IRC-Galleria

11. Jos Linuxia ei olisi, niin kumman seuraavista valitsisit: Mac OS X vai Windows 7? Perustelut.

I've not really ever used either, so I can't really give any rational argument for or against one or the other.

That said, I do like apple laptop hardware (the air in particular), and having a unix shell available is another reason to believe I'd prefer OS X if I couldn't just run Linux. That said, the Apple "control the whole ecosystem" thing does make me leery.


12. Jos olet windows- ja mac-vihaaja niin miksi?

I don't really hate either windows or mac. Linux was never started as a reaction *against* microsoft, and in fact I think that if you base your technology (or your life, for that matter) on what you hate or fear, you're just sad.


13. Mistä sait idean alkaa kehittämään omaa käyttöjärjestelmäänsä?

Linux started from me not even trying to make an operating system so much as just trying to learn about the new toy I had bought myself: my (at the time) fancy new 386 computer. I started writing all these things to exercise low-level functionality - switching from the old traditional 16-bit mode (aka "real mode") into the new exciting 32-bit mode ("protected mode"), turning on the new MMU features (paging), exploring some of the odd system instructions the i386 had (task switching), and just getting acquainted with the hardware around it (keyboard, display, serial port etc).

So it started as a test program, which expanded to a terminal emulation package, and by the time I decided that I wanted to be able to download and upload files, I realized that what I really needed was an operating system. So I decided to write one, because "How hard can it be?"


14. Millä perusteella "kiintoleyvt on saatanasta", ja pilvipalvelut parempia?

Ei ne pilvipalveut ole parempia.

I don't like *rotating* disks. I've used SSD's ("Solid State Disk" - silicon chips rather than rotating magnetic media) for the last several years in all my machines, and not having to wait for the disk head to move from track to track, and not having to wait for the platter to rotate until the right sector is under the disk head is *wonderful*.

I don't particularly want terabytes of storage. And I don't really even care about how quickly I can read or write big files in one go. I care deeply instead about the _latency_ of the IO, and especially for more-or-less random access patterns when you're reading or writing many small files.

And that has just made me convinced that I never again want to use a machine with one of those horrible rotating platters of rust in them.
Having an SSD in my machines has made my machines so much faster - it's to me a much more noticeable performance upgrade than replacing the video card or CPU tends to be.

Of course, there's been bad SSD's too, so its not like "all SSD's are better than any rotating disk". But in general, I really don't want to have anything to do with rotational media in my computer, the same way I don't want to have some old tape drive there either.

Note: this doesn't mean that rotating media isn't fine for some things. They have wonderful big capacities, and they are cheap. So rotational media makes perfect sense as a backup device, or in the NAS box that you keep your videos and pictures on. Or in those big server rooms where all the cloud computing happens. Just not in the client.


15. Mitä mieltä olet älypuhelimien Linuxiin pohjautuvista käyttöjärjestelmistä?

I used to absolutely detest cellphones - I'm not a huge fan of phones in general, and cellphones were just a way to annoy me even when I was on the road.

But I do love my Android phone. I don't use it as a phone, though - it's just a small email client that I can take with me anywhere. So I love Linux on cellphones.


16. Linus Torvalds, miksi opensource eikä vapaa ohjelmisto?

This is too big a question to answer easily, but it boils down to me not liking the FSF very much. The FSF is too black-and-white, and too single-issue. They also make these big nebulous arguments around a word ("free") that is very emotionally charged in English (and _particularly_ the US) and has tons of moral connotations.

And I don't think open source is about some "moral" choice, like the FSF tries to brand it. And I don't think proprietary programming is "evil".

Some of the problems with the word "free" do not exist outside the US (the obvious one being that most languages do not confuse the issue of "freedom" with "no money" - English is just odd that way), but even without the (almost religious) morality stance, the whole "Free Software" movement was just really off-putting to a lot of people.

And many people saw this. "Open Source" is about the _pragmatic_ advantages of doing source code development in the open, without the moralistic holier-than-though crap which often goes together with the term "Free Software". And I don't want it to be a "moral choice" - I want people to use open source because it's the *better* choice - better software, better development, way more *fun* to develop, cheaper, more efficient, less licensing hassles, you name it.

Pragmatic reasons, in other words.

17. Linus Torvalds, kuinka monesti olet menettänyt hermot käyttöjärjestelmääsi kehittäessä?

I love arguing, and I don't necessarily have a very high threshold for calling people names when they say something I think is stupid. So I'm fairly well known for being somewhat grumpy and for swearing when I get upset. I'm just not a very polite or "nice" person. Really. I'm not.

That said, I really do love what I do, and while it can look like I'm about to "go postal" at any moment, I actually don't tend to stay upset all that long. I do have strong opinions, but I calm down, and often let things go (or even sometimes admit I was wrong - hey, it happens).

So there have been lots of heated discussions, but very few of them have ever even come remotely close to me just saying "I can't take this crap". And maybe the fact that I don't have a problem with letting out a little steam when I feel it is needed is part of it.