Torvalds
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Twitter set to become the newest addition to the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation's been racking up big-name brands since its early days, and one of the latest is mostly everyone's favorite rapid-blogging service, otherwise more commonly known as Twitter. Following in the steps of chip-maker NVIDIA and that Platinum-leveled Samsung, the Blue Bird recently announced it'll be joining the open-source association come next week, with the official revelation set to take place in a few days at the LinuxCon North American gathering in California. Twitter's Manager of Open Source, Chris Aniszczyk, says that by doing so "we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter." Needless to say, this is a win-win situation for all parties involved.
NVIDIA responds to Linus Torvalds' critique: 'supporting Linux is important'
Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't mince any words with his criticism of NVIDIA earlier this week -- calling it, among other things, the "single worst company we've ever dealt with." That unsurprisingly didn't go unnoticed by NVIDIA, which has today issued a statement that attempts clarify its position on the open source OS. It leads off by flatly stating that "supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA," before addressing some of the criticisms that have been leveled at it from Torvalds' and others. That includes its lack of Linux support for its Optimus laptop graphics, to which NVIDIA points to its support of the Bumblebee open source project, and its decision to not provide detailed documentation on all of its GPU internals -- on that, it says that it's "made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure." The company goes on to note that it supports a variety of GPUs on Linux and is an active participant in the ARM Linux kernel, but acknowledges that its position "may not please everyone." We're going to go out on a limb and guess that includes Torvalds. Hit the source link below for the full statement.
Linus Torvalds shares Millennium Technology Prize with pioneering stem cell scientist
It's not often we see Linux creator Linus Torvalds in a tux (as opposed to with a Tux), but he had a good reason to ditch the casual look this week. He was just named as the co-recipient of the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize (often referred to as the "tech Nobel"), an award that he shares with pioneering stem cell scientist Dr. Shinya Yamanaka -- the two will also each get an equal cut of €1.2 million prize fund. Torvalds was of course recognized for the creation of Linux itself, with Dr. Ainomaija Haarla of Technology Academy Finland (the prize's organizers) noting that Torvalds' work "has kept the web open for the pursuit of knowledge and for the benefit of humanity -- not simply for financial interests." What's more, Torvalds also sat down for a fairly in-depth interview with the BBC for the occasion, in which he talks about Linux at length and offers a few thoughts on Google, Microsoft and Raspberry Pi -- you can find it at the link below. [Image credit: Millennium Technology Prize]
Linus Torvalds is now a happy Nexus One owner, pinch to zoom put him over the edge
Linux originator Linus Torvalds isn't really big on these "phone" things, but he's finally caved to his Nexus One lust. In a recent blog post he explains how the G1 never did it for him, despite his love of the "concept" of having a Linux-based phone. He finds phones in general irritating, and cellphones "an opportunity to be irritated wherever you are," but the Nexus One's offer of car-friendly GPS navigation got him thinking he'd have a good excuse to bring it with him places, and the recent announcement of pinch-to-zoom capabilities somehow put him over the edge. He still says the phone part is "kind of secondary," but we sure he'll eventually be won over to the dark side and be just as annoying as the rest of us phone talkers at restaurants.
Linus Torvalds calls Apple's file system "utter crap"
Linus Torvalds may have dabbled in Apple territory in the past, but he's definitely not mincing any words about competing operating systems now. In a recent interview, Linus says that OS X is a "much better system" than Windows Vista overall, but that "in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for." Apparently these problems are rooted firmly in OS X's file system (HFS and HFS+), which he describes as "complete and utter crap," and even "scary." Of course, Torvalds also took the opportunity to tout the many virtues of Linux, which he says is an "obvious choice for anything from full-blown PCs to phones or video players." Damn straight it is.[Photo courtesy of AP, thanks Ash]
