Linus talks about Apple laptops, Linux distributions, his work
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> 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”)
A good portion of the adults on the planet need this rule.
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.
"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.
I work daily in Python, but I wouldn't use it for a VCS or DVCS.
By the way, git was originally written in a mixture of C and shell-code. They replaced most of the shell code.
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.
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.
edit: found a "leaked" photo of the x230. http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/X230-p...
When I want an super-portable laptop in "lap mode", I need the pointing device that doesn't suck. The only one that delivers is the Macbook. With all my PCs I've needed to connect a mouse for decent productivity, which really sucks for portability.
but it's a damn small price to pay for the clitmouse.
no self respecting programmer should use any other mouse device. my bottom touchpad is configured in X to be 100% scrolling
hey, that's a good good idea. i have always just had mine disabled. thanks!
How exactly did you set this up? I tried Googling for it, but nothing relevant came up.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoin...
Besides, perhaps, a proper mouse?
The trackpoint is very cool in that you don't have to move your hand, but extended use can become very uncomfortable.
that's why i said clitmouse, not touchpad.
my touchpad was ignored until i transformed it in a square-scroll-wheel.
that's a clitmouse http://www.clickykeyboard.com/2005/trackpoint/14288_classicd...
FWIW: this is not a hardware problem. This is an issue with trackpad drivers on PCs, which have been shit since the dawn of time.
I'm typing this from a MacBook Pro running Arch. It took me quite some time to configure the trackpad so that it was comfortable and half-usable. There's a driver for X called "mtrack"[1] which handles clickpads (i.e, where the entire trackpad surface is a button) properly. It's a more configurable fork of the "multitouch" driver that comes with most popular Linux distros these days. It does tap-to-click, tap and drag, drag lock and multitouch just fine. mtrack's palm detection is better than most trackpad drivers, but still not perfect, which is why I ended up having to turn off tap-to-click entirely because I'd get accidental mouse input while typing even with the trackpad sensitivity turned way down.
Now my trackpad works great. I still can't use guestures, though, because (1) X has shitty guesture support and (2) the GNOME folks haven't yet added guestures to Shell. The situation will (hopefully) be fixed with a future release of X and GNOME. I did get some guestures working using an unholy combination of xbindkeys, xdo and a Python script, but it wasn't worth it.
If you're running Windows on your MacBook and using Apple's drivers, you're fine. OTOH, if you're using a non-Apple notebook running Windows and your trackpad vendor doesn't give a fuck about writing good drivers, you're totally and utterly screwed.
This same trackpad works flawlessly on OS X. Clearly, the folks at Apple have spent a lot of time analyzing trackpad input patterns and determined the types of input that should be ignored.
thinkpads are ok (if you stay in the T series) and asus eeepc1000 was years ahead of any mac at the time. heck the air is a copy of that machine with a less plastic-ey case.
but neither asus nor lenovo buy billboards in times square and hollywood blvd, or center fold wired.
anyone that swears to buy apple after researching for the best is just a sad victim of marketing. Sadder as they will never accept it.
The quality is not about the cpu/ram/hd specs (which are mighty fine in the MBA). Are those other computers as thin? As light? Some are? Cool. Are those also made of a solid chunk of aluminum? No? Bad. Do they have the highest quality touchpad? No? Bad. Do they feature a very usable "chicklet" keyboard? No? Bad? Do they have the same resolution and display quality? No?
But it's telling you say that "air is a copy of" eeepc1000. It's nothing like eeepc1000. Actually all the "media pundits" were waiting and asking Apple to produce a netbook like it, and they never did, they made the MBA.
I've dropped my x61s three or four times now from substantial heights, and a little bit of the plastic is cracked and lately it seems like the cables to the screen might be getting sketchy, but after I pulled apart all the keys and cleaned it out really good a couple of weeks ago it still feels (and looks) new. It's the perfect laptop for traveling at this point, enough power and battery life and low enough weight for anything, but it's old enough that if something happened to it, it wouldn't be devastating.
The machines will be fully tested to make sure important things like graphics work well, battery life is maintained and suspend/wake works reliably.
You will also be able to choose your desktop (Unity, Gnome, KDE, XFCE) and ask for additional software to be installed (like Dropbox, not Norton Anti Virus ;-).
Please check back on the site next week and the full product details will be up.
Photo: http://instagr.am/p/ZEKYG/
"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."
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).
I do know that I much prefer gaming and coding on a square display.
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.
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.
Because most consumers are just users and they don't want to see black bars when they watch a movie.
Why oh why do we measure screen size diagonally and not area or something that actually makes sense.
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
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-prototyp...
I think you may have to hand in your 'Apple-hater' card.
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.
Take a look at the Sony Vaio 505 models released before the air.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2011/12/hitting-all-the-right-marks-acer-aspire-s3-ultrabook-review.ars
* ultrabooks often seem cartoonish and feel cheap
* not much cheaper than Apple's offerings
* included software not equivalent
* battery life not as great
* "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...)
Still, cherry picking virtually all the bad points out of what is clearly a very positive review[1] to support a decidedly negative "short version" for an online argument is just terribly dishonest. Please. You two should be ashamed of ourselves. Either make points of your own or stay silent, don't claim that Ars Technica said something they quite clearly didn't.
[1] It amuses me greatly that you try to spin even that. Oh, they're only saying positive things because you know (somehow, from facts not apparent in the article) that they really mean them in a negative context by comparison with a piece of hardware they aren't reviewing. You should consider going into politics.
Linus uses Linux on his macbook air so that doesn't really matter.
"Oh, nothing really..." proceeds to give the best answer in the interview
Isn't Linus already a millionaire through the shares Redhat gave him a while ago?
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.
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
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.)
Are you serious?
For what it's worth, there does exist a 1600x900 12.1" screen in the Panasonic SX. Also there's an ASUS transformer tablet (or something), maybe not yet out, that has a 1920x1200 resolution in something like a 10" screen.
If the rumours are true, Apple will release a 2560x1440 (2560x1600?) laptop in the foreseeable future, though.
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.
And I can't buy it in any other country, because Sony won't sell notebooks with english keyboards anywhere not US or UK.
> 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?
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.
I could probably use an SSD in it, I guess.
> 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?
I'll agree that Android updates aren't exactly timely, but saying they're abandoned completely after a few months is a bit unfair.