In a world full of fancy development tools and sites, the kernel project’s dependence on email and mailing lists can seem quaintly dated, if not positively prehistoric. But, as Greg Kroah-Hartman pointed out in a Kernel Recipes talk titled “Patches carved into stone tablets”, there are some good reasons for the kernel community’s choices. Rather than being a holdover from an older era, email remains the best way to manage a project as large as the kernel.
A kernel is the first layer of computer, it controls everything on how the computer will work. The Linux Kernel is the most popular kernel in use today, powering over 1.5 billion Android devices, millions of Chromebooks, and millions of devices that are in use everyday (things from wireless routers to smartwatches). This doesn’t include all of the web services we depend on every day that run some version of Linux. You’re probably using something that requires Linux every day.
So what does that have to do with email? With Kernel development which involves thousands of developers around the world, email is the only technology that has proven itself to manage the process of Linux kernel development. Even if email seems old fashion, I like to point out to students that almost every service they use relies on email for account maintenance.
Making learning easy may not get the results you desire. In the period of 1920–40 American food manufacturers wanted to reduce the time and effort required to make a cake. They simplified so much the process that the cooks needed to add only water and bake the cake. Unfortunately, the sales of the cake mix…
What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more…
When it comes to kids, growth mindset is a hot topic in education. Studies indicate that children who view intelligence as pliable and responsive to effort show greater persistence when encountering new or difficult tasks. In contrast, children who view intelligence as static or “fixed” have a harder time rebounding from academic setbacks or are…
The onslaught of robots and automation on all sorts of careers is a topic I’ve talked about previously. I believe as educators we need to be aware of the world our students will be inheriting. But one journalist doesn’t believe automation is happening fast enough. Baffling because it’s starkly at odds with the evidence, and…
At first I thought it was a teacher thing. I would ask how someone was doing and they would say, “I’m really busy.” This was often followed by a description of how little sleep they had gotten and how much grading they had done. Teachers weren’t whining. It wasn’t a “poor me” attitude. It was…
Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks—research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Source: Take notes by hand for better long-term comprehension I…
