33 years ago...

Classic Usenet @lemmy.sdf.org

33 years ago...

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128 comments

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 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.
  
  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 ;-)
- 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?
  
  Wait until you need nested commas, those lists won't delineate themselves!
  
  Or he could have used brackets.
- 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.
  
  You have to use a Windows desktop at home.
  Sincerely,
  Barnes & Noble
  
  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.
- 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.”

“Just a hobby, won’t be big” - he really didn’t think it will be one of the most sought after projects.
- Or wanted to appear non-threatening
- "We will be in and out, 10 minutes"

I for one really appreciate the effort of supporting non-AT drives despite the initial skepticism.
- I'm glad someone was able to donate a non-AT drive because Linus could not afford it :-(

...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.

Yeah, I was looking at it today actually.
Happy Birthday, Linux.

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
  
  A few years ago there was a fantastic video detailing thorvald's PC and it is a beast, crazy how far we've come
- Poor Linus :c

Ehh, it'll never take off.

And an OS was born.
- This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
  
  I was just thinking today about how I want a tattoo along the lines of "even the ones with digital watches", great timing!

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!

Jfc im older than Linux
- Me too man, but not by much

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.

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.
- 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.)

Truly humble beginnings.

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.