If you don't care what others do with it, make it public domain. If you want recognition and copyright but still have others able to use it, make it BSD. If you want others to get access to changes people make in the code you wrote, make it LGPL If you believe in the Free Software movement, make it GPL
Do you follow LKML (all 15K messages/month)? If you only pay attention to the messages that get covered on Slashdot then you're going to have a pretty warped view of how he communicates.
The majority of the time Linus is direct but not abusive. On the rare occasions that he uses what could be called abusive language there is usually a recurring problem and more subtle means of communication have not been effective.
In the 3.10 release cycle (2 months) there were 34000 messages posted to the kernel mailing list. A small number of them had arguably abusive language, and in some of those cases it may have been unwarranted. Usually it's between people that know each other and are expected to know better because they're experienced.
Any given novice developer is very likely not going to get random abuse hurled at them. Most maintainers are easy to deal with, I've contacted quite a few of them over the years.
Publicly, on LKML. I was a young developer at the time. The world didn't come to an end, I didn't get flamed. We had a rational discussion about the technical issues.
Generally when Linus uses attention-getting language it is because he's trying to get attention. Typically there has been more than one instance of bad behaviour and the person involved has not responded to more subtle messages.
In the 3.10 release there were roughly 13500 changesets committed in 2 months. During that time there were 34000 messages posted to LKML. Given the publicity over this one message thread, the absolute number of comments with any contentious language must be low otherwise there would have been more of them mentioned.
Given those numbers, the changes of a casual developer being the recipient of an unprofessional comment is exceedingly small.
The linux kernel community as a whole is not abusive. There are a small number of people who could stand to moderate their tone. I would actually not put Linus in this camp, on the rare occasions that he blows up at someone there has generally been significant provocation.
If you're interested, hook up with the kernel janitors project, start looking around for bugs that have been languishing on the to-do list for a long time, find something that interests you and contact the maintainer.
There are core areas of the kernel that are probably not a good place to jump right in (process scheduler, filesystems, memory management, etc.). But there's lot's to be done around the edges.
Sarah Sharp is not a new person on LKML. She's the USB3 host controller maintainer. She's been there for a while, and she totally overreacted. Linus' original message was a tongue-in-cheek one talking about Greg Kroah-Hartman (who is a fairly large guy while Linus is not):
"Have you guys *seen* Greg? The guy is a freakish giant. He *should* scare you. He might squish you without ever even noticing."
Sarah's reaction was, "Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence..."
Anyone who takes Linus' comments as a serious suggestion needs their head examined. It was *clearly* meant as a joke.
The Linux kernel can absolutely use new developers. The trick is to find a small piece of it and learn about it and start fixing bugs. Usually there's a list of things that need to be dealt with and lots of them are simple enough for even a new developer to deal with its just that nobody has taken the time to do it yet.
Most developers don't normally work with Linus--they work with the maintainer for a subsystem or a driver.
My reading on that is that *if* the new European Commission data privacy rules get passed, then Germany would expect US firms to abide by those rules *for citizens of the EU*. Seems quite reasonable, actually.
Basically it's just an extension of the fact that those same US firms already have to comply with existing privacy rules in various countries around the world. (I seem to recall Google having to blur faces and license plates when it launched Street View in Canada...)
Personally, I think that if you can touch the entire surface of the screen with your thumb while holding the device in one hand then it's still useful as a phone. If not, then it's essentially a tablet.
My touchpad is running CM9 and still going strong. Even now it's got some of the best-sounding speakers of any tablet out there...which is kind of sad. The inductive charging is awesome, too.
Agile is all about adaptive development. This includes management, not just the developers. Part of adjusting to new requests is to prioritize them relative to existing commitments...by getting management to prioritize you're just bringing them into the Agile process.
Ultimately someone needs to be responsible for what gets into a given release. And given a fixed pool of developers, if something new comes in then something else likely needs to get pushed out.
If I update the library it resolves the problem for all users of the library. Therefore, the problem is in the shared library, not in the users of that library.
It may be possible to trigger the bug in users of the library, but the actual error (and the thing that must be fixed) is in the library, not the program using it.
As I understand it, the signed redhat bootloader will only boot redhat kernels (which in turn will extend the chain of trust upwards). The generic linux bootloader will boot anything, but will require proof from a person that they acknowledge that it is booting that thing (in order to prevent a "blue pill" type attack).
In this instance, the person with physical control over the system could load an arbitrary kernel, but it is difficult for an attacker to install a hidden rootkit.
I got a TV tech support job at one place for a couple months through a temp agency. I eventually found out that the agency was taking a >20% cut of what the company was paying.
On the plus side, I got all the complicated (and thus interesting) equipment setup calls, because nobody cared how long my average call was but they came down hard if the actual employees took too long with the calls.
I've heard of places with a 3-month trial period written into the contract. If it doesn't work out at that point, either party can cancel the arrangement with no penalties.
I'm a fulltime teleworker doing linux development. I was assigned a Win7 machine.
I turned the installed system into a vm image using VMware tools, installed linux on the bare metal, and run the original image in a VM. Now I'm root on linux, and the corporate IT people are admin in the VM. Everyone is happy.
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but it detects carrier just fine, so if the hardware is only checking for carrier and not actively testing throughput it won't detect a problem.
The solution is to shut down the link totally in order to force the failover mechanisms to pick a different link.
In the simple case:
If you don't care what others do with it, make it public domain.
If you want recognition and copyright but still have others able to use it, make it BSD.
If you want others to get access to changes people make in the code you wrote, make it LGPL
If you believe in the Free Software movement, make it GPL
Do you follow LKML (all 15K messages/month)? If you only pay attention to the messages that get covered on Slashdot then you're going to have a pretty warped view of how he communicates.
The majority of the time Linus is direct but not abusive. On the rare occasions that he uses what could be called abusive language there is usually a recurring problem and more subtle means of communication have not been effective.
In the 3.10 release cycle (2 months) there were 34000 messages posted to the kernel mailing list. A small number of them had arguably abusive language, and in some of those cases it may have been unwarranted. Usually it's between people that know each other and are expected to know better because they're experienced.
Any given novice developer is very likely not going to get random abuse hurled at them. Most maintainers are easy to deal with, I've contacted quite a few of them over the years.
Publicly, on LKML. I was a young developer at the time. The world didn't come to an end, I didn't get flamed. We had a rational discussion about the technical issues.
Generally when Linus uses attention-getting language it is because he's trying to get attention. Typically there has been more than one instance of bad behaviour and the person involved has not responded to more subtle messages.
In the 3.10 release there were roughly 13500 changesets committed in 2 months. During that time there were 34000 messages posted to LKML. Given the publicity over this one message thread, the absolute number of comments with any contentious language must be low otherwise there would have been more of them mentioned.
Given those numbers, the changes of a casual developer being the recipient of an unprofessional comment is exceedingly small.
The linux kernel community as a whole is not abusive. There are a small number of people who could stand to moderate their tone. I would actually not put Linus in this camp, on the rare occasions that he blows up at someone there has generally been significant provocation.
If you're interested, hook up with the kernel janitors project, start looking around for bugs that have been languishing on the to-do list for a long time, find something that interests you and contact the maintainer.
There are core areas of the kernel that are probably not a good place to jump right in (process scheduler, filesystems, memory management, etc.). But there's lot's to be done around the edges.
Sarah Sharp is not a new person on LKML. She's the USB3 host controller maintainer. She's been there for a while, and she totally overreacted. Linus' original message was a tongue-in-cheek one talking about Greg Kroah-Hartman (who is a fairly large guy while Linus is not):
"Have you guys *seen* Greg? The guy is a freakish giant. He *should* scare you. He might squish you without ever even noticing."
Sarah's reaction was, "Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence..."
Anyone who takes Linus' comments as a serious suggestion needs their head examined. It was *clearly* meant as a joke.
The Linux kernel can absolutely use new developers. The trick is to find a small piece of it and learn about it and start fixing bugs. Usually there's a list of things that need to be dealt with and lots of them are simple enough for even a new developer to deal with its just that nobody has taken the time to do it yet.
Most developers don't normally work with Linus--they work with the maintainer for a subsystem or a driver.
My reading on that is that *if* the new European Commission data privacy rules get passed, then Germany would expect US firms to abide by those rules *for citizens of the EU*. Seems quite reasonable, actually.
Basically it's just an extension of the fact that those same US firms already have to comply with existing privacy rules in various countries around the world. (I seem to recall Google having to blur faces and license plates when it launched Street View in Canada...)
"polycarbonate" actually means something. "plastic" could be anything from low density polyethylene to Kevlar
Personally, I think that if you can touch the entire surface of the screen with your thumb while holding the device in one hand then it's still useful as a phone. If not, then it's essentially a tablet.
My touchpad is running CM9 and still going strong. Even now it's got some of the best-sounding speakers of any tablet out there...which is kind of sad. The inductive charging is awesome, too.
they're just running on ARM or MIPS, not x86
Agile is all about adaptive development. This includes management, not just the developers. Part of adjusting to new requests is to prioritize them relative to existing commitments...by getting management to prioritize you're just bringing them into the Agile process.
Ultimately someone needs to be responsible for what gets into a given release. And given a fixed pool of developers, if something new comes in then something else likely needs to get pushed out.
If I update the library it resolves the problem for all users of the library. Therefore, the problem is in the shared library, not in the users of that library.
It may be possible to trigger the bug in users of the library, but the actual error (and the thing that must be fixed) is in the library, not the program using it.
WinRT ARM devices already lock out the user from disabling secure boot or modifying the keys.
Secure boot on ARM *prohibits* the user from modifying the signing keys or turning it off.
As I understand it, the signed redhat bootloader will only boot redhat kernels (which in turn will extend the chain of trust upwards). The generic linux bootloader will boot anything, but will require proof from a person that they acknowledge that it is booting that thing (in order to prevent a "blue pill" type attack).
In this instance, the person with physical control over the system could load an arbitrary kernel, but it is difficult for an attacker to install a hidden rootkit.
I got a TV tech support job at one place for a couple months through a temp agency. I eventually found out that the agency was taking a >20% cut of what the company was paying.
On the plus side, I got all the complicated (and thus interesting) equipment setup calls, because nobody cared how long my average call was but they came down hard if the actual employees took too long with the calls.
I've heard of places with a 3-month trial period written into the contract. If it doesn't work out at that point, either party can cancel the arrangement with no penalties.
Typically 2x4 is spruce or pine. Fir is generally only used for strength-critical things like solid-wood floor joists.
Ever tried to write nice-looking code in a proportional font? It's pretty much impossible to line anything up properly.
On a related note, I think programmers also have a tendency towards more deeply-nested grammar.
I'm a fulltime teleworker doing linux development. I was assigned a Win7 machine.
I turned the installed system into a vm image using VMware tools, installed linux on the bare metal, and run the original image in a VM. Now I'm root on linux, and the corporate IT people are admin in the VM. Everyone is happy.