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The plan9 wiki got abused by spammers and page rank boosters. So it was set such that you could only edit it with wikifs.

If Valve's gets pwned then they should probably make an editor that requires a Steam login in order to contribute.

hehe way to broadcast your ignorance

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/

No listing at nVidia.
OS developers have worked out graphics cards in single head mode, no nForce support.

http://www.openbsd.org/

Not listed at nVidia.

Supported hardware section reports : nForce/nForce2/nForce2-400/nForce3/nForce3-250/nFo rce4* (SATA controllers are not supported)
Graphics support via X.org drivers

before you say "well there you go, you can use your specialised OSs" remember that my point was that it is all well and good for nVidia having a team of in house devs writing drivers for their hardware if one runs Windows or Linux. The rest of us have to reverse eng. and cobble stuiff together which would be solved by releasing a few docs.

And what non-linux, non-BSD OSes are around now?

There's Plan 9 and Inferno. I haven't had much opportunity to experiment with either one, but they both look really interesting. There's also Hurd, but as far as I can tell (which admittedly isn't very far) it's currently about where it was in the nineties in terms of actually working.

Some years ago the great guys at the Advanced Computing Lab of Los Alamos National Laboratory built this very cool setup with a bunch of Thinkpads running Plan 9:

The Powerwall

> how do you think "everything is a file" works, exactly?

it works by having user level file systems, I use them all day, every day

blame who ? why, it doesn't necessarily need kernel modification

you can even try this LiveCD

or read the pdf

his is how you open a text file from a remote system in the Kate editor by pointing the Open dialog to ftp://ftp.system.com/directory/file.txt [system.com].

see: bloat

how am I going to open a remote image with gimp ?

oh dear, no go

all that KDE protocol crap is, well, wrong.

If only they got "everything is a file" not "every protocol needs a new KIOslave"

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.html

2 An Agent for Security is the particular section relevant to your question.

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

They could read http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._k eyboard/index.html
for counter arguments. Ofcourse, as the tty/line based input interfaces on *nix, the mouse might do that much for applications such as vim/emacs as they are today.

The guys at http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/ did innovative things.
Linux has been good at optimizing the above mentioned guys previous attempt.

Naw. A better, integrated solution like Factotum on Plan 9

The last few decades have seen a tremendous growth
in wireless communication. The most popular examples are
cellular voice and data networks and satellite communication
systems. These and other similar applications have moti-
vated researchers to extend Shannon's information theory for
a single-user channel to some that involve communication
among multiple users. A few such examples are the multiple-
access channel, the broadcast channel, and the interference
channel. The exact capacity region is, however, known in the
most general case only for the multiple-access channel, while
the broadcast capacity region is known only for few specific
channels, like the additive white Gaussian noise channel and
the deterministic channel [7], and even fewer results are available for the interference channel [23]. It should be further
noted that the above applications as well as the channel models
used for analyzing them involve mainly single-hop wireless
communication.

9p has been around for 15 years and reference code is even Open Source these days.

v9fs on sourceforge for Linux alows mounting remote 9p servers and u9fs is a 9p server for other unix likes.

I use plan9 to edit files on my hosted Linux / FreeBSD / OpenBSD boxes at the co-lo and on the LAN. plan9 usefully mounts the remote file system into my file tree so one can grep sed awk cut join etc. as normal as though the files were local.

Excuse me but I must just say one thing : fuck java, fucking fuck off and die

And I remember PLATO running on Control Data 721's.

GUI screenshots.
http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interface s

Englebart's famous 1968 demo.
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Acorn Archimedes GUI
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~lrtc/computers/acorn_ro/ acorn/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A225785

Knowledge Navigator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator

Apple II GS
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/computers/IIg s.html

BeBox
http://www.bebox.nu/history.php

8-1/2: The Plan 9 Window system
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/8%BD/8%BD.pdf

Genera
http://www.geocities.com/mparker762/toys.html

Video Interviews of Early Pioneers
http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/

GUI News
http://interfacelift.com/news/

ZUI's
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/applications/in dex.shtml

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There is no perfect solution, naturally.

I prefer an application-centric environment rather than a data-driven one. But then again I know that the majority of my files will be plain text. The file type in Windows afaik maps a "what application to open this file type with". The application itself then tries to open the file and determine its file type from the contents. If I have a jpg called just Image with no extension then most applications I know will open it just fine. Even if it was called Image.doc!

My prefered working environment (plan9) uses text matching for its form of file association in the plumber but the rules aren't based on the file name alone. Thus the information on what to do with the file isn't even part of the OS itself, it's just an application. Filenames aren't special and even back in the days of DOS not all applications used 8.3 (ask anyone that used WordPerfect in the days of text mode). MS hijacking the generic .doc is still a real bugger for non-Office users!

For instance, let's say my the web server I am working on is called "freddy".
I will mount the remote file system into my own via srvssh (could be any unixy OS like BSD or Linux - this example is OpenBSD). I will be running tail -f /n/freddy/var/logs/httpd where any php errors go. e.g. :

[Tue Apr 19 18:47:10 2005] [error] PHP Parse error: parse error, unexpected ';', expecting ')' in /php/pg_db.class on line 7

My httpd is chrooted hence the /php
I use this rule to configure the plumber such that should it be sent the above string it will open pg_db.class from the remote server for editing in my local text $editor (in this case Acme) and line number 7 will be highlighted

type is text
data matches '/(php/.*\.(class|inc|php)) on line ([0-9]+)'
arg isfile /n/freddy/var/www/$1
data set /n/freddy/var/www/$1
attr add addr=$3
plumb to edit
plumb client window $editor

In this way one can have a rich set of rules and they are malleable. I can write new rules to the plumber that will only survive this logged-in session, indeed I can have a different plumber for each process group if I felt like it.

So I can send the produced HTML from http://freddy/test1.php for inspection in the editor and yet have http://slashdot.org open a browser window in my remote X session, whereas other systems I have used (like say Outlook's URI highlighting system) would force me to only have "open in the default browser" as an option for any URI's encountered. In my world the URI's in this paragraph can start actions whereas if you were reading this in vanilla Firefox they remain plain text.

There is no perfect solution, naturally.

I prefer an application-centric environment rather than a data-driven one. But then again I know that the majority of my files will be plain text. The file type in Windows afaik maps a "what application to open this file type with". The application itself then tries to open the file and determine its file type from the contents. If I have a jpg called just Image with no extension then most applications I know will open it just fine. Even if it was called Image.doc!

My prefered working environment (plan9) uses text matching for its form of file association in the plumber but the rules aren't based on the file name alone. Thus the information on what to do with the file isn't even part of the OS itself, it's just an application. Filenames aren't special and even back in the days of DOS not all applications used 8.3 (ask anyone that used WordPerfect in the days of text mode). MS hijacking the generic .doc is still a real bugger for non-Office users!

For instance, let's say my the web server I am working on is called "freddy".
I will mount the remote file system into my own via srvssh (could be any unixy OS like BSD or Linux - this example is OpenBSD). I will be running tail -f /n/freddy/var/logs/httpd where any php errors go. e.g. :

[Tue Apr 19 18:47:10 2005] [error] PHP Parse error: parse error, unexpected ';', expecting ')' in /php/pg_db.class on line 7

My httpd is chrooted hence the /php
I use this rule to configure the plumber such that should it be sent the above string it will open pg_db.class from the remote server for editing in my local text $editor (in this case Acme) and line number 7 will be highlighted

type is text
data matches '/(php/.*\.(class|inc|php)) on line ([0-9]+)'
arg isfile /n/freddy/var/www/$1
data set /n/freddy/var/www/$1
attr add addr=$3
plumb to edit
plumb client window $editor

In this way one can have a rich set of rules and they are malleable. I can write new rules to the plumber that will only survive this logged-in session, indeed I can have a different plumber for each process group if I felt like it.

So I can send the produced HTML from http://freddy/test1.php for inspection in the editor and yet have http://slashdot.org open a browser window in my remote X session, whereas other systems I have used (like say Outlook's URI highlighting system) would force me to only have "open in the default browser" as an option for any URI's encountered. In my world the URI's in this paragraph can start actions whereas if you were reading this in vanilla Firefox they remain plain text.

There is no perfect solution, naturally.

I prefer an application-centric environment rather than a data-driven one. But then again I know that the majority of my files will be plain text. The file type in Windows afaik maps a "what application to open this file type with". The application itself then tries to open the file and determine its file type from the contents. If I have a jpg called just Image with no extension then most applications I know will open it just fine. Even if it was called Image.doc!

My prefered working environment (plan9) uses text matching for its form of file association in the plumber but the rules aren't based on the file name alone. Thus the information on what to do with the file isn't even part of the OS itself, it's just an application. Filenames aren't special and even back in the days of DOS not all applications used 8.3 (ask anyone that used WordPerfect in the days of text mode). MS hijacking the generic .doc is still a real bugger for non-Office users!

For instance, let's say my the web server I am working on is called "freddy".
I will mount the remote file system into my own via srvssh (could be any unixy OS like BSD or Linux - this example is OpenBSD). I will be running tail -f /n/freddy/var/logs/httpd where any php errors go. e.g. :

[Tue Apr 19 18:47:10 2005] [error] PHP Parse error: parse error, unexpected ';', expecting ')' in /php/pg_db.class on line 7

My httpd is chrooted hence the /php
I use this rule to configure the plumber such that should it be sent the above string it will open pg_db.class from the remote server for editing in my local text $editor (in this case Acme) and line number 7 will be highlighted

type is text
data matches '/(php/.*\.(class|inc|php)) on line ([0-9]+)'
arg isfile /n/freddy/var/www/$1
data set /n/freddy/var/www/$1
attr add addr=$3
plumb to edit
plumb client window $editor

In this way one can have a rich set of rules and they are malleable. I can write new rules to the plumber that will only survive this logged-in session, indeed I can have a different plumber for each process group if I felt like it.

So I can send the produced HTML from http://freddy/test1.php for inspection in the editor and yet have http://slashdot.org open a browser window in my remote X session, whereas other systems I have used (like say Outlook's URI highlighting system) would force me to only have "open in the default browser" as an option for any URI's encountered. In my world the URI's in this paragraph can start actions whereas if you were reading this in vanilla Firefox they remain plain text.

If I so desired, I could limit the login / password for my MySQL account to only allow row INSERTs and SELECTs, but no DELETEs or DROPs

This is a bit of a kludge, no?

Have a look at capability systems like EROS. Capabilities are like file descriptors in Unix: only processes holding the file descriptors may access the corresponding files, and there is a specific function (the open system call) to obtain file descriptors.

Now suppose that only the initial shell may open files and that all other processes receive the content of files by redirection (established by the shell). A compromised process cannot access just any file but only those files given to it.

Improving the redirection mechanism along the lines of Plan 9 or, similarly, MSH produces a very powerful and secure system.

If I was making hardware, I'd implement a 9P file server on the device.

This leaves developers free to choose whatever language they feel comfortable with, be it Java, C#, COBOL or Brainfuck.

How some non-technical person struggles with installing a USB ADSL modem in Linux is of 0 concern to me.

I'm a plan9 user, a system you have to be serious about. It doesn't even have a web browser.

But it isn't elitism, it is pragmatics. In the same way that my 80 y.o. grandad can drive his car but he would have no chance driving mine because "it's too complicated".

An OS for everyman is a distraction.

There is no revolution, Linux or otherwise. Some of us had *that* installed before Windows95 was even on the shelf.

"Ready for the Desktop" is a sideshow. It was ready for *my* desktop 30 years ago, before I even had a desk.

From a conversation with a friend earlier today:

"OpenBSD was my first *NIX, and I thank God for initiating me to Unix with the only barely sane *NIX at the time."

Of course this days I know of better things.

It works if you follow the right link: Plan 9 Wiki

Where did you find a that erroneous link?

Fix your Wiki!!

I think that project is obsoleted by plan9port.

Why have a userspace based in a 30 years old dead[1] operating system, when you can have the userspace from it's successor that is actively maintained, and was developed by the same team following the same principles and philosophy.

[1] "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." -- Rob Pike circa 1991

Start here.

You can continue here.

That should get you going, then you can read The UNIX Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming

Start here.

You can continue here.

That should get you going, then you can read The UNIX Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming

How much bullshit, XML is not a "standard data format", it's an "standard for the (very lousy and almost completely useless) 'definition' of data formats". An XML file without documentation is as useless as a big binary BLOB; some day you should check the XML MS word generates, and I have seen much worse from other proprietary XML tools.

UTF-8 is a real standard data format, infinitely easier to parse and read than XML, and I got the best tool set to work with it just under /bin

So, when will you be adding the -X option to gnu/grep so it understands XML? No, wait, it will be --parse-XML-files-and-be-slower-than-g++, because you, like all GNU fools, can't live without verbosity.

If you excuse me while I wait I will go back to work in a XML-free system.

The Plan 9 license is "OSI approved(Open Source), and accepted by FSF and RMS as Free Software; what more do you want?

If that is not enough, complain to Lucent with a clear explanation of why the LPL is not good enough for you.

in my experience, both in Bell Labs and elsewhere, anyone with experience on "real" unixes thinks the GNU tools are second-rate at best. their coding ability isn't the primary issue (although there are certainly questions there); it is, as you said, their lack of understanding of the philosophy. at least the BSD folks, who got many things wrong in their own derivative works, understood the fundamental philosophy (mostly) of Unix.

to be fair, GNU and Linux have made some very significant, very positive contributions. but with one or two exceptions, they are not in code. GNU and LInux are interesting for sociological/political reasons. they are not scientifically interesting.

HURD does, at least, have some interesting ideas in it. of course, most of them got there because Plan 9 had them, wasn't open source, and RMS wanted access to them. now that it is just use the real thing.

in my experience, both in Bell Labs and elsewhere, anyone with experience on "real" unixes thinks the GNU tools are second-rate at best. their coding ability isn't the primary issue (although there are certainly questions there); it is, as you said, their lack of understanding of the philosophy. at least the BSD folks, who got many things wrong in their own derivative works, understood the fundamental philosophy (mostly) of Unix.

to be fair, GNU and Linux have made some very significant, very positive contributions. but with one or two exceptions, they are not in code. GNU and LInux are interesting for sociological/political reasons. they are not scientifically interesting.

HURD does, at least, have some interesting ideas in it. of course, most of them got there because Plan 9 had them, wasn't open source, and RMS wanted access to them. now that it is just use the real thing.

Yes, plan 9 people don't seem to realise it, but
this http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/license.html remains the single largest barrier to wider plan 9 adoption, not any technical issue.

> GNU made most of the core programs that Linux normally uses, and they are universally considered excellent
In my universe they are considered junk; that BTW, is the same "universe" of the inventors of Unix and C(and many other things).

RMS and GNU never understood Unix and the Unix philosophy, and it shows; they can't code in C either, take a look at the source of gnu-core-utils some day... I did it, and I'm still recovering from the trauma. And gcc and other gnu "tools" are not better.

The only original "contribution" GNU did to Unix was info, a documentation system so hideous that even most GNU zealots don't use it.

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

"metadata is just data with unstandard interfaces"; read, write, and hierarchical file namespaces rule

Sablime? All changes are closely tied to a request number. You pull code based on the request numbers you want build. Of course one request can touch multiple files. The whole thing is on top of SCCS.

Java is a langauge and say it is prorietary is like saying C or C# are proprietary.

Java is a platform, not a language, dependent on a Virtual Machine and a ton of libraries. C is a solely a language targetted at being compiled directly into machine code.

I have read the freely available documentation on Java and you'd be surprised how complete it is.

It's a user guide, not a guide to what's under the hood.

There is no need to reverse engineer anything since JavaDoc spells it all out for gou, and heck Sun provide the source code to the files too!

It gives Java source to some of the libraries. Not to the JVM itself.

It bugs me that people perfer Mono'a C# over Java because it's "more free".

I don't know where you get that idea. Most prefer to avoid Mono C# because they know M$ is going to pull the rug on them at some point.

Well it's only free because people coded it up. If they spent half the time coding a JVM that they've spent coding a Mono they'd be done years ago. And if Sun keeps their own implementation proprietary, well they own so let them. You can use IBM's or Apple's or your own.

There is kaffe and gjc. Java is a bit of a moving target though and not easy to keep up with. If there was one standard Open Source version then we wouldn't need a dozen different versions all trying to play catch-up with the 'official' Sun version.

Why don't people stop using C since Intel still offers it's own closed source compiler?

Try reading the history of C. If the language B wasn't Open Source then C wouldn't have existed at all!

Java is really spread wide open from letting people participate with JSR (though just like in democracies unless you are with someone big you won't get heard.. but you are free to try), and even poke around with the source. Is there some big piece that I'm missing that would bother anyone besides GPL Zealots?

You must be a young programmer to be satisfied with a few scraps thrown out to you. The thing you are missing is the bigger picture.

Phillip.

I think so. Still after 30 years, 70% of all software development is done in it. But why is that? Large commercial support? ISO and ANSI standards? I sure love it as C++ is my prefered coding platform.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

A compiler that inserts malware into binaries? Like this?

I've personally created complex programs with several thousand threads, without having to worry about any of the defensive techniques you preach, simply by using a better concurrency model. Not only do they work, I can prove that there are no thread-related bugs (which testing - no matter how much you do - simply isn't guaranteed to catch) because the CSP concurrency model can be mathematically analyzed and mechanically model-checked.

Concurrency isn't the problem - the threads model is. The CSP style of concurrency reduces the number of difficult to reproduce bugs, and make those bugs that remain aenable to mathematical analysis to determine their cause and solution.

This is what it means for me: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rsc/thread/

Also see Brian W. Kernighan's "A Descent into Limbo" and Dennis M. Ritchie's "The Limbo Programming Language".

And of course Hoare's classic: Communicating Sequential Processes.

Now you can enjoy the power and beauty of the CSP model in Linux and other Unixes thanks to plan9port including libthread and Inferno; yes, it's all Open Source.

plan 9?

For example, no one has given a MAC protocol that solves the hidden/exposed sender/receiver problems simultaneously. Without such a MAC protocol, it is impossible to resolve the contention fairly. 802.11 DCF solves hidden and exposed sender, but not receiver.

Also, Gupta and Kumar showed that the per-node bandwidth in a wireless mesh with random node placement is O(1/sqrt(n)). This is especially bad news for the sort of nationwide wireless meshes people have been talking about here.

Finally, TCP is especially problematic over multiple wireless hops. It causes self-interference which creates massive packet loss due to contention. TCP is built on the assumption that all packet loss is from congestion, but this assumption is not met by wireless contention losses.

In my own simulations, TCP's overaggression causes routing packet losses, creating spurious route breakage and even more TCP timeouts.

The use of a conventional computer mouse requires continuous lifting of the fingers.

The first mouse I ever used, on the AT&T 5620 terminal, didn't have this problem. Your hand draped naturally over the mouse, and you could relax your fingers completely rather than having to hold them up to keep from clicking. Even though it was perfectly symmetric, there was no handedness problem either.

Some day I may try to take the guts of a modern mouse and fab up a new one in this form factor.

the plan9 people wrote il

sadly it has been deprecated in plan9 itself as not enough people were using it and it was feared that it wasn't getting exercised enough and thus could rot away into bugsville.

The Multics approach wouldn't have worked in all the environments UNIX thrives (look at NetBSD!) It would be just as "accurate" to say that Plan 9 is a "slapdash clone" of UNIX.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Second, it's not so much that I don't see a connection between "pure FP" and CSP, but rather that I think that the concepts are orthogonal. CSP is a concurrency model. Threads is another concurrency model. Don't think of a CSP as a layer on top of threads, think of it as a different way of representing concurrency. To quote from here:

Most computer science undergraduates are forced to read Andrew Birrell's ``An Introduction to Programming with Threads.'' The SRC threads model is the one used by most thread packages currently available. The problem with all of these is that they are too low-level. Unlike the communication primitive provided by Hoare, the primitives in the SRC-style threading module must be combined with other techniques, usually shared memory, in order to be used effectively. In general, programmers tend not to build their own higher-level constructs, and are left frustrated by needing to pay attention to such low-level details. For the moment, push Birrell's tutorial out of your mind. This is a different thread model. If you approach it as a different thread model, you may well find it much easier to understand.

The concurrency semantics that implementations of CSP-style concurrency (such as occam) make use of allow a precise and safe one-to-one mapping from theoretical constructs to language constructs. That's the point - there's no need to have "enough knowledge about the properties of the compositional monads", because the concurrency model of CSP makes that knowledge essentially unnecessary.

Yes, you can map CSP style concurrency to thread style concurrency (which is what JCSP) does. You can also map threads to CSP if you want: the advantage of doing that being that you can then mathematically reason about thread interactions, which is not possible directly in the thread regime (in fact, the JCSP team has built and verified a CSP model of Java's monitor-threads concurrency system, as part of the larger effort to ensure the correctness of the JCSP implementation). But instead of going that roundabout route, why not just implement a good concurrency model in the first place?

Maiman did develop the first operational laser, but not for AT&T ... they (Bell Labs, that is) come into the story because their researchers Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes wrote the seminal papers. Good background info sources

http://www.bell-labs.com/about/history/laser/index .html

http://www.spie.org/web/oer/august/aug00/maiman.ht ml

If you want examples of operating systems that help with gridding, check out Plan 9 from Bell Labs and it's sister project Inferno. Nice thing about Inferno is that it runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Plan 9, and on native hardware.