Linus Torvalds

Fantastic. There aren’t many programs, they tend to be Windows only, and they’re VERY expensive. I remember Linus writing a blog post about this exact problem. Seems it was in 2010. http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.html?m=1

The only issue is that most people reviewing the commit history will ascribe a value to the worthiness if a commit. Linus Torvalds has described his thoughts on rebasing: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/happiness-is-warm-scm.h…

It's 57% sure http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ is written by a woman, too.

are you strong and fit enough? A few thoughts: * Can you run a short distance without collapsing? * If you're helping a buddy move furniture - are you able to take the heavy end? * If the lift goes out - can you walk up a few flights of stairs without too much effort? * Can you play backyard sport well? Not everyone wants to be a bodybuilder, and you're probably better off than a lot of overweight hackers, but there's something to be said for being fit. Or for the opposing view, see Linus (http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/healthy-lifestyle.html): Best Quote: "And just about every single damn article about it had that annoying "Eat healthy and exercise" note. I want to kick the next person who says that in the nuts. And I'll call that my exercise for the day (or, to be honest, for the week)."

Here is a post by Linus: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/01/fantastic.html Billy Idol's "White Wedding" he mentions is indeed hilarious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCWo1qdTdE

If it had to be done, GNU programs could all be replaced. Port BSD tools or improve busybox tools, use KDE instead of Gnome, and there is a variety of great packaging solutions that aren’t .deb. AFAIK GCC is already being replaced by clang due to the GCC codebase, amongst other reasons. Distros mostly use GNU programs for historical convenience. Given incentive, GNU could be dropped by Ubuntu for the desktop. The most popular Linux distro Android has moved away from GNU already. FSF does fabulous work, which we are all appreciative of, but some decisions are peeing in the open source pool. I think RMS creates unnecessary division against Linux and Linus for what I feel are poor reasons. I went to a lecture by him where he spent half his time being negative towards Linux and Linus (that felt like he was just pissed off because Linux was popular) and a bit because Linus had used the GPL2 (not trivial to change, and you don’t get change by attack). Being negative towards the people who are on your own side is wrong IMHO. It could equally be argued that Debian should be called Debian/Linux. Edit: I just found a quote from Linus about RMS that summarises what I wished to say here: “It's not passion for something, it becomes passion against something else.“ - http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html PS: I totally admire RMS and his relentless idealism. He has given so much to the world, and the faults I see in him are interwoven with the strengths I see:…

Reminded me of a comment by Linus Torvalds [1]: Meat is kind of important to people. Young kids in particular need a lot of varied nutrients, and a balanced diet - with meat - is likely to be way healthier than the alternatives. Quite frankly, being vegetarian is like being religious: you should let the kid decide on his/her own when they are grown up and can make that choice on their own. Plus by then they've done most of their development, so your choice won't mess them up for the rest of their lives. Humans are designed to be omnivores. Don't play games with your kids nutrition. Eating meat is not at all unnatural. It's generally considered to be one of the main reasons humans could afford to evolve a larger brain - because meat is denser in nutrients than vegetarian diets. Yes, you can do a healthy vegetarian diet (and even a vegan one, although at that point you really are crazy - there's no substitute for milk), but it is certainly not at all a trivial matter. It's much saner to just say "eating meat is natural". Once you're fully grown, it's a different matter. Quite frankly, anybody who tells their kids to "don't eat meat" is kind of crazy. You're much better off telling them to not drink sodas, avoid overly processed foods etc. And yeah, I care a hell of a lot more about my kids health than I care about cows or even pigs. Deal with it. [1] http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/05/pig-lovers-oath.html?showC…

one famous user of Sinclair QL http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/01/odd-hardware.html

I use regularly another of the side projects of Linus: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.html. My wife has thousands of embroidery files that are nicely displayed in gnome explorer.

Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this architecture is shit" than "you're shit". They can be taken personally (and imo are sometimes over the top), but they don't seem intended in a more vicious way as trying to "hit" a particular person. When he does criticize people it ends up being pretty measured, e.g. a widely talked about blog post where he "attacks" RMS [1] is not a flame at all, but just him saying he isn't a huge fan of RMS and thinks RMS is a bit of a single-issue, black-and-white type of person. Which is a personal criticism, but a pretty civil one. And he definitely doesn't stoop to starting campaigns to try to drive people out of the open-source community who he doesn't like; he just works with them or doesn't. [1] http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html

Linus' blog entry on the pre-Oscar party mentioned in the article - http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2011/02/pearls-before-swine.html

I think this blog post goes a long way to explaining part of it: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/stranger-in-strange-land.h…

All I could think of was Linus: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.html

I avoid these types of optimizations, say, 97% of the time This reminded me of Linus' blog post on optimizing SHA1 routines in Git [0]. FTA: "Some people seem to think that C is a real programming language, but they are sadly mistaken. It really is about writing almost-portable assembly language, and it turns out that getting good results from SHA1 really is mostly about trying to fight the compilers tendency to try to be clever." [0] http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/08/programming.html

non blogspam: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/02/happy-camper.html

Linus from http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/02/happy-camper.html: I don't worry about out-of-tree development for odd devices too much. I wish we could merge android, but I also accept it likely being a few years away. We had similar out-of-tree issues with the SGI extreme scalability stuff, and it took quite a while before the standard kernel merged all of that.

It might be a bit rough if you're looking in on the issue as an outsider, or if you've never been faced with the dilemma of how to license your product, but you should know that there is an entire spectrum of licenses that could fall under the umbrella of 'free software' i.e. BSD, MIT, and the GPL. When Linus says the 'extremists' of the free software world, I think, he's mainly refering to where the FSF is taking the GPL[v3] and what this new version proibits. For more see this post, http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html

Only if the drive is based on Intel's MLC or, even better - Samsung's SLC flash. Regular (cheap) MLC-based SSDs are good only at reading big sequential files and lose out to 7200rpm drives when it comes to many small writes. I can't find a ling to a guy who blogged about his disappointing experience compiling C/C++ sources on a regular MLC drive, but I googled Linus Torvald's experience with Intel: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-… I personally find that I just have all my software open all the time, most of what I need gets pre-cached in 4GB of RAM I have, and I never reboot, i.e. no need to restart anything [unless, of course, freaking Adobe Flash freezes my Mac]

Linus Torvald's Blog: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ Paul Graham Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/ Coding Horror: http://www.codinghorror.com JoelOnSoftware: http://www.joelonsoftware.com Bryan Cantrill's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/ Rich Burridge's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/richb/

Here are two reviews of the X25-M SSD you're talking about: http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/10/29/review-intel-x25-m-80gb-ssd http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-… I'm waiting a few months until the 160GB version is available (and costs about the same as the current 80MB version).

Linus just blogged about how in acutal use ssds are usually vastly slower than advertised he was pleasantly surprised to find one that wasnt in this post http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-…

Flash has a wear mechanism for writing, limiting the number of erase (and thus write) cycles. The firmware in the device does "wear leveling" which spreads the wear around as evenly as possible rather than concentrating it. The net result is that the SSD will probably outlast the computer it is in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages Depending on how the "garbage collecting" (moving active sectors out of erase blocks and erasing the blocks, number of erased blocks held in reserved, etc.) is implemented, SSDs can be fast for initial writing, but slow down significantly after they are used a while. Some manufacturers use better algorithms, but the algorithms are based on heuristics and trade-offs, so what works well for your neighbor may not work as well for you. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-box-40-perfo… http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-…