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Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#161

Post by digi_owl »

gukov wrote: post #155
hawski wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the word "steal" in "Good artists copy, great artists steal" quote always meant: make it that good that the public will think it was always yours. The origin does not matter, because reality for people is what they believe in. If you will execute it better than anyone else it will be considered "yours". Edit: At the same time there are also few options to make people believe it's yours beside exceptional execu…

I like this. Build it so well the customers won't suspect a thing and will think you're the original creator. In a way, this is "fake it 'till you make it... the best version ever." Apple is going to steal all the thunder again, this time in AR/VR, isn't it.

Hard to say. I can't shake the feel that that the consumer electronics Apple that we have come to know this last decade or so came down to them making products for one man, Steve Jobs. The iPod was basically tuned for his ears for one thing. If he didn't want to use it, never mind be seen using it, it didn't make it to the stores.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#163

Post by mrlyc »

Good grief, not that again. One of Edison's contemporaries said that Edison would have found a working lightbulb faster if he had put more thought into his investigations.

What works for me is a series of plan -> do -> review sequences with about 10 to 15% planning, 80 to 85% doing and 5 to 10% reviewing.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#164

Post by calebm »

gue5t wrote: post #8
anjc wrote: post #7

Someone who should be a multi billionaire says to ignore marketing and sales and just work. Edit: I'm not saying that he WANTS to be a multi billionaire, but the fact is that he has attained disproportionately less value than he's created. By rights he should be one of the wealthiest people in tech. He might have 150m but that's peanuts given what he's done. The wealth of the guy who made Instagram dwarfs that. The g…

If you think money is important you aren't a hacker.

I'm assuming this is sarcasm, but in case anybody thinks this, just remember: money = freedom.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#166

Post by coupdejarnac »

xvcnmdfs wrote: post #112
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course he bragged about it. He actually wanted people to use his technology to fund other ventures. Whats the point of creating things if no one actually knows about it?

You could say that if an invention is any good it speaks for itself, in which case you've saved yourself the effort of bragging and people still get to know about it

This has to be one of the biggest fallacies in tech.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#168

Post by tobltobs »

calebm wrote: post #164
gue5t wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think money is important you aren't a hacker.

I'm assuming this is sarcasm, but in case anybody thinks this, just remember: money = freedom.

> money = freedom

That's a strange formula. Shouldn't there be some kind of saturation for freedom.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#169

Post by Animats »

frederikvs wrote: post #88
vidarh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's too harsh to call them "stolen". Apple understood things about these ideas that most others didn't. The end result was something that was qualitatively very different from what preceded them. As an example, I worked on a tablet in '99 [1]. As the referenced article indicates we were not alone, nor were we first, and more came after. Around the same time there were a number of attempts at gluing together…

Very insightful post, thanks! I still stand by calling it stolen ideas though: if you go to PARC, see some cool stuff, and then come home and build it again for yourself, that's stealing an idea. But the main point I was trying to make was : taking Apple's slogan to mean "just think of something new and the world will be changed" is wrong, Apple hardly even did the "think of something new" part, but they did the hard…

As someone who went to PARC and saw the cool stuff years before Jobs did, I don't think he stole their idea. The PARC approach was to build the future expensively and wait for hardware to catch up. Eventually the hardware did, but not until the late 1980s.

Kay had a vision, but his vision was quite different from the way personal computing went. He was thinking of closed systems which would replace dedicated word processors. The Xerox Star was the result. Imagine a machine with Microsoft Office built-in, with all the software installed at the factory.

Kay also had a thing for discrite-event simulation as the killer app. Kay wrote, in Personal Dynamic Media, "In a very real sense, simulation is the central notion of the Dynabook." This matched well to Smalltalk, which was the successor to Simula-67, an ALGOL dialect with objects for discrite-event simulation. All that "message" stuff came from the simulation world, where you have many asynchronous blocks passing events around.

The real successors to the PARC work were the first generation of UNIX workstations. The Three Rivers PERQ, the Apollo, the Sun I, and the Apple Lisa all predated the Macintosh. They were all much better, but much more expensive. The UNIX workstation era tends to be forgotten, but those were the first good desktop computers. Macs were toys.

The original Mac was a flop. No hard drive, 128K RAM, too slow, and too expensive. The competition was the IBM PC/AT - 20MB hard drive, about 1MB RAM. This almost killed Apple. Not until the Macintosh SE (1989) did Apple have a built-in hard drive. In the Apple II era, Apple had a majority of desktop system market share. The Mac in the 1980s had about 15%, which gradually declined.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#170

Post by mianos »

smarpidity wrote: post #156
mwfunk wrote: post #150

I think we're all reading lots of different things into what Linus said here. My interpretation is that he's just saying that we tend to overvalue ideas and undervalue the less glamorous work involved in bringing those ideas to fruition. The Tesla vs. Edison narrative is always couched in terms of the idea guy vs. the more pragmatic (perhaps more business-oriented) guy, not unlike the popular Woz vs. Jobs narrative,…

I agree with your interpretation, "he's just saying that we tend to overvalue ideas and undervalue the less glamorous work involved in bringing those ideas to fruition." I would also add, Torvalds is an enchanted unicorn from a resume perspective, it's not like he has followed a typical FOSS career trajectory, so seriously, what does he know --> that you can put to use? It's like a beautiful young woman telling you h…

Then he wrote git and hit the doubt out of the ball field. This may be an anomaly, but he is behind one of the most successful large projects in the history of software engineering. It's an insult to say 'enchanted unicorn'. It makes this sound like luck. That is exactly what he is saying is bullshit.The difference between some great lightweight projects and the Linux kernel is not linear. There are almost no other projects that are as complex.
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