Silicon Valley is supposed to be the center of the universe when it comes to technology," he said. "It's a third-world country." Torvalds cited online banking, saying it's still a slow, and often paper-based, process.
On the other hand, he quipped, Finnish companies are working on advanced technology because "winters are long and dark. There's nothing else to do."
I dont know about online banking in Silicon Valley, but some of my friends were mighty amused when about 2 years ago they read the news that a major bank in Japan was first to launch continuous availability for its cash dispensers (meaning they are open 8-19 monday to friday:)
Here we were all used to the luxury of all major banks having 24/7 availability in that sector for several years already. The same for online banking.
And we are not even Finland but a 5 times smaller country (Estonia) next to it, that had been annected by Soviet Union from 1940-1990. (We do speak a language that is quite similar to Finnish though, and like them have near 100% literacy attributed most likely to not dubbing foreign movies but instead presenting the translations in written form in the lower part of picture;)
I suspect that the announcemant by the Japanese bank was a little innacurate, but even the ability to make such a statement seemed to indicate some to some degree the state electronic banking.
It would be interesting to hear peoples comments on the state of online banking in both Americas, Europe and Asia.
This may be becoming irrelevant quite quickly for the two following reasons:
Diskspace is cheap, compression is fast
X can use font servers, font servers can be in some place US patents don't apply
The first means that it may soon be possible to "use" TrueType by pre-rendering the small point sizes that benefit from moving control points and store them in some format similar to Type1 bitmap fonts, including things like leadings and real kerning info for that point size, and then use the renderer to render the outlines for bigger point sizes without using the patented features. This has the added benefit that "hinting" bitmaps can is easy to distribute between a lot of developers on the internet:)
The second means that you can keep your font server in some patent-free zone and use just the result of using the patent - afaik the patent protection does not extend to products that are manufactured using patented technologies.
I believe you can run 8 1/2 in an 8 1/2 window. (Its the windowing system that comes with Plan 9) You can run X11 in an X11 window too, just use Xnest.
At least their press releases claimed the reason for using Linux instead of QNX to me bigger user/developer base and thus better support for all emerging technologies. I guess that it also holds for Linux vs *BSD as there seems to be at least 10/1 ratio between Linux and all BSDs combined.
As to why they refuse your SMTP server, it is probably your language;cP
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I dont know about online banking in Silicon Valley, but some of my friends were mighty amused when about 2 years ago they read the news that a major bank in Japan was first to launch continuous availability for its cash dispensers (meaning they are open 8-19 monday to friday
Here we were all used to the luxury of all major banks having 24/7 availability in that sector for several years already. The same for online banking.
And we are not even Finland but a 5 times smaller country (Estonia) next to it, that had been annected by Soviet Union from 1940-1990. (We do speak a language that is quite similar to Finnish though, and like them have near 100% literacy attributed most likely to not dubbing foreign movies but instead presenting the translations in written form in the lower part of picture
I suspect that the announcemant by the Japanese bank was a little innacurate, but even the ability to make such a statement seemed to indicate some to some degree the state electronic banking.
It would be interesting to hear peoples comments on the state of online banking in both Americas, Europe and Asia.
- Diskspace is cheap, compression is fast
- X can use font servers, font servers can be in some place US patents don't apply
The first means that it may soon be possible to "use" TrueType by pre-rendering the small point sizes that benefit from moving control points and store them in some format similar to Type1 bitmap fonts, including things like leadings and real kerning info for that point size, and then use the renderer to render the outlines for bigger point sizes without using the patented features.This has the added benefit that "hinting" bitmaps can is easy to distribute between a lot of developers on the internet
The second means that you can keep your font server in some patent-free zone and use just the result of using the patent - afaik the patent protection does not extend to products that are manufactured using patented technologies.
I believe you can run 8 1/2 in an 8 1/2 window. (Its the windowing system that comes with Plan 9) You can run X11 in an X11 window too, just use Xnest.
As to why they refuse your SMTP server, it is probably your language ;cP