Yes you could but he didn’t and clearly his style was self evidently effective. And I’d add that if you’ve ever read the LKML archives, that these rants were rare and usually preceded by long chains of discussion before it reached that point.
Exactly. It might not be good to be on the receiving end, but the chain of discussion that went before these rants should have given people the clue they needed to stop while they were ahead.
In almost instances of Linus going off on one in public it is because maintainers weren’t doing their jobs (to act as quality gatekeepers), or particular developers thinking they could steam roll road changes through if they kept submitting them, or not listening to what Linus was saying. I remember Linus used to ream out Hans Reiser a lot (the guy who was subsequently imprisoned for murdering his wife) because he constantly tried to get ReiserFS into the kernel despite serious issues Linus had with it.
So generally when you see a rant, there is a history behind it and the rant itself is directed with a point. I also think it’s self evident that the kernel has benefited from this “benevolent dictator” model. I’m sure some people have gotten all precious over their feelings being hurt. The rest raised their game and the result has been a code quality standard you’ll probably never see anywhere else.
His style of being direct, having a high quality threshold and calling out bullshit immediately and bluntly is why the Linux kernel went from a university project to powering everything from lightbulbs to super computers. I think it kind of ridiculous that this demonstrably effective style got framed as “toxic” just because he hurt a few people’s fee-fees.
I define effective by the fact it was self evidently effective. No need to split hairs or dissemble here. Linux is objectively, indisputably the most important piece of code in the world. Everything else, such as a the context free boo hoo about some times when he has had a go at people is just noise.
The logic is simple. This is s his style and it demonstrably worked. I’m sure you could point to someone else’s style that also works in another context but that’s irrelevant.
Not necessarily. It might be privacy but it could also be a combination of other reasons too - a cultural aversion to paperless transactions, a lack regulation for electronic payments, lack of a decent indigenous payment system, lack of financial safeguards, prevalence of fraud / skimming devices etc.
Some European countries were more into electronic transactions than others but with stuff like SEPA, chip & PIN, contactless payments I think most people are just fine using electronic payment unless they have reason to control the transaction in some way. For example I usually pay pretty much everything electronically but I still pay taxis and most restaurants with cash. Also tradesmen if they’ll give me a discount for cash.
Not to mention the impending massive economic crisis they’re about to go through - Japanese automotive industry is heavily in debt and watching China eat their lunch. While China was building battery plants and electric cars, Toyota was chasing hydrogen and other go-nowhere technologies.
Cash is off the books so there is an incentive for certain kinds of businesses like tradesmen to take cash because it still works out cheaper since they don’t have to declare it to the taxman.
But even if you aren’t interested in reading that source with a critical eye and recognizing the ways it manipulates language and information to make a point (I’m still not clear why a towing company wrote this), you can literally just look next to the authors name and see:
The RAC isn’t just a “towing company”. It provides a range of motor services like breakdown assistance, insurance, vehicle inspections, servicing, fleet management. Therefore it happens to know a great deal about automotive matters unlike say Forbes or some other outlet which does not. It’s also not some stealth EV proponent controlled by some shadowy puppet master, it just happens to have knowledge from supporting fleets of EVs of their outcomes. The AA, a similar organisation also debunks EV myths, again coming from a position of experience.
I live in Europe where trucks are fairly rare but you still see large SUVs, 4x4s and vans around. My own feeling is that certain classes of vehicles should be considered commercial for the purposes of insurance, taxation, VAT, inspection, tolls, permitted usage and everything else. The legislation already exists for commercial vehicles so extend it to these kind of vehicles.
So is someone must have a stupidly oversized vehicle purely for personal reasons they can enjoy all the bullshit and restrictions that goes with it. Doesn’t stop them complying but making it more onerous to do it will take demand for these vehicles off the market entirely.
This is something you really can’t say one way or the other.
I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn’t have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn’t.
And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn’t just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.
That’s literally uncomparable. Government does things that ignore profit. That’s what government is for. The provide services at a loss. The only “profit” might be things like societal improvement, education, security, and such.
People pay taxes that fund the government. If the money is wasted then services suffer. So it’s not profit or loss but they must deliver value. Value is harder to quantify than profit but governments have to figure a way out of doing it and provide incentives to staff to deliver it.
A lot of subjectivity about what is a success or not, but I would say many nationalised companies (and most were only nationalised for 20-30 years) were absolutely stagnating and/or suffering from widespread union disruption and should have been cut loose. But just picking out a handful of privatisations that went well, I think British Telecom, British Gas & British Airways did much better as privatized companies. Some privatisations went not-so-well - look at steel or coal privatisations or British Rail.
And an example of successful nationalisation - hospitals & doctors were a loose arrangement of private / charitable causes before being nationalised as the NHS. I think we can agree the situation is far better for everyone as a public health service than if it were run for-profit.
It works great too. Day to day I’ll be building Linux code, running IntelliJ under X, installing docker containers and doing other stuff all from a Windows desktop.
Some US news websites still geoblock European visitors rather than fix their site to not track the ever loving fuck out of visitors who say no. So imagine what they’re doing to their domestic visitors.
If you look at any modern desktop application, e.g. those built over GTK or QT, then they’re basically rendering stuff into a pixmap and pushing it over the wire. All of the drawing primitives made X11 efficient once upon a time are useless, obsolete junk, completely inadequate for a modern experience. Instead, X11 is pushing big fat pixmaps around and it is not efficient at all.
So I doubt it makes any difference to bandwidth except in a positive sense. I bet if you ran a Wayland desktop over RDP it would be more efficient than X11 forwarding. Not familiar with waypipe but it seems more like a proxy between a server and a client so it’s probably more dependent on the client’s use/abuse of calls to the server than RDP is when implemented by a server.
I actually got off my arse and did some productive programming over the Christmas break. Spent too long vegetating in front of the computer watching YouTube vids or playing games.
Linus does not fuck around (lemmy.one)
An oldie, but a goodie
Japan is living in the future that the 1990s dreamed of. (startrek.website)
Yes, also Teslas (media.mastodon.scot)
Seriously spends $80 to drive 20km.. (lemmy.ca)
They aren't, and I'm sick of being told they are (lemmy.world)
I just realized /c/piracy is the most subscribed community in the lemmyverse! (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
lemmyverse.net/communities?order=subscribers
Your average Wine enjoyer (sh.itjust.works)
For real tho (lemmy.world)
Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default (www.phoronix.com)
Happy New Year Coders. (lemy.lol)