33 years ago...

pipsqueak1984@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 1372 points –
128

Just look at those nested parentheses. A true sign of (pedantic) greatness, when a person needs to clarify something in their earlier clarification.

I love it™ (The nested parentheses are one of the greatest tools known to mankind (And to all other creatures))

To paraphrase an old tweet: "parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts".

I always tell myself I am reading minds when I read inside parentheses

I have been stopping myself from using those and instead restructure my sentence. But if people like it, guess I can start keeping it.

I do find it more useful, however, to have a kind of a reference to the thing written at the end instead [1], but markdown doesn't seem to have anything for that, and using the syntax for Markdown references, is only useful for hyperlinks, or if the reader is willing to read the hover text 2.

[1]: Like This. I would love it if the markdown viewer would link the above [1] to this line. Maybe with a scrolldown effect.

Lemmy's markdown does actually have footnotes!^[they work like this: ^[text here]]

And automatically numbered too! Nice.

Though for me, instead of a scrolldown effect, it reloads the page on clicking the link. Trying a second time, it does the scrolldown properly. Weird
But that's just an implementation detail and as long as this is standard, I'll just start using it.

Thanks

Well ain't that some shit. It would make my comments more readable to a degree^[not that I'd ever use it]. I also like how they have return links for when you have some monster text wall that nobody would ever read in the first place on this platform.

People like these? I do em all the time but always feel I'm overexplaining.

I've had a teacher in elementary school scream at me for doing so. (Nesting parentheses is forbidden. [You are supposed to use brackets.])

It's wild seeing square brackets for something other than array indexing.

I had a teacher that screamed at me for “taking the lords name in vain…” They’re definitely wrong from time-to-time ;-)

I had a science teacher that told us, "If you sneeze three times and nobody blesses you, the devil takes your soul!"

It's science.

Pretty sure I read that paper a few years back ;-)

What did the teacher say about apostrophes to indicate possession?

No idea… stopped listening after I was adminished for my “god damnit…” ;-)

Some of those parens could've been replaced with commas and retain their meaning (that's what I do to avoid nesting, so that it doesn't get confusing).

You have command of English grammar, clearly.

How's your Finnish?

Not as good as my other primary languages, I have to admit. Finnish has too many consonants for my taste.

Wait until you need nested commas, those lists won't delineate themselves!

Or he could have used brackets.

I've never seen that being used, but it seems it's a thing in English. What if you wanna best deeper? Do you go {}? Then <>? «»?

Not really an English thing so much as a math thing that makes too much sense to not use elsewhere. For instance, in math you might have x[3 - 7{3y + (a * b)}]. I haven't actually seen them go deeper than three sets, though, so I'm not sure what would be next.

at that point I start recycling them, and go back to parenthesis.

so when bp = 300x - 3, this:

4( 4[ 4{ 15bp + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000

would turn to

4( 4[ 4{ 15( 300x - 3) + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000

perhaps not the best, but I rather stick to conventional symbols rather than using... idk, question marks? that'd be funny as hell, though

just picture it:

4© 4« 4¿ 15bp + 10 ? - 375 » - 2250 🄯 - 15000

The amount of effort I do to try and avoid using double parentesis is trully herculean.

I think that stuff is the product of a completionist/perfectionist mindset - as one is writting, important details/context related to the main train of thought pop-up in one's mind and as one is writting those, important details/context related to the other details/context pop-up in one's mind (and the tendency is to keep going down the rabbit hole of details/context on details/context).

You get this very noticeably with people who during a conversation go out on a tangent and often even end up losing the train of thought of the main conversation (a tendecy I definitelly have) since one doesn't get a chance to go back and re-read, reorganise and correct during a spoken conversation.

Personally I don't think it's an actual quality (sorry to all upvoters) as it indicates a disorganised mind. It is however the kind of thing one overcomes with experience and I bet Mr Torvalds himself is mostly beyond it by now.

perfectionist mindset - as one is writing,

I think an "M-Dash (perfectionist mindest— as one is writing,)" would be more appropriate than an "N-Dash" in your statement. No 'nested' parentheses needed (unless you're looking to add non-essential (though insightful) info to your sentence); but the type of... "PAUSE" makes all the difference

I once did double "parentheses" in speech when started doing streaming year ago, lol.

Thought I was the only one noticed abundance of the parenthesis

Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.

33 years later, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except ... the desktop.

(I'm paraphrasing his quote -- he said something like this years ago, can't find it, though.)

(Edit: to be more fair with quotes, it might be the case that I "hallucinated" the quote. he might not have said that, or he might have just said part of it and other part would be someone else's comment. This cio.com article is probably a better source on his position )

I would argue that it does dominate the desktop now as well, just not by usage numbers.

If I was told I had to use a windows desktop these days at home I think I'd start investing in a very large book collection.

Without a distro to rally behind I'm personally somewhat skeptical. Ubuntu was the best shot we had but since switching everything over to SNAPs it's on the slow side. With the number of Windows ads and early end of support for Windows 10 there's a real opportunity for desktop Linux, but until there's a well supported distro that genuinely doesn't require using the terminal I can't see there being mass adoption.

My grandmother ran Linux for a couple decades until her death at 101 years old. My 80+ year old mom has been running Linux for at least 2 decades. Yes, I'm tech support, but I don't really have to do anything. It just works.

And I'm cracking up at the scammers phoning up my 85 year old father telling him his Windows has been compromised on his Linux desktop.

It's not about the distro. Most distros out right now are pretty good. What you need is hardware that lots of people want to buy with Linux installed on it as the default choice. Normal people don't want to install any OS, be it Linux, Windows, MacOS or BSD. Whatever comes by default, it's good.

I'm pretty sure that right now the most popular Linux distros are ChromeOS and SteamOS. I wonder why

Any distro that ships KDE/Plasma as its default desktop should do the trick. I'm not personally using it right now but I hear OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is kicking a lot of rear end lately.

When I used TW few years ago it kicked every ass too.

1 more...
1 more...

You might be thinking of this:

https://youtu.be/ZPUk1yNVeEI?feature=shared

Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don't really care what their computer is running as long as it works.

Well, I was thinking of a quote that was much more similar to what I wrote (and it's not in the video you linked).

I had such a trouble finding it that I'm starting to feel like it might be one of those "quotes" where the credited author never really said that, but I haven't completely given up :D

Here's one closer to what I paraphrased (but not quite it)--quoting an article from cio.com

While Linux pretty much dominates almost every walk of our lives, even on the consumer devices like smartphones and smart TVs, it has not had the same success on the desktop. What does Torvalds think about it? Is Linux a failure on the desktop? Not really. “The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I’m known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”

1 more...

I for one really appreciate the effort of supporting non-AT drives despite the initial skepticism.

...probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks,as that's all I have. :-(.

Cuteness.

As in hilarity.

That's why he needed glasses.

(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)

Aged like fine milk. Looking at you, GNU Hurd.

not really, gnu is still a big professional project

GNU, or as I'd like to call it, GNU+PTerry

GNU Hurd didn't take a good path of development following MACH design. But I still think GNU Hurd is the kernel of the future. Probably the Next generation Hurd. Just because GNU MACH and Hurd present very convoluted designs.

A kernel that performs most of their activities in user space and that it is truly modular looks very promising for the kind of systems we have nowadays and in the future.

Someone has to make the change, or we will stagnate in cumbersome and up featured systems.

There’s no guessing what will catch the world by storm. At a party once, Bram Cohen tried to get me interested in his ideas for a a peer-to-peer protocol, and I thought nothing of it.

My cousin's buddies asked him to build the website for their new ride hailing app but he didn't feel like doing some rinky dink thing, apparently Travis and them took it in stride though.

that's all I have :-(

aww

We should make a donation campaign, pretty sure somebody has a spare SATA drive around. This minix clone sounds good

It was about as prescient as "640k is enough for everybody", but in a good way.

People back then just grossly underestimated how big computing was going to be.

The human brain is not built to predict exponential growths!

That post changed my life, gave me a great hobby, which became a career, and still puts food on the table for me and my family to this day. Thank you, Linus.

This somehow makes me feel both old and young at the same time.

Congratulations you've just unlocked midlife crisis. You can now wear sunglasses inside and shop at camp david.

GNU is older than Linux? Neat.

Yeah… but it was just RMS yelling at people from a street corner, nobody actually used it until Linux came along ;-)

I'm pretty sure Apple and Google already rewritten all important GNU parts into something with Apache or BSD license, to throw everything GPL licensed out of their embedded systems. The biggest and most important part was obviously GCC, replaced by Clang.

How many GPL-licensed system libraries and tools are in Android right now, except for the kernel? I'm pretty sure the answer is zero.

Clang and the LLVM with BSD like licences so we can get the 80's suing experience of UNIX yet again.

It's impressive how many people in the FOSS community hate GNU. Even to the point of creating OSes without GNU in it. Working for free for companies just to get their contributions stolen or expunged.

Apple loves Open Source, they can stole it as they like, like they did with Darwin (a derivation of XNU). Everything is open until we no longer want to, and you don't have any right to desist such actions. This sounds like a dream for them.

Google loves Open Source, they can build an spyware, ad vending machine, DRM platform that is hosted in almost any IOT machine. This is Android.

The community has to realize that if you care about your software you have to ENFORCE the freedom of it.

The are entire projects just to liberate android from google. That's is all fault of the open source licence.

There are quite a lot of projects which exist to liberate software projects that have been taken hostage. This is no sense.

Most of the IOT devices are presenting paywall features thanks to Android: cars, fridges, TVs, etc. What is next?

3 more...

Yeah, gotta’ love how all the Apple fanboys were like Bash? Meh’ zsh is the superior shell in the span of a day.

I mean was the GPL viral… yeah probably. But it’s not like the courts came after either of them. Or ever really will in a meaningful way. Although hope springs eternal for non-webkit browsers in the not-EU 😌

What’s wrong with ZSH? I was using it for 5+ years before it became the default over bash, mainly because of the auto complete features, oh-my-zsh and later just plugins and powerlevel10k.

Oh I didn’t think there’s anything wrong with it, I love oh-my-zsh. But it did feel like a bit of a cannery in the coal mine scenario when they elevated it the default and said they would phase out bash because of the GPL license.

1 more...
4 more...
4 more...

Yeah. And I like how even from the message it shows that it's been already well recognized by then.

If I recall correctly from some RMS' talks I've seen many years ago, they've been working on it for years before, it's just the kernel that was missing. As I see it, GNU and Linux was the breakthrough for FLOSS, since at that time you would still have to use a proprietary kernel. (Well, there's GNU Hurd, but I'm not sure if it existed at that time, and even if it did, it was not ready.)

4 more...

Has he come up with a name yet ?

It's a minix clone, so... mimix?

I actually like that name, but it might be too close to the original for trademark comfort.

I love it, totally should have gone with that.

“This is Linus Torvalds introducing minix as Linux.”

I’m OOTL, what’s the backstory here?

Linux

What was minix then? A non FOSS version?

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10754

MINIX originally was developed in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as a teaching tool for his textbook Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Today, it is a text-oriented operating system with a kernel of less than 6,000 lines of code. MINIX's largest claim to fame is as an example of a microkernel, in which each device driver runs as an isolated user-mode process—a structure that not only increases security but also reliability, because it means a bug in a driver cannot bring down the entire system.

In its heyday during the early 1990s, MINIX was popular among hobbyists and developers because of its inexpensive proprietary license. However, by the time it was licensed under a BSD-style license in 2000, MINIX had been overshadowed by other free-licensed operating systems.

Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history. It inspired Linus Torvalds to develop Linux, and some of his early work was written on MINIX. Probably too, Torvalds' early decision to support the MINIX filesystem is responsible for the Linux kernel's support of almost every filesystem imaginable.

Later, Torvalds and Tanenbaum had a frank e-mail debate about the relative merits of macrokernels (sic) and microkernels. This early history resurfaced in 2004 when Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution prepared a book alleging that Torvalds borrowed code from MINIX—a charge that Tanenbaum, among others, so comprehensively debunked, and the book was never actually published (see Resources).

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate

Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history.

It's still used tho.

What was minix then? A non FOSS version?

It wasn't FOSS, but then neither was Linux originally.

That kind of depends on how you define FOSS. The way we think of that today was in very early stages back in the 1991 and the orignal source was distributed as free, both as in speech and as in beer, but commercial use was prohibited, so it doesn't strictly speaking qualify as FOSS (like we understand it today). About a year later Linux was released under GPL and the rest is history.

Public domain code, academic world with any source code and things like that predate both Linux and GNU by a few decades and even the Free Software Foundation came 5-6 years before Linux, but the Linux itself has been pretty much as free as it is today from the start. GPL, GNU, FSF and all the things Stallman created or was a part of (regardless of his conflicting personality) just created a set of rules on how to play this game, pretty much before any game or rules for it existed.

Minix was a commercial thing from the start, Linux wasn't, and things just refined on the way. You are of course correct that the first release of Linux wasn't strictly speaking FOSS, but the whole 'FOSS' mentality and rules for it wasn't really a thing either back then.

There's of course adacemic debate to have for days on which came first and what rules whoever did obey and what release counts as FOSS or not, but for all intents and purposes, Linux was free software from the start and the competition was not.

I read a biography of Stallman several years ago. The whole free software movement was an attempt to preserve the early hacker culture where everybody freely swapped code. So, Stallman didn't really "invent" FOSS; he just codified that early hacker ethos.

Agree with you up until “the competition was not”.

GNU HURD was competition for one thing.

More importantly, so was BSD. BSD predates Linux ( though its distribution specifically as FreeBSD does not ).

I've read Linus's book several years ago, and based on that flimsy knowledge on back of my head, I don't think Linus was really competing with anyone at the time. Hurd was around, but it's still coming soon(tm) to widespread use and things with AT&T and BSD were "a bit" complex at the time.

BSD obviously has brought a ton of stuff on the table which Linux greatly benefited from and their stance on FOSS shouldn't go without appreciation, but assuming my history knowledge isn't too badly flawed, BSD and Linux weren't straight competitors, but they started to gain traction (regardless of a lot longer history with BSD) around the same time and they grew stronger together instead of competing with eachother.

A ton of us owes our current corporate lifes to the people who built the stepping stones before us, and Linus is no different. Obviously I personally owe Linus a ton for enabling my current status at the office, but the whole thing wouldn't been possible without people coming before him. RMS and GNU movement plays a big part of that, but equally big part is played by a ton of other people.

I'm not an expert by any stretch on history of Linux/Unix, but I'm glad that the people preceding my career did what they did. Covering all the bases on the topic would require a ton more than I can spit out on a platform like this, I'm just happy that we have the FOSS movement at all instead of everything being a walled garden today.

1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...

A microkernel teaching OS by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

In 2017 the world (including Tanenbaum) found out that the Intel Management Engine uses Minix internally. Intel just kind of did that silently. So Minix is still around.

1 more...
1 more...
1 more...

I'm pretty sure the eventual conversion of every atom in the universe to computronium will run Linux.