4 ms·

For Linus things are always black and white and people who disagree with him are "stupid". That's a shame. It's amusing to read this today because x86 compati

For Linus things are always black and white and people who disagree with him are "stupid". That's a shame. It's amusing to read this today because x86 compatibility is obviously of declining value; that is, his "XScale" (ARM) prediction came true but markets do not change overnight. I would invite some factual data on the "cold cache" issue of RISC. With the switch to solid state storage, is the binary load time still really an issue? (I assume the L2 -> L1 transport can be made arbitrarily fast).

marcosdumay 12y ago
The instruction cache gets cold every few hundred ms, when processes are rescheduled because of a tick, or trying to do I/O. Disk speed never had much relevance here.
- mark-r 12y ago
  Disk speed had a lot of relevance in the day when RAM was constantly being swapped out. I honestly can't remember if this timeframe would qualify.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
It's true that he's often abrasive, but he usually has his facts straight.
- mwfunk 12y ago
  The think the abrasiveness thing is a separate issue from the black-and-white opinions thing. For the most part he is extremely knowledgeable within his field and has a pragmatic outlook that I like a lot. At the same time, anyone who presents incredibly complicated topics as black and white rarely has their facts straight. That by itself is a huge red flag. They're either misinformed at best or lying to you at worst. In Linus' case, I usually give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his stated black-and-white opinion is a vastly simplified version of his much more nuanced and informed opinion that he keeps to himself. Sometimes he makes me think I'm giving him too much credit though. Abrasiveness always makes me question someone's credibility when used in defense of a binary opinion on a complicated topic (this applies to anyone, not just Linus).
  - vacri 12y ago
    Where is the abrasiveness in this article?
    - mwfunk 12y ago
      The post I was responding to was talking about Linus' behavior in general, not anything specific to this article.
      - vacri 12y ago
        My point is more that the talk of Tovald's abrasiveness is largely a strawman. People take selected excerpts of his conversations, show them out of context, and then a tsunami of "what a bastard!" results. Almost every time I've seen this happen on HN, the excerpt is taken from a longer discussion, where he's already spent some time talking to the person in question before 'turning on them'. And then when an article like this comes along, with no offensiveness in it, people just have to talk about his 'issue with being abusive'. The funny thing is that here on HN, Jobs generally gets a nod for behaving like a bastard ("because that's what's needed to make a good product"), but Torvalds gets demonised. Even de Raadt, famed for his abrasiveness, is accorded respect for it. It puzzles me on two fronts, because Torvalds really isn't that abrasive unless you really push him, and that for some reason, he doesn't get respect that other tech 'names' do for (supposedly) being so.
- TheCondor 12y ago
  On more than a few occasions, he has appeared abrasive when he was trying to be funny and make fun of someone. If you can laugh at yourself, it is less abrasive than it seems. If you can't it's infuriating.
vacri 12y ago
It's ironic that people who call Torvalds as being black-and-white only see him as black-and-white-themselves. That page is a long page full of back-and-forth over different aspects of architectures, well-written, and he has issues against all of them (hardly black-and-white) If you search for 'stupid', there's only one place where it's directed at people rather than technical issues, and then it's about a 'stupid question' rather than a stupid person. And then he goes on to describe why he thinks it's stupid - because the question implies no-one had tried before, when there had actually been a lot of effort for no gain. TLDR: You're using Torvalds as a punching bag. Which is ironic, given that you're pinging him for using others as a punching bag.

marcosdumay 12y ago

The instruction cache gets cold every few hundred ms, when processes are rescheduled because of a tick, or trying to do I/O. Disk speed never had much relevance here.

mark-r 12y ago
Disk speed had a lot of relevance in the day when RAM was constantly being swapped out. I honestly can't remember if this timeframe would qualify.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

It's true that he's often abrasive, but he usually has his facts straight.

mwfunk 12y ago
The think the abrasiveness thing is a separate issue from the black-and-white opinions thing. For the most part he is extremely knowledgeable within his field and has a pragmatic outlook that I like a lot. At the same time, anyone who presents incredibly complicated topics as black and white rarely has their facts straight. That by itself is a huge red flag. They're either misinformed at best or lying to you at worst. In Linus' case, I usually give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his stated black-and-white opinion is a vastly simplified version of his much more nuanced and informed opinion that he keeps to himself. Sometimes he makes me think I'm giving him too much credit though. Abrasiveness always makes me question someone's credibility when used in defense of a binary opinion on a complicated topic (this applies to anyone, not just Linus).
- vacri 12y ago
  Where is the abrasiveness in this article?
  - mwfunk 12y ago
    The post I was responding to was talking about Linus' behavior in general, not anything specific to this article.
    - vacri 12y ago
      My point is more that the talk of Tovald's abrasiveness is largely a strawman. People take selected excerpts of his conversations, show them out of context, and then a tsunami of "what a bastard!" results. Almost every time I've seen this happen on HN, the excerpt is taken from a longer discussion, where he's already spent some time talking to the person in question before 'turning on them'. And then when an article like this comes along, with no offensiveness in it, people just have to talk about his 'issue with being abusive'. The funny thing is that here on HN, Jobs generally gets a nod for behaving like a bastard ("because that's what's needed to make a good product"), but Torvalds gets demonised. Even de Raadt, famed for his abrasiveness, is accorded respect for it. It puzzles me on two fronts, because Torvalds really isn't that abrasive unless you really push him, and that for some reason, he doesn't get respect that other tech 'names' do for (supposedly) being so.
TheCondor 12y ago
On more than a few occasions, he has appeared abrasive when he was trying to be funny and make fun of someone. If you can laugh at yourself, it is less abrasive than it seems. If you can't it's infuriating.

vacri 12y ago

It's ironic that people who call Torvalds as being black-and-white only see him as black-and-white-themselves. That page is a long page full of back-and-forth over different aspects of architectures, well-written, and he has issues against all of them (hardly black-and-white) If you search for 'stupid', there's only one place where it's directed at people rather than technical issues, and then it's about a 'stupid question' rather than a stupid person. And then he goes on to describe why he thinks it's stupid - because the question implies no-one had tried before, when there had actually been a lot of effort for no gain. TLDR: You're using Torvalds as a punching bag. Which is ironic, given that you're pinging him for using others as a punching bag.