KernelTrap Interview With Alan Cox 126
Jeremy writes "KernelTrap has spoken with Linux guru Alan Cox. He is perhaps the second most
influental Linux kernel hacker, next only to Linus. In this interview he talks
about himself, his history with computers and Linux, working for Red Hat,
Marcello and the 2.4 kernel, the DMCA, the future of Linux and much more."
DMCA Issue. (Score:2)
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:5, Informative)
Iit weren't copyrighted, the GPL couldn't tell you what to do with it. If it were truly in the public domain, I could ignore all the provisions of the GPL and do whatever I wanted, including incorporating it into the next version of Windows, and nobody would have any legal resource against me. Copyright law is what makes the GPL enforceable.
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:2)
>>the GPL won't be legal.
The GPL keeps source open, so it can be shared.
If there was no copyright, and GPL was a
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:3, Informative)
So it isn't redundant.
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:2)
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:2)
MUCH easier said than done. MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH easier....
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:1)
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
No you're wrong! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:1)
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
I could steal your open-source code, change the header information, and release it as my own, closed-source product, and there's not a damn thing you could do about it, because you never owned your code in the first place. Losing copyright law would mean losing all control over your code, including telling other people what they can and can't do with it.
The GPL *needs* IP law in order to force people to release their source. Without that, it would just be a polite request.
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
But why would you do that? Anyone could just make copies of your closed-source product, give it to whomever they wanted, put it up for download on the internet, whatever. How could you possibly make money selling closed-source software in a copyright-free world?
I can see where this discussion is going, so let me make this clear: I don't advocate abolishing copyright. I'm just saying that the argument "We need copyright because it makes the GPL possible" is invalid.
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if nobody makes money off of it; people are perfectly happy to take credit for other peoples' work even if they aren't earning anything from it.
In fact, I could even loudly thank the original author, and make no secret of the fact that my code was based off of his. That still doesn't change the fact that under the GPL I'm required to release my source, but without copyright law nobody could force me to.
I'm just saying that the argument "We need copyright because it makes the GPL possible" is invalid.
Well, that isn't my argument. I never stated a position in favor of either copyright or GPL. In actuality, my argument is "if you're going to advocate the GPL, you are also advocating copyright law, whether you like it or not". I couldn't care less about the GPL; I'm just tired of hearing the we-should-abolish-copyright argument from overzealous open-source fans.
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:1)
That doesn't make any sense. If someone dislikes copyright laws and believes that the GPL helps to mitigate against the problems that they associate with copyright laws then they are in no way contradicting themselves by both supporting the GPL whilst copyright laws remain in place and supporting the abolition of copyright laws (thus rendering the GPL no longer necessary for THEIR purposes; the fact that copyright law + GPL could provide something that some other people might consider overall good is irrelevant).
To try an analogy, remembering that you don't have to agree with their view that copyright is a bad thing in order to appreciate whether they're being consistent; suppose that there exists a horrible lethal disease. It cause massive suffering and slow death. Suppose that a vaccine against the disease can be made, but in order to do so you have to make use of the germs of the disease itself. Now suppose that the vaccine has some extra effect on top of protecting against the disease, perhaps it also helps you build up immunity to some less serious diseases. Now, if someone both supports use of the vaccine to fight against the disease for so long as the disease is around and supports eliminating the disease as an even better long term goal, are they being inconsistent?
Again, you do not have to believe that copyright is analogous to a horrible disease to assess whether those that do are being consistent. The vaccine won't be possible without the disease, the vaccine gives benefits that will then no longer exist, but if their primary goal is eradication of the disease... where's the inconsistency?
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:2)
Until sometime in the early 80s, when the law was amended, it was an open legal question if computer machine code was covered by the copyright law. Stallman and others in the FSF opposed that change in the law, and the GPL was devised afterward as a away to turn the intentions of the law against itself.
You are correct that the GPL relies on IP law, but it's inventors would prefer that would not be the case.
In addition, note that 99% of commercial software is not distributed under the terms of copyright law, but instead try to rely on a seperate contract (a click-thru or signed agreement). In the absense of copyright law, the GPL could easily be altered slightly be become a 'click-thru' licence (and you could argue that it alread sort of is a End User Licence Agreement, because it imposes some minor requirements on the end user as soon as they modify the software, irregardless of distribution.)
Trade Secrets (Score:1)
So, getting rid of copyright does not get rid of closed systems. Splitting hairs, perhaps. But isn't that what law is all about?
(The next paragraph is just me, IANAL, guessing)
If you got rid of copyright, then anyone could take the newly un-GPLed software, and make it a trade secret. Or at least distribute binaries without the source code.
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:5, Informative)
The DMCA is also self-contradictory on a couple of point, so YMMV.
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
A computer running Linux can be used to store copyrighted information (e.g. the book that you are writing on, the movie that you are producing). Linux is not like MSDOS or a C64; it has logins and permissions and stuff, so that you can access your copyrighted work, but other people can't.
Because of that, it quite possibly qualifies as a "technological measure to limit access to a copyrighted work." This applies to other operating systems such as OpenBSD, Windows NT, MacOX X, as well.
If you discuss details about security bugs in any of these systems, you are potentially trafficking in tools and information about how to circumvent the technological measure the limits access to copyrighted works.
For example, I store my copyrighted work on a Linux ext2 filesystem. You find a buffer overflow in a program which I happen to run, and you describe the bug on a mailing list. Someone reads the list, infers an exploit from your bug description, and uses it to break into my system and access my copyrighted work. You just violated DMCA, and are potentially liable to me, should I decide to sue you.
Brilliant law, eh?
Re:DMCA Issue. (Score:4, Informative)
The specific issue you're referring to (Alan's Changelog that omitted details of a security fix for DMCA-related reasons) was, IIRC, related to a flaw in enforcement of file permissions. Because someone could use file permissions to build a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system (dumb, but that may not stop them), it is feasible that by Alan documenting the problem more precisely than I've done, he could be found to be distributing a circumvention device, as outlawed in the DMCA.
If anyone's got a better insight on this, feel free to correct me, but I think I've pretty much nailed it.
--
mirror (Score:5, Informative)
This interview is part of an ongoing series. Join our announce-only mailing list to receive a brief email when interviews are posted to Kerneltrap.
Jeremy Andrews: A quick Google search reveals that you've already been involved in quite a few interviews. However, for the readers out there who are not familiar with you and your contributions to Linux, can you tell a little about yourself?
Alan Cox: Pretty generic on the whole - born (that bit is required anyway), school, chickenpox, German measles, mumps, lessons and somewhere down the line computers thanks to a couple of teachers interested in computing who gave up their own lunchtimes one evening a week to teach pupils who were interested. At the time the school had 3 computers and you'd get maybe 15 or 20 minute sessions, but that was way more than most. Somehow computing just soaked in, so by the time I officially did computing at school I was the owner of a ZX81 (first real mass market cheap UK computer) and already teaching the teachers.
I did the end of school exam ('O' level to UK people) in 30 minutes for a 3 hour paper and by the time I was at college (16-18) I was convinced of my own brilliance.
At the end of college before going to university I worked briefly in the game world, helping do ports of the Scott Adams games to UK machines and bits of some other games, then my own game. That taught me a certain amount about the computing and real world. The computer game business at the time was run by the people who failed to get into the music industry because they'd have to think a moment before selling their grandmother. It was also full of people who were all as good at computing and many of them rather better than I was. Worse yet, every one of them was either as convinced of their own brilliance as me, mentally unstable, or both.
Like the music industry nobody in the computer game industry made any money but mysteriously all the game company owners drove expensive cars and lived in huge houses.
University was a slightly checkered career, not on the whole due to taking other people's computers apart but because of the rather odd rules at Aberystwyth. I learned a lot there (more from my own experiments and trying to achieve things than from the course), but because of the other courses you had to pass (Physics in my case) ended up changing university to one that didn't require I could do physics but required I could do computer science.
Looking back on university I'm very glad I did it. At the time I thought management skills, software engineering, databases and even bits of maths like proof by induction were completely irrelevant. I've used all of them in my Linux work.
The whole Linux thing was really an accident - my interest was text based adventure games (the world of Colossal cave etc) and also multi user games based on that style (Essex MUD1 and so on). I got into Linux looking for a better platform to developer AberMUD on.
I ended up doing time synchronization across ethernet, a large C++ network file/project manager, and then ISDN code for Sonix and later 3COM. I then escaped to be a sysadmin at NTL, left to work at a small saner ISP (Cymru.Net) which NTL bought. At that point I escaped to Red Hat and Linux became a job.
That wasn't actually an easy decision. It probably has many people thinking "So why didn't he go to Red Hat earlier, surely they would have taken him on". I probably should have, but to turn a hobby into work always risks losing the fun factor. It was actually something I had to give a lot of thought. When it came down to working on Linux or working for a telco again however that made the decision easy.
JA: How long have you worked for Red Hat? Can you offer any reflections on them, as a company? As a distribution?
Alan Cox: I joined Red Hat properly Jan 1 2000, that was the point at which there was a Red Hat in Europe and we'd sorted all the paperwork out. It suits me well as it's very much an open source company, and has a management that believes in both open source and running a company well to make a profit. Not that we get everything right, but we try.
As a distribution I run it on most my boxes. The software I always change is the usual "religious warfare" stuff - removing sendmail for exim for example.
JA: You mentioned earlier a game that you wrote. What was the game called? Is it still available anywhere?
Alan Cox: It was called Blizzard Pass. The ZX spectrum 128 version of it was released with a Spectrum 128K launch pack, then by Tynesoft as part of a two game pair. The rights to the Spectrum 128K version and the game interpreter it uses are still owned by Adventuresoft UK and/or Tynesoft somewhere.
JA: Do you still play any text based games? Or other games?
Alan Cox: Single player ones yes and there are people turning out games in the yearly IF competition that are the equal of Infocom. I actually find most of the multiplayer ones extremely boring, and the quality and gameplay has not improved that I've seen in the past ten years.
MUD1, MIST, AberMUD and the like were originally designed to be very competitive games. The game play was designed so that you had to be able to figure game strategy very fast, and included large amounts of player versus player violence.
JA: Many were surprised (and disappointed) when you announced that you were not interested in maintaining the 2.4 kernel tree. What caused you to make this decision?
Alan Cox: A variety of things were involved in that decision. In part I want to work on other projects and ideas. I've already been using some of the time freed up to rewrite the aacraid driver and to clean up some of the very old and grungy SCSI drivers instead.
It's also good that a system doesn't settle down with a sort of elite who created it and that new ideas and younger people are always stepping into the project. I want to be sure that when I'm an old fart there are plenty of people in the community with both the knowledge and the standing to call me an idiot when I say something stupid, rather than treat my words as gospel.
Some of the attitudes people had after the decision were annoying. The vision most people have of Brazil is bizarre. Its not the third world that people seem to think. Yes it has its problems, but it is one of the ten largest economies in the world, and overall it has lower crime rates than the UK or USA. Its a source of huge amounts of innovation and many great projects - including things like Window Maker, and apt for RPM.
JA: Speaking of Window Maker, what desktop environment do you use?
Alan Cox: That varies. Of choice I generally run xfce but I am frequently running the Gnome + nautilus set up and occasionally KDE because plenty of time is spent beta testing new releases. The only good way to beta test a new release is to run it.
JA: Marcelo Tosatti is now maintaining the 2.4 tree. You even suggested him yourself. Why did you recommend him, above others? How do you feel he's doing so far?
Alan Cox: I sort of shadowed Marcelo the first release without telling him. His 2.4.17 looked a lot like my collection. The differences were minor and quite reasonable. I'm extremely happy with the way Marcelo is turning out kernels and also dealing with people. He got a lot of people trying to push him around at the start, and a deluge of journalists but has survived very well.
JA: The "stable" 2.4 series has had a bumpy ride, most noticeably with a complete change in the VM. How stable do you feel the current 2.4.17 release is, in comparison with the 2.2 series? Are there reasons why people may still not want to upgrade business critical servers?
Alan Cox: A prior major release is always going to be much much more stable. Many people run the 2.2 tree on critical systems because it does what they need and it has stayed up for years. There is no deliberate vendor enforced upgrade system in the free software world so people can choose older code. It's a good idea for many projects.
2.4.9-ac and 2.4.9-RH (the Red Hat errata kernel) I was pretty happy with. The 2.4.17 tree is getting there, with Ben's recent fixups and a bit more tuning I think it will turn out nicely. I'm never truly happy until the box stays up for so long that I only reboot to do a major upgrade.
JA: Where do you think this tuning most needs to occur?
Alan Cox: Thats always the problem. When you know what needs tuning the job is almost done. The lower disk throughput seems to be caused by the VM layer but at the moment I don't know for sure it isn't some of the disk scheduling changes.
JA: Linus agreed that the major changes he made to the VM in a "stable" kernel tree were ill-timed, however claiming, "I think that Alan will see the light eventually." Are you happy with the new VM?
Alan Cox: Not really. I'm seeing 20% slower performance on a lot of real world workloads and while that is likely to be a bit of tuning it should have happened in 2.5. I don't think the Andrea VM is technically superior and that the scale of change was right. Once Linus had done it however there was no point going backward. By 2.4.15/6 various bits from Rik and Marcelo and others had the tree in a state where everyone agreed that it was better to start future VM work from that point. Rik is doing a revere map based VM now which is interesting and Andrea is tuning the VM stuff he did for 2.4.
JA: You still maintain the stable 2.2 kernel, the most recent release in that series being 2.2.20. In the changelog building up to this release was a controversial tag, "Security fixes. Details censored in accordance with the US DMCA". What prompted you to censor these fixes? Was it intended as a political statement, or done out of fear of possible prosecution?
Alan Cox: It was simply a matter of following the law and avoiding liability. The fact that American citizens are forbidden by their own government from hearing, or speaking the truth turns itself into a political statement.
It's an unfortunate situation when the major Linux conference pretty much has to be in Canada because the US will not let some of the attendees even pass through their airspace, and many of the others fear to visit. I just hope that over time things will improve.
At the moment the US, UK and much of the EEC slide slowly toward a police state. Innovation is hard, and innovators are generally buried in courts by established interests. I don't want to become a citizen of the new soviet union, forbidden from watching DVD's from the outside world, from burning flags in protest, and risking jail for offending a large company. People have to get involved in fighting such things. If they do not fight, they may well be swimming to Cuba, or serving in restaurants in Mexico City while trying to avoid deportation within thirty years.
I'm working with FIPR (the foundation for information policy research) to do my bit. It's up to everyone else to do their bits too.
JA: You mention the UK moving toward a police state, as well as the US. Has the UK passed similar laws to the US DMCA, or the proposed SSSCA?
Alan Cox: The UK already has certain anti-convention laws, and the EU is implementing a common set at the moment. In some ways it is a lot saner than the DMCA (eg its a lot more explicit about reverse engineering for compatibility) and it doesn't seek to censor people in quite the same way. Nevertheless it has many of the same effects as the DMCA such as getting people arrested for helping the disabled read e-books.
Could Sklyarov have happened in the UK. I think the answer is yes but as a civil case. Regardless of what the law says large companies can always play the system against the little guy.
JA: Since the events that occurred on September 11'th, here in the US it has been increasingly difficult to reason with people about the need to preserve our freedom and privacy. Since that time, there's been a fury of attempted legislation that seems to, as you say, move us toward a police state. Can you offer any ideas for ways we, ordinary people, can help prevent this from happening?
Alan Cox: Keep reminding people they live in a police state ?
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
On the whole for the US, I'm not the one to answer that. It is a different system and society. We have real trouble even telling the two US parties apart.
JA: Back to Linux, at what point, if any, will you stop maintaining the 2.2 kernel?
Alan Cox: I guess when nobody is using it. It takes a lot less effort to just keep a very stable tree ticking along. There are still people intentionally shipping 2.0 based products even today.
JA: Do you foresee maintaining a stable 2.6-ac branch, when the 2.6 stable tree is started?
Alan Cox: I haven't thought that far ahead.
JA: Does 2.5 development get much of your focus?
Alan Cox: Right now basically none. I was pondering collecting together driver and other stuff to feed on to Linus as he worked on the bio but Dave Jones has already started doing a good job on that.
JA: A lot of kernel hackers greatly admire you and your Linux efforts. You certainly have an amazing ability to organize and create stable kernels. For example, during the unstable period of 2.4, your -ac series proved to be quite solid on all my servers, as reported by many. In regards to your own accomplishments, what do you most take pride in?
Alan Cox: The 2.4-ac tree turned out very well. It was never something I set out to make a big thing but it ended up being used as the base for most 2.4 vendor released kernels. That was a big thing, not just for the code quality, but also because it showed everyone is still working together. 2.4-ac was built out of patches from many places, and I think almost every vendor, put together by someone at Red Hat and in various variant forms shipped by many other companies.
Probably the greatest thing has been seeing all that Linux has made possible around the world, many of which with proprietary licenses charged in US currency simply could not have happened. Being able to say "have a copy, have as many copies as you want, make changes, localize it, build an entire local computing industry" to anyone in the developing world is something very special. Even in the developed world its created so many great things, like the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) putting Linux in schools that simply could not have afforded to do it any other way.
I always like to say "_Em_powered by Linux".
JA: You released 2.4.18pre3-ac1 last Sunday (1/13), the first since 2.4.13-ac8 in early November. What prompted this release? Do you intend to actively release the -ac kernel patches again?
Alan Cox: People kept bugging me. It's a mix of the stuff I actually run here and a trawl of the stuff that I had piled up during the change over - I found a lot more than I expected that was in my pile that was before Marcelo took over and escaped merging. Most of it is stuff I need to send on - so its not like the huge -ac patches of old, just some handy bits.
I'll probably stick out an ac2 soon as well.
JA: The 2.2 tree is quite solid, and hence few changes are made. Your -ac series is no longer the huge patch "of old". What do you do with all this reclaimed time?
Alan Cox: Sleep.
Some of it is being spent doing drivers, other bits working on new things and some is beginning to get spent on projects big Red Hat customers need and which will benefit Linux as a whole.
JA: Do you use Linux exclusively, or do you use other operating systems as well?
Alan Cox: I run Linux on pretty much everything except the microwave and washing machine. Those are tempting targets but would probably make Telsa extremely cross.
JA: Do you have any predictions as to the future of Linux?
Alan Cox: For the next five years I guess (and its definitely a guess)
Linux in TV sets/set top boxes becoming much more common
More consolidation
A lot of work on clustering and fault tolerant Linux
Limited desktop penetration, at least until some lawmaker or civil litigants have the guts to get a just settlement out of Microsoft.
People figuring out which software models work best and where
Vastly more software development moving from the EU and USA to Eastern Europe, Brazil and the like, both in Linux companies and outside.
Just possibly IBM becoming a Linux vendor proper perhaps by buying out the rest of SuSE.
Possibly Linus becoming directly paid to work on Linux, perhaps via OSDL or a standards group so he isn't "owned" by a vendor - should transmeta die.
(I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest)
JA: Do you consider Linus a friend?
Alan Cox: Business associate perhaps. We are very different people. Linus is terribly reserved, quiet and neat. I'm none of those and don't intend to be. Live fast, die old, and make very sure everyone knows you were there.
JA: What do you enjoy doing in your non-Linux time?
Alan Cox: New things. Cooking is fun, gardening has been less of a success, although I do enjoy grinning manically at passing people while waving an axe around attempting to kill off unwanted plant life.
JA: That's a humorous image, you waving an axe and grinning manically. What have you been trying to grow?
Alan Cox: Actually it's mostly been trying to stop things growing and pruning them. In particular a small tree that was too close to the house and which refuses to actually die off when it is chopped down. The plants I have at the moment are growing quite well enough without assistance.
JA: As for cooking, what types of food do you like to prepare?
Alan Cox: Mostly Chinese style stuff. Actually I guess the right phrase is "British Chinese restaurant style food". Telsa is actually the better cook although she will never admit it.
JA: How did you meet Telsa?
Alan Cox: She lived in the same house in Aberystwyth as an old friend, so we first met that way. Lucky co-incidences.
JA: Have you and Telsa played the 'U.S, Patent Number 1' board game she bought you for Christmas yet?
Alan Cox: Not yet. Building a time machine (the goal of the game) would be useful but I'd personally not use it to get patent #1 but to take the proposers of the patent system forward to today so they can go back home and figure out how to invent it in a way big business cannot corrupt and abuse.
JA: Do you have any advice to offer people just getting started with kernel hacking?
Alan Cox: Ignore everyone who tells you kernel hacking is hard, special or different. It's a large program, and bug fixing or driver tweaking can be a best starting point. It is however not magic, nor written in a secret language that only deep initiates with beards can read.
Play with it, try things, break it horribly and enjoy yourself. I started on the networking code because it didn't work very well. Everything I knew about TCP/IP I had downloaded the same day I started hacking the net code. My first attempts were not pretty but it was *fun*.
JA: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Alan Cox: Another zero to the end of the average Linux uptime, Ralph Nader to the list of US presidents and some semblance of real democracy to UK and EU government.
JA: Thank you very much for the time you've put into this interview, and much more for all the amazing effort you've put into Linux. You have done a lot to help bring us where we are.
moderators points, links, Re:mirror (Score:1, Redundant)
Moderation Totals:Redundant=4,Informative=11, Overrated=1,Total=16.
A am clueless why moderators keep spending points in this. but the facts:
-She (a "cow is a she?") posted as Anonymos Coward. So it was no karma whore. However it would have been better to mirror it and post a link.
-kernelTrap is
-Why waste moderation points points on this? Moderate the trolls down. Moderate gems up, leave the rest, don't push an agenda.
-Read the article first before moderation,(if the moderator did this you would have found out is was
Some interviews i filtered: (if i say post links i should support this)
[lwn.net]
1999 linux weekly
1999 from c't (german) [heise.de]
june 2000, linux journal [linuxjournal.com]
Nov 2000 linux.ei [linux.ie]
and a
aug 99
Slashdotted already ;-) (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted already ;-) (Score:1)
MySQL errors (Score:1)
What, you were reading slashdot again?
There you are! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Not a world record. (Score:1)
was an instant drama
Re:... (Score:1)
let's see
Re:... (Score:2)
It was designed, and always worked very well, as a single (to very few) user data mining tool. In that environment absolutely nothing beats it for speed (my own experience only of course, but it wiped the floor with Oracle in certain applications). On the other hand multi user read/write environments are precisely what MySQL is not good at.
It especially pains me to see people use it for message boards - that's just plain wrong.
So no, it's not a "toy database" but you have to use for applications it was designed for.
Re:... (Score:1)
pfffffft (Score:1)
>gets DirectX.
Hmmm, an OK graphics API with sound and input-devs
support, not bad, but we can catch up with OpenGL
and alsa.
>If a user can't click a button and get Internet > Explorer to come up under Linux, they will NOT > use it. End of story.
Wait a minute? Did you say IE? if so, then I will
take your "DirectX" to mean "ActiveX".
They are different technologies (actually, ActiveX
is one application of COM.)
We already have a decent browser (actually, half
a dozen at that, just counting the engines; the
GUI are even more.)
> Come on guys, nobody cares about CORBA
WHAT?
CORBA and COM are workalikes. If COM gave win32 its
seamless desktop experience, the CORBA (actually, subsets of it.)
are giving Unix desktops that very integration.
Or is it only cool when they do it?
Answer for those Ask Slashdot questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
University was a slightly checkered career, not on the whole due to taking other people's computers apart but because of the rather odd rules at Aberystwyth. I learned a lot there (more from my own experiments and trying to achieve things than from the course), but because of the other courses you had to pass (Physics in my case) ended up changing university to one that didn't require I could do physics but required I could do computer science.
Here is the key part that follows:
Looking back on university I'm very glad I did it. At the time I thought management skills, software engineering, databases and even bits of maths like proof by induction were completely irrelevant. I've used all of them in my Linux work. - Alan Cox
Maybe I should file this one away for those fairly regular Ask Slashdot questions about whether one should go to university or just get a certification in order to work in the computer industry. Attending university is not the end-all-be-all, but his comment does sum up one of the best arguments for seeking a degree.
Re:Answer for those Ask Slashdot questions... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Answer for those Ask Slashdot questions... (Score:3)
I disagree. Of course, I went the College route for 2 years (pre-engineering, yah!), then dropped out when I discovered that mechanical engineering seemed a lot like accounting.
Seeing what the IT-school mills turn out, I'm better qualified then most of those people for computer work. For specific apps or OS'es I know nothing about, I can read a book and be more learned then the IT-mills turn out. No, this isn't a measure of my conceit, its a measure of the poor quality of the graduates from these mills.
Now a four year school might be different. Then again, it might not be. I believe that how people approach school is very simular to how people approach certification. Most people study to pass the test, not for additional knowledge. A lot of schools are now teaching to the tests. An example can be found by looking at the A+ certification. Its a rather easy certification (probably a lot of slashdotters can pick it up without a problem), and yet it covers some of the fundamentals quite nicely, especially in a wintel world. However, when you look at A+ holders, most of them (that I have met) are very ignorant of the knowledge. They are simular to "paper" engineers, nothing more. They cannot apply the knowledge to fit the real world, since they never learned the knowledge, only the correct answers to test questions.
OTOH, for coders, this doesn't hold true. Its a lot harder to know the correct answers to the test questions without picking up some knowledge. However, I'd still give more weight to someone who did 2 years of school/2 years of real-world work then the person who did 4 years of school
~ Dasunt, who's thinking of going back to school anyways.
Yes, I know I praised the A+ exam. I feel dirty now
Re:Answer for those Ask Slashdot questions... (Score:2)
It's been done. (Score:1)
Re:Answer for those Ask Slashdot questions... (Score:1, Insightful)
Me, I liked Alan's comment about how he thought himself brilliant, and then he went to University and found himself surrounded by hundreds of other people who also though themselves brilliant. University is humbling that way.
Re:Answer for those Ask Slashdot questions... (Score:1)
Really? I must be at the wrong university.
Alan Cox on why he won't maintain the 2.4 tree (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also good that a system doesn't settle down with a sort of elite who created it and that new ideas and younger people are always stepping into the project. I want to be sure that when I'm an old fart there are plenty of people in the community with both the knowledge and the standing to call me an idiot when I say something stupid, rather than treat my words as gospel.
This is a refreshing attitude, and a wise one. People need the freedom to try new ideas without fear that their ideas will be rejected simply for being different than the currently accepted "gospel."
As an example, if Einstein had listened to his early professors in Switzerland, who thought they couldn't possibly be wrong and had nothing to learn from him, he would not have started down the road to many of his discoveries. Many of his early papers and theories were rejected simply because they didn't side with the accepted theories of the "experts." While not all of those early theories were correct, some were and formed the basis for his later work.
Re:Alan Cox on why he won't maintain the 2.4 tree (Score:1)
And if scientists listened to... (Score:1)
--InfinityEdge
Re:And if scientists listened to... (Score:1)
I really don't want to get into the topic of the oldest fallacy, which I think is actually getting into a land war in asia, or possibly never bet with a Sicilian when life is on the line, but rather into appeal to authority. Appeal to authority is not a fallacy; appeal to inexpert authority is. Appeal to authority is entirely proper if (1) the authority is actually an authority, (2) the authority is an authority on the topic in question, and (3) there is general agreement amongst relevant authorities. Alternatively to (3) the appeal is cogent if the topic is a new area of expertise and the particular authority under discussion has a record of correct predictions.
In spite of all this what Mr. gorillasoft has done is not an appeal to authority or inexpert authority, but rather a counterexample. He offered as resolution, "one should follow one's antecedants without question," and showed how such a premise would lead to an undesirable conclusion, "quantum mechanics would have never been developed." An appeal to inexpert authority would be something like, "Albert Einstein says always use Alan Cox kernels," which didn't occur in this discussion.
-Loyal
Re: And if scientists listened to... (Score:1)
You misunderstand the context in which the term fallacy is used here. In the discipline of rhetoric, a fallacy is, to speak generally, a false argument. In rhetoric, a fallacy cannot merely be an unwise suggestion or incorrect idea.
Funny reference to the Princess Bride, though.
but rather into appeal to authority. Appeal to authority is not a fallacy; appeal to inexpert authority is.
No. Appeal to authority is NEVER a good argument, it is always a bad argument, assuming we know nothing else about the knowledge of the listener, or need to make a quick decision. A proof derived from authority, or argumentum ab acitoritate, is never by itself a good argument.
You are also wrong to imply that general acceptance of an idea makes it true. Reality has a firmer base than any of our mental apparatuses.
Take, for example, your most beloved authority on computer programming, whoever he is. For the sake of argument, and to stay on topic, let's say that it is Alan Cox. Let's say Alan Cox once said on Usenet back in 1998 that "foo does X," where foo is a C function. So you're writing a C program, and you need to use foo. You note what Alan Cox said about foo, and include foo in your program. Later, however, you test the program. That way you can be sure that foo really does X. Even though Alan Cox himself said foo does X, it still might not. That's why you test it. Every single human being is fallible. Thus, knowing nothing more about your skills as a programmer, or about Alan Cox's, or about how much time you have to make a decision, to purely rely on an appeal to authority for your information is simply a false argument, also known as a fallacy.
Re: And if scientists listened to... (Score:1)
Certainly I misused 'fallacy' for the purpose of humor. I believe it was misused in the same way in The Princess Bride, but it's been some time since I've seen it and I might be misremembering.
In the discipline of rhetoric, a fallacy is, to speak generally, a false argument.
Just for the record let me state that I believe a fallacious argument to be an argument rendered defective by an error in reasoning.
No. Appeal to authority is NEVER a good argument, it is always a bad argument,
On the contrary. One well known counterexample is the use of expert witnesses in a court of law.
assuming we know nothing else about the knowledge of the listener,
Why should we assume any such thing? An argument is cogent or not regardless of the knowledge or lack thereof of the listener. The salient point is that if the premises are obvious or can be checked and the reasoning lacks error, then the conclusion is true (or in the case of inductive logic--can be relied upon to the stated degree.)
or need to make a quick decision.
Why so? I would think that if a quick decision were necessary, an appeal to expert authority would be more desirable.
You are also wrong to imply that general acceptance of an idea makes it true.
Certainly correct. However, at most I implied that general consensus is one of three necessary requisites for a proper appeal to expert authority.
Even though Alan Cox himself said foo does X, it still might not. That's why you test it. Every single human being is fallible. Thus, knowing nothing more about your skills as a programmer, or about Alan Cox's, or about how much time you have to make a decision, to purely rely on an appeal to authority for your information is simply a false argument, also known as a fallacy.
Certainly experts can make mistakes, and the consensus of experts cannot alter reality. Nevertheless appeal to expert authority is an acceptable argument form. The implication is that experts are less likely to make errors than the population in general when they discourse upon their area of expertise, and the consensus of experts serves to bolster the reliability of their conclusions. In your example, and assuming that Alan Cox is an expert in foo, it is likely that Alan will make correct pronouncements on foo. You didn't mention in your argument that most other foo experts also agreed with Alan regarding foo. Given those details and the fact that you tested foo and found it to fail, I would think that you misapplied foo, or misinterpreted your test results, or have foo0.81, or any of a number of other failings.
In an, perhaps vain, attempt to remain topical, in the present discussion it is not the case that people should accept teachers' or authors' pronouncements unquestioningly, therefore Alan Cox is wise to remove himself and allow new people to program.
-Loyal
Re: And if scientists listened to... (Score:1)
If Tom Brokaw says the world is made of cheese, and I tell you, upon the authority of Tom Brokaw, that the world is made of cheese, you would be reasonable to dispute my position.
Re: And if scientists listened to... (Score:2)
Princess Bride Re:And if scientists listened to... (Score:1)
Re:Alan Cox on why he won't maintain the 2.4 tree (Score:2, Informative)
The papers were mostly submitted to his professors, with a few going to professors at other institutions. I have read direct quotes from those professors obtained from their correspondance with him, and some were discounting or berating his works. I haven't read the title you mentioned, but have read others. I think we are talking slightly different periods here, which is where the confusion is coming from.
What makes me like Alan... (Score:3, Funny)
Dammed fine words to live by.
What maketh ME like AC (Score:1)
Did you catch this? (Score:1, Insightful)
I did the end of school exam ('O' level to UK people) in 30 minutes for a 3 hour paper and by the time I was at college (16-18) I was convinced of my own brilliance.
And then, his head exploded because it got too big!
This is VERY un-Linus like.
Re:Did you catch this? (Score:1)
Re:Did you catch this? (Score:1)
What a great quote (Score:3, Funny)
Alan Cox: Another zero to the end of the average Linux uptime, [...]
Love it! As for the /.ing - I jumped in right when the story popped up and PHP_Nuke was already showing 803 guests online so it went down fast and hard!
Re:Another zero to the end of the avg Linux uptime (Score:2)
If it was a decimal. Seems to me if the average uptime of linux boxen went from 1000 days to 10000 days, things are improving. Whose math skills are suspect here?
Re:What a great quote (Score:2)
Re:What a great quote (Score:2)
Mirror - HTML (Score:2, Informative)
Its better then the text-only one.
Download Alan Cox's Game for the Spectrum (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Download Alan Cox's Game for the Spectrum (Score:1)
I was only trying to help
Re:Download Alan Cox's Game for the Spectrum (Score:1)
the US is a police state (Score:2, Offtopic)
i spent most of yesterday reading this site [whatreallyhappened.com]. this site could be dismissed as just conspiracy theory, but the points raised are backed with evidence, and quite alarming.
thank god i don't live in the US.
Re:the US is a police state (Score:1)
what i found interesting on that site was a comparison [whatreallyhappened.com] between current US events, and events in Germany right before WWII. it's eerily similar.
Re:the US is a police state (Score:2)
Blizzard pass (Score:3, Informative)
There is a minireview on that site. Here it comes.
I have been involved with a lot of recent discussions about Old Games vs New Games and Gameplay vs Graphics. If I could give only one example to prove that graphics are largely irrelevant when great gameplay is present then Bilzzard Pass would be that example.
I can objectively state that Blizzard Pass is THE greatest adventure game of all time, on any platform. The fact that it was designed for a machine with 128k of RAM is a testament to just how little graphics actually matter.
The game controls are comprised of a basic text-line interface below static images and, for the most part, many of the commands are triggered by one letter (eg: N for Go North, U for Go Up, etc). It is not easy by any stretch of the imagination and will take somewhere in the region of 80-100 hours to complete. I will not go into the story, because I do not want to spoil it for anyone, but I can assure you that it is rich and deep and will captivate you almost as much as the puzzles, problem solving and logic that are at the core of this classic game.
It's very funny how you could relate that to Linux vs windows. Interface etc. I wonder which game Bill wrote 1986. I'm sure it was full of colors, mostly blue.
Mosix interest (Score:1, Informative)
Re:LTSP interest (Score:1)
Always one of my favorite... (Score:3, Informative)
The Linux Portaloo [linux.org.uk]
and of course:
The more accurate diary. Really. [linux.org.uk]
Good reading...
t_t_b
True Story... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me tell you something about Alan Cox. I met him once at LinuxExpo, and asked him, "Alan, why Linux? Why does a man of your talents spend all day coding away for little pay?" He replied, "I actually get paid quite well."
It just goes to show.
Alan Cox on a chip.. (Score:1)