What and where is the People's Republic of Cambridge?
Linus fails to give credit where credit is due.
on
Linus in PC Week
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· Score: 1
I have a suspicion(sp?) that the interview was heavily edited. I've seen other interviews with Linus where he said that he had linux where he wanted it within the first year, which wasn't all that far. Much of the rest of where Linux is is due to other people. He pointed out that virtual memory was someone else's doing. Things like that. Linus is pretty humble, generally speaking.
If I recall with regard to Tannenbaum, he was really railing Linus for requiring a 386 for Linux, Tannenbaum was advocating a 286. Going with the 386 gave linux a major advantage in terms of stability, etc. I don't know to what extent Linux was modeled after minix, but for making the differences, only so much would be due to Tannenbaum anyhow(IIRC).
As far as GNU stuff, RMS is one hell of a guy. He has done the world a lot of good. I'm sure that Linus has great respect and thanks for RMS, but he doesn't have to mention it all the time. He was talking about Linux, and Linus tends to make a big separation between Linux the operating environment with libraries, programs, etc. and Linux the kernel. He generally seems to refer to Linux as the kernel only, which FSF helped greatly, but wasn't directly responsible for, AFAIK.
Later down, Linus said, "It started out as a personal belief that, yes, open source was needed. Then, when it got large enough, I encouraged people to license their own development, their own parts. Now there are multiple owners sharing all these licenses.
I did it partly because I didn't want to have the paperwork to deal with that. In another way, I tied everybody's hands behind their backs. Nobody can fundamentally change it now because they'd have to coordinate everybody who owns these pieces."
He certainly wasn't claiming to have written the whole thing himself, nor did he claim to have written a single line of user-land code.
Of course, as I said earlier, this interview was probably singificantly edited, so he may well have given explicit credit to people, and that was edited out.
Lastly, Linus' first language is not english. He may or may not be aware of the distinction between "invent" and "design a particular implementation and then implement it". There are plenty of native english speakers who wouldn't really draw a distinction between the two. Invent isn't exactly a highly technical term. Not the way corrupt^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinnovate is.:-)
In conclusion, considering the above and how much Linus has done for the world, you might go easier on him.
I don't think that anyone is going to claim that Linux has more installs than NT. The article wasn't even about Linux, it was about UNIX, from what I have gathered, but I didn't read the article so I won't push that one. As a number of people have said, this doesn't really mean anything, anyhow. Linux is picking up momentum, and fast. Maybe it won't happen this year, or next year, but things are moving along fast. Also, about your sig, what JWZ said was true. The thing is, NT costs more in terms of purchasing and in terms of getting it to do what you want. NT can sometimes work to do what other people want, sometimes. It lacks scripting, it lacks remote display, it lacks a good command line, it lacks a good programming environment (well, I should qualify that. I've only ever used Visual C++ 1.0. Subsequent versions really looked like they suck, but either way, programming windows is painful. And Why are so many fields in structures "reserved", but their value matters? Anyhow, NT doesn't come with any development environment, unless you call those truly pathetic DOS batch files a development environment), it lacks configurability, it lacks virtual desktops, and whole bunch of other things. Have you ever tried getting real work done on an NT box? It can be done, sometimes. Often I end up just ended up wrestling with the damn thing. And it's networking is so slow. If you are connected to anything of a complex network, just getting to a file on your own box can take 30 seconds or more, and that's just finding the thing. There is no good way to access an NT box remotely, let alone get any work done that way. I have yet to run across a job that took even the same amount of time under NT than under Linux, except browsing the web. Maybe email, though I have done my best to avoid that under NT. Yes, Linux costs you time, NT costs you a lot more time. And when the damn box crashed seven times in 6 days, often at the screen saver, that's way too much time in terms of getting my evnironment set up for maximum productivity. Oh, and did I mention that NT has no good, reliable way of shutting down apps that are frozen? Sometimes I had to do the ctl-alt-delete kill app thing five or six times, sometimes more. And why are the window control buttons (minimize, etc.) part of the app? WHy is it that when the app freezes, you can't even minimize it? And how do you send process a SIGHUP, to get ones that are geared to it to re-read their config files so that you don't have to reboot. Come to think of it, how do you change your IP address without rebooting? Just a closing though: "The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws)." -- Doug Gwyn
He can natively run Visual Basic programs. Aside from that... well... um... He can natively run word and generate 1 meg documents that can be converted to 100k html documents (pictures included in both)... hm. I would say that he could pay lots of money to get actual functionality, but you could do the same thing if you wanted to, there are people who make commercial compilers for Linux. Of course, there's no reason to do so under Linux, what comes with the box is pretty good... Ah, he can pay for Bill Gates House!:-)
Actually, for a while at work I was forced to use an NT box. Thankfully it had Exceed installed on it. I telneted to my Linux box, then ran an xterm remotely. Shortly thereafter, I had a productive environment. Of course, the only app that was being executed on my local CPU was exceed, and notepad (for an unrelated job). NT didn't make a terrible dumb X terminal. Pretty bad in some regards, though. It captures a lot of useful keystrokes. Then I think that it crashed on me later that day while in the screensaver (default NT screensaver). Frankly, what can you do on an NT only box besides send some email and browse the web?
No, you can't expect a refund for the tape player in your car. You aren't presented with a EULA that explicitly states that you can. These people have purchased a computer, and the EULA that was included with it explicitly stated that they could return the software product for a refund.
"What the hell kind of server can you buy for $700? That's all the NT Server license will cost you."
Well, 3 NT licenses will cost you $2100, which will buy you some nice hardware compared to >$100 for any variety of free unix that you want. Let's say a bsd. The rest of the money ~$2000 could buy you another PII 450 + dual motherboard. Or let you go for a nice alpha. And lots of ram. True, you won't pay as much for NT as for the unices, on a budget, you'll get less hardware for the expenditure.
"NT4 SP4 was about a 75 meg download with all the extra stuff. 6 Gigs a day would allow maybe 70 people to download it, which is more likely the number of people who downloaded it every minute. "
Let's see... First, that's actually about 80 people downloading it ((6000 MB\day) \ (75MB\person)) = 80. Now, at 80 people\second, that makes it 5.184 * 10^8 MB/day. ((75 MB/person) * (80 people/sec) * (60 sec/minute) * (60 minutes/hour) * (24hours/day)) = 5.184 * 10^8 MB/day. Oh, that's 6,912,000 hits per day. If you use your number of 70 ftp hits per second, that's 6,048,000 ftp hits per day for 4.536 * 10^8 MB/day. I'll leave the translation into gigabytes to you. Are you sure that you have your numbers right?
"If you have a hardware failure, can you afford for your site to be down several hours or even several days while you fix it? " As someone else pointed out, 2 servers (I will assume with a hardware raid system and some extra drives stored for just in case) would be plenty of backup. You've got to be running a really important system to need much more backup than that. Of course, if you site is that important, you should have it in at least two different physical locations, etc. How many people are running sytems that important for any sort of file sharing (http|ftp|nfs|etc.)?
How exactly should I do that? How am I supposed to afford a 100 MBps connection to the internet? I have no desire to go into the business that cdrom.com is doing, and I can't really prove this in any other way.
Also, I heard that the people who set up the avalon cluster didn't do any tweeking to get Linux to fill a 100MBps ethernet cable without any tweaking (while doing its actual computing work), so this does say a lot.
Also, I'm glad that *bsd is around, they're great too. I've never used them, but I know that they are open just as linux is, so among equals, to each his own.
You sort of read it right. The 6G is for all data pushed through. In order to accomplish this, MS uses 25 Compaq 5000 and 5500s. Each of them is a quad PPro 200 w/ 512 MB RAM. Three of these are dedicated exclusively to ftp. Therefor, those three ftp servers aren't even pushing 6 Gig.
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What and where is the People's Republic of Cambridge?
I have a suspicion(sp?) that the interview was heavily edited. I've seen other interviews with Linus where he said that he had linux where he wanted it within the first year, which wasn't all that far. Much of the rest of where Linux is is due to other people. He pointed out that virtual memory was someone else's doing. Things like that. Linus is pretty humble, generally speaking.
:-)
If I recall with regard to Tannenbaum, he was really railing Linus for requiring a 386 for Linux, Tannenbaum was advocating a 286. Going with the 386 gave linux a major advantage in terms of stability, etc. I don't know to what extent Linux was modeled after minix, but for making the differences, only so much would be due to Tannenbaum anyhow(IIRC).
As far as GNU stuff, RMS is one hell of a guy. He has done the world a lot of good. I'm sure that Linus has great respect and thanks for RMS, but he doesn't have to mention it all the time. He was talking about Linux, and Linus tends to make a big separation between Linux the operating environment with libraries, programs, etc. and Linux the kernel. He generally seems to refer to Linux as the kernel only, which FSF helped greatly, but wasn't directly responsible for, AFAIK.
Later down, Linus said, "It started out as a personal belief that, yes, open source was needed. Then, when it got large enough, I encouraged people to license their own development, their own parts. Now there are multiple owners sharing all these licenses.
I did it partly because I didn't want to have the paperwork to deal with that. In another way, I tied everybody's hands behind their backs. Nobody can fundamentally change it now because they'd have to coordinate everybody who owns these pieces."
He certainly wasn't claiming to have written the whole thing himself, nor did he claim to have written a single line of user-land code.
Of course, as I said earlier, this interview was probably singificantly edited, so he may well have given explicit credit to people, and that was edited out.
Lastly, Linus' first language is not english. He may or may not be aware of the distinction between "invent" and "design a particular implementation and then implement it". There are plenty of native english speakers who wouldn't really draw a distinction between the two. Invent isn't exactly a highly technical term. Not the way corrupt^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinnovate is.
In conclusion, considering the above and how much Linus has done for the world, you might go easier on him.
I don't think that anyone is going to claim that Linux has more installs than NT. The article wasn't even about Linux, it was about UNIX, from what I have gathered, but I didn't read the article so I won't push that one.
As a number of people have said, this doesn't really mean anything, anyhow. Linux is picking up momentum, and fast. Maybe it won't happen this year, or next year, but things are moving along fast.
Also, about your sig, what JWZ said was true. The thing is, NT costs more in terms of purchasing and in terms of getting it to do what you want. NT can sometimes work to do what other people want, sometimes. It lacks scripting, it lacks remote display, it lacks a good command line, it lacks a good programming environment (well, I should qualify that. I've only ever used Visual C++ 1.0. Subsequent versions really looked like they suck, but either way, programming windows is painful. And Why are so many fields in structures "reserved", but their value matters? Anyhow, NT doesn't come with any development environment, unless you call those truly pathetic DOS batch files a development environment), it lacks configurability, it lacks virtual desktops, and whole bunch of other things. Have you ever tried getting real work done on an NT box? It can be done, sometimes. Often I end up just ended up wrestling with the damn thing. And it's networking is so slow. If you are connected to anything of a complex network, just getting to a file on your own box can take 30 seconds or more, and that's just finding the thing. There is no good way to access an NT box remotely, let alone get any work done that way. I have yet to run across a job that took even the same amount of time under NT than under Linux, except browsing the web. Maybe email, though I have done my best to avoid that under NT. Yes, Linux costs you time, NT costs you a lot more time. And when the damn box crashed seven times in 6 days, often at the screen saver, that's way too much time in terms of getting my evnironment set up for maximum productivity. Oh, and did I mention that NT has no good, reliable way of shutting down apps that are frozen? Sometimes I had to do the ctl-alt-delete kill app thing five or six times, sometimes more. And why are the window control buttons (minimize, etc.) part of the app? WHy is it that when the app freezes, you can't even minimize it? And how do you send process a SIGHUP, to get ones that are geared to it to re-read their config files so that you don't have to reboot. Come to think of it, how do you change your IP address without rebooting?
Just a closing though: "The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given
tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws)." -- Doug Gwyn
He can natively run Visual Basic programs. Aside from that... well... um... He can natively run word and generate 1 meg documents that can be converted to 100k html documents (pictures included in both)... hm. I would say that he could pay lots of money to get actual functionality, but you could do the same thing if you wanted to, there are people who make commercial compilers for Linux. Of course, there's no reason to do so under Linux, what comes with the box is pretty good... Ah, he can pay for Bill Gates House! :-)
Actually, for a while at work I was forced to use an NT box. Thankfully it had Exceed installed on it. I telneted to my Linux box, then ran an xterm remotely. Shortly thereafter, I had a productive environment. Of course, the only app that was being executed on my local CPU was exceed, and notepad (for an unrelated job). NT didn't make a terrible dumb X terminal. Pretty bad in some regards, though. It captures a lot of useful keystrokes. Then I think that it crashed on me later that day while in the screensaver (default NT screensaver). Frankly, what can you do on an NT only box besides send some email and browse the web?
No, you can't expect a refund for the tape player in your car. You aren't presented with a EULA that explicitly states that you can. These people have purchased a computer, and the EULA that was included with it explicitly stated that they could return the software product for a refund.
StartServers 1
MinSpareServers 1
MaxSpareServers 2
Would do you a lot of good. Or something close to that. If you don't want apache to be big, direct it to be small.
"What the hell kind of server can you buy for $700? That's all the NT Server license will cost you."
Well, 3 NT licenses will cost you $2100, which will buy you some nice hardware compared to >$100 for any variety of free unix that you want. Let's say a bsd. The rest of the money ~$2000 could buy you another PII 450 + dual motherboard. Or let you go for a nice alpha. And lots of ram. True, you won't pay as much for NT as for the unices, on a budget, you'll get less hardware for the expenditure.
"NT4 SP4 was about a 75 meg download with all the extra stuff. 6 Gigs a day would allow maybe 70 people to download it, which is more likely the number of people who downloaded it every minute. "
Let's see... First, that's actually about 80 people downloading it ((6000 MB\day) \ (75MB\person)) = 80. Now, at 80 people\second, that makes it 5.184 * 10^8 MB/day. ((75 MB/person) * (80 people/sec) * (60 sec/minute) * (60 minutes/hour) * (24hours/day)) = 5.184 * 10^8 MB/day. Oh, that's 6,912,000 hits per day. If you use your number of 70 ftp hits per second, that's 6,048,000 ftp hits per day for 4.536 * 10^8 MB/day. I'll leave the translation into gigabytes to you. Are you sure that you have your numbers right?
"If you have a hardware failure, can you afford for your site to be down several hours or even several days while you fix it? "
As someone else pointed out, 2 servers (I will assume with a hardware raid system and some extra drives stored for just in case) would be plenty of backup. You've got to be running a really important system to need much more backup than that. Of course, if you site is that important, you should have it in at least two different physical locations, etc. How many people are running sytems that important for any sort of file sharing (http|ftp|nfs|etc.)?
How exactly should I do that? How am I supposed to afford a 100 MBps connection to the internet? I have no desire to go into the business that cdrom.com is doing, and I can't really prove this in any other way.
Also, I heard that the people who set up the avalon cluster didn't do any tweeking to get Linux to fill a 100MBps ethernet cable without any tweaking (while doing its actual computing work), so this does say a lot.
Also, I'm glad that *bsd is around, they're great too. I've never used them, but I know that they are open just as linux is, so among equals, to each his own.
You sort of read it right. The 6G is for all data pushed through. In order to accomplish this, MS uses 25 Compaq 5000 and 5500s. Each of them is a quad PPro 200 w/ 512 MB RAM. Three of these are dedicated exclusively to ftp. Therefor, those three ftp servers aren't even pushing 6 Gig.