Which is essentially what Mauro did and why Linus exploded on him.
The thing is, there was no analogy to the plane crash in this scenario. Mauro's behavior was careless and his attitude needed recalibration, but the consequences of his faux pas weren't visible and memorable until Linus lit into him.
Linus used the event productively as a lesson to the rest of the maintainers: Thou Shalt Not Hose the User.
And just as in the Carnegie story, nobody got killed and nobody got fired, but somebody got better at his job. Win-win.
Every employer will easily find out that Mauro is a worthless coder (even though he is not - you don't get to become a kernel maintainer if you don't know the difference between p, &p and *p.)
Hmm, I don't know about that. Mauro took a Full Metal Jacket grade flaming in stride, resisted what must have been an overwhelming temptation to fire back, and eventually took responsibility for screwing up. He obviously isn't a "worthless coder," or Linus wouldn't have bothered to yell at him. He would have simply unsubbed Mauro from LKML, reverted the commit, and moved on with his day.
And he probably isn't going to do anything else like this in his career. So yeah, I'd probably hire him.
Lots of people in this story are citing How to Win Friends and Influence People, and there's a similar story in that book as well. Apparently a famous test pilot was performing at an air show in a vintage WWII prop plane. The plane's engines died at 300 feet. The resulting crash damaged the plane heavily, and the pilot only barely survived. As he climbed out of the plane, he stepped in a puddle of fuel. He realized that it was Jet-A kerosene, not the aviation gasoline the older prop plane required.
The young mechanic at the airport who had refueled the plane for him was understandably terrified when he heard how badly he had fucked up, and petrified with shame at being responsible for wrecking $VALUABLE_VINTAGE_AIRCRAFT and almost killing $FAMOUS_TEST_PILOT. But when the pilot got back to the airport, he didn't lose his shit at the mechanic. Instead of screaming and cursing at him, or ordering that he be fired or otherwise punished, the pilot said something like, "I bet you're not going to do that again, are you? Now fix my goddamned plane."
The book doesn't say whether the mechanic did a good job, but my guess is that the pilot made it home OK when he took off for the second time.
Pics or it didn't happen. Apple had Asshole-in-Chief Stephen P. Jobs with the technical and moral authority to do exactly that. And guess what? OS X took almost a decade before it was anything other than crap.
That's an interesting way of phrasing your point, because of the parallels that can be drawn with Linux itself. Linux has been "crap" for well over a decade, in the sense that it has never made much headway against competing OSes in some key markets. In the past, Linux's competitors -- from Apple, Microsoft, and Sun to vendors of RTOSes that everybody uses but few people have heard of -- were all just too effective at meeting the needs of their customers.
Right now things are finally looking up for Linux. Android is proving to be a key player, if not the key player, in the most important and most promising sector in mass-market computing. Meanwhile, Apple is hell-bent on repeating every mistake from its proprietary past, making its usual heroic effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. At Microsoft, there's a certified Sales Guy(tm) in charge, beneficiary of the luckiest dorm-room assignment in history. Right now Ballmer's monkey-see-monkey-do act is stampeding the company's herd of very valuable sheep, from Valve to Dell. Seismic changes are happening underfoot, some visible to the casual observer and others not.
In short, Linux's enemies are making mistakes at an utterly unprecedented rate. Leadership and vision are important, but given Apple's and Microsoft's behavior of late, it will be enough for Linus to keep his eye on the ball and his mind on the needs of the end user. The future of personal and mobile computing is up for grabs to an extent that hasn't been true since the early 1980s. All he has to do is not fuck up.
This email thread was about just that: the need to not fuck up.
If you can put "Linux Kernel Maintainer" on your resume, it's worth a lot more than $0/hour. When hundreds of millions of users and embedded devices run your code, you have assumed an enormous amount of responsibility and performed at least reasonably well.
Unless you fuck up this publicly. Then it's more like being the "Chief Rocket Scientist" the day after the pad explosion that wipes out half the town and a visiting Congressional delegation.
The rant wasn't about bad code, but a bad mindset. It was an apt response to Chehab's disregard for the integrity of existing Linux applications.
It also wasn't really aimed at Mauro Chehab. Even the worst manager knows better than to discipline an individual employee in front of his/her peers, right? No, that flame was aimed at the entire mailing list. Linus obviously felt it necessary to drive the point home in a conspicuous way that wouldn't be forgotten or blown off.
If there were still people at Microsoft with the technical and moral authority to send emails like that, the company's flatlined stock price graph would look very different.
If only for laughs, please give us the rationale for this extreme brand of paranoia.
1. Offer loyalty cards to your customers in exchange for "discounts."
2. Jack up prices, such that the "discounts" merely restore the status quo for the cardholders. Anyone without the card either pays through the ass or has to shop at a competitor. (Of course, said competitor is working towards a rollout of their own loyalty-card scam.)
3. Enjoy significant marketing power that you gained at no cost by extorting personal data from your customers.
4. Profit! Also, occasionally pause for a chuckle as morons on Slashdot rush to white-knight your marketing department.
I think the most revealing comment about C++ comes from Stroustrup himself, in the first line of the preface to the first edition of The C++ Programming Language.:
"C++ is a general purpose programming language designed to make programming more enjoyable for the serious programmer."
I suppose if you enjoy connecting car batteries to your testicles you might enjoy programming in C++ as well. But for the rest of us, this line adequately demonstrates how little self-awareness Stroustrup brought to the language design process.
At absolute worst, the global warming "true believers" are putting their faith in scientific consensus; why is this some great intellectual crime?
Because science is not a democracy?
Because, historically, those who have placed their faith in the "scientific consensus" of the day have almost always turned out to be spectacularly wrong?
Permatex may be the winner - I'll find out when it's finished.
Permatex Ultra Black is really awesome stuff. It's rated for use with O2 sensors, so it will survive very high temperatures and will cure without outgassing anything corrosive to electronics.
I've used it in some very delicate electronic applications that otherwise called for RTV 162. Very cheap, very effective.
Whether or not they have a legitimate beef against FormLabs, the act of dragging Kickstarter into their little patent war was absolutely inexcusable. This is a company that sees itself as threatened not only by competition, but by the existence of the marketplace itself.
If you are considering purchasing a 3D printer you could do well to pick a company that won't use your money to suppress competition through enforcement of bullshit patents on abstract ideas like photolithography. Or one whose business model is so insecure that it relies on barratry against unrelated parties.
Something I think a lot of people miss when these arguments come up is that the freedom to leave a place where you don't agree with the local interpretation of the "social contract" or whatever is exactly why the US was founded as a union of more-or-less independent states. Increasing Federal oversight over state matters tends to remove choices that "free" people might otherwise expect to have.
Basically, if my only two options are paying 85% income tax or moving to Somalia, well, that kinda sucks ass. Sorry if that offends people, but that's how I see it.
How about you go to Somalia while the rest of us stay here? For some reason that option never seems to come up in these threads where some nebulous and mysteriously unproducible "social contract" is used to justify the implementation of a totalitarian nanny state.
Read the report. The crash happened because they didn't realize they were losing altitude. A quick glance at any consumer-grade GPS receiver that reports altitude would have changed things dramatically.
I have no idea what equipment the plane comes with, and apparently neither did the pilots.
As far as I'm aware, large commercial airplanes all still have inertial guidance. "There's more than one way to do it" has been the rule in air navigation for a long time, and that won't change anytime soon.
Not all of them have GPS, either. AF 447 could have been saved if one of the pilots had bothered to bring a sub-$100 Garmin with them. Instead, it was "Derp, what's an ocean doing up here at 40,000 feet?"
You don't have any understanding of radio, or its importance to the operation of a commercial aircraft, do you?
It sounds to me like the people who don't have any understanding of radio are the people who designed avionics that, we're told, can be taken out by a Game Boy.
Slashdot Mirror
What, you think all that hardware support and architecture specific corner case fixing just happened overnight?
Not at all -- I'm just saying that now would be a really, really bad time for the kernel devs to get sloppy.
Which is essentially what Mauro did and why Linus exploded on him.
The thing is, there was no analogy to the plane crash in this scenario. Mauro's behavior was careless and his attitude needed recalibration, but the consequences of his faux pas weren't visible and memorable until Linus lit into him.
Linus used the event productively as a lesson to the rest of the maintainers: Thou Shalt Not Hose the User.
And just as in the Carnegie story, nobody got killed and nobody got fired, but somebody got better at his job. Win-win.
Every employer will easily find out that Mauro is a worthless coder (even though he is not - you don't get to become a kernel maintainer if you don't know the difference between p, &p and *p.)
Hmm, I don't know about that. Mauro took a Full Metal Jacket grade flaming in stride, resisted what must have been an overwhelming temptation to fire back, and eventually took responsibility for screwing up. He obviously isn't a "worthless coder," or Linus wouldn't have bothered to yell at him. He would have simply unsubbed Mauro from LKML, reverted the commit, and moved on with his day.
And he probably isn't going to do anything else like this in his career. So yeah, I'd probably hire him.
Lots of people in this story are citing How to Win Friends and Influence People, and there's a similar story in that book as well. Apparently a famous test pilot was performing at an air show in a vintage WWII prop plane. The plane's engines died at 300 feet. The resulting crash damaged the plane heavily, and the pilot only barely survived. As he climbed out of the plane, he stepped in a puddle of fuel. He realized that it was Jet-A kerosene, not the aviation gasoline the older prop plane required.
The young mechanic at the airport who had refueled the plane for him was understandably terrified when he heard how badly he had fucked up, and petrified with shame at being responsible for wrecking $VALUABLE_VINTAGE_AIRCRAFT and almost killing $FAMOUS_TEST_PILOT. But when the pilot got back to the airport, he didn't lose his shit at the mechanic. Instead of screaming and cursing at him, or ordering that he be fired or otherwise punished, the pilot said something like, "I bet you're not going to do that again, are you? Now fix my goddamned plane."
The book doesn't say whether the mechanic did a good job, but my guess is that the pilot made it home OK when he took off for the second time.
Yes. Linus Torvalds is more than welcome to come by my office, review my code, and deliver any insults he feels are warranted.
The code will be better after that, and that's all I care about. I'm not paid for my ego.
Pics or it didn't happen. Apple had Asshole-in-Chief Stephen P. Jobs with the technical and moral authority to do exactly that. And guess what? OS X took almost a decade before it was anything other than crap.
That's an interesting way of phrasing your point, because of the parallels that can be drawn with Linux itself. Linux has been "crap" for well over a decade, in the sense that it has never made much headway against competing OSes in some key markets. In the past, Linux's competitors -- from Apple, Microsoft, and Sun to vendors of RTOSes that everybody uses but few people have heard of -- were all just too effective at meeting the needs of their customers.
Right now things are finally looking up for Linux. Android is proving to be a key player, if not the key player, in the most important and most promising sector in mass-market computing. Meanwhile, Apple is hell-bent on repeating every mistake from its proprietary past, making its usual heroic effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. At Microsoft, there's a certified Sales Guy(tm) in charge, beneficiary of the luckiest dorm-room assignment in history. Right now Ballmer's monkey-see-monkey-do act is stampeding the company's herd of very valuable sheep, from Valve to Dell. Seismic changes are happening underfoot, some visible to the casual observer and others not.
In short, Linux's enemies are making mistakes at an utterly unprecedented rate. Leadership and vision are important, but given Apple's and Microsoft's behavior of late, it will be enough for Linus to keep his eye on the ball and his mind on the needs of the end user. The future of personal and mobile computing is up for grabs to an extent that hasn't been true since the early 1980s. All he has to do is not fuck up.
This email thread was about just that: the need to not fuck up.
If you can put "Linux Kernel Maintainer" on your resume, it's worth a lot more than $0/hour. When hundreds of millions of users and embedded devices run your code, you have assumed an enormous amount of responsibility and performed at least reasonably well.
Unless you fuck up this publicly. Then it's more like being the "Chief Rocket Scientist" the day after the pad explosion that wipes out half the town and a visiting Congressional delegation.
The rant wasn't about bad code, but a bad mindset. It was an apt response to Chehab's disregard for the integrity of existing Linux applications.
It also wasn't really aimed at Mauro Chehab. Even the worst manager knows better than to discipline an individual employee in front of his/her peers, right? No, that flame was aimed at the entire mailing list. Linus obviously felt it necessary to drive the point home in a conspicuous way that wouldn't be forgotten or blown off.
If there were still people at Microsoft with the technical and moral authority to send emails like that, the company's flatlined stock price graph would look very different.
It has been a common sight to see multiple document copies with different versions in their names cluttering a shared network drive
There are two types of word processor users. One type does this. The other type has never actually used a word processor for anything nontrivial.
If only for laughs, please give us the rationale for this extreme brand of paranoia.
1. Offer loyalty cards to your customers in exchange for "discounts."
2. Jack up prices, such that the "discounts" merely restore the status quo for the cardholders. Anyone without the card either pays through the ass or has to shop at a competitor. (Of course, said competitor is working towards a rollout of their own loyalty-card scam.)
3. Enjoy significant marketing power that you gained at no cost by extorting personal data from your customers.
4. Profit! Also, occasionally pause for a chuckle as morons on Slashdot rush to white-knight your marketing department.
I think the most revealing comment about C++ comes from Stroustrup himself, in the first line of the preface to the first edition of The C++ Programming Language.:
I suppose if you enjoy connecting car batteries to your testicles you might enjoy programming in C++ as well. But for the rest of us, this line adequately demonstrates how little self-awareness Stroustrup brought to the language design process.
Also, the barber says you need a haircut.
At absolute worst, the global warming "true believers" are putting their faith in scientific consensus; why is this some great intellectual crime?
Because science is not a democracy?
Because, historically, those who have placed their faith in the "scientific consensus" of the day have almost always turned out to be spectacularly wrong?
Funny, I didn't see a tutorial, or need one, when I bought my iPad.
Permatex may be the winner - I'll find out when it's finished.
Permatex Ultra Black is really awesome stuff. It's rated for use with O2 sensors, so it will survive very high temperatures and will cure without outgassing anything corrosive to electronics.
I've used it in some very delicate electronic applications that otherwise called for RTV 162. Very cheap, very effective.
Whether or not they have a legitimate beef against FormLabs, the act of dragging Kickstarter into their little patent war was absolutely inexcusable. This is a company that sees itself as threatened not only by competition, but by the existence of the marketplace itself.
If you are considering purchasing a 3D printer you could do well to pick a company that won't use your money to suppress competition through enforcement of bullshit patents on abstract ideas like photolithography. Or one whose business model is so insecure that it relies on barratry against unrelated parties.
Something I think a lot of people miss when these arguments come up is that the freedom to leave a place where you don't agree with the local interpretation of the "social contract" or whatever is exactly why the US was founded as a union of more-or-less independent states. Increasing Federal oversight over state matters tends to remove choices that "free" people might otherwise expect to have.
Basically, if my only two options are paying 85% income tax or moving to Somalia, well, that kinda sucks ass. Sorry if that offends people, but that's how I see it.
How about you go to Somalia while the rest of us stay here? For some reason that option never seems to come up in these threads where some nebulous and mysteriously unproducible "social contract" is used to justify the implementation of a totalitarian nanny state.
How many people reading this intentionally pay more tax than they are strictly required to?
Read the report. The crash happened because they didn't realize they were losing altitude. A quick glance at any consumer-grade GPS receiver that reports altitude would have changed things dramatically.
I have no idea what equipment the plane comes with, and apparently neither did the pilots.
Get yourself stored for a billion years, go to a library, get to the time masheen and let us know of what you have discovered. Thanks.
Fortunately, DNA analysis allows you to do just that, no time machine required.
It's also plainly obvious from an inspection of the whale's skeletal structure.
As far as I'm aware, large commercial airplanes all still have inertial guidance. "There's more than one way to do it" has been the rule in air navigation for a long time, and that won't change anytime soon.
Not all of them have GPS, either. AF 447 could have been saved if one of the pilots had bothered to bring a sub-$100 Garmin with them. Instead, it was "Derp, what's an ocean doing up here at 40,000 feet?"
And then they lose around $30B or so in a couple days of trading a week or so ago
That is not how profit works.
A Republican politician is someone who puts his right foot on the Constitution and swears to uphold the Bible.
None of the big publishers other than Valve are seriously thinking about supporting Linux.
Rest assured, they are now.
The Windows 8 debacle has farther-reaching implications than most users -- and certainly most Microsoft execs -- realize.
You don't have any understanding of radio, or its importance to the operation of a commercial aircraft, do you?
It sounds to me like the people who don't have any understanding of radio are the people who designed avionics that, we're told, can be taken out by a Game Boy.