Quotes of the week

[Posted December 24, 2008 by corbet]

XFS is not something I look into the innards of as I don't have enough chickens to sacrifice.

On the subject of the longstanding "treason uncloaked!" kernel message:

Most people won't actually think their printer is on fire. But most people WILL think there is serious cause for concern when they see this for the first time in dmesg. Many will search the net for explanations and come away confused and not entirely reassured. And at least one clueless guy will call the police because he still thinks he's under attack.

Now that certainly fits my definition of amusing and if my goal for Linux was to amuse myself at the expense of users, I'd be all for keeping it[1]. But perversely, I actually want users to enjoy their Linux experience.

[1] Hell, I'd probably even get them to use git.

-- Matt Mackall

It's never been rejected. For a long time it has been in a state where we're looking for the data which would allow us to agree that its benefits are worth its costs. AFAIK that has never really been convincingly demonstrated. Nor has the converse case been demonstrated, so it floats in limbo.

-- Andrew Morton on FS-Cache

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Quotes of the week

Posted Dec 25, 2008 1:48 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (1 responses)

And at least one clueless guy will call the police because he still thinks he's under attack.

He who calls the police might be good friends with the Tuttle (Oklahoma) City Manager. ;)

I once received a phone call from a woman who was frantic because her computer had alerted her (via a popup dialog box) that she was about to view a web page over a secure (SSL) connection. Of course, those skilled enough to view kernel messages via dmesg(1) are perhaps a little more well-informed than these poor souls...

Quotes of the week

Posted Dec 25, 2008 16:43 UTC (Thu) by amikins (guest, #451) [Link]

Nowadays a lot of desktop environments and distros have easy-to-use ways of accessing those logs, enabling less clued individuals to see Scary Things.

It's like looking at the code in the Matrix. Funny stuff, if you're in the room with the uninformed user at the time.