So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob “correctly”, so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.
Whoever came up with “hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on ‘your keyboard is buggered’ mode” should be shot.
I don’t doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.
I actually don’t believe that everybody should necessarily try to learn to code. I think it’s reasonably specialized, and nobody really expects most people to have to do it. It’s not like knowing how to read and write and do basic math.
So I’ve decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn’t really care about money, and who is very humble but who still makes a lot of money and is very famous, but is very humble and rich and famous...
Personally, I’m not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren’t, they shouldn’t be, and microkernels are just stupid.
A lot of people still like Solaris, but I’m in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.
I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.
Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.
I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It’s the right way to do things.
I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.
I’m a technical manager, but I don’t have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.
Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you’re screwed.
I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or ‘big thinker.’ I don’t have any lofty goals.
What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.
An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.
By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don’t always agree with my decisions, they know I’m not working against them.
In many cases, the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.
Helsinki may not be as cold as you make it out to be, but California is still a lot nicer. I don’t remember the last time I couldn’t walk around in shorts all day.