they said it, May 2008

It's Friday evening, and the US is preparing for a long three-day weekend, often considered the official start of summer here.

So what's a pasty white nerd to do? You can't go out on the beach, because the goodlooking people will laugh at you, and kick sand in your face.

But now you _can_ do something: you can download the latest -rc kernel, and smile smugly to yourself, knowing that you are running the latest and greatest on your machine. And suddenly it doesn't even matter that summer is coming, because you can just sit in the basement, and close the blinds, and bask in the warm light from your LCD, rather than the harsh glare of the daystar..

The geeks with embedded hardware can consider themselves doubly special (and not just because your mothers told you you are), because we've got updates to ARM, SH and Blackfin.

The embeded people actually solved a lot of the power problems, but they tended to solve it for their particular platform... You had ten solutions for ten different uses, then none were interchangable because they were very sepcialized... Now... we have a good over-arching model that works hopefully for everybody... We're just now at the stage where we can solve them for everyody.

I don't even have a mobile phone! I hate phones in general because I'm the kind of person that when I work I want to concentrate on my work and if somebody calls me that completely destroys my concentration. I hate phones because they just disturb you, and mobile phones are even worse because you have them with you all the time, so I don't do mobile phones at all. I have one of the early Linux mobile phones in my workroom because I got it for free, but its not turned on.

To the Sydney Morning Herald at the same event:

An o/s should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying f*** about it except the technical people.

It's stupid - when you make a big deal about something like Vista or Leopard a lot of it is about things I don't consider to be the operating system. It's about the visual shell around it. The fact Microsoft tied the two together so much actually caused them problems, not just the legal problems. If you manage a thousand clients, or a hundred thousand clients which is not at all unheard of, you sure as hell don't want to point and click at them. In many ways Microsoft has had to fix the design mistakes they made when they thought the graphical approach should be a very intimate part of (Windows).

To Microsoft and Apple the o/s is important as a way to control the whole environment, from a marketing and money-making standpoint, to force people to upgrade their applications, and your hardware.

I don't think they're equally flawed. I think Leopard is a much better system. On the other hand, (I've found) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary. I think OS X is nicer than Windows in many ways, but neither can hold a candle to my own (Linux). It's a race to second place!

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Torvalds-worries-about-patents-and-slow-storage/0,130061733,339285687,00.htm

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Linux-is-ready-to-go-green-Linus-Torvalds/0,130061733,339285555,00.htm

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/q-and-a-with-linus-torvalds/2008/02/05/1202090403120.html?page=2

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and -- possibly -- sky marshals. Everything else -- all the security measures that affect privacy -- is just security theater and a waste of effort. - Bruce Schneier

He Said It, May 2008