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Steam for Linux -uutissivu. Humble bundlessa Dungeon defenders ja Super hexagon.

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.

Galtsun käyttäjillä oli mahdollisuus esittää Linus Torvaldsille kysymyksiä. Ihan kaikkiin Galtsussa esille tulleisiin kysymyksiin ei Linuksilla ollut mahdollisuutta vastata.

1.What was your dream profession as a child?

I wanted to be a scientist, a physicist in particular. Possibly a mathematician. I was interested in math, and people like Newton, Leibnitz, Gauss, Einstein etc were my idols. More close to home, my maternal grandfather - who also the person who introduced me to computers - was a professor of statistics at Helsinki University, and he was a big influence in my life.


2. What will the future Internet be like? / What things we have to overcome in developing the Internet?

I don't think there is any huge technical issues for the future of the internet - obviously with IPv4 running out of addresses, people really *will* have to move over to IPv6, but the technology is largely there, and as far as most users are concerned it's not even an issue they need to think about. And a lot of other technical details are just about making it faster, cheaper, and just generally more available and used for just about any data transmission. I don't think anybody would be surprised by that part.

No, the interesting things - and this is where I really don't know what will happen, and what the future will be like - is what people will *do* with the internet. IOW, the "what's the next facebook?"
question. And I don't know what the answer to that is. People are inherently very social animals, and so I absolutely don't think that "social networking" as a concept is a fad, but how it will change - who knows?

On a more serious side, the thing that is a bigger threat tends to be political issues - censorship and trying to "control" the internet.
The internet is a great way to communicate, but exactly because it's such a powerful medium, and not inherently controlled from the top (like broadcast media tends to be), the real threat isn't about technology, but by political - and business - concerns about it.
Political censorship, and censorious "intellectual property" laws are something to worry about. What to *do* about them - I don't know.


3.How has the Millenium Technology Prize changed your life?

Heh. Right now, the main change has been added travel. I'm a homebody - not only do I work from home, but I really *like* working from home and don't usually travel that much. I go to a couple of conferences a year, and we do a yearly family vacation, but normally I don't travel that much. The Millennium prize so far has about tripled my normal travel for the year ;)


4. What is the secret behind becoming a great scientist like you?

I think a lot of it is "persistence". Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Outliers" has a "10,000-Hour Rule", where he makes the argument that anybody who spends ten thousand hours doing something will basically be in the top of his or her chosen profession. And that may not sound like much, but it is - you need to work on something for many hours each day, for several years.

And that rings true to me. It may not be the _whole_ truth, but it's a big part of it, I think.

Of course, people who *do* spend hours every day on what they do, for years and years, often do have some other reason to do so in the first place. There's something that gets you started, and maybe there's an initial aptitude that gets you to that point. But a lot of it is "keep doing it".


5. Elätkö unelmaasi, ts oletko aina haaveillut pääseväsi "julkisuuteen" tieteen kehittämisen ansiosta?

I'm not going to lie, I dreamed I'd be a world-famous scientist. As a teenager I basically dreamt of being a world-renowned physicist that came up with the grand unification theory and got the Nobel prize in physics.

I ended up in computer science instead of physics, but on the whole, I think I'm living the dream. t didn't happen the way I expected it, and while I don't particularly like being a public figure per se, I _definitely_ like the fact that I've done something big and gotten recognition for it.


6. Mikä on tärkein jatkokehityksen kohde innovaatiossasi?

I often quote Thomas Edison: "Genius is 1% innovation, 99% perspiration". The important part isn't some particular target of innovation: the important part is all the hard work to get the thing to work, and get all the details right. So I'm just trying to say that there is no "tärkein kohde". There's a lot of different things we want to work on, there's no single big thing I can point to and say "that's the target".

7. Mikä oli lempi oppiaine koulussa?

Matikka. Ihan oikeasti.


8. Mikä on tiedon rinnalla tärkein asia tutkimuksen tekemisessä?

Communication.

The thing about research is that almost none of it is getting done by a single person (or necessarily even a single university or company).
So when doing research, of course the research itself is important, but if you cannot communicate with others, it almost certainly doesn't end up being very important.

And by communication, I'm not implying the kind of "PR wire"
communication that so often ends up getting noticed in the press, because some university PR person ends up being good at writing it up so that it gets lots of attention. No, working together within your research group, helping others make the research more meaningful.
There are people who may not be all that great at the technical side themselves, but if they can get others to work together and understand each other, they may well be the most important person in the group.


9. Onko Sinulla uusia ideoita seuraaviin innovaatioihin? / Missä parhaat ideat syntyvät?

So I don't think in those terms. The things I've done, I've done not because I've had a great new idea - I've done them because I had a particular problem, and I thought to myself "how hard can it be".

And I seriously think that that is how real problems get solved. Not by great ideas, but by just sitting down and doing it. Nike uses the slogan "Just Do It" in athletics, I think it's often true in "innovation" too. Don't over-think things. Don't think that "an idea"
is how you solve a real-life problem. Most real-life problems are solved not by one big idea, but by a million small ones.

10. Onko NVIDIA:lta kuulunut minkäänlaista rationaalista perustelua tai vastinetta kuuluisalle keskisormitempaukselle?

I don't really think there was (or should be) any "rational response" to the middle finger salute per se.

That said, nVidia does seem to want to make at least their mobile graphics work better under Linux, and there have been rumors about them trying to help out with the Optimus graphics switching too. So hopefully things are improving. I'd love to come out publicly some day and just say "I was wrong, nVidia is great".

Silloin kun olisi tarvetta tehdä jotain kannettavalla paikassa, jossa ei nyt satu olemaan mukana mitään muuta boottaavaa mediaa (esim live-cd tai tikku), niin eikös käynnistettäessä kone tervehdi käyttäjäänsä iloisesti:

error: out of partition
grub rescue>

No joo, edellisenä päivänä käyttäessä jo alkoi olla oireilua, kun pakettienhallinta ei pystynyt päivittämään juuri mitään.

Kotihakemistossa toki oli käytännössä lähes kaikki pysynyt ehjänä, mutta muuten tiedostojärjestelmä tuntui olevan enemmän tai vähemmän rikki, joten kopsasin nuo tiedostot talteen ja kaikki sileäksi ja uutta Ububtua asentamaan. No edellinen oliskin 11.10, joten olisi ollut muutenkin ajan kysymys, koska olisi se hetki asentaa taas. Oikeastaan ihmettelen vain, miksi en sittenkään asentanut Debiania, olisi sitten Debian jokaisessa käyttökoneessa...

Ja unohdin kuin hirveä tämä Unity on, nyt tilalle nopeasti Gnome Classic.

Sinänsä ensimmäisiä kertoja, kun ext3:n kanssa tulee itsellä ongelmia. Jos joskus jotain on ollut, niin sillo on ollu joku live-usb-tikku hajonnu.

Loistavaa :-)

Linuxin virittelyä koko päivä, ja hyvähän tästä tulee. Toimii desktop-käytössä perus käyttöjärjestelmänä, ja sen lisäksi se on täysin customoitavissa joten hyvä setti kaiken kaikkiaan. Asentelin Ubuntun aikoinaan Vista päälle, joka levähti, ja muutenkin aloin olla aika täynnä älytöntä pakko-päivitystä, joten päätin testailla vanhaa kunnon linuxia. On muuten kehitystä tapahtunut jumalattomasti, nykyään esim. Synaptic ohjelmistonhallintatyökalulla saa ohjelmat helposti koneeseen; se on helpompaa kuin Windowsissa. Kaikki softa tulee verkosta, ja voit valita millaisia haluat - täysin ilmaisia (Open source), jollain tapaa rajoitettuja, jne.

Vaihdoin Vistasta Ubuntu Linuxiin (8.04 ilmaisjakelu-CD:ltä, ei ole uusin mutta kelpaa) ja koneeseen tuli lisätehoa ihan hirmuisesti. Ihana käyttää taas kun hommat ei tahmaa.

Vista hajosi, joten oli käytännössä 4 vaihtoehtoa:
- fiksata itse (vie aikaa)
- viedä huoltoon (takuu kattaa, mutta kone on jonossa luultavasti)
- vaihtaa käyttöjärjestelmää
- lopettaa tietokoneenkäyttö

Viimeinen on hieman vaivalloista ja epäkäytännöllistä. Ekaa en jaksanut alkaa tehdä; huolto olisi myös ollut poissa käyttöajasta. Siispä vaihdoin. 30 minuuttia asennukseen, muutama kysymys vain. Helppoa. Ja toimii.

Hyvältä maistuu. :))

MITEN TÄÄ KONE SAMMUTETAAN =(((((((((((((((((((