soong

I propose IOI

Same here. Thanks.

This sounds like a good idea at first, but i dare you to take a non trivial Lisp function and "pythonize". This instantly becomes an indentation nightmare. Lisp function calls are highly nested and rarely one per line.

"Climbing Mount Improbable"[1] is the title of a book by Richard Dawkins. Haven't read it yet, but I can absolutely recommend "The Greatest Show on Earth"[2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climbing_Mount_Improbable

[2]https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolutio...

Thanks, for the tip ;-)

>>Beside that, I really don't get the point of all this, seriously. Not from a technological benefit, be warned, but from a user perspective the benefit is almost intangible. Why should the average sysadmin care? Linux is a rock solid kernel that does everything, what is the niche that Hurd is filling?

Well, that's debatable. Linux just crossed the 20 MLOCs bar. Granted, this is mostly driver code which you will only need a small subset of, but still: Linux is a huge complex blob. Linus himself said it's bloated years ago[1] and that it has a high entry barrier for new developers due to its complexity[can't find the link right now].

My guess would be that this is partly due to its classic monolithic architecture and partly due to their developement model[2].

After working with Plan9 for a while I can't help but take my hat off to the beauty and simplicity of the system. Especially as a sysadmin your life would be so much easier. No LDAP, no Kerberos, no NFS, no need to update or deploy software on/to terminals. But as it stands we're living in a land where every computer thinks it is a Mainframe.

Linux has done a great deal for OSS and will without question be around for quite some time but you have to wonder how computing would look like today, if history had taken a few diffenent turns.

FWIW: Is it just me, or is OS R&D gaining a little more traction lately after it almost stagnated in the 2000s ?

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/linus-torvalds-linux-is-bloated/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux#Kernel_code...

Exactly! Our brain may be our center of computation but the models it develops of the outside world and hence about itself are based on the signals it recieves from the senses.

"Linux was once 10,000 lines of code and required part-time tending. It’s now 19 million lines of code, and changing it involves a complex hierarchy."

Just wondered: 19 MLOC all driver code included, right?

Yacy[1] is a decentralized search engine

[1] http://www.yacy.net/en/

Or you could put a TOC at the beginning (you know, like in a book) and do no sliding at all.

-> No confusion, great overview, direct jumps with hyperlinks, easy to realize with pure HTML.

You have it pretty much the other way around. The reason we have to rely on all this stuff like

* NFS, CIFS, etc for networked files

* Kerberos for network wide auth

* LDAP for network wide user management

* basically all http abuse for music/Video streaming etc.

is because our OSes still follow the 70s One-Big-Machine-Many-Dumb-Teletypes-Paradigm. Basically all our devices, from the biggest server to the smallest Smartphone, think they are a Mainframe. The rest, including networking in general, is fumbled on top.

This is ugly at best but becomes a real PITA as soon as you have to deal with a couple of machines(BYOD or not).

Exactly because the computing landscape has changed from mainframes to networks of desktops was plan9 developed. An OS where it doesn't matter anymore if a resource is local or on the network.

Following your line of thought, since computers become more and more capable, soon we wont need networks at all.

EDIT: Btw. resources here means anything, from all HW devices to the Text in an open editor. Every file can be exported and in plan9 really everything is a file.

"Introduction to OS Abstractions Using Plan 9 From Bell Labs" by Francisco J Ballestros is a great help, too.

http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/_books/comp/plan9/Introductio...

>how do we stream a 4k screen or perhaps why would we stream a 4k screen?

Exactly! Why would you? Plan9 networks typically consist of File/Auth/CPU Servers and Terminals. Every machine boots from and has its rootfs on the File Server. Your screen content will be computed locally unless you decide to run a computationally intensive task on the cpu server. The content of this window will then be computed on the cpu server.

>[...] distributed features in Plan 9 [...] were unsuited for desktop of the 90s, or the laptop of 2000 or a tablet today.

You can however run all servers on a single standalone machine (though this somewhat defeats the purpose) without considerable performance loss, since all syscalls are implemented as local and as network version and the appropriate will be chosen.

From personal experience I can confirm that Plan9 run at very acceptable speed on a 400MHz,64MB,100MBit machine which is less than your typical smartwatch these days.

I believe the documentation is installed in /sys/doc. At least 9Front does so.

My guess would be that despite what they are advocating believes are something you cannot be too tightly bound to as a high ranking government official. But this discussion is becoming increasingly off topic.

>let it be offered by the market

1) But that is the whole point: It is warranted, because it is imposed on the providers( at least until law changes). It is quite obvious that ISPs have no interest in doing so by them selves.

Netflix was slow because Verizon throttled their traffic, not because they didn't have the capacities to route it properly. They simply wanted a piece of the Netflix Pie. So net neutrality will prevent that not cause it.

2) This is not about the big content providers at all. They would simply pay the ISPs a fee and pass it on to their customers. So net neutrality actually prevents increased consumer fees.

>I had as much neutrality as I wanted or needed before the FCC got involved, from the 3+ wireline and 5+ wireless providers in my area (San Francisco)

3) The fact that you can choose from so many ISPs in SF is good for you, but you are probably well aware that in more rural parts of the country this is not the case. What will people in those areas do, if their only ISP decides to throttle a protocol that is important to them?

4) Most importantly, the traffic we create is growing constantly. Not only Downstream but Upstream. Especially since more and more "services" become decentralized. Decentralizing architectures is one of the biggest challenges we face today as internet citizens. Decentralized search engines, social networks and who knows what will come in the next decades. Decentralized Systems are more democratic, enable people to actively take part and give us back a piece of independence from the goverment (no, i am not an Anti-Gov't lunatic) as well as corporations. But for that we need to have our packets routed from A to B without being throttled, because some ISP cannot make a quick buck out of it.

Thank You for Your time!

Yes, nothing is ever too stupid for him, but that's a new low (again).

Are you willing to trade the warranty that every protocol that you are EVER going to use will be treated equal for a better TV reception NOW ?

The irony here is, that being statically linked isn't even considered an advantage by many people these days.

Since the window system exposes all windows including their attributes(position,size, etc) via the file system, at least some of the tiling WM functionality could easily be implemented with rc scripts. Being a dwm user myself I planned to do so, but after using rio for some time I found this completely unnecessary since you can place your windows very conveniently with the mouse in the first place.

Even better: Add fn term%{ $* } to your profile and you can just dbl-left-click and send the old command. And since Rio remembers your last menu item selection this becomes just dbl-left-sgl-middle-click on second execution.

Pretty neat.

Edit: Of course this does not make it much easier if you really just want to execute the very last command. But usually you want to either

* edit the last command, because you mistyped it, in which case you can edit the old command in place and then proceed as described above

or

* you want to execute not the last but some previous command in which case this becomes increasingly useful the older the command is

Yes, one can't stress enough how much Plan 9 is not Unix. When Bell Labs eventually gave up on Research Unix and started from scratch they deliberately broke with almost every standard and convention in existence.

The programming language (Plan 9 has its own C dialect), breaking with POSIX, abolishing the process/thread dualism and doing away with the root user just to name a few.

By getting rid of all these inherited liabilities they were able to create a much slicker, much more uniform and most importantly truly network centric OS, which in many aspects (not necessarily in terms of performance) still surpasses modern unix-derived operating systems(you know...the usual suspects). On the other hand the lack of backwards compatibility and the high barrier of entry prevented Plan 9's widespread adoption outside the research community.

On the contrary if we need new functionality today the way to go seems to be piling new layers of abstraction on top of the already overly complex stuff we gatherd over the years until everything becomes an incomprehensible mess of special cases(16 million loc linux kernel, anyone?). That of course is a good ol' tradition, which started when we first fumbled network support into the unix kernel and thereby broke the open-read-write-close interface convention.

To summerize: Plan 9 is not Unix. Thankfully...