| Almost ten years ago I was working on an interesting Linux multiboot system, googling to find far-from-default grub operation hints. I think it can be agreed the present grub documentation is very broad, with only a few undocumented features, but still not very deep even on the default operation. Grub was also undergoing more rapid change at the time. Came across a message where Tao had explained a concept like no other, and after what I had seen it was clear to me he understood it like no other, so it was purely logical. He knew more than the documentation. I didn't know he was a widely recognized mathematician or anything, I just thought he was a very bright computer scientist on a message board. There were only a couple sentences that nearly applied to my system, within a couple paragraphs on his solution to a different problem. There was no useful answer for me yet so I moved on. Googled to exhaustion that session with no code changes to make, but I looked at it again and it was the only tab I kept open, even though Tao did not show the direct way forward for me at all, everything else was actually useless. Next day I read it again, scrutinizing it over & over for an action I could follow through with, wishing someone had posted equally straightforward advice for my particular situation. No such luck, but it inspired me to go forward in a similar fashion. Mostly use both grub and syslinux as separate alternatives to boot my distributions ever since. For years I've felt like I couldn't have done it otherwise. And with Windows, grub or not, I ended up bringing more reliability to my employer. Fairly recently I found out Tao had started out as a mathematical child. That was incredibly helpful. He actually communicated the unique abstract concept I needed without even knowing the problem and without intentionally trying. I imagine he made up his own notations quite a bit before he carefully adopted the various professional terminologies. |