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.
There was a vision: “The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everyone in the world pervasively networked worldwide”. A few principles: Source: Alan Kay’s answer to What made Xerox PARC special? Who else today is like them? – Quora In the 70s, Xerox Parc was THE research facility in the United States. Technology…
Until you know how to focus, you’ll never be able to think clearly, solve problems, make decisions, or remember things. Being focused is important but staying on a task is becoming harder and harder. A symphony of notifications can draw you out of whatever you’re doing at a moment’s notice. Source: How to Focus and Maximize…
What do you do when you are stuck working the overnight shift at a hospital reception desk? You become an expert in Microsoft Paint. Turns out, sometimes our resistance to learn something new and master a new skill can lead to something pretty amazing. Pat Hines, who couldn’t be bothered to learn Photoshop and illustrated…
Specifically, the number of Americans engaged in R&D has jumped by more than twentyfold since 1930 while their collective productivity has dropped by a factor of 41. “It’s getting harder and harder to make new ideas, and the economy is more or less compensating for that,” Bloom said. “The only way we’ve been able to…
The water bottle flipping craze, in which a partially filled bottle of water is flipped and magically lands upright, swept the globe a couple of years ago. Now a group of Dutch scientists has designed a classroom demo version of the feat, described in a recent paper in the American Journal of Physics. It is…
As a previous math teacher, I have a soft spot for the pains teachers and students can feel when trying to use math symbols and expressions in technology. The same thing can be said in science when typing chemical formulas. Technology seems to play best with normal letters and numbers, rather than exponents, subscripts, fractions, and such. Although…
