Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=49m45s

by flabbergasted • 14 years ago

370 141 14 years ago

youtu.be

You have to love Linus for not being afraid to speak his mind.

rosser• 14 years ago

"I wish everybody was as nice as I am."

stesch• 14 years ago

What have I expected? He really says it and gives the finger.

SkyMarshal3• 14 years ago

TLDR: Linus at a Q&A, a woman asks why Nvidia still isn't providing any support for Optimus on Linux, Linus responds that Nvidia is being really difficult about that without good reason and "Fuck You Nvidia!" (flicks off the camera).

Her question actually starts a minute earlier than the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=48m14s

PS - Bravo Linus. This is issue is a real PITA, and a bit incongruent considering the historically awesome driver support Nvidia has provided for Linux.

alecco2• 14 years ago

That doesn't reflect his opinion. First, Linus states Nvidia is an exception, one of the worst trouble spots. And he is also very upset because Nvidia at the same time tries to sell a lot of chips into the Android market, a Linux based system. Very ungrateful of Nvidia. I agree, fuck Nvidia.

forrestthewoods2• 14 years ago

Ungrateful? Since when is that part of any sensible business plan? I don't know why Linus would expect a corporation to devote significant resources to an endeavor out of kindness. Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so.

Edit: I expected downvotes and I'll gladly take them if someone can explain to me how Nvidia is being unreasonable.

bingbing• 14 years ago

Your link didn't quite work for me, starting in the 49th minute somewhere,

Using a fragment identifier to demarc the time offset works better for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=48m14s

dwc2• 14 years ago

> incongruent considering the historically awesome driver support Nvidia has provided for Linux

It's not really incongruent. Nvidia has provided driver support for Linux, but that does no good for, say, FreeBSD. This driver support is in lieu of providing specs. They're keeping a lid on things and maintaining control. There are very good hackers who would make open source drivers if they had specs. Arguably less buggy drivers. Since they make sure they have control it's not surprising that they either 1) think this isn't worth their trouble, or 2) have actively decided they don't want this to happen, for whatever business reason.

cookiecaper4• 14 years ago

I haven't checked recently but nVidia also used to provide decent support for FreeBSD and Solaris.

AlexDanger• 14 years ago

Later in the talk someone says they are working for nVidia and doing something with Tegra. I couldnt quite make it out, what is he saying?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&feature=playe...

grannyg00se2• 14 years ago

He said they are now upstreaming tegra (super? / supra?)

I guess he's talking about pushing out some new driver support.

cookiecaper4• 14 years ago

I've always harbored the hope that nVidia is working behind the scenes on a release that supports KMS/Wayland, and that the release of Optimus support will be released simultaneously. It makes sense when you consider that Optimus support is probably a pretty big change and putting that investment in the legacy X11 non-KMS driver would be a waste when KMS will be a requirement for all new distros in 2 years' time.

It's worth noting that just last night they released a stable driver that (finally) supports RandR 1.2. From what I understand this was also a significant change and it may bode well for future standardization improvements like KMS (moves multi-monitor management away from the proprietary TwinView driver components into standard xrandr, for instance, so that is complexity the KMS version will not have to handle).

Fingers crossed that they release this imaginary driver soon. :)

rmk22• 14 years ago

> It's worth noting that just last night they released a stable driver that (finally) supports RandR 1.2

The XRandR support in the driver is not yet stable [1]. The 302.xx line is currently in beta, but will support both XRandR 1.2 & 1.3 at the same time. That part also works flawlessly, however, your mileage may vary in regards to suspend/hibernate, since both I and multiple others on the nvidia forums experience serious problems with resume from either, i.e. the computer hard locks (and doesn't even respond to ssh etc.), which requires you to powercycle it. So while the XRandR is a huge step forward, it is not without problems yet.

[1]: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/latest.txt shows you the latest stable driver, which is 295.59

superxor• 14 years ago

I have a Notebook with Optimus, and watching this made me so happy. Nvidia is being an ass by not supporting Optimus.

rsanchez12• 14 years ago

Even nVidia can't properly handle Optimus on Windows, so it's no surprise they aren't even trying on Linux.

dazzawazza• 14 years ago

It's a shame he doesn't go in to specifics, just saying "Fuck you" makes him look like a child, which I am sure he isn't.

What is the problem?

flabbergasted7• 14 years ago

Unlike Intel and ATI, Nvidia doesn't play nice with open source developers.

tshadwell• 14 years ago

It's still much harder to find ATI drivers for Linux than Nvidia drivers.

paol• 14 years ago

While this is true, nvidia's closed-source drivers do have the virtue of actually working.

(ok, this is slightly unfair to intel's video drivers, they work fine as long as you don't need 3D acceleration)

btian• 14 years ago

Presumably he said that because nVidia makes it difficult for developers to develop open source drivers for nVidia devices

Intermediate3• 14 years ago

I guess the problem is that Nvidia pretending to be Linux supporting company (they even joined Linux Foundation) while completely disregards linux users in many ways, e.g Nvidia still doesn't support Optimus in drivers for Linux. What stopped them? Today almost every second laptop goes with GPU built with nvidia optimus technology and it's can be a very painful experience to use linux on such devices.

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

I don't think that this would have been the right venue to go into an in-depth rant about Nvidia's lack of cooperation. That's certainly not what the audience was looking for and probably not what Linus wanted to go into; moreover, I doubt anybody from Nvidia was there or would even have heard the talk.

The last point is somewhat ironic: if Linus had been reasonable and talked about Nvidia at length, Nvidia would probably not have noticed the talk; since Linus decided to be curt, the talk got onto HN and people from Nvidia have no doubt noticed it.

Besides, whatever you think about it, Linus's approach was indubitably effective. We are, after all, talking about the issue right now!

jofer2• 14 years ago

Actually, there at least one Nvidia employee in the room. Have a look at the last question (asked by an Nvidia employee).

srean• 14 years ago

Aside from the FU, its a nice and interesting talk with an engaging Q&A that spans: decision making, being blunt by choice, micro-optimization, licensing, commercial interests, limited success on the desktop....

flabbergasted7• 14 years ago

From "If you like subversion, you are ugly and stupid" and now this. I always enjoy this man's talks.

simonbrown• 14 years ago

It was CVS.

flabbergasted7• 14 years ago

His comment was more general:

"You can disagree with me as much as you want, but during this talk, by definition, anybody who disagrees is stupid and ugly, so keep that in mind."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&feature=youtu...

exDM694• 14 years ago

Well, it was targeted at both, CVS and Subversion and centralized version control in general. He commented on the "SVN is CVS done right" that you can't do it right since it's the wrong thing to do in the first place.

_delirium• 14 years ago

I'm behind the times here, but it took me a second to realize this was really Linus in the video. I still think of him as looking like the now-10-year-old photo gracing his Wikipedia article (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus_Torvalds.jpeg), but he looks a lot older here, possibly accentuated by the business attire.

tomjakubowski• 14 years ago

Same thing happened to Larry Page. When I saw the Charlie Rose interview I hardly recognized him.

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

I think Linus looks better these days. He’s lost weight, and the grey hair and glasses make him look wiser.

jvehent• 14 years ago

I guess he just proved he isn't any wiser, after all :)

zerostar072• 14 years ago

really? i think he ages very gracefully, even looks younger than 43

unkoman• 14 years ago

A man who speaks his feelings about his passion, oh how will we ever handle this.

benwr• 14 years ago

"I like offending people, because I think the people who get offended should be offended."

sho_hn2• 14 years ago

One for the ages. Added to Wikiquote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#2012

faragon• 14 years ago

Link to the source (Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=61m28s

I've found it while watching the video after the "fuck you nVidia" discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698

Edit: Actual quote: "I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended" (without the "the" before "people").

FlyingSnake• 14 years ago

I hope NVidia notices this and instead of going into a shell, helps make Optimus chips a first class citizen in Linux land.

tubbo• 14 years ago

wow linus is really the original DHH

cookiecaper4• 14 years ago

Linus is so ridiculously out of DHH's league that just the existence of this comparison is asinine.

cpinto• 14 years ago

Let the memes begin! Here's an image template of Linus giving the finger: https://skitch.com/cpinto/ebemj/linus

burke• 14 years ago

As much as this isn't reddit, I can get behind this.

sp332• 14 years ago

Try posting it to http://canv.as/ you might get a better response :)

m_for_monkey• 14 years ago

Here it is: http://memegenerator.net/Angry-Linus.

gdi2290• 14 years ago

he also said Microsoft is full of shit

kennywinker• 14 years ago

if you skip ahead to 1:00:30 a guy in the audience who works at Nvidia responds during Q&A, ever so politely. Linus responds, quite politely as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&feature=youtu...

kristofferR• 14 years ago

The title you gave it doesn't make much sense considering what this post/part of the speech and following discussion really is about - Nvidia's lack of support for Linux and Linus' reaction.

You should have titled it "Linus Torvalds Angry at Nvidia, Flips the Finger at Speach" or something.

That would have been more descriptive, just a heads up for next time! ;)

flabbergasted7• 14 years ago

I used the title 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"'.

Apparently, a clueless moderator decided to change it.

StephenFalken• 14 years ago

We desperately need open sourced chip cores. An open community would build them with open source EDA tools and the final tapeout would be physically produced by a foundry. I know open source EDA tools are still decades away from proprietary ones, but we won't go anywhere if we don't start somewhere.

vidarh• 14 years ago

We do have open sourced chip cores: http://opencores.org/

It's still in its infancy, and faces a lot of challenges that open source software doesn't, but it's come a long way in a few years.

castilhor• 14 years ago

here's a gif http://cl.ly/313u2y471p1F0G3Q1a2i

saurik3• 14 years ago

The original title of this submission was 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"', which was renamed by someone (the moderators? can the submitter change the title?) after a ton of people had upvoted and commented on it, and despite the link being not to the entire video but instead to a specific point in the video for which the title of the entire video is probably not even an appropriate description.

So, when people are reading the comments of this submission in the future, please keep this in mind as a historical note. (This, humorously, was actually the kind of situation that caused the complaint[1] that itself turned into a massive hullabaloo recently regarding what can be discussed on HN and what the policies regarding hell-banning are; to view the reference you will need showdead.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013

flabbergasted7• 14 years ago

I guess the moderators were offended by a four letter word.

"People who get offended should be offended!" - Linus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=3672s

aurelianito• 14 years ago

I really agree with Linus on this one. I usually say that when one person offends other person, the one who is wrong is the offended person.

kitsune_• 14 years ago

That was a great line by him.

"I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended."

JoeCortopassi• 14 years ago

The new title completely changed what I was expecting when I clicked this link, which was much appreciated when I opened it at my in-laws with the volume on :-/. I honestly thought this was a follow up to the "Linus to Nvidia: 'F*ck You'" post for some commentary, and now feel like I just got Rick-Rolled...

Edit: Seriously though, is the new rule that we aren't allowed to submit anything other than the page's title?

Devilboy2• 14 years ago

Can we get a mod to clarify the title rules please? This is getting annoying.

detst• 14 years ago

This is really unfortunate and takes away from HN. I'm fully in favor of defaulting to maintaining the original title but often it's so vague to be completely meaningless. Most people don't have time to click on every link so we simply pass on content that we would have read with a descriptive title. Generally I just pass the first time and check it out if it's still on the front page later; thinking it might be worthwhile if it's popular enough to still be there.

Of course, in this case, it is a descriptive title for the talk but completely takes away the specific thing the submission is about. This is slightly less bad but still bad.

SkyMarshal3• 14 years ago

The current moderation system isn't scaling. This post is a good example to illustrate the problem.

At first glance it appears to be a flamebait title, and hence a mod who sees it may feel it's a no-brainer - correct it and move on.

However, there's a nuance to it - that is exactly how Linus Torvalds expresses himself, and the original title ("Linus to Nvidia: Fuck You!", or something close to that) captured his sentiment accurately, so maybe it's not flamebait after all.

Or maybe it is flamebait even despite that, since Linus's SOP is to sometimes start flamewars to make a point, break through the red tape, or otherwise just make a command decision and move on.

Clearly plenty of room for moderation error, a nd that's just one submission. What's a mod to do?

So on the one hand, there has been a spate of godawfully-titled submissions in recent months:

1. "X things you should ... whatever" type titles (clearly banned in the HN posting guidelines)

2. Too short and uninformative (like a word or three).

3. Sensationalism, flamebait, miscategorized comparison results, etc.

4. more I'm sure...

But on the other hand, the mod system has problems as well:

1. Nobody even knows what the mod system is

2. Nobody knows who the mods are.

3. There's no way to give feedback on moderations, for the ones that were incorrectly modded.

4. Too many false positives (posts that shouldn't be modded but are, resulting comments like saurik's above, and entire threads complaining this problem).

5. Too many false negatives that slip through anyway.

And of course, not part of the mod system, but too many submitters just don't know how to descriptively, accurately, concretely title submissions anyway, increasing the volume a seemingly too-small group of mods has to deal with.

HN isn't the first social media site to have problems like this, but most others have a full-time dev team working on solving them, and they evolve certain solutions like Slashdot's meta-moderation or Reddit's user-run/modded subreddits.

So I don't think the mod system in its current form can scale with those problems, but on a more meta level I'm not sure that PG can scale as the developer of the mod system, given that YC takes 110% of his time.

Just trying to identify the problem before attempting to solve it, any thoughts?

functional-tree• 14 years ago

It's been like this for a long time. It's by far the least transparent moderation in a community I've ever seen. For a long time I thought of HN as a generally smart, reasonable community (less so these days with the masses here) but the completely opaque moderation has always seemed extraordinarily, unnecessarily restrictive and elitist. It's unlikely to change at this point. The minority who care don't matter enough.

Personally I'd love to see another smaller, more refocused community spin off where better, more open and reasoned tech/startup discussions can take place. Keep it invite-only perhaps.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

> But on the other hand, the mod system has problems as well:

> 1. Nobody even knows what the mod system is

That is not a problem. This is excellent feature of a moderation system. Meta is death - really. I'm never going to make another meta post after this one. (Unless it's t help a new user.)

> 2. Nobody knows who the mods are.

Again, that's not a problem. It avoids turning moderating into character battles. A mod who makes a mistake anonymously has no investment of face-saving; they can easily undo the error.

> 3. There's no way to give feedback on moderations, for the ones that were incorrectly modded.

There is an email address clearly listed in the guidelines.

I really don't think the problems are as big as people are making out. Sure, some things are frustrating. Taking this video and post as an example: Don't link to the small part of the video where Linus tells nvidia to go fuck themselves, link to the entire video (and to the start of that video) and then give it a better title. Trying to attach blame to mods because someone made a weird sub-optimal choice when submitting a link is un-good.

andyjohnson0• 14 years ago

Two suggestions:

1. If a post is renamed then the original title(s) should be available to view somehow. Maybe via a moderation summary link.

2. The downvoting mechanism should require the downvoter to post their reasons.

cnp• 14 years ago

ughhhh by the time you get to that fuck you part you're cheering along as well... perfect timing

wordplay• 14 years ago

http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=20m50s "If you think like a computer, writing C actually makes sense."

nnq• 14 years ago

...anybody else picked up the line where he basically says that WEB PROGRAMMING ISN'T [REAL] PROGRAMMING? I wonder what a community like HN, with so many people developing web apps thinks about this... :)

Quote (~min 11:30): "I have never in my love done any web programming because I'm not interested, I think that kind of stuff... there's MIS people to do that for you, right? I'm interested in programming"

[edited some spelling bugs]

sdfjhjhjhjhd• 14 years ago

web programming is boring CRUD work in almost all cases.

pm902• 14 years ago

I hope people like him continue to say things like that. He is a systems engineer who loves what he does so of course he feels that what he does is better than everything else. That said, he also mentions that he feels bad when people take him too seriously on such things, so don't :)

zokier2• 14 years ago

Was there anything else of interest in that talk?

zerostar072• 14 years ago

I liked that he likes the open science publication movement. I think he would be a great advocate for it .

kabdib• 14 years ago

There is a bunch of hardware in the world that is inaccessible. I don't see this changing.

Reasons include: Keeping competitors away from what you think are valuable secrets and maintaining an advantage. Keeping people away from features that, if misused, could result in chip damage. Keeping security holes secret (e.g., badly designed DMA hardware that could be exploited, if the flaws were known). Limiting access to known buggy features, or unfinished features that either don't work or that could leak damaging hints about strategic direction. You have purchased or licensed 3rd party technology that you contractually cannot divulge details of. For interoperability with other products you have embedded knowledge of them in the product, under NDA.

More: It's expensive to document chips to the point that outside development can be done. Perhaps the documentation doesn't exist, at all, and would have to be reverse-engineered out of the chip design (yes, this happens). It's expensive to write drivers for multiple platforms, or even to get software into a state where it can be consumed by an outside party (just dumping a tree onto GitHub is /not/ a release). You feel that "forking" would result in a loss of control of your own product (and would dramatically increase the cost of future releases, lest you break things). You regularly rev chips and cover the changes transparently in the software layer, and this would /not/ be transparent if you released product details (thus increasing the cost of revisions).

More (the slimey side): You have misappropriated technology and divulging it would be harmful to you. There are design errors or bugs verging on malfeasance that could expose you to litigation. You have lied about the product's capabilities and a release would reveal this (whereupon, litigation).

Or, it's a pain in the ass, the market is significantly less than 1 percent of your total, and you have a horizontal skyscraper of engineers already behind schedule. "Good faith and being nice" doesn't pay the bills.

[I have also heard, from other parts of the industry, that the company in question is hard to deal with].

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Sure,

Some companies have a financial incentive to effective tell the open source movement to f-- off. Sure, when they take that, they may not be being evil on a grand scale. But hey, if they are telling linux to f-- off, it seems appropriate Linus return the favor. He's just making things clear.

Is there anything wrong that?

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

A few observations:

1. One of the highly distinctive characteristics of being a Free Software project leader is having the freedom to speak your mind. What Linus does (hacking the Linux kernel) and who pays him to do it (presently the Linux Foundation) are pretty loosely linked. The primary objective of LF is to fund Linux development, and Linus is pretty much the guy to get that done. If LF didn't pay him for it, someone else would. He can state his opionions on relevant technical matters with few if any fears of repercussions. I'm looking forward to next week's press releases from Nvidia.

2. Linus addresses what Nvidia are doing wrong at a few points, both directly and indirectly.

Around 15 minutes in he talks about what Free Software provides in the way of developer freedoms: you can focus on what you are interested in and what you are good at. In Linus's case, issues such as maintaining Linux-related websites, init, QA, and Linux distributions is stuff he fundamentally doesn't care about (while other bits such as, eventually, creating a useful revision control system he does). Free Software lets you focus on your own core competencies.

He also makes the point, around 35 minutes, that it's very important that people need to know how he feels about things. Including how he feels about support received from hardware vendors.

More specifically, for hardware manufacturers, playing nice and closely with the kernel development community leads to both better product performance and customer relations. The woman asking the Nvidia question clearly wasn't happy with her Nvidia experience. I've learned in assessing hardware compatibility to treat any Nvidia componentry as at best a red flag if not a show-stopper. I'll actively go out of my way to avoid their products (Intel have gone out of their way to ensure compatibility and open specs, my most recent purchases centered on Intel chipsets, in particular for graphics). Playing well with devs also means that issues are addressed in a timely manner, compromises can be reached, and in general communications are open and positive. I don't know the full backstory on the Nvidia front (though searching the LKML mailing list should turn up some bits).

3. ... and yes, the HN moderators fubared this one.

abruzzi• 14 years ago

At one point in the video he says he's proud that Linux is the only OS (I'm presuming he meant kernel) that is in mobile and desktop/server systems. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption that OSX and iOS were both based on essentially the same Darwin/XNU kernel?

ellie42• 14 years ago

MS Vista has no drivers: "Vista sucks! Mi$roSoft sucks!"

GNU/Linux has no drivers: "Fuck NVIDIA!"

wowoc• 14 years ago

GNU/Linux has drivers, but they are distributed as a binary blob compiled against a specific version of kernel.

dbbolton• 14 years ago

Does anyone know the full story behind the "suicidal" reference?

TimMontague• 14 years ago

This was a really interesting talk. Does anyone know where to find other lectures (or whatever this is technically called) by other influential programmers/computer scientists?

rsanchez12• 14 years ago

Optimus has to be one of the worst products nVidia has pushed. There's the Linux incompatibility, and there's the little problem where you are always tied to the vastly inferior integrated graphics. Games that I should be able to play at 60+ FPS with highest settings and resolution play at 20-30 FPS because I can't use the graphics card to the fullest. Then I need to do obscure hacks to get some games to even recognize the nVidia graphics card because the game developer thought it would be a great idea to wait until you downloaded and installed a 7GB game and launched it to tell you, "Oh, you're one of those Optimusers, well fuck you." Just google "sonic generations optimus" and you'll see what I mean.

Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

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