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> Why are people so interested in Torvalds' opinions about everything ?

because Linus is the best and Linux is the best OS ever.

oh and i forgot to say, Git rocks too

I think he's dreeeeeeeeeeeeamy.

Linus is a celebrity. A wise celebrity. Thats why people care about his opinion.

BTW - I'm sort of biased; I'm a fan of him because 95% of the time his unusual opinion matches up with mine. Eg. I don't own a mobile phone either (got tired of mine and gave it away) and I prefer lots of old computers instead of one powerful computer with virtual systems on it.

I don't consider him wise. I think he's an arrogant asshole who's a bit full of himself. He did a nice effort with his Linux kernel, but other than that, he has absolutely no social skill. Either he likes something, which ain't a lot of things, or it's immediately outright shit and makes a lot of backhanded comments about said subject. No such thing as grey areas in his opinions. I don't want to know the opinion of such a guy.

So don't read the article. That's a lot simpler than first reading it and then complaining about having read it.

Not reading his article doesn't make some folks stop parroting his opinion in places where I surf.

Edited 2008-01-31 17:55 UTC

a lot of the interview was actually about the kernel.

Bill Gates and Steve jobs can talk like salesman but Linus is the main man actually doing the coding we use to power Linux.

He is every bit as important as both of them, his code speaks volumes.

I'd much prefer to hear about what Linus has to say than perhaps Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer. Linus seems to be far more reasonable and less of a tyrant seeking money.

Besides, who can take someone like Ballmer seriously? Have you seen how he enters the stage like a rock star? Was 'developers developers developers developers developers' actually planned to be said or was he just stuttering? Come on.

But you appear to be said moron...

There is an old saying...

Monkey say, monkey do.

Did you read the interview?

"Well for the last few years all I have really done is communicate. I end up merging other people's code. I actually seldom write code myself..."

So he's more like the Jobs and/or Gates of Linux

The point being he still does that sort of work, merging code is important and he still has the last say and still written more code than any of them both.

Maybe he's written more code than both of them, but Gates was actually a pretty brilliant programmer according to his professor at Harvard (who also said he was one of the least sociable members of that CS department).

He and Allen hand-wrote the Altair BASIC without an assembler and without actual access to the hardware (at least according to the legend), and it worked the first time. Linus at least had a compiler. I'm not saying that Linus isn't good, but I don't think he's a God among mortals like some people (I'd nominate Dave Cutler for this title, given the code I've been looking at recently).

don't compare Linus with these both idiots,

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are nothing, they are idiots.

Linus Torvalds is the best, ever.

I think if you asked him nicely, he would let you lick his bum.
Just send him an email...

happy_linus@waitingfordiego.com

To call Gates and Jobs idiots is actually the spouting of an idiot.

i've always enjoyed his interview and his biography was really good -
anyways what i liked about this interview is his view on virtualization. I like vmware because i can run windows and linux on the same machine so I was a little puzzled when in the summary it said that he thought it was hype...but linus was just saying that virtualization is just not for him - where Steve jobs and bill gates would be spazzing all out about this even if they didn't use it..and then when linus said that just because virtualization wasn't for him didn;t mean that linux wouldn't spuuort it just shows how strong linux is.
BDH

What subjects do you have no opinion on? Hey, you asked for it! j/k

Because everything Linus says is NOT the mind-numbing market-speak we get from Ballmer, Gates or Jobs.

He never needs to tell a lie, and he tries to never tell a lie.

He is also a genius when it comes to managing the Linux development crowd. He definitely is not good at motivating people and keeping track of costs, so as a project manager at a company he is wasted talent, but for what he does, he seems to do it intuitively right.

And he is an interesting person.

I you take a closer look at what he said then you might realize that what he said goes a long way to explaining one of the reasons why linux has gained such notariety.

It basically boils down to making the system do what you as the person want it to do. Thats what he did and thats what he does his best to help others do the same.

What that means is that Linux can be tailored into what ever Debian, Redhat, Novell, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, SGI, Cisco, Nokia, Military, Student, Teacher, Astronaut, Toy Maker, Hobbyist, Philanthropist, Animation Studio, Non-profit organization, Web Host, ISP, Researchers, Developers, Restaurant, GNU, etc.

Thats not to say there aren't others that do the same (*BSD, Solaris, XNU, ...), but what I think sets it appart is that the goal has most fundamentally been ... do what YOU want.

Guys, you just simply prove, how strange thinking persons there might be out there. Do we live the same planet? Cell phones are revolution. Of course those have negative aspects, but you probably also forget how many lives were saved because of ability to call for a help using a cell phone.

And Linus being the best? Maybe he is a celebrity, because ppl regard him being so. I don't think he feels like that himself. Well, we should probably also remember he's sayings like Who needs multimedia, or when he tried to explain QNX folks, that noone needs precise and magnitude faster kernel switching times.

Linus started rather cool movement. That is his best achievement imo. But technically/revolutionary wise, for me, there are persons like Carl Sassenrath. And maybe, who knows, the best engineers are not even known to us, because there is always some boss taking all the price :-)

Edited 2008-01-31 10:53 UTC

I used to think so too, then I got some friends and actually had people I wanted to get in contact with.

Not meaning to be facetious , I found this post funny.

Fair enough though.

I have one just I am not into the overhyping and general abuse down to endangering people's lives with poor usage.eg bad drivers.

I don't think anybody is into that are they?

Yes, some are into that.Consider some people who can afford to eat well but choose to eat poorly so they can afford the latest handset for bragging rights.

My rule with my friends is I will talk for 30 seconds in the case of an emergency or a quick informational rap.

Otherwise, drop by and visit, or e-mail.

With e-mail you get word choice, detail, and compositional detail -- a communication that is sometimes prosaic, sometimes concise, but something you can file and refer back to if you like.

In real life conversations you get the full spectrum of communicative devices - facial expressions, gestures. You aren't limited by the technological limitations of cellphones where voices cut out when the other side starts to talk, not to mention the signal problems in bridges and so forth, low battery...

Phone cuts down the middle and gives you the basest form of communication - the ums, ands, errs of conversation, with none of the humanistic benefits. They're horrible. Which is why every phone conversation I've ever overheard has ranged from banal to plainly idiotic. Get behind some yakking teenager in the supermarket and you're in for some misery.

I think cell phones are fantastic as emergency devices. I despise them for every other use. I despise other people for not being able to shut up for 5 minutes. Mostly I despise people driving badly while yakking about asinine crap. Short conversations like "need directions" or "should I pick up milk" - this is where they come in handy and useful, imho.

Cell phones could have been a great thing. Instead, they're electronic drivel machines.

And Torvalds's point is probably the most important - since I'm going to turn it off anyway, because I'll talk to you *when it is damn well convenient for me to do so*, the utility is diminished. I might as well leave it in the car. When someone interrupts me to answer the phone, I find that pretty insulting, if only because (except in obvious emergency situations), I'd never do that to someone else.

People need to talk less and think more, jabber less and converse more, and we need less prattle and more discourse.

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN YOU IPHONE TOTING WEENIES. IN MY DAY, WE DIDN'T NEED BLUETOOTH AND TEXTING AND CELL PHONES.

WE'D YELL AND SCREAM FROM THE TOP OF HILLS AT EACH OTHER UNTIL OUR THROATS WENT RAW AND WE WERE COUGHING UP BLOOD AND EVEN OUR MOTHERS TIRED OF OUR VOICES, AND WE'D BE SENT OUT TO THE WOODS TO DIE LIKE ANIMALS....AND WE *LIKED* IT.

Phone cuts down the middle and gives you the basest form of communication - the ums, ands, errs of conversation, with none of the humanistic benefits.

That is actually one of the reasons why I very much hate talking on the phone. And I have some issues which makes it almost unbearable for me to talk on the phone to people who I don't know from before. I could easily talk face-to-face but when I can't see them and their facial expressions I just kind of lock-up and can't say anything :/ But well, I sure love sending SMS messages all around!

Agreed.100%.

My phone has this super neat feature which your phone might have as well. When it rings I can see, before I answer, who's calling. And if it's someone I don't want to talk to right then I can press a button that makes the phone stop ringing without actually ever having to talk to that person. Hell I don't even have to check who's calling, I can just make it stop ringing and check who called later. If someone had something really important to say they'll follow up by sending an SMS, which I can read at my convenience. This way I can have my phone on and still only talk to those people I want to talk to when I want to talk to them, and if an emergency of some sort pops up (like a bunch of my friends decide to go out to pub and they want to know if I want to join them), I can find out about it right away.

I'll admit that if my phone didn't have those features it would be very annoying.

I have my phone on silent mode 24/7, I just check every now and then if I've gotten any SMS

Most phones have that, but the point is I don't even want it to ring or vibrate or anything to distract me. I feel like an animal sometimes, my whole life led by the sounds of alarm and bells.

I think it is time for me to move to the Great Basin and start a doomsday religion.

Am I the only one who didn't understand shit of what you wrote here?

No, I didn't get it either.

Dont feel bad, no one understands him.

Ain't that the truth. That's why he is generally ignored and/or voted down because of his infantile opinions and slender grasp of English. Watch him challenge me now to converse in his native language or some other language that he "knows" (as these pricks always do)

The difference is, I know my Spanish/French sucks so I will not try and write coherent arguments in it, because I will just be showing myself up and will fail to get my point across adequately.

Moulinneuf doesn't get this.

So according to Moulinfool, Tomcat worships Linus as a god, and prays before the might os OSS ?
hehehehe funniest thing I have read this morning !

The thing is that such a trend is not wise. Looking from the kernel's point of view, virtualisation is not really elegant, as is virtual machines. Virtualisation invokes a speed/overhead penalty, and it is probably easier and faster to just let linux do the clustering and load balancing.

Another reason is that the ease of management brought about by virtualisation allows more of the incompetent sysadmins to continue whatever rubbish they were doing.

I think that is what linus is trying to summarise for people like us who cannot directly see. Please do understand that people like him, being at the top, is able to see things that can be wrong, even though it is a world trend.

Edited 2008-01-31 12:51 UTC

I personally agree with exactly what you're saying. I don't have personal experience in big IT, so I can't say categorically that virtualization is useless, but I think the OS should take care of things that we currently tout virtualization for. Resource management, load balancing, and isolation should all be part of the OS infrastructure and should not have to be bolted on underneath the OS at a cost in performance.

If you'll read more carefully, you would have noticed that Linus wasn't opposed to virtualization at all, he just didn't find it personally interested because he never does the kinds of things that virtualization solves. He then goes on to talk about the many options Linux offers for virtualization and does in no way badmouth the idea of virtualization. But you have to read CAREFULLY.

It's not surprising that Linus doesn't like Virtualisation

He didn't say he doesn't like virtualisation, he rather said he doesn't find it interesting to him. He has no use for it so it's understandable. Like f.ex. I don't have much use for it, I just can't think of anything useful to use virtualisation for (in my own home, that is. I know it is useful in several other use cases)

So, to embrace technology you need to use everything possible, even if you find it annoying and disturbing? Care to explain exactly WHY should he own a mobile phone, eh? Does a mobile phone suddenly make a person an idolized god instead of a "tosser"? Or could it be that you're just here trolling and making a completely jackass of yourself?

He succeeded in making a jackass out of himself I see.