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Linus talks about Apple laptops, Linux distributions, his work
- hollerith 15y agoUpvoted because the interviewer asked penetrating informed questions.
- jwoah12 15y agoThey seem to completely ignore the existence of ultrabooks. They say that nobody is making thin and light laptops other than Apple, but my thin, quiet, slightly lighter, cheaper, and higher-resolution Zenbook would beg to differ.
- ajross 15y agoHonestly (and I say this as a card-carrying Apple hater) the Macbook Air is an Ultrabook. The term "ultrabook" is Intel's attempt to push PC vendors in that direction via branding. But the form factor was fundamentally Apple's innovation, and they got there three years early. But yes: some of the recent ultrabooks looks really nice too, and the upcoming ones look even better. I'll probably buy one once someone gets a 1920x1080 display on a ~13.3" screen (I know there's a Vaio Z that does this, but it's a little old and not thin enough to qualify).
- tbe 15y agoSlightly off topic, but does it annoy anybody else that when TVs "upgraded" to 1920x1080 as de facto standard, computer screens were downgraded from 1920x1200 as a consequence? Why do computers need to be 16:9 all of a sudden??
- Symmetry 15y agoBecause it allows laptop manufacturers to claim that they have a FOO inch screen while not having to pay for as much screen surface area.
- tjoff 15y agoThis. And nothing else. Why oh why do we measure screen size diagonally and not area or something that actually makes sense.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- technomancy 15y agoI've heard the excuse that they have to buy LCDs from companies whose primary customers are TV manufacturers. The end result is the same of course, but the laptop manufacturers would have to cut their LCDs in shapes that would result in waste to produce machines with reasonable aspect ratios. (Of course what this means practically is that I'm just not going to buy a new computer, so whatever.)
- tedunangst 15y agoEverybody says this, but it doesn't make any sense. They don't sell 1080p TVs at small screen sizes. A 15" or 17" 1080p panel is not getting sold to a TV manufacturer.
- raverbashing 15y agoI suppose the issue is slightly deeper than "users want to see their movies without letterboxing" Sure, you could simply slap any resolution in a PC monitor. But if you keep the aspect rate constant across devices, you can easily change displays. Why? Example: 2nd monitor, and especially the big screen TVs that are being used in place of projectors nowadays. Funny that the 13' MacBooks (Pro/Air) still have a 1.6 (16:10) ratio, and the 11' has a 16:9 ratio
- fein 15y agoI truthfully think that the fault for this lies entirely with the consumer. People got used to/ were told that widescreen 16:9 setups were like being in the movie theater, and therefore better. I don't much like this, however I don't speak for the largest demographic of people that actually buy monitors. I do know that I much prefer gaming and coding on a square display.
- pook1e 15y agoLaptops are still used as a media device for many, so mimicking the resolution of televisions makes sense in those cases. Personally, I prefer a 16:10 screen because I spend more time programming than watching videos on my laptop, but I'm sure there are plenty that beg to differ. You can still buy laptops with 16:10 aspect ratio, but I think the people that explicitly prefer it are the minority at this point. I'd say most people don't really care.
- tzs 15y ago> Laptops are still used as a media device for many, so mimicking the resolution of televisions make sense in those cases. Actually, laptops as media devices is an argument against having the same resolution as televisions. When one watches a television, one generally operates the television and media source via a remote control, which has dedicated buttons for most functions. When using a laptop for a media device, one generally does not have a remote control. The controls are usually done as on-screen controls that you manipulate with the pointer. Hence, for a laptop used as a media device, 16:10 makes more sense than 16:9, because it provides room for the controls outside the video.
- pook1e 15y agoAren't the on screen controls almost always hidden? The only time I could see them actually getting in the way would be while adjusting the volume, but I'm fairly certain most (if not almost all) laptops come with hardware volume buttons nowadays anyways.
- mhurron 15y ago> Why do computers need to be 16:9 all of a sudden?? Because most consumers are just users and they don't want to see black bars when they watch a movie.
- Arelius 15y agoI think that you mean that most users are just consumers.
- zobzu 15y agoIt cost less for production. I eventually just accepted it.
- culturestate 15y agoYep, I'm right there with you. Luckily Dell's still got 1920x1200 in their UltrSharp line.
- starwed 15y agoIt's really only the 2010 Airs onward that are "ultrabooks", and intel had prototypes circulating at tradeshows that were approximately that form factor in the summer, before Apple announced/released that line.[1] So, it wasn't really Apple's innovation, it was just yet another case of them doing it better and faster. [1]http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/01/intel-canoe-lake-prototype-netbook-hands-on/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/01/intel-canoe-lake-prototyp...
- ajross 15y agoBut that's mostly a semantic game. The early Air obviously doesn't qualify for Intel's branding, being based on a different technology base. But that's just a feature list. Intel can't be credited with inventing the "Ultrabook" on the basis of requiring some maximum thickness, battery life, or CPU brand. Certainly the idea of an ultrathin laptop came from Apple; Intel grabbed it later as a good way to sell CPUs.
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoAre you really claiming Apple invented the idea of putting the same amount of technology in a smaller package as the underlying tech moves on? I think you may have to hand in your 'Apple-hater' card.
- ajross 15y agoOf course not. Apple shipped the first ultrathin laptop. And that kind of product turned out a few years later to be really attractive to Intel, who put their own branding and initiative on what was essentially the same idea. I'm not crediting Apple with anything breathtaking, I'm doing the opposite: pointing out that the "Ultrabook" is really just a clone of the Macbook Air.
- mitjak 15y agoIt appears that hating something must mean that you produce arguments against it, however irrational. I'm with you, ajross.
- Tichy 15y agoI had a fanless 12'' notebook that weighs less than 2 pounds long before the Air: a Dell Latitude X1 (which is really some Samsung notebook whose name I can't remember).
- binarycrusader 15y agoThe extensive reviews for the new "ultrabooks" would seem to disagree, at least if you want something that's equally enjoyable to use: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2011/12/hitting-all-the-right-marks-acer-aspire-s3-ultrabook-review.ars That's just one of many, short version: * ultrabooks often seem cartoonish and feel cheap * not much cheaper than Apple's offerings * included software not equivalent * battery life not as great Of course you could argue that some of these things are because Apple is in the unique position of creating the hardware and software, but so what? That's part of the point...
- jwoah12 15y agoI wasn't trying to get into a Mac vs. PC argument here. I was strictly pointing out that saying Apple was the only one making thin and light laptops is just plain wrong. That being said, your oversimplified "short version" of the reviews of all ultrabooks reeks of Apple bias, and my own experience with the Asus Zenbook contradicts all of your bullet points (except the included software not equivalent...I'm not sure what the Air comes with).
- ajross 15y agoUm... I'm never one to shy away from a good platform flame, but your linked article doesn't say anything like the bullet list you provide. It's not even close; it's actually a very positive review on the whole. What you just posted amounts to pure distortion; you're basically lying your face off. Stop it.
- kbutler 15y agoFrom the article: * "Body is cartoonish and feels cheap: * "$300 less than the comparable model at $1,299" (from me: compared to the "Apple Tax" on the MacBook Pro, 25% seems almost reasonable) * Bad: "Pre-installed software is abundant, in-your-face" The article mentions battery life is 6 hours (comparable Air rated at 7 hours), which could be read as "similar" or "not as great". And the description of the S3 touchpad is more "finally, it's bearable" than "enjoyable to use." Gonna have to agree with the grandparent on this one. Though it IS a positive review on the whole, that's partly because previous-generation windows thin & lights have been pretty bad. (Recall that the previous-generation Air had its problems as well...)
- notatoad 15y agoThe zenbook is a nice machine, but the term ultrabook has become so diluted as to be near meaningless now. There's 15" laptops with optical drives being marketed as ultrabooks.
- niels_olson 15y agoMost valuable thing for me in that interview was this pearl on how a successful person raises kids. We do the time outs, but I had never thought of the bathroom. Great idea. > I think the kids have grown up really well, and I don’t think it hurt them that we had rules in the family that were fairly strictly enforced (usually with a five-minute timeout in the bathroom). We had a very strict “no whining” rule, for example, and I’ve seen kids that should definitely have been brought up with a couple of rules like that. > That said, maybe they’re just naturally good kids. I don’t remember the last time I sent them to the bathroom (but it’s still a joke in our family: “If you don’t behave, you’ll spend the rest of the day in the bathroom”)
- J3L2404 15y ago>We had a very strict “no whining” rule A good portion of the adults on the planet need this rule.
- aangjie 15y agoAgreed.. though i kind of think it applies to me as well :-)
- jannotti 15y agoMy sister had her children trained. If they whined, she would ask, "What do whiners get?" They had to yell back, "Nothing!" (Or the siblings would do it, if the whiner was too pouty.)
- dhx 15y agoIt's worth noting that Linus has three daughters. The brilliance with this rule is that his daughters may avoid spending hours fighting over the bathroom during their teenage years. Not even psychology escapes the scope of Linus' hacking prowess.
- juiceandjuice 15y agoYou know, it's not in the same class as a macbook air, but my Thinkpad x61s has been my tiny performant champ for 4 years now. Roughly the size of the netbooks of the time, but tons more power than a netbook and the initial macbook air means it's still powerful enough for anything I throw at it. The one bummer has been screen resolution, but I still get 6 hours battery life on it (I did have to replace the battery once), and it was just a bit over three pounds with the larger battery.
- protomyth 15y agoI will say that Apple did a good job on the screen resolution of the Air line, although the lack of 8gb option for memory is a pain. My biggest problem with non-Apple "ultrabooks" (thx Intel) is the weird off-center keyboard / touchpad. It is really hard to find a keyboard / touchpad that is actually centered. Never-mind Sony putting a numeric keypad on theirs. How am I supposed to sit centered to the screen and type properly? It looks like that thinkpad is centered but it is so hard to tell with the angled shots.
- trentmb 15y agoThinkpad x120e here, the touchpad is centered if that helps at all.
- protomyth 15y agoThat looks like a winner. Saw a bunch of HPs and Acers that have a weird offset. Nice to see some company actually has people who type working there.
- marekmroz 15y agoI also have the x61s, there is no touchpad on that model, just the trackpoint. Which, by the way, is centered. My dream laptop would be a macbook air with a trackpoint and top notch linux support... I am curious to see what x230 will look like.
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- spwert 15y agoThis tidbit from the interviewer made me laugh: > Surely there’s an opportunity there for the global Linux community to influence laptop design for the betterment of everyone? Yes, because Linux-influenced hardware has worked out so well in the past. Do we really want to reenact the Android catastrophe in the laptop space?
- davegauer 15y agoWhat Android hardware catastrophe? I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious.
- olalonde 15y agoPerhaps he is referring to hardware fragmentation? Calling it a catastrophe seems a bit exaggerated given the enormous success of Android though.
- zerostar07 15y ago"a bit exaggerated" or "wild distortion of facts" ?
- prezjordan 15y agoA bit exaggerated. The direction Android has taken really rubs me the wrong way. The hot new phone is obsolete after 3 months and stuck with an old OS unless you root. It's not a trend I can appreciate the way I did when Android first surfaced.
- pook1e 15y agoI never understand this argument. How is an Android phone more obsolete than an iPhone after 3 months? Technology progresses just as fast in both cases.
- RobAtticus 15y ago
- olalonde 15y ago> I guess I won’t have to worry about the kids education any more Isn't Linus already a millionaire through the shares Redhat gave him a while ago?
- kprobst 15y agoI believe he cashed out quickly (before the stock tanked during the crash) unlike ESR who just wrote articles about how awesome it felt to be a millionaire and then watched his money disappear. I remember at the time on Slashdot the comment du jour was that Torvalds dumping his RHT did not reflect well on the future of Linux as a product. Not a popular view, although obviously RedHat eventually came back with a vengeance. The problem was that the stock was incredibly inflated, so I was always of the opinion that it was the right thing to do for him.
- pbiggar 15y agoI think it was VA Linux, no?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Jun8 15y agoMy takeaway was this: "what’s even more interesting than improving a piece of software, is to improve the way we write and improve software. Changing the process of making software has sometimes been some of the most painful parts of software development (because we so easily get used to certain models), but that has also often been the most rewarding parts. It is, after all, why “git” came to be, for example." Exactly! with so many frameworks, platforms, languages and what not floating around this is getting more and more important. Yet, AFAIK, truly innovative approaches like Light Table are rare.
- ajross 15y agoSomehow I don't think Linus was thinking about Light Table when he wrote that...
- moonchrome 15y agoI think that's sort of ironic given that git is written in C.
- heretohelp 15y agoGit being fast is an important property of the problem it's solving. I work daily in Python, but I wouldn't use it for a VCS or DVCS.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- vgnet 15y ago"What do you want to tell people that no one has ever bothered to ask you?" "Oh, nothing really..." proceeds to give the best answer in the interview
- orbitingpluto 15y agoLT using an Air surprises me because of the lack of screen real estate. I dislike coding at 1280x800 (but I'm usually using Eclipse these days). Heavily customizing Compiz has made 1680x1050 bearable with Eclipse, but I prefer the 1920x1200 dual monitor setup. LT would probably say something akin to, "real men don't use IDEs." I'll go for super portable when they put 1920x1200 into a 12" inch screen. (I won't have issues with reading at that density.)
- vph 15y ago>I'll go for super portable when they put 1920x1200 into a 12" inch screen. (I won't have issues with reading at that density.) Are you serious?
- dualboot 15y agoYes, he is. Some of us have excellent visual acuity. We would welcome devices that reward this with open arms.
- to3m 15y agoAnother way of looking at it is that the new iPad has 2048x1536 on a 10" screen - and yet despite this, even your genetic inferiors can read what's on it...
- notatoad 15y agoThat's really irrelevant here, the text size didn't change between the old and new iPads, it just got sharper.
- daniel-cussen 15y agoSecond. I was stoked about Retina display, not because it was an actual retina display IMO, but because you didn't have "pixels the size of gorillas," so to speak.
- SamReidHughes 15y ago
- mullr 15y agoUnix is great because everything is a file. Except when it's not so great. By far the best part of the article: "The one really memorable “Oh sh-t” moment was literally very early on in Linux development, when I realized that I had auto-dialed my main harddisk when I meant to auto-dial the university dial-in lines over the modem. And in the process wiped out my then Minix setup by writing AT-commands to the disk that understandably didn’t respond the way the autodialling script expected (“AT commands” is just the traditional Hayes modem control instruction set). That’s the point where I ended up switching over to Linux entirely, so it was actually a big deal for Linux development. But that was back in 1991."
- arunoda 15y agoI have some good story too. Once I met one of the top apache foundation guy in Sri Lanaka while he is in Apache Road Show Asia. So I asked him why do you use Apple (a mac book) and try to promote apache (he promote FOSS while using anti-FOSS tools) He said me, Laptop is just another tool for me. I don't want to buy a IBM and install Linux and work hard for get it worked. He also said that, time he saved is more worthy than $2000 dollars spend my his mac-book
- zobzu 15y agoThat's funny, the above reason is exactly why i've a Vaio Z. Can't be bothered with the crap you have to do to get Linux to work on Mac. It was working out of the box on the Z (i dont use the media dock)
- arunoda 15y agohmm. But his argument is he don't need Linux becuase he can do all the stuff he want in Mac.
- zobzu 15y agoI agree with him on hardware. Except I use a 13" Vaio Z. Which also happen to compile Linux about 5 times faster than his mac - cold and hot. And also be lighter. And it's silent (except during compile). I really mean silent. Can't hear it - at all. And has a better screen. Yada yada. So it doesn't look as nice as the mba but its not that bad. And the inside, uuh.
- glogla 15y agoThe vaio looks good too. Too bad sony decided to screw us and only sells the i7, 8, 256, 1600x900 version here, and it costs about twice the money macbook air does, while including fairly unnecessary stuff like 256 GB SSD. And I can't buy it in any other country, because Sony won't sell notebooks with english keyboards anywhere not US or UK.
- loup-vaillant 15y agoThe press release says: > The free availability of Linux on the Web swiftly caused a chain-reaction leading to further development and fine-tuning worth the equivalent of 73,000 man-years. […] Linus Torvalds’ achievements have had a great impact on shared software development, networking and the openness of the web, making it accessible for millions, if not billions. Wait a minute, shouldn't we credit Stallman for this chain reaction? Without the GPL, Linux would probably have stayed proprietary, and unsuccessful. Without the GNU system, computing would probably be much less open than it is now (I don't know what the impact on BSD would have been, though). It seems that saying "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" has a significant impact after all. Or did Stallman got this very prize before Torlvalds?
- SamReidHughes 15y agoNo it wouldn't. There existed free software before, during, and after the advent of the GPL and the FSF that had nothing to do with Stallman's work.
- loup-vaillant 14y agoMust I remind you that the FSF wrote the fucking Gnu Compiler Collection? It made available a high quality compiler for free (both meanings), and used the GPL to keep it that way. It had a great impact on the expectation we now have for language implementations (namely, they should be free). Linux is traditionally build with GCC if that's count for anything. The fact is, these days, it's quite hard for Free Software to escape GCC. LLVM didn't take over the world yet. Richard Stallman may be ugly[1], old, and asocial, but he's not irrelevant. [1] You'd be surprised how much it counts. Compared to him, Linus is hot.
- jofo25 15y agoSupplementary interview with Linus from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17784495 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17784495
- lucian1900 15y agoI love my Thinkpad E325. Very quiet (although not entirely), small, light and good battery life. AMD Fusion is really nice. I could probably use an SSD in it, I guess.