosion -> proletarian revolution -> withering of the state.
But that's just my take on it.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Phonies? Hmmmmmm. Kim Philby? Heh. Points to those that recognize that name...
Ed McMahon/Dick Clarke also come to mind.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Yes, I understand Time's definition of it. :)
;)
:}
What I'm saying is, a LOT of people (check the premature posts here on Slashdot for example) just assume that "Person of the Year" or "Person of the Decade" is a reward for being good. For example, you wouldn't find anyone who would declare the dirty fat kid in the back of McDonalds who wipes his nose on his hands as he fixes a Big Mac for you, "Employee of the Month".
Yeeees, I know Time's definition isn't the same. But I'm betting most of the readers aren't going to think that way unless they put some rediculous disclaimer at the bottom of the picture.
I'm just trying to find a way to make it so that someone GOOD doesn't get pushed out of the way by some schmuck who murdered people. It would spare us from hearing the multitudes of "THEY PICKED HITLER??" cries from people who don't understand the qualification process.
As for Linus...personally, I wouldn't lose sleep if he got recognition on that level. Most of the people on that list don't impress me. I'm rooting (so to speak) for Einstein, just because I love that saucy 'fro. >;)
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
Because I'd vote for him... Although I'm sure it'll be worse in 9999... with windows Triple X!
BTW.. whats so cool with firstpost... I hope to be the lastpost!
Cosmic
I didn't know the Time editors were Linux geeks...
That would be Gavrilo Princip. There's a bio at: http://raven.cc.ukans.edu/~kansite/ww_one/bio/p/pr incip.html
r agutin.html
Of course, Princip was just a pawn in the hands of the true mastermind, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic: http://raven.cc.ukans.edu/~kansite/ww_one/bio/d/d
It seems that their legacy lives on, as old tensions create new wars and problems in the area.
While a great choice for political expression, I'd like to think that ultimately, leaving "the cradle of Earth", the flurry of spin-off technology associated with the space race, and the power projection offered by missiles adds up to a good deal more. I'll keep von Braun as my vote, but I'd have to say that at least Dimitrijevic belongs up there too.
I voted for Ronald Reagan. He's #9 on the list.
:-)
It's just another WWW poll, and not much more can be said about it. I don't know why Time dignifies the concept with their name. I'm not trying to slam any of the people who've made it to a high ranking on the list, but this thing is about as stacked as any survey I have ever witnessed.
Awhile back, a publisher tried to engage in a "Greatest Books" survey and it was basically taken over by Ayn Rand fiends. This isn't a lot different.
They should rephrase the question "which perl script can pump through the most votes" and just leave it at that.
Yes, I know I just forked the topic of my message from being about the legitimacy of the survey to a rant about the feasibility of a perl script hack of the poll page. I only mentioned it as one hacking venue. It could be done with Python or suchlike as well.
Surely one wouldn't proclaim some evil beast of a man
as deserving this award. Although it sounds somewhat
corny, they should have two seperate but equal awards:
One for a positive influence, and one for the centuries worst villain.
Seems fair to me, but it lacks that "Man of the Century"
simplicity that makes for a good press. >:P
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
A century is far too long a period of time to be able to pick one person and say that they somehow sum it up. It would be better to take each decade and describe the people who made the world a better place during that time, or the people who made the world a different place for those who came after them. This whole man of the century is nothing more than something to sell more magazines, it's got very little merit as an idea.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
"Ronald Reagan? Nothing against Ronny, personally, but he was a pretty mediocre President."
Beg to differ, but I don't think that he was a particularly mediocre president.
Alot of ppl give him a rap, for spending us into a huge hole, but the long term legacy of the debt that he created, is that we won the cold war. We simply outspent the Communists, because our system could support the deficits better. And the debt itself, isn't the issue that it seemed like either. We are in a position now, where a mere 28 years after Ronnie was ushered into office, we could basically retire the debt, if we desired.
Just for the record tho, I voted for Einstein. He was instrumental in the theories behind the bombs that Ronnie spent so much building. Along with so many other theories.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I've been hoping for a digioptical range finder. Just a little readout that identifies what I'm focusing on and tells me its distance, maybe velocity.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
-Barry
"I don't need no steenking sig"
Now wait a minute. The entire field of computer science was spawned this century. Think of all the towering giants who made huge contributions:
Alan Turing
John Von Neumann
Edsger Dijkstra
Don Knuth
Niklaus Wirth
Tony Hoare
John McCarthy
Frederik Brooks
Ivan Sutherland
Alan Kay
Robin Milner
Ken Thompson
Jim Blinn
...etc., etc.
... of the sum total.
What Linux has become, like so many other open source projects like it, could *only* have been possible, (or might *never* have been possible) due to the efforts of those other people in the list.
That's my point. Linus, and therefore Linux, is the best representation *in the list* of the sum total of all of those other members of the list, and therefore, if you want a good end-sum evaluation of all those other data points for the 20th Century, Linus/Linux is it.
Thats all I was trying to say.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"As humans, how much pain and lives have been saved by having penicillin? In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered an 'accidental'
mold in one of his petri dishes that would save countless lives. Both in war and peace. If you are looking for sheer numbers of people
affected by one thing, that would have to be close to the top. "
I'm sorry, but that is pure crap. Yes, Fleming discovered penicillin mold and it's properties, but he thought it was just a curiosity, not worth anything. It was Howard Florey and Ernst Chain who turned penicillin into a medicine. If it hadn't been for them, it could easily have taken far longer for someone to rediscover the effects of antibiotics and to actually use them.
If you're going to argue for people's inclusion in this list on the basis of their effect on this century, you could hardly go much further than the people who essentially destroyed the world's fear of illness - prior to penicillin people could easily die from complications to minor illnesses (even the common cold): consequently people lived in genuine fear of illness. Since the advent of antibiotics minor ailments are exactly that: minor. No one worries that they might die if they don't get over their cold in a week.
The last fifty years would have been a very different time if it hadn't been for the work of Florey and Chain in making use of Fleming's fortuitous discovery.
Of course, since this "Man of the Century" thing seems to be a popular vote, it will probably end up going to someone who was either popular or well known for no good reason, or someone who had a reasonably large, but very *visible* effect (eg Hitler), rather than to the people who had the massive but largely invisibile effects. Popularity polls always put forward popular people, but rarely are the really important people popular.
So hey, lets all vote for Linus. It's more fun than voting for Florey, Chain or Salk and having your suggestions upstaged by "Entertainers" who never did anything with their lives. Elvis? That makes me sick. So I'll laugh it off, and vote for someone I think would apreciate the joke.
himi
Linus 4PM!
My very own DeCSS mirror.
The man who started the first world war. A killing in Sarajevo and some ambitious people in Austria and Germany had the idea they could win a great war. The first would war made it possible for Lenin to take power in Russia. It made it possible for Hitler to take power in Germany. Well, someone else might have done the killing (in fact there was quite a number of people trying to do so), however they didn't.
It's called new wave but it's just the same.
I have to say I voted for William Shockley, for that very reason. I also think you could have been a little more polite in your diatribe, although I do agree with the spirit of what you're saying. ;-)
Ethan
First off, I hope that Time will decide that they should have a group of people be the "People of the Century", rather than have a single person. Perhaps it should be a group of leaders, whether it includes the likes of Hitler or not. Maybe some of the people that put together the first computers in this century -- the computer has definitely had a lasting impact (at least on those of us in developed or moderately developed countries). There is a huge number of people in the computer (and networking -- i.e. Internet) field that could be mentioned. Of course, those people would probably get much more credit if the century had started in 1940 or 1950 instead of 1900 -- nobody wants to have someone from 1995 to be a Person of the Century...
Of course, Time isn't going to take the online poll as a literal thing -- they are most likely just using it to get ideas, and to see some of the different people that we look up to, hate, or get brainwashed by..
I think Time will pick someone we don't all know, just to prove a point.. Perhaps the person that discovered you could transmit sound over the radio, the inventors of RADAR, or some other moderately obscure person or group. I guess I just don't need to get reminded about all the wars, oppression, and death that happened in this world in the last century.. I'd rather see someone that made a lasting, positive impact -- even if we hardly recognize their names.
And another moderator comes along, sees an interesting post marked 'Troll', and bumps it back up to counter the "abuse"...
:)
I wonder if there's a trend which says "a comment moderated once, is more likely to moderated five times than an 'equivalent' unmoderated comment"
-matt
Gates brought the simple computer to the masses. Steve Jobs did not. He screwed up. Gates picked up where he left off, and for that he became a virtual god on earth (monitarily at least). Everyone seems to think marketing directs the people. Well, they are wrong. The people direct marketing. Gates created what the people wanted. Torvalds created what he wanted, and let the people help him. Both are fine ways to do it, but offering a service for a fee is more appealing to the consumer then forcing them to help out. Deal with it, the consumer doesn't program, and the consumer doesn't use Linux! In time though, more and more people will use it. Why?
So take the good with the bad, and get your wooly head out of that sheeps @$$ in front of you. Take a look around and view reality for the first time. It is always easier to let the person in front of you do the thinking for you, but then why bother living at all?
Corndog
No oviously the moderators had too many points on their hands. A few oviously moderated it up to atleast 3 then someone moderated it back down to 2 with troll being the reason. Why it got moderated up to 3 in the first place excapes me.
Preach on! I actually voted for Turing myself, seeing as the transistor can't necessarily be attributed to ONE inventor...but my line of reasoning was almost EXACTLY yours... Not to mention the effect that the transistor and modern computational theory had on the development of television, which, in my humble opinion, has had the greatest impact on culture than almost anything in history.. I couldn't believe that Turing wasn't even in the Top 20!
It probably got moderated up to three, and the last person who saw called it a troll, causing it to slip back to 2.
I can certainly see how that would happen - it was written intelligently, but was certainly provocative. The moderation system worked - it's still on the first page of results, and I think it deserved to be there.
D
----
Truman? Truman came to office just as the war was ending, just in time to make the decision to drop the bombs. FDR helped bring a bit of hope to the nation during the Depression and then WWII, so he definitely belongs on the list. Truman just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
As for Lennon, you're very sadly mistaken if you think he "just sang a song". He helped influence every single artist in Rock 'n' Roll from the very beginning. He helped other artists to see that music just wasn't music, but a way of making a statement and changing the world around you. Artists from The Who to Rage Against The Machine have their sociopolitical roots in songs like "Revolution" and "Working Class Hero". Lennon and the rest of the Beatles weren't pop culture because some record exec said they should, they were popular because they struck a chord with so many people with both their music and their lives.
Bottom line: FDR, Hitler, Stalin, Ford and Mother Teresa have all had major influence in this century and deserve to be recognized (not necessarily applauded, but recognized) for it. But let's not dismiss someone as a "pop-culture knee-jerk answer" just because they weren't a politician, religious leader or baron of industry. JFK wasn't a particularly good president (one has to look no further than the negotiations with the steel industry at the time) but he touched something inside of us. And that is why Lennon belongs on that list.
"My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all."
- John Lennon
It's a shame that most of the people on the list simply represent the most memorable names hyped by the (predominately TV) media in the last decade. While I don't disagree that most of these people are important in one way or another, can they fairly be described as having been the people who most influenced the course of history in the last 100 years?
For what it's worth, I didn't use tactical voting - my nomination went to the former German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, whose contribution to scientific advancement throughout the world has precipitated more change than can be reasonably recorded in even a single volume book, let alone a simple sound-bite.
TIME's Person of the Century is that person who, for better or worse, most influenced the course of history over the past 100 years.
I bet Rabin has had a lot more votes than the poll suggests - I mean, who can write "Yitzhak" without tyops?-)
Lots of computer geeks have been more influential than Linus Torvalds. Dennis Ritchie is an obvious one (The C programming language, and Unix). So is Donald Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming"). Even Bill Joy (BSD, and Sun too I think?) was more influential than Linus.
I had to vote for Alan Turing though. Not only did he invent the model of computing, he also broke Enigma. If not for that WWII might have gone the other way.
And of course, his model of computing has affected the space race, the arms race, etc. Not as significant as mass production, but hey, he was "one of us".
My contributions are many, of course-
http://steve.fojar.com/
I would settle for an implant that made the time display in the corner of my field of vision.
Why clutter up vision? If I could have an implanted clock, I'll have one that simply let me know what time it is by thinking of it. Similiar to how I can instantly know wheter I am sitting or standing. No reason for going the long route via the vision system, with the possibilities for misreading and the need for interpretation of what I see.
I chose not to talk about Stalin because without Hitler/WWii causing a dramatic arms buildup to begin, the cold war may never have begun. World War II also left europe desimated which allowed for stalin/ussr to move in and create the iron curtain. Think about the disputes over eastern/western germany - it became a major focal point in the 'war against the commies'. Without Hitler leaving Germany weakened and unstable, germany would never have been partitioned up and the USSR would not have power there.
Stalin was a very important person in the century, but it took Hitler to bring him to our attention.
This vote probably reflects the Internet user community in which computer users are of a high percent. However, Linus does not deserve to be called person of the century. He did not set out to change the world. Maybe 100 years from now he can be named one of the Man of the 21st century. But right now at this time he is not that important in history. History will record the impact of Free Software, and Richard Stallman will be more historically significant than Linus. Linus probably deserve man of the year, though.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
My father was a starving poor person in a third world country. He lived to breed to produce people who now work in that third world country to help other starving poor people gain access to your purported "Information Revolution".
I'm not saying I'm all that great, but the effects of your OSS haven't been felt yet, except in the higher income brackets of society. Maybe next year.
so that would make Linus the Man of the Century NEXT century, not Man of this one. I haven't voted, but I'm not gonna vote for Torvalds, much as I think he's great. OSS is too late to move this century - but it might make a difference in the next.
Might - or we may blow ourselves all up anyway.
All of those other people in the list are either
1: political leaders that a) started wars, or b) ended wars
2: religious leaders that a) fell from grace, or b) held the grace of their god
3: pop culture figures that are products of a greedy western hype machine (Madonna, Bill Gates, John Lennon, Pricess Diana)
4: appear on the list only by virtue of the revenues they have generated for the media machine.
Where does Linus sit? He's not in either of those categories, realistically (okay you could say #4, but that's secondary to his function, unlike Madonna whose prime purpose is to do just that).
Linus, and the entire Linux project, is a peace-time project. You have Jews, Hispanics, Atheists, disabled people, nerds, geeks, jocks and other 'types' of people all working together, peacfully, productively, making something that countless thousands of other members of the human race will put to use to enhance their lives through greater productivity, education, etc.
For free.
Linux is the product of a truly Free Society. It is not some government funded project, it is not based on some fascist/rascist/capitalist/whateverist agenda.
Linus' inclusion in that list is the only one that makes sense.
Should we put a figurehead on the 21st Century that means anything *other* than what this civilization has fought the *entire* century to become, which is a Freedom for All Races? Should we say "the 21st Century was best represented by Adolf Hitler, who was a war monger who persecuted the Jews"?
Should we say "the 21st Century is best beheld by the image of Mother Theresa, who, in spite of her own personal suffering and persecution, continued to suffer her entire life so that children in 3rd World Countries, ignored by the rest of the species, could have decent health services"?
No. I don't think so.
Linux is the child of all of those other people on this list. It's prime creators' (Linus) image is the natural representation of everything that all of those other figureheads has either fought *HARD* to obtain, or *HARD* to prevent.
So I say he deserves to be in that list with the rest of them.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Do you honestly believe that Linus Torvalds has influenced human history over the past 100 years more than any other individual? Listen kids, he may be the most important guy according to your tenth grade geek circle but, honestly, ancient history to you is anything prior to 1980.
Personally, most people on that list are lightweights who don't even deserve much more than a footnote in the past 100 years. Elvis Presley? I can't believe he's second. Billy Graham? Only if you're a nutcase. John Lennon? Good musician who influenced a few others but hardly changed the course of history. Princess Diana? Nope. Madonna? Nuh-uh. Yitzhak Rabin? A small circle of the world. Martin Luther King? If only in America. Bill Gates? I'd choose an earlier geek. Saddam Hussein? Ha! Nelson Mandela? Nadda.
The only people I see in the top twenty who may have changed the course of human history would have been either Adolf Hitler (WWII still has its repercussions), Henry Ford (automation helped lift us out of the industrial age and into post-industrial, and possibly Ghandi who is a global icon and not just an American one. All the rest are either bit players, pop culture icons or those voted in by Americans who seem to think their corner of the world *is* the entire world.
ian.
ian
Linus got to where he is by bringing people together. He isn't famous because of the people that fought and died for him, or because of who he ordered to kill. He wrote a kernel for fun. It was a pretty good kernel, so people all over helped him.
Now this openness and sharing is trickling through to other areas, not necessarily for the right reasons, but can something so pure be corrupted, even by marketroids? This is a great accomplishment.
Of course, if we want to praise Unix, there are others more deserving. That doesn't seem to be the point however.
Yes, realistically, it's just because slashdotters like polls. Still, even if Time won't give him the cover, it's nice to give him the vote he deserves.
But Bruce Lee should win.
JFK?? He nearly started WWIII. Yeah, he deserves recognition like Hitler deserves recognition.
FDR?? He was so incompetent that he created a depression *within* a depression. That takes a rare talent. He ranks up there with Stalin for destroying productivity.
Mao?? He only killed millions.
How about recognizing creative instead of destructive people?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Hilter #3?
This site is a joke, being upkept by people that enjoy using their refresh button in Netscape.
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
And what would all the nerds on the planet do with an optic nerve clock?
Be more on time to everything?
sheesh.
Make RMS happy? GNU/Stallnix? /Linux.?
Make Orielly happy? O'Linux?
Make RedHat happy? Rhinux?
Make Taco happy?
Make ESR happy? Linux?
Make me happy? Linux?
Ok, enough of that...
Corndog
You mean to tell me with all of Bill Gates Innovations, and contributions to personal computing he still get's ranked lower than Linus?
Well at least he beat out Saddam, however both
ranked lower than Elvis and Hitler.
(no this is not serious:)
Awesome!
It hasn't been going on for centuries! The problem was caused by the British who promised Palestine to three groups: The Jordanians (Arabs), Palestinians (also arabs), and the Jews. Before the 1940's Jews and Arabs got along great. It was far better to be a jew in The Ottoman empire than to be a jew in the Russian Empire, for sure.
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
Daniel.
Woah, slow down there cowboy. The hundreds others that could, did.
Its called the FreeBSD project, formely 386BSD, and its first
free release is almost as old as Linus, and older than me and probably a lot of you guys (and girls) out there.
Linux has had impressive growth over the past 7 years.
But not as impressive as FreeBSD with its first roots dating back to 1969.
Linus was -not- the first. He was -not- an impressive coder.
Whats going on today has already been done.
-bugg
Since the whole survey has turned into a vote by a series of Perl scripts hacking the survey site, I think we could say that Larry Wall (or his code, in any case) has done almost all the voting.
agreed, smallpox vaccine was 18th century, were talking man of the year for the 19th century.
--
--
"Insert witty quote here."
Yes, that is the case Church did indeed demonstrate much the same thing with 'Lambda Calculus'. But Turing gave what was really needed - a simple and elegant way of visualizing 'computable numbers' with the Turing machine. Interestingly, he invented it ten years before the first computer was even built! He had no way to build an actual model.
The history of this is very interesting. It's curious that the invention of the Turing machine is more philosophical than scientific. Church's Lambda Calculus was scientific. Where's Ken Burns when you need him?
Another person you won't hear about is Kurt Goedel. His 'incompleteness' theorem fundamentally changed mathematics. How important is mathematics to all of science??
While the poll seems to be more for entertainment than actual reflection on humanity's 19th century, it is an interesting question on who really had the most far reaching influence. Is there somebody that has been ignored or overlooked?? Or is the poll more about popular notables? Another question, will the most influential person of the century be a Nobel prize winner?
I know that there are a couple people who should have received the Nobel prize, died before there discoveries became apparent - I can not think of them off hand - any help?
Time for a reality check. (And yeah I love Linux, it's the best since sliced bread, blah blah.)
First of all, Linus Torvals isn't an ideologist. He's a pragmatic programmer. All the talk about equating Linus with peace, love and Utopia is hogwash. If you want to do that, then nominate Richard Stallman. Stallman is the one responsible for all the freedom Linux has, and not very indirectly for the great success it has had.
But you know what? Forget the previous point. The Time poll is about people that have actually had a tangible influence. World wide. In everyday people's lives. Get a grip. Linux is a piece of software. It has not prevented world hunger. It has not shaped the economies of countries around the world; it hasn't created countries (some of the other people in the list are indirectly responsible for this!); it has not caused or prevented mass murder; it has not caused or prevented entire cultures and races from deadly conflict going back hundreds if not thousands of years. Etc etc.
Yes, there is good ideology behind Linux. Yes, Linux has influenced millions of people world wide. But the actual tangible impact is only in the software world. And the real world is much, much bigger than that. To those that really think Linus deserves to be above people like Mother Theresa, Yitzhak Rabin, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill, shame on you. Get out from behind the computer; spend some time in front of non-technophiles; and read up on history and what is going on in the world.
Disclaimer: I apologize for the holier-than-thou tone. Seriously. I am not a history expert, and definitely need to follow much more of my own advice.
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
I use Linux, I like to use Linux, but I do not worship Linus. This is pathetic. This is what we are against, worshipping people, but everyday this place gets bombarded with posts of "I Love Linus".
Screw Linus. All of us Open Source people should have been voted in.
Oh well, I'm a scientist myself.
Anyway, I know Fermi perfectly well. He just doesn't know me. And in hindsight I did know Salk. Haven't met anyone who knows Viktor Hambardzumian though.
I just did a search on Hambardzumian. Altavista returns 6 results, one of which refers to a scientist, but that one is Valeri Hambardzumian. So unless there's a typo in the name, this Hambardzumian with it's half million votes is a hoax.
(And how is someone supposed to learn about scientists if they shouldn't read about them... hmmm... I just proved your remark is dumb... therefore you're the dumbass... QED)
On the Time Poll for "most imporntant even" " Elvis teaches American teens to rock 'n' roll (1954) " Is the second most important event, more important the the creation of the internet, the first nucliar bomb, the holocost, the U.S. civil rights movement, World War I and II, and the invention of the airplain. The only thing more imporntant was the trip to the moon. What is up with these people?
elvis is also the second most imporntant *person* to.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think what I was saying is that "Linus Torvalds contributions to humanity are going to do more to improve the average quality of life than Mother Theresa's preventing random uneducated starving people from dying has done".
Just because I base my system of beliefs diferently than you do doesn't make me a "Sick Person". I just believe that the death of people who cannot even support themselves and most likely will not contribute to society is well, probably, on average, a good thing.
Remember. The average quality of life on earth will go UP if that 10% of the population with the lowest quality of life were to die off. What mother Theresa was doing would DECREASE the average quality of life on earth by allowing that lowest 10% to reproduce, causing there to be more of them and decreasing their quality of life further.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
*smooch!*
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
Rabin was the Prime Minister of Israel in the early 90s and made many serious moves toward creating peace in the middle east. He was so serious that he was eventually assassinated by an Israeli extremist. His death de-railed the peace process. Whether or not it is finally getting back on track....we'll never know.
I have to tend to agree that, in a perfect world, every human does diserve the right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness... if this were a perfect world we wouldn't have staving, poor, uneducated, non-useful people.
A little help with birth control to prevent the production of more of these surplus humans would be a heck of a lot more useful than just feeding, clothing, and protecting them from diseases so they can grow up and breed.
The ability to make and use tools are the only thing that (realy) differentiates us from shaved gorillas who have been taught sign language. A computer o/s is a tool (and Linux is the result of multiple human generations of work). With tools we might eventualy be able to leave the planet, thereby preventing the extintion of the entire species by some random cosmic event. (Such as an astroid hitting the earth while we wern't paying attention). Poor, uneducated people in 3rd world countries arn't contributing to this kind of thing, and even if they are their contribution is so minimal as to be non-existant.
Just because they're alive doesn't mean people are useful!
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Forget Linus Torvalds -- an excellent candidate for man of the decade, but not the century.
I'd like to suggest that if we must vote for a fellow geek, that slashdotters turn out in force for the generally recognized father of the electronic computer, Alan Turing.
Comments? Discussion?
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
"This vote probably reflects the Internet user community in which computer users are of a high percent."
Duh.
FunOne
FunOne
Firstly, Linus shouldn't be anywhere near that top 20 list. For next century? Perhaps. Not for this one, though.
And what the hell is Yitzak Rabin doing at the top? he was a fine man, but he's not oe of the most influential people this century by a long shot.
I voted for Lenin, because he is, in my opinion, the most influential person this century. it is fair to say he was only a leader of a group but he was a strong leader, and he helped create a country that became very strong, and very influential. Look at the effect it had on the US!
Without the USSR there to fight against, would Hitler have lost WW II? I think he'd have had better odds, at least. And there would not have been a Cold War for certain.
Princess Diana is about as influential a person in terms of this century as I am ie. not at all.
Now if we made a list of influential computing people who were up there, RMS would have to win out against Linus any day.
Ho hum. Another tuppence worth.
Concentrating on current figures is braindead given the references to changing the course of history in this century; obviously, the earlier someone lived, the more of the century they may have affected.
I like the nomination of Henry Ford; it fits well with the sense of history that assumes our physical environments, and sense of physical possibility, 'really' shape history. In the "Great Man" theory of history, I'd nominate whoever was responsible for starting WWI: unlike WWII, WWI doesn't seem inevitable to historians, but once WWI became as broad as it did WWII probably was inevitable in some catastrophic form.
In a lot of ways (according to, e.g., the Economist) world culture is only now recovering the health it had before WWI; truly global trade, cities that haven't seen war in generations, artists and intellectuals who assume they can collaborate across boundaries and languages.
I don't think that any one person is worthy of the title of "Man of the Century". For every "big name" you see in that list, I'd bet there's at least 50 people working twice as hard behind-the-scenes that don't get media attention.
All of the people on that list are who they are/were because they have people behind them. They have a following. People working for them, subscribing to their way of the world, willing to go the extra mile for them. A single man is nobody without his peers to back him up.
In my opinion, the Man of the Century isn't even a man. It's the brain. Not necessarily the human brain, just the brain in general. They're everywhere. The unstable element in an otherwise stable experiment. They get us into trouble, and sometimes out of trouble if we're lucky. They build things, and they break things. They can be your best friend, or your worst enemy. They can reason, and adapt. And who knows what they'll experience over the course of the next century.
Beacuse were only counting people who did somthing In *this* century.
actualy, I think he can make that argument. What Ford did, no one else had done. He brought us into a new era (or so the poster says). Altho he did build on the ideas of others, it was him, himself who gave us modern Mass production
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm wondering how many of Hitler's votes came from little kids trying to be funny, and how many came from people who were voting for "historically signifigant" people. Myself, I thought that Person of the Century was supposed to be about people who had a positive impact on history, but I dunno. I didn't read the fine print.
First, for all the people getting their knickers in a knot about Saddam and Hitler being high on the list: The purpose is to pick, and I'm quoting from Time's own website, the "person who, for better or worse, most influenced the course of history over the past 100 years." (Emphasis mine.) It's just like when Time selected the Ayatollah as Man of the Year back in 1979 or 1980 -- it's not like the editors actually thought he was a good guy.
Second, I wouldn't be astounded at Linus ranking high or above Bill. If you haven't yet learned that Linux zealots love flooding polls like these, you haven't been paying much attention. Hell, if OS/2 had a figurehead (and no, I don't think Dave Tholen counts as one), I'm pretty sure that he'd be running away with this contest.
FWIW, I'm not sure who I'm going to vote for, although I'm struggling to find someone to top Hitler, the Holocaust being only one of a number of reasons for choosing him.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Obviously this is a geek poll. If people were polled leaving the grocery store, Linus would not make the top 1000. In fact, as more non-geeks are polled online I bet he drops off the list.
Certainly he's no hero, and as far as villiany goes, he's too small-time to be at #4. Plenty of dictators existed that should outrank him.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The Question is who made the biggest impact over the last 100 years not who was the nicest person or even who was the cleverest. I wouldn't agree that Sadam has made much long term impact but Hitler changed the face of Europe directly and the rest of the world indirectly. You can't give Hitler many points for being a nice guy but you could argue that Democracy is stronger in the world because of Hitler however ironic that would be.
Regards
Mark
Case in point: my personal favourite was a few years back, where the local radio station's year-end poll was for "best song of all time": "Bohemian Rhapsody" won. Coincidentally, that was the year in which "Wayne's World" was released. The same station had the same poll the next year, B.R. didn't even place.
Don't take these polls seriously, they're just comic relief.
-Barry
sigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsig
I suppose you can tell me why you think that
voting for Linus Torvalds as person of the year
in a meaningless poll for the fun and good spirit
of it is worship?
Greyface.
The 100 Worst Ideas. I only have two small complaints:
1) You can only pick one choice out of the list.
2) The choices at the top will probably get more votes simply because they're at the top.
Still, it's quite entertaining just to read through the choices.
By the way, I voted for Albert Einstein for the Person of the Century, simply because it's the best thing I could come up with. How Madonna or Linus even got on the list is beyond me. And who is Yitzhak Rabin? Am I missing something?
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Where do they get all those hundreds of thousands of votes from? This poll surely got hacked. Also check out this poll. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk got 1305357 votes? Yeah right. Or look at Scientists and Thinkers. As if 769029 people in this world actually know the name of Enrico Fermi (and to be honest, I don't know either Jonas Salk and Viktor Hambardzumian).
Yes, there's lots more non-programming users than programmers. But without the programmers there'd be nothing for the non-programming users to actually use. Saying the programmers' preferences are irrelevant because we are the minority is short-sighted. It's like saying that grocery stores are more important than farmers, since most people buy their food from grocery stores and not from the farmers. Without the farmers there's nothing for the stores to sell. Without people who 'hack', there's nothing for the Jobs, Gates, and their collegues to sell either.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'd say that a "Man of the Century" is someone who has led a truely admirable life that has influenced large numbers of people. But who's on top of the list? Yitzhak Rabin... the leader of a small middle-eastern nation of 3 million people. Almost insignificant on the world scale. His goal of peace in the middle-east was indeed an admirable aim, but perhaps an impossible task.
/. Time's Man of the Century! Slashdot.org takes about half a million hits a day... if we all voted, Linus would be #1 by tomorrow!
Adolf Hitler is certainly not an admirable person either. He may have influenced the thoughts and lives of many people, but in a negative way. And ultimately, he failed. Elvis Presley may have been a fine musician, but being a great entertainer in the eyes of some does not make you Man of the Century.
In short, many of the candidates that have been voted for should probably not be there. In contrast, although Linus Torvalds may not have started any wars, or released any music, he has given many of us a way of showing what we are capable of. That is the Linux Operating System. Many others have merely showed what they are capable of. So I say, let's show our might, and
Linus would never be approved by the Time editors, but it would show the mainstream, where the world may be going!
Neurotic
I agree with pretty much everything you said, and your argument for Ford is very good; I may have to go back and vote again. I also agree that Linus being in the ranking is ridiculous, he has done nothing to influence the course of history over the past 100 years, or the past 2 years for that matter.
However, I disagree with you on the point that Bill Gates has not done "squat" for influencing the course of history. Certainly he hasn't had an influence for as long a time as Ford or Hitler, but our culture is in the middle of a revolution and Gates is leading the way. Bill Gates didn't initiate the revolution, unlike Ford and Hitler, which is why I don't think he should win, but he has had a significant impact over the past decade. That is why I feel he should be much higher than 17th on the list.
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It is possible for your mind to be so open that your brain falls out.
Unfortunately the phonies & frauds list doesn't keep a running tally (at least visibly), but I did find it interesting that the large majority of the ones I saw read "Bill Clinton"
The problem I have in this arguement is pinning it down to specific individuals.
Granted: no one can do anything significant enough to influence the course of history by themselves, but it the one person that provides the impetus for revolution, the one individual that shapes and defines the way in which that revolution is to be carried out that has changed the world.
Sure, Hitler wouldn't have been able to initiate World War II without Billy Bob the Nazi or Fred or Ed, but take away Billy Bob, Fred, and Ed and you've got Han, Jack, and Joe that take their place. Take away Adolf and his demands for revenge against the Jews and you've got no war, no change.
Yes, Ford couldn't have done it without his fellow engineers designing the machinery that would carry out his vision. But that's the whole point: it was his vision.
No, Kennedy wasn't responsible for getting us to the moon. But it was his vision and his pledge that motivated hundreds of men and women to get the job done.
The point is this: Anyone can carry out a vision, it's comming up with it in the first place that's the hard part.
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It is possible for your mind to be so open that your brain falls out.
Everything you said supports the fact that Mao signifigantly shaped this century. BTW, Hitler is on the list. You should at least read the little story blurb before posting.
Hey all,
At last it looks as if Linux (#15) has beaten Window~1 (#17)... and all's fair in love and war. Great these surveys, arn't they ?
Ok I lied. Personally I don't see quite what the point of "Who's the best person in the world ever blah blah " surveys. Whilst in the computing field Linux and Windows (not forgetting the others such as MacOS) have made a significant difference... but how does that compare to the literature of authors ? How can it compare to the musical geniouses that are now around ? Simply. They cannot be compared. Ever had that algebra lesson trying to add apples to pears ? Well, there you have it.
Instead of everybody screaming "This is ridiculous blah blah blah, Linux doesn't deserve this blah blah blah, here's my overreacted opinion blah blah blah", let's all take this lightheartedly and /. the poll with more votes for Linux/Madonna/Hank ; )
Just take a minute to think about the impact of Hitler/WWII on everyday life. It changed the face of the world, created the cold war which in turn lead to the space race, the arms race, the increased rate of developement of new technology and uncountable other things. Hilter was not a nice fellow, and by no means should this poll be seen as supporting him, but what he did has had a bigger influence on our present day lives than anybody else this century. Of course, we can't know what things would have been like without him (well, not until I get this time machine working anyway) but its a pretty safe bet that things would be rather different.
After perusing through them, I find also that the message boards attached to the poll reflect a level of intelligence, respect and tact that makes slashdot look like a graduate debate seminar. Between the Theologically Impaired and the Single-Issue Media Potatoes, it's a large and gratuitous mess.
>Everything you said supports the fact that Mao
>signifigantly shaped this century.
While we should learn from, and never forget, the acts commited by these monsters, we shouldn't be rewarding them and calling them a "Man of the Century".
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
That would be John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, Inventors of the transistor. E-V-E-R-Y-B-O-D-Y uses the transistor. Without which Linus would be programming an abacus -er- Eniac.
Need to vote for a computer geek?? Then that would have to be Alan Turing, who gave us computability theory, of which I do not believe we have seen the full effects of yet.
But lets get even more real. We could have lived without the transistor. Sure, alot of us would be glass blowers instead of hackers.
As humans, how much pain and lives have been saved by having penicillin? In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered an 'accidental' mold in one of his petri dishes that would save countless lives. Both in war and peace. If you are looking for sheer numbers of people affected by one thing, that would have to be close to the top.
Along this line, look at Jonas Salk, who created the first polio vaccine. How many children can live without the fear of this horrid disease now?? But thats not what makes him a good choice. He spent his life travelling the world to foster peace among all people. You need a hero??? he would be a very good choice.
Slashdotters, get real and go back and change your dumbass choices.
While Gates can't begin to qualify as being as bad as Carnegie in absolute terms, I suppose relative to the times and his industry he hasn't done badly; maybe your comparison is apt.
Linus is on the list because people think of him as a figurehead of a movement. If you look at the list, almost all of those people are figureheads of some sort of movement. (Einstein being a notable exception.)
If you had seen the poll without /. linking to it, who would you have picked out of the hat inside your mind?
Obviously, quite a few people picked Linus. I don't believe because "Linus is a great guy," but rather that "Linus gave us something that brings us together."
The poll, was, indeed for the person who influenced history for better or for worse, so no, Linus does not qualify for person of the century, but I agree with other posters that he does deserve person of the year.
The poll is now biased since /. posted the link and mentioned it, but the fact that people were thinking of Linus before /. saw it is a true testament of what people think.
Remember, his name isn't on the list because he wrote Linux. His name is on the list because he gave Linux to the world.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Times accual choices will not be influenced by this poll. It's just something to see who the public would pick if they could.
Chances are the person Time picks will not have even made the top 100.
Linus might make it inside the top 100.. Maybe..
There are however far more worthy contributors.
On the other hand if he dose make it that will be less for who he is and what he's done than what it all represents.
Linus didn't change the world into a world where people all over the world would willingly work together. That world existed. He simply made use of it.
Linus represents what we have become and where we are going.
I don't actually exist.
Seing how as nearly every political action taken in the the latter half of the century was driven or influenced by the atomic bomb, they're right about Fermi. That's who I voted for, and I wouldn't be surprised if others did (if I'm only in tenth grade and I know this, well... who wouldn't ;-). ;)
BTW Salk == first polio vaccine
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Glad to see someone already posted what I was about to. Also, even though he greatly exaggerated his role, he did play an important part in helping the Bolsheviks take control of Russia. Stalin didn't pop into my mind before I voted, and I didn't think about him right away because he didn't make the top 20, but I'd probably put him above Hitler.
And Saddam? Sheeesh. You could cut all of Stalin's limbs off like that dude in the Monty Python flick, and he'd still kick Saddam's arse. Hell, who's 21? Freakin' Noriega?
Still trying to decide on the Fraud/Phony of the Century. Choosing between Bill/Hillary Clinton, Princess Di, Milli Vanilli, Patricia Ireland, Jar Jar Binks, |3\/1n M1+n1c|, Sanford Wallace, and whoever came up with the original Good Times email. Any other thoughts? I can't get any good ideas from the Time site since almost all the choices are "Bill Clinton."
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
> I do not think Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao,
> Stalin or any other monsters like them
> should be honoured by giving them the
> title "Man of the Century".
I have changed my mind (it is not just for positive deeds, but for overall effect on humankind). Adolf Hitler would have to be a strong candidate for that. And Stalin.
Although I would prefer to see a scientist rather than a politician or military dictator receive this award.
Beautifully put, troll boy.
There is no award given as a result of this poll
anyway; it is just for sh*ts and giggles.
Grow up or something.
I would not be surprised to see the same kind of urging on neo-nazi sites to promote Hitler. (although admittedly, he did influence the 20th century a lot, but he was still a dirty bastard)
- the Crazy Fraggle
Did anyone vote for Larry Wall? :)
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Perhaps "Person of the Century" is a bad idea from the start. They should have a whole edition of the magazine dedicated to these people, and list them in alphabetical order, since no two people can agree on the same order of importance.
I can't think of any one person that could be considered the most important person of this century, which the title seems to imply.
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I think he and Pinky DID try to get on this list, in one of thier "take over the world" schemes...
I have to say this is impressive. It's the middle of the night (in the USA), and we Slashdot Time Warner. These guy don't have wimpy web servers. They're used to getting lots of hits, but they've been Slashdotted. BTW, is anyone tracking sites that have been Slashdotted? Might be an interesting historical document. What was the first site to be Slashdotted?
Man, my sentiments exactly. Extremely amearicun.
Can someone please tell me why the "Designated-hitter rule" vastly overwhelms "the blacklist?" Oh yeah, baseball is american as apple pie and anyone who doesn't absolutely love baseball is a commie who wants to destroy the precious country. Even rabid Canadian hockey fans aren't *that* bad. I know, I live here and have absolutely no interest in hockey.
I voted for "the blacklist." If that weren't there the "laugh track" would have to be the one. Everything else seems quite frivolous (well, except the dumbass Valdez maneuver).
Also, why is the Apple Lisa there? Just because it didn't become famous doesn't mean it didn't have any positive signifigance.
Great as in the Great Leap Forward. Not great as in "These Super Golden Crisps sure are great," or, "That's a great big bowl of Super Golden Crisps you've got there."
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Can't get enough of that Super Golden Crisps...
Car parts, bottles and cutlery
And I guess I'll call my car an "assorted nuts and bolts" sedan, 'cause lord knows that's the largest number of pieces in it (and let's face it - where would it be without them?), and my computer is an SIS computer 'cause that's what most of the chips in it say on 'em (cpu's doin' nothin' without the chipset, credit where credit's due I say), and my motorcycle is of course a Snap-On motorcycle 'cause those are the tools I use on it (not goin' anywhere if I can't work on it), cool, that makes perfect sense.
On a slightly more serious note, it really doesn't take much rational thought to see that Linus' contribution to computing has a) been very significant and b) almost nothing to do with writing code.
> Hitler, who only massacred around 6 million
> people.
That 6 million is the number of Jews murdered. Don't forget the millions more Poles, Gypsies, Catholics, etc.
And don't forget the millions of soldiers more who died on both sides of the war that he started.
I do not think Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin or any other monsters like them should be honoured by giving them the title "Man of the Century".
Gates should not be #1 on the list, but not just because I (or we) don't like him. His influence on the world became significant only a decade ago.
It's like many radio stations around the globe that are running a Chart of the Century or some such endeavour. Do you think today's char tops won't appear there just because their time-wise proximity blinds the voters? Of course some of them will.
Being from Israel, it is nice to see Rabin at the top, but believe it or not, IMHO he doesn't qualify. His effect on this century is smaller than Hitler's. Being a Jew as well, this is hard for me to say, but nonetheless true.
So how do we choose? Each of us can either follow the instructions as best we can, and try to assess in our own opinions who had the most influence on this century.
The other thing we could do (and some of us do this), is to take a dominant figure in a certain field, who influenced our own lives a lot and vote for this person.
Is there another way? Of course. We could always try to look at the consequences of choosing a certain person for "Man of the Century". Undoubtedly a bad title, because such titles are rarely used to say anything other than "Good Man of the Century". Choosing someone like Madonna, Hitler, or other might cause the people of the 21st century look back at us and say "How could they choose this person?" Not too many would bother finding out that Hitler was chosen because the definition called for "for better or worse influenced...".
And so we are stuck. Because as computer people, we have this tendency towards following the instructions literally (almost too much so). But we already understand that the consequences of this may not be to our liking.
IMHO, this means that we (computer geeks) need to grow up a little more. We must have some sort of life outside the computer, if we are to choose the person who most influenced the century - life existed outside the computer for more than 70% of this century, after all...
Breaking news....
1 999Aug2.html
"MICROSOFT co-founder Bill Gates has denied media reports that he is close to giving away his estimated $US90 billion fortune, Bloomberg reported today"
http://it.fairfax.com.au/breaking/19990803/A1664-
Sorry.
You're right. There are hundreds who could have written the kernel. The point is, though, that they didn't. Linus did.
Does he deserve all the credit? Obviously, no. I'm sure he would be the first to agree with that. Does he deserve much of the credit? Obviously yes. Remember, he did alot more then just write a kernel. He shepherded this project from being a toy that he wrote for his own entertainment to the powerful, stable, productive environment that it is today.
And does he deserve to be Man of the Century? You've got to be kidding! Next century, on the other hand...
. . . that had voted for John Cage, right?
;-)
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Are bananas necessary to the survival of vegetables?
If we're going to give a prize for "person of the century", I consider AT to be a better bet. He was, after all, the intellectual father of the computer.
Yeah, yeah, I know, Atanasoff and even Karl Zuse beat AT to the punch with working prototypes, but AT did the math, to put it succinctly. Without Turing, no computer-related career would even make this list.
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".sig,
Many, if not all of the other name are also icons that represent some event or ideology, shure some of the names realy made something big and some others didn't. But what realy matter is what they represent.
Linus today is the most recognized icon to free software and this is good to the cause. Icons helps people to focus the feelings they have about something (what do you hate, propietary software or Microsoft/Bill Gates?). I belive that when someone says "The hell with linus" what people would hear is actualy "The hell with open source/linux/free software", and this is not good.
I would ratter say Linus Rules
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
If you want someone who was instrumental to computing consider the following. How about John von Neumann. He was instrumental in the success of Eniac and he created the idea of a bit and to sequential instructions, which made the modern computer possible. Or how about Dennis Ritchie. He was instrumental in the creation of UNIX and created the C programming language, which in one way or another affect everyone using a computer.