Submitted by He doesn’t own a mobile phone and he is proud of it. And he thinks virtualization is over-hyped. Find out what else we prize from Linux guru Linus Torvalds. “Linux has done what I wanted it to do for the last fifteen years, literally. So since very early on my motivation actually came from the outside: my motivation came from problems that other people see. I don’t see the problems, my usage model is actually fairly simple and it’s still the same development model that I tend to concentrate on. So I am actually motivated by other people’s issues, and sometimes they make me go ‘those people are just crazy, that’s just insane’, but sometimes the crazy people have some of the most interesting problems too.”
Why are people so interested in Torvalds’ opinions about everything ? This is just a polite version of the obsession with celebrity that has propelled Corey Delaney ( http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,23136307-5012985,0… ) to notoriety.
Torvalds was in the right place at the right time and got lucky, that’s all. Only his opinions on the Linux kernel are of interest.
Yes, mark this down as an envy-fuelled diatribe if you must. Or ask me a question ! About anything ! I have opinions on just about every subject.
> 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
Hey Wee man,
You wouldn’t be one of those Gnome users who took a valid criticism of Gnome as a personal attack… would you?
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.
“who can take someone like Ballmer seriously?”
Raise hand and say me.
You have to be a stupid f–king moron to think the CEO of Microsoft is someone to be taken lightly.
But you appear to be said moron…
There is an old saying…
Monkey say, monkey do.
“But you appear to be said moron… ”
Who is Steve Ballmer ? If you know him or about him , you agree with me that the man is to be taken extremely seriously. Not only for is current position , but for his past one , inside Microsoft and is impact on the IT industry.
I don’t appear like a moron at all or to be the moron. But then again if that’s your conclusion , it say a lot more about you then me.
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).
If Windows is anything to go by then I’d say he’s not, but on the other end linus is not greedy, company killing, monopolistic salesman who FUD’s the market.
Gates is a businessman that cares about nothing else then money, linus is not even like that and gives his time to make something people like, without a price tag with a crazy EULA attached to it.
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…
[email protected]
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.
Was that read a waste of time! THAT is really what the great all-powerful creator of Linux thinks? “I’m not interested in it, but it interests me that everyone else is, so I’m interested in it.” Are you kidding me? He would have had more to say had he farted in the microphone during the entire interview. Talk about non-committal….I haven’t heard that much “nothing” spew out of someone’s mouth since the Bush v. Kerry debates of ’04.
That penguin better learn to speak, that’s all I can say….
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.
Agrees with him about the mobile phone.Such a frigging hassle.Worst invention of the century.
Cool interview otherwise.
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.
Or….
My dick is bigger than your dick !
U-huh, that addresses another issue (not that I am aware of anyone that knowingly does that either), but my question was actually directed at your previous statement, where you said:
which suggests that some other people are into endangering people’s lives with bad-driving (presumably caused by cellphone usage). Accidents caused by driving whilst using a cellphone are definitely a big problem, but I don’t think anyone is a proponent of or ‘into’ causing accidents.
Point taken and fair enough.
Edited 2008-02-01 13:10 UTC
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
I must be one of the strange few who have people in my life whom like it when they want to contact me.
Heeeh
… mine is usually turned off. If it is important they’ll have called twice or more, or left a message or sent a sms.
Let’s burn this new technology. I happen to know a place where there is much eligible clay and all can have their picks. Then we can draw runes in the wet clay and slap each other when the plates have dried
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.
It’s nice to see that the adulation of countless geeks hasn’t gone to his head or corrupted him in some obvious way. What I like most about him is his pragmatism. It would be easy to see Linux (or, more specifically FOSS) as a religion, but Linus has shown that, when push comes to shove (and it has, as far as GNU is concerned), he’ll fall on the side of pragmatism when it comes to defending Linux. He isn’t going to let Linux be co-opted by religion. You have to admire him for that.
Linus is not righteous , he is wrong most of the time.
Linus aint pragmatist. He is stuborn and loyal and was brainwashed and bought by Open Source.
Linus IS the religious problem in GNU/Linux. He is perceived as a god who oppose the force of evil according to you and your ilk. When what he attack is the GPL and the FSF. You know the people who created , funded , man , distribute sale and do service every day on GNU/Linux. The stuff the commercial wont touch or do.
Linus is the reason why Linux failed and he is the reason why GNU/Linux win today. When the Linux kernel under the linus torvald license failed he switched to something else.
Linus is the greatest Free Software advocate , developer and living example in the world.
He release is software under the GPL …
Linus is teaching people like you a lesson : Don’t listen to what people say , watch what they do , do what work and if it work for you do what they do.
Am I the only one who didn’t understand shit of what you wrote here?
It’s established that to actaully understand other people you actually have to want to read them and understand them and be able to.
0/3 = “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.
What is it you don’t undertsand specifically ? english ?
Pot calling the kettle don’t you think?
English don’t seem to be your problem …
Wow. Am I supposed to be insulted by that? Again I’m having an issue understanding the meaning behind your words.
The reason I replied to your post in the first place was because you contradicted yourself numerous times and I had issues understanding the point that your were making. I’m having the same issue now, since you don’t really seem to be making one.
You feel insulted ? Ha ha ha ha ha ha !!!
That’s all I got to say.
Dude, did you just come off of the little yellow bus? What the f–k are you talking about?
Anyone else who speaks retarded, please fill me in.
He never does. Trust me it’s better to ignore him.
I think you are right. I wasn’t rtying to be mean, I was just trying to figure out what he was saying but if this is common practice for him then I don’t think I’ll bother with that person anymore.
I have to say that neither do I understand your post.. It’s just mostly bull or gibberish, and then there are a few sentences which just don’t make any sense (missing words or something?)
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.
Chicken Blood ,
I can’t be infantile if you don’t understand any of the word I wrote. That comment of your’s is what’s infantile and is completely devoid of any sense.
Technically I am voted up more frequently then down. But then I got , infantile people like you , who somehow got modding point , who instead of opposing what I said , just press the little down modding button and try and portray me as something I am not. I probably also got my own **special** FAN club.
I am coherent and make sense and I am short on details , but that’s because your suppose to know the subject discussed by the article in order to be a valid and worthwile participant.
I feel pity and sorry for people like you , who think that behing popular and follow the mass is somehow leading to the truth and that are afraid to offer there opinion because it might hurt the feeling of other’s who are just like you , who’s simple pleasure in life is pressing the modding button to feel that they contributed something worthwile to the forum.
No , sorry , I wont ask you to write or understand another language , you already got enough trouble with simple english.
Hey everyone, I’ve identified ‘Patois’. Is there a prize?
http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/patois.htm
More like Loopy really:
http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/loopy.htm
I think you’re right. Or maybe the lovechild of Loopy and Garble:
http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/garble.htm
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 !
I find it slightly odd that someone of his stature can’t see that virtualazation is the way things are going to go in the server market.
It’s also strange that he finds having the ability to make direct contact with friends and love ones a burden.
Each to his own I guess.
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.
(from the interview)
CW: Are you disappointed there is no dunk-tank at LCA this year?
Linus Torvalds: No, no. The dunk-tank is one of those things that I think once you’ve done it once, you don’t need to do it anymore!
http://lwn.net/Articles/66665/
Linus rocks
Bill Gates hasn’t been relevant to techs for over a decade.
Bill the Buffoon Balmer, well you already know what I think.
Most of Apple’s products are minutely affected by Steve Jobs and what and how he thinks should be.
Torvalds is the glue of Linux.
Everyone can be replaced. Well, apparently Apple couldn’t find anyone good which is why Jobs is back.
I believe Linus when he says that he doesn’t do any dev work anymore. I do however, and could not live without my VM’s.
I shudder when I think about the bad old days, when you would have a bank of test PC’s lined up that would be re-imaged every night.
It’s not surprising that Linus doesn’t like Virtualisation, as it tends to reduce the importance of OS’s on the box. I can get a Mac (or even using my PC with a bit of work :-), and load MacOS, Windows and Linux, and flip between them. The OS in this case is less relevant.
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)
Linus is a tosser … “doesn’t own a mobile phone and is proud of it”. Way to embrace technology. Don’t tell me, he’s like Stallman as well and doesn’t even use modern things like a web browser
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.