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Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

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Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#111

Post by lailoken »

batista wrote: post #109
exDM69 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is quite popular with scientific computing people doing GPGPU math.

All 10 of them? Less fun edition: I'm sure it is. As it is with Linux based 3D render farms. Do both of those represent a large portion of Nvidia's income or an insignificant one? I presume it's the latter: there are billions of desktops/laptops but only several thousands of scientific computing / 3D rendering installations. The fact that Nvidia doesn't seem to go out of its way to help people using Linux seems to co…

Clearly you have not worked in enough fields to see where this may be used. I've worked at high frequency traders where we used some of this technology. And how about a large portion of android phones?

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#112

Post by danmaz74 »

batista wrote: post #97
twelvechairs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so. Not to disagree with your point (which is right), but It becomes in NVidia's financial interests when they have negative press coverage because someone like Linus says bad things about them. I hope you understand what I am saying. Linus isn't just talking in an abstract-intellectual environment, his voice is strongly publicise…

This is correct in abstract, but not in real terms. I don't think Linus sayings have any significant effect on NVidia's bottom line (if they have any effect at all). It's not like more than 0.01% potential buyers will read this Linus quote and choose a competing product. Especially if NVidia's product is the best for their use case in the first place.

A bad hit to your image among opinion leaders in your field might not hurt your sales right away, but it can hurt them in the long run if this creates a negative image for your brand.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#113

Post by kabdib »

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].

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#114

Post by dwc »

cookiecaper wrote: post #66
dwc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bugg…

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

Perhaps. Now what about OpenBSD and NetBSD, or whatever else? If they provide specs then they don't have to write drivers, but they don't get to bless or withhold their blessing.

There was a stink a while back where Adaptec had been providing drivers for FreeBSD, but then stopped. People were stuck either not upgrading their boxes (bad!) or moving off their RAID setup (painful, expensive!). It's ugly. With specs, there is not this issue.

The (pervasive) idea that vendors providing drivers for your system of choice, for the time being is being open source friendly is something the vendor promotes, but it's not actually friendly.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#115

Post by batista »

lailoken wrote: post #111
batista wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All 10 of them? Less fun edition: I'm sure it is. As it is with Linux based 3D render farms. Do both of those represent a large portion of Nvidia's income or an insignificant one? I presume it's the latter: there are billions of desktops/laptops but only several thousands of scientific computing / 3D rendering installations. The fact that Nvidia doesn't seem to go out of its way to help people using Linux seems to co…

Clearly you have not worked in enough fields to see where this may be used. I've worked at high frequency traders where we used some of this technology. And how about a large portion of android phones?

>Clearly you have not worked in enough fields to see where this may be used. I've worked at high frequency traders where we used some of this technology.

And clearly if I had to have worked to some niche fields to know about that use, it's not that widespread.

I seriously doubt Nvidia's bottom line is affected by such professional uses of GPUs.

>And how about a large portion of android phones?

What about them? You think companies like Samsung or Motorola are gonna switch just because Linus said something negative? Or that Android customers are gonna demand a different GPU?

Not to mention that Nvidia is, if not "the only game in town", one of the "counted on the fingers of one hand with some digits cut-off in a tragic saw accident" games in town.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#116

Post by pm90 »

nnq wrote: post #87

...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 so…

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 :)

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#117

Post by pm90 »

exDM69 wrote: post #105
jofer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There were several Nvidia employees in the room, I wasn't one of them because I missed the sign-up for the event. But my co-workers were there and they got the message, and I hope the message propagates upwards to the people who make the big decisions on this. But Linus' message was a bit disheartening. Most of our crew would really like to open source everything we write. But then there's the fact that our code woul…

you should really post this as a reply to the link. Not many will see this after its been nested all this way down (at the moment)

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#118

Post by saurik »

vacri wrote: post #100
DanBC wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Really? Moderation has been a feature of complaint across every web forum (and many non-web forums) I've ever been a part of. See, for example, the comments here (and even there) about StackExchange; 4chan; suicidegirls (NSFW) "spring cleaning"; the HUGE amount of meta / drama on Wikipedia (ANI alone is gigabytes of guff stretching over years about moderating that community. The holy books of millennia ol…

I'm not part of the 4chan nor suicidegirls communities, and the meta in wikipedia is not forum-style moderation. The places I've been that have moderation issues don't have people wondering why they've been hit. I'm not saying that other forums don't have issues, but that there is a constant sussurus about the problems of moderation here that I don't have in other places. No insight and no accountability = bad modera…

I had down voted you (and thereby might be the person whom you are referring to who did so) as you are making an anecdotal statement that is sufficiently far-fetched as to be ludicrous. Now, in your follow-up, you seem to be lumping me (the person who downmodded you) into the category of "moderators", which is technically fine but then useless: I am another member of this site, just like you; the mechanisms here are then no different than they are on almost any other system that ha peer moderation. If you are using Slashdot, reddit, Digg, DISQUS... virtually any modern forum solution, there is a downvote feature, and it works virtually the same way. Yet, now your new comment (which I also "downmodded") seems to be ignorant of this mechanisms on all of these sites, disregards the list of sites procided by DanBC, and continues to not list any other sites thaw here moderation was not a common topic; you seriously just look like you've never used any other websites at this point.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#119

Post by willvarfar »

functional-tree wrote: post #78
SkyMarshal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sent…

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 enoug…

An approach I think would work is self-organising rather than moderated: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#120

Post by kitsune_ »

flabbergasted wrote: post #61
saurik wrote: post #58

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 read…

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

That was a great line by him.

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

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