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Alan Cox Interview 56

Posted by sengan from the mentions-my-code dept.
Nathan Chantrell writes "I haven't seen this yet on Slashdot: A brief interview with Alan Cox where he talks about he started hacking the Linux kernel".
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Alan Cox Interview More

Alan Cox Interview

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  • I want to be like him... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    do what ever you feel like.. not watched by PHBs... Having long beard... Having multiple PCs and Hacking Linux...


    most of it has come true now... got multiple pcs.. networked.. got a beard.. learning multiple langs..

    I still need few months to catchup on C and so on.. but heck... I am just 19... :P


    BTW: and I also like #7... 'they did..I said no'

  • mv /usr/src/linux /usr/src/coxux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously, Alan is King!

    What RedHat pays him isn't enough. This guy should receive
    one of those genius grants. Linus has non-Linux job so Alan's
    contributions have far exceeded anyone else.

    Once the work begins on the next development kernel will
    Alan be able to wok on both 2.2.x and 2.x?

    Perhaps the maintenance plan for 2.x needs to be re-instated so
    that guys like Alan can spend more time doing high quality development.

  • mv /usr/src/linux /usr/src/coxux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I happen to like merging, maintaining and working
    on all sorts of little cleanups and bits of code.

    Alan

  • isn't really conducive to organized production (a-la corporate workplace, irregardless of what you may think of that).

    another thing that tends to hinder the "corporate workplace", is when doze guys don't speak so great.

    yes

    • irrespective
    • regardless
    • supposedly

    no

    • irregardless
    • supposably

    - jk
    (anal enough for ya?)

  • yeah it is..its an old sparcstation...the things run hot as hell and are slower than a 486 (: but if you're testing alpha code..i guess its better than nothing (hm..lets guess how an alpha chip will run this code..heh)



    -xyster
  • Well, MS employees have the stereotype of wearing black shirts and slacks and looking extremely "neat". So turning up their noses at people who look like Alan would probably follow..
  • what the hell... I thought Linux was supposed to be stable !@$)!(@&$!@$! I was doing something important and I just assumed that since I was in Linux I would be safe... but it crashed! I couldn't even telnet in... what's going on? I'm tempted to reinstall 2.0.36 right now.
  • I never had Linux crash on me in the 2 years I've been using it, so I kinda blew up when that happened. I have a Dell XPS H266 running at 266, it's been very reliable, it has 128 megs of RAM, I'm running a newly installed copy of Red Hat 5.2 with X version 3.3.2 and the Millenium II driver that came with it. I didn't really expect help, I just thought Linux was never supposed to crash on a normal computer like mine. I was running Netscape 4.08 alone with a couple of other things, but everything was run as a user, not root.. I didn't think anything was supposed to be able to bring down everything including the network. The only things I've changed lately are installing KDE pre2 and kernel 2.2.1, but KDE was run as a user..
  • :)

    Would make a great .sig

  • Nonsense. The market simply would have been controlled by others. With Apple, IBM and plenty of others in the fray and the amount of money up to be made, someone else would have done the job.

    Tell me... how would computers be more expensive if OS/2 or Desqview had made it big? For that matter, can the recent availability of free OSes do anything but make end-user costs even less?

  • Uh-huh. (Score:1)

    by cduffy ( 652 )
    I don't remember them giving away Windows. Licencing it to retailers, sure. Giving it away? Umm... nope.

    Anyhow... are you saying that if OS/2 claimed to work with 2MB of RAM (though it wouldn't REALLY be useful without 8), it would have been a better thing? That's pretty much what MS did with Windows. Those IBMers -- too honest for the users' good! Uh-huh.
  • I enjoy watching Andrea Arcangeli progress while working on shared memory and memory swap routines, and memory maps.

    The poor guy is going to the university and writing code probably 20 hours a day. He needs sleep. Linus tells him to "go away" but Andrea comes back with new ideas and more code:>)



  • Sister came to visit, arriving in evening, bearing gifts from a recent American visit. Sister gave Alan a catapult (note to Americans and Australians: you call this a slingshot: a Y-shaped piece of wood with elastic or rubber band which is used to propel objects at great speed). Sister and Alan tested whether it was true that penguins don't fly.

    Penguins fly.

    http://roadrunner.swansea.linux.org.uk/~hobbit/d iary.html

  • Income? (Score:1)

    by Fubar ( 1615 )
    8-9 hours a day hacking away? I'm all for dedication to a cause, but how does the guy get money to eat?
  • What industry do you think this guy works in, marketing? Christ, he's a kernel hacker, not an account exec... hell, half of my days I dont even put on anything but boxers and sunglasses and I cant even compare myself to the likes of Alan Cox.

    You probably think everyone around here looks like the main characters in movies like The Net and Hackers.

    Not that Im not beautiful, but christ, who needs to shave when you dont leave the house for days on end? :) His wife seems very cool with it all, btw.

    Go natty dread geeks!
  • Red Hat hires him.
  • While this is obvious flamebait, I think if I was Alan Cox's wife, I would get him to shave. Still, maybe she likes him that way.

    Incidentally, though being British means I've never actually encountered any "white trash", don't they normally look more like Kenny's parents than Alax Cox?

  • I was wondering the same thing. They go out of their way to make it look ilke it's a real link, but don't bother to actually make it a real link. What the hell? Fucking annoying.
    ---
  • Honestly, that sort of appearance impresses me. I read it as expressing "I am; and no, I don't care what you think about it" and get the impression these people know what their stuff.
  • I think it was the small Taiwanese companies hiring 20 year old girls to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, 51 weeks a year for only a couple of hundred US dollars a month who were and remain responsible for the cheap hardware we all enjoy. Certainly, Microsoft had NOTHING to do with it.

    An American in Taipei
  • Let them grow beards, let them be free!

    But you have to admit that it's an attitude that isn't really conducive to organized production (a-la corporate workplace, irregardless of what you may think of that). "Oh, you know. Just come in whenever and work on something that holds your interest," isn't something you get to hear until you've spent many, many years in the industry.
  • this may help [linux.org.uk]

    It's a diagram of the CPUs in the shot.

  • ..blab incoherently with a fist up your ass?

    impressive..

  • I cant help but wonder..... is that a Sun IPC/IPX on the far left in the top picture? Sure looks like one to me, especially in conjunction with the keyboard next to it which appears to be a type 5.....

    Oh well, thats my random curiosity for ya....
  • I've always kinda wondered this. I got into linux right around the time that they were talking about two different network packages, so it was a big deal at the time, but then I forgot about it.
    (This was Net-3 right?)
    Can anybody point me to some details?
  • The scary thing is that they used a font tag to make the url's blue when they could have just a-href'd them instead...hehe

    btw - you don't have to reboot, you just have to close all netscape windows and then kill a stray netscape task that seems to get loose every once and while.

    "It's Brazilian"
  • Great computer geniuses have beards. Look at my beloved friend --jon. Postel, RMS, and Alan Cox. There are some more whose names I do not remember right now.

    Let us not criticize the facial appearance, but let us criticize the code. If you don't like the appearance of Alan Cox, then please seek your revenge by writing better code than he does. (I have not examine code written by him recently, so I am not making a statement of the quality or lack thereof of his code.)

    Cheers,
    Joshua.

    I need ritual cleansing. I spent the evening hooking up my brother's Thinkpad to the LAN here, and had to download all this Windows garbage. Have you ever installed Windows 95 Service Pack 1? <screams> As soon as I post this article, I'm going to go boot Zipslack. Anything is better than this Windows 95 prison.

  • The interview was just a little bit inaccurate about the details..
    If I remember correctly Fred did release something
    that actually went in (replacing Ross' code), however
    he then continued to work on new releases without
    showing anybody the new code (very much Cathedral with
    himself as the only one in there). Alan fixed and maintained
    the already released code, and in the end everybody got
    fed up of waiting for the new stuff to come out of
    the Cathedral and Alan's version stayed in for good.
    You can find Fred's copyrights in the code.
  • I would bet that you work for MicroSoft.

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