.comment: The Wit and Wisdom of Linus Torvalds
Linus on other operating systems and
programs

Dennis E. Powell
Wednesday, January 31, 2001 08:10:02 AM
Shades of Windows, in my opinion:
"yeah, we know it is broken, but we preferred some
hard-to-trigger filesystem corruption to breaking a legacy program
that couldn't understand the new filesystem features."
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Either
(a) Solaris has solved the
faster-than-light problem, and Sun engineers should get a Nobel prize in
physics or something.
(b) Solaris "scales" by
being optimized for 10000 entries, and not speeding up sufficiently for a
small number of entries.
You make the call.
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If I understood the GNU make syntax
correctly (which is possibly not the case - GNU make is possibly the
only example of "overkill" to rival GNU emacs), this looks
like a reasonable idea.
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This is why I'd love to not see
silly work-arounds in apache: we obviously can fix the places
where our performance sucks, but only if we don't have other
band-aids hiding the true issues.
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Maybe somebody should tell gcc
maintainers about programmers that know more than the compiler again.
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The fact I dislike about the HP-UX
implementation is that it is so obviously stupid.
And I have to say that I absolutely
despise the BSD people. They did sendfile() after both Linux and
HP-UX had done it, and they must have known about both
implementations. And they chose the HP-UX braindamage, and even brag
about the fact that they were stupid and didn't understand TCP_CORK
(they don't say so in those exact words, of course - they just show
that they were stupid and clueless by the things they brag about).
Oh, well. Not everybody can be as
goodlooking as me. It's a curse.
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Also note how I said that it is the
BSD people I despise. Not the HP-UX implementation. The HP-UX
one is not pretty, but it works. But I hold open source people to
higher standards. They are supposed to be the people who do
programming because it's an art-form, not because it's their job.
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Think of all the security scares
sendmail has historically had. But it's a pretty secure piece of work
now - and people know if backwards and forward. Few people advocate
switching from sendmail these days (sure, they do exist, but what I'm
saying is that a long track record that includes security issues
isn't necessarily bad, if it has gotten fixed).
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