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Why imagine? Install Plan 9 and make your imagination become reality. It has been available for at least ten years, but ever since Lucent bought Bell Labs nothing has been done with it.

OS Guru Rob Pike works at Google.

Rob Pike of plan9 fame.

So I hope that any Google OS would be akin to plan9!

OS Guru Rob Pike works at Google.

Rob Pike of plan9 fame.

So I hope that any Google OS would be akin to plan9!

Symlinks suck balls

this is what grown ups use

Open source software is great, isn't it? It makes one hide his chicanery better. There's a wonderful old bit about the dangers of trusting trust. Perhaps you've read it?

There's always a limited number of people who can read code. It's limited by those who know the language. Those who are interested in the code. Those who have the time. Oracle was given as a case of an extreme example. They could hide massive amounts of things in relatively plain view in such a large source. Because, even with many eyes, the scope would be too large. But, how many eyes would be qualified and capable to understand all of that code? How many eyes would be drawn to the firmware of a router which has a strange function name which happens to be parsed in weird ways during the authentication procedure?

You're spouting rhetoric here.

snoopy

In the early version of UNIX, timestamps were in 1/60th second units. A 32-bit counter using these units overflows in 2.5 years, so the epoch had to be changed periodically, and I believe 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973 were all epochs at one stage or another.

Until the early to mid 1990s, Cobol was the most used programming language for over 30 years. I didn't actually realize this was the case until it was pointed out by Al Aho during a guest lecture. Interestingly enough, the current predominant language, based upon number of users, is Visual Basic; not C or C++, not Java... Visual Basic. A good deal of scientific computing is still done with Fortran 90/95.

On the subject of Windows NT, the Windows 2000/XP executive and microkernel architecture is fundamentally identical as in NT4.0. Where else have you seen this executive and microkernel archtiecture? Xbox for one, and soon on a PowerPC platform (or rather again since Microsoft did have a build of NT for PowerPC awhile back). Like it or not, NT4.0 is highly successful modern OS, which lives on to this day.

This whole thing reminded me of the MS's settlement with AOL-TW, that involved AOL killing Mozilla development, I wonder how long will Sun keep supporting OpenOffice.org after this... fortunately for anyone that uses OO.o(not me), OO.o is Open Source so in a way the cat is out of the bag, still, IIRC sun provided most of the development resources, while Mozilla the dev team was under 50 people IIRC(more like 20 in reality), I think I heard sun has 300 people working on OO.o...

Does anyone here see a pattern? Apple, Corel, AOL, Sun, ... (I'm sure there have been a few more) What you do when you have an (practically) infinite pile of cash?
pay your competition to kill any product that might threatens your monopoly.

As for Java, IBM better start to think what they are going to replace it with...

I'm glad I dumped Java completely and now I work mostly with Python, not only it's a much nicer language, I also don't have to worry about Sun politics anymore.

If you use java you are still in time to switch to something better, more portable, truly open, and that "sucks less", something like Python... or like Inferno/Limbo ;)

[Inferno is now really Free, you can download it from Vitanuova, and as an extra you will get the greatest C compilers ever created, Ken God Thompson C Plan 9 compilers! don't worry about the "details" form, you can just click the "proceed to download" button]

Best wishes

uriel

Oracle playboy Larry Ellison is "multi-talented, not only is he an acute business but he is also a jet pilot, marketing genius, sports enthusiast and world champion yacht racer"

Nietzsche once said people who aspire to lofty ideas ( like "help inspire today's youth to dream big" ) often have very simple, direct, greedy drives that propel them. A scientist might say he's out to prove the hardest theorem, but perhaps all he wants is fame ( eg. Dr. Watson says in his book on decoding DNA that he simply wanted to beat the competitors & become famous ). A philosopher might set out to "find the truth", but perhaps all he wants is tenure at some ivy league institution. Looks to me like Dr. Gregory Olsen simply wants good PR for his firm with this stunt...claiming to inspire American youth seems outlandish.

Oracle playboy Larry Ellison is "multi-talented, not only is he an acute business but he is also a jet pilot, marketing genius, sports enthusiast and world champion yacht racer"

Nietzsche once said people who aspire to lofty ideas ( like "help inspire today's youth to dream big" ) often have very simple, direct, greedy drives that propel them. A scientist might say he's out to prove the hardest theorem, but perhaps all he wants is fame ( eg. Dr. Watson says in his book on decoding DNA that he simply wanted to beat the competitors & become famous ). A philosopher might set out to "find the truth", but perhaps all he wants is tenure at some ivy league institution. Looks to me like Dr. Gregory Olsen simply wants good PR for his firm with this stunt...claiming to inspire American youth seems outlandish.

I actually think the logo is one of its strong points, by comparision. The four-color Windows logo and the MSN butterly are utterly stupid. The BSD logo some idiots find offensive. There is really nothing wrong with it.

And speaking of silly logos, have you seen Plan 9's bunny logo? Now that's just goony, but I do like the astronaut picture.

Ada doesn't have a very catchy logo either, all they have is a picture of Ada Lovelace. At least Linux has an actual logo and mascot.

But I guess I just disagree with you because I happen to have different tastes.

here's Glenda's

In plan9's the single sign on is a bit different as it can save credentials for your regular internet services such as ftp, ssh, vnc, pop3, imap

secstore is an encrypted file store, one of which is your factotum keys

here's some example keys (SECRET is where my password would be):

key proto=pass server=www service=ftp user=matt !password=SECRET
key proto=p9sk1 dom=outside.plan9.bell-labs.com user=mattp9 !password=SECRET
key proto=pass server=colo service=ssh user=matt !password=SECRET
key proto=vnc server=kit user=matt !password=SECRET

one can load one's passwords into a text editor and add/remove them in secstore

or do echo 'key proto=vnc server=kit user=matt !password=SECRET2' > /mnt/factotum/ctl

if they key is not present, factotum prompts you for it and remembers it while you are logged into the terminal

When you log out factotum forgets all the entries not in secstore

It's a great system, I just enter my secstore password at boot and I have passwordless access to the services I have stored.

though one tends to just hit power when you go to lunch you can just do 'kill factotum | rc' to unload all the keys and then 'ipso factoum' to load them from secstore again (i think thats how you unload them, i've never done it)

servers need not know anything about it, no .NET libs to compile against or licensing fees to pay

• Before the Bell System Breakup in 1984, there was Bell Labs.
  
• After the split, AT&T got Bell Labs, Long Distance, and Manufacturing (aka Western Electric), and the 7 Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) jointly ran a smaller Labs spinoff called Bellcore.
  
• Bellcore had N years of funding, and eventually turned into Telcordia and was bought by SAIC.
  
• In 1992-93, AT&T spun off Unix Systems Labs, which got acquired by Novell, which sold it to SCO in 1995.
  
• In 1996, AT&T spun off Lucent (aka Western Electric) and NCR. Lucent got most of Bell Labs, especially the physics/chemistry/computer people, and AT&T kept a much smaller AT&T Labs, mainly communications and computer and Internet folks.
  

• Before the Bell System Breakup in 1984, there was Bell Labs.
  
• After the split, AT&T got Bell Labs, Long Distance, and Manufacturing (aka Western Electric), and the 7 Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) jointly ran a smaller Labs spinoff called Bellcore.
  
• Bellcore had N years of funding, and eventually turned into Telcordia and was bought by SAIC.
  
• In 1992-93, AT&T spun off Unix Systems Labs, which got acquired by Novell, which sold it to SCO in 1995.
  
• In 1996, AT&T spun off Lucent (aka Western Electric) and NCR. Lucent got most of Bell Labs, especially the physics/chemistry/computer people, and AT&T kept a much smaller AT&T Labs, mainly communications and computer and Internet folks.
  

• Before the Bell System Breakup in 1984, there was Bell Labs.
  
• After the split, AT&T got Bell Labs, Long Distance, and Manufacturing (aka Western Electric), and the 7 Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) jointly ran a smaller Labs spinoff called Bellcore.
  
• Bellcore had N years of funding, and eventually turned into Telcordia and was bought by SAIC.
  
• In 1992-93, AT&T spun off Unix Systems Labs, which got acquired by Novell, which sold it to SCO in 1995.
  
• In 1996, AT&T spun off Lucent (aka Western Electric) and NCR. Lucent got most of Bell Labs, especially the physics/chemistry/computer people, and AT&T kept a much smaller AT&T Labs, mainly communications and computer and Internet folks.
  

The lay offs at bell-labs have had a massive negative imapact on plan9.

Rob Pike has gone to google for instance

Stories of them taking out 75% of the light bulbs in the labs to save money.

We're down to three devs from the labs working on plan9, mostly in their own time.

So sad, Lucent have bungled it.

The part that went to Lucent is called Bell Labs -- the part that stayed is called AT&T Labs

Have you tested it with the real awk? Not the bloated GNU version, but the one straight from Kernighan?

.... was the fate of Shannon. He is the father/creator of information theory which he shared with the world in a brilliant paper. He was afflicted by Alzheimer's disease, and he spent his last few years in a Massachusetts nursing home.

Good point, and one I had considered myself.

If all new software is written with 'aw well, NX will catch it' then that's another stick to beat the non-upgraders with.

Up here in the non-Windows world, where hardware upgrades for every point release are not an issue, programmers prefer to put their faith in the libraries.

string(2): avoiding buffer overruns in upas since 1984

The weak point then, is users have to hope that the programmers read the manual!

The Plan9 installation CD is a 'live cd'. When you boot it, you are asked if you want to install or run from the cd. (This applies to PC type hardware).

Available from plan9 (this page will take you to 'additional software' after you agree to the license, select the current snapshot to get a 70Meg download)

Rob Pike works there now, perhaps he can get plan9 in the mix.

Rob Pike works there now, perhaps he can get plan9 in the mix.

Plan9; the most beautiful code in the most beautiful OS with the prettiest mascot.

Plan9; the most beautiful code in the most beautiful OS with the prettiest mascot.

Plan9; the most beautiful code in the most beautiful OS with the prettiest mascot.

Designers in abundance, salesmen all around but what I need is a coder and a C to sail them on.

But this C is tiny and difficult to sail so I'll hand them all an upgrade to C++ and let them wail.

This shrieking is ill met, I stop and look profound as I have a solution it's C pound.

My coders all have left me with this ugly stinking mess I should have not given them more and more but merely better less.

see man ls

-Q By default, printed file names are quoted if they contain characters special to rc(1). The -Q flag disables this behavior.

The number of successful break-ins to plan9 systems was zero

beat that MacOS !

EK knew consumer film was dying before the world did, considering they invented the CCD.

i believe the ccd was invented at bell laboratories, not eastman kodak.

Very recently, I've been writing some low-level code. There was a long while I'd thought this was out of my league. Then I realized several things:

• I was not happy with several characteristics of the low-level code other people had written and I was depending on.
• I had done some more low-level stuff long ago - like a couple simple but legitimately useful assembly programs in DOS, and even a patch that added a sort of capability system to the OpenBSD kernel. (I never polished up the patch enough to send it in to them or anything, but the point is that it essentially worked, and I wasn't afraid to take it on.)
• When I'd done those things back in the day, I wasn't anywhere near as good a coder as I am now.
• The only reason I'd been unable to do these things more recently is an attitude that I'm not good enough, not a reality. (It's an attitude a lot of people in low-level code promote, I think. They so much don't want to waste their time with people who really are bad that they probably don't mind scaring off a few people who are in fact good but don't realize it. Also, I think there's ego involved - it's an exclusive club, why not let it stay that way.)

So I think the moral of the story is to just be fearless/persistent. If you're not confident, there are plenty of ways you can improve without even involving anyone else:

• Read the code. It sounds obvious, but there's a lot of code I'd stayed away from even looking at because of intimidation.
• Try experiments. Make a change, set a hypothesis about what it will do, and run it. Then see why you were wrong, if you were. Then try it again. Even just getting in the habit of running the build system will help, and setting up experiments like this will help your debugging.
• Find something lacking and try to fix it.

And then, if you're still not comfortable talking on the linux-kernel list, I think you have at least another couple choices:

• If you're lucky, you're friendly with someone more skilled and can use him/her to screen questions.
• There's a couple lists like kernel-janitors and kernel-newbies to dip your feet in the water.
• Sometimes in the process of writing an eloquent question through email you'll figure out the answer yourself. (Did you see the teddy bear anecdote in the debugging link above?)

As for myself, I'm taking my own advice to make sigsafe - an alternate set of system call wrappers (libc level) that eliminate a couple race conditions involving signals, without a performance penalty. It's going well - the code works, and I have a race condition checker and microbenchmark to prove it. I just released my first version. Now I'm working on the documentation; it still needs a lot of work. (I could use plenty of help with this project! If you want to try low-level programming, it's a great way. It requires writing assembly for each combination of operating system and architecture. I've only written it for two systems. There are plenty left, and public systems to do it on if you don't have access to exotic machines of your own. Plus, you can hopefully gain some low-level understanding by proof-reading and helping me write the documentation.)

Once I have that polished, I've got a couple projects I might try in the Linux kernel (and/or other kernels):

• implementing a couple of system calls - the nonblocking_read(2) and nonblocking_write(2) that djb mentions.
• implementing SO_RCVTIMEO and SO_SNDTIMEO under Linux. Assuming no one has yet; I haven't checked, so the manpage could just be out of date. Which brings m

Would you people please stop seeing this project as a X replacement (by which I mean that it is yet another X implementation, much like the freedesktop.org implementation)? By taking simple cursory glance at the website, I've easily determined that the relationship between X and Y is more like the relationship between *nix and Plan 9. This is an evolution of the graphical subsystem on *nix, not a replacement for X. It frees itself from the limitations of the architecture and mindset of X to take advantage of new hardware and ideas for graphical interfaces.

You have to press keys, how gauche.

I bet you've never even tried a proper interface.

I thought that bell labs came up with this technology first. Is this just spin?

There's always Plan 9 if you'd like to continue an under the radar subculture. It's so exclusive and cool that slashdot doesn't even have an icon of
Glenda for it yet. ;)

There's always Plan 9 if you'd like to continue an under the radar subculture. It's so exclusive and cool that slashdot doesn't even have an icon of
Glenda for it yet. ;)

For a real nice grid system, take a look at Plan9. Very nice, well-designed system.

Bill Thompson is a regular at this one - check some of his previous missives to get a good grasp of his general tone.

Oh yeah, he's a prize idiot. His position is, basically, "governments should keep their hands off everything I do, and regulate everything that I'm not interested in anyway" and also "all corporations are evil, except the ones that make toys I like". I remember he also wrote an article calling on programmers to more more "professional", with his picture in the article, long unbrushed hair, unshaved, in a stained t-shirt with a stupid leer on his face. Bill Thompson, unrelated I'm sure to our Ken Thompson, is nonetheless an embarassment to the name. Still, he's typical of the quality of recent BBC "journalism".

The US was (and probably still is) at the forefront of technology for the last couple of decades for one simple reason: innovation and invention. We have all of the patents for most of the major breakthroughs of the computing age. Look at the major US companies in the tech sectors, Microsoft, IBM, etc. What would the US be without Intel? What would have happened if Bell Labs had not existed? Oh, you don't think Bell Labs did anything? Look here [Bell Labs]. They invented most everything that makes the world turn, from UNIX, to C, to the transistor, and the cell phone.

Don't blame this on the failing economy, blame the US government for not funding the sciences more. Blame them for not cultivating this in schools. Where's the incentive to become an engineer, to become a software developer?

When money is poured into a field, great things happen. Look at the Apollo program. Look at Bell Labs. UNIX is the result of a bunch of PHDs sitting around with a lot of money. We are coming to a point in time where the US is losing its upper hand in the tech sector. And don't tell me that we build more airplanes than anyone else. Airbus overtook Boeing in terms of sales quite a while ago. The US is losing ground, and outsourcing is one of the effects of this.

The underlying reason is not the lack of confidence in the economy, or the cheaper labor in India, it's because America is starting to lag behind.

For those new to Plan 9, it's a continuation of some core UNIX ideas like everything is a file, most services can be handled by fileservers, anything can be accomplished with a few simple operations (read, write, open, close, fork, exec). Nore notable concepts in Plan 9 are individual process namespaces and no root user per se.

The design of Unix was for a PDP-7 an 18-bit machine. You don't hear anyone complaining about Linux being a direct ripoff of an OS for a 18-bit machine, do you? The descendent is not the same as the ancestor.

After reviewing the affidavits of Plaintiff's and Defendants, experts, a great deal of uncertainty remains as to what trade secrets Net2 might contain. One fact does seem clear: the header files, filenames, and function names used by Defendants are not trade secrets. Defendants could have printed these off of any of the thousands of unrestricted copies of Plaintiff's binary object code. (Kashtan Aff. at 9-11.) Moreover, the nonfunctional elements of the code, such as comments, cannot be trade secrets because these elements are minimal and confer no competitive advantage on Defendants. The copied elements that contain instructions, such as BREAD and CPIO, might perhaps be trade secrets, but Defendants' experts have argued persuasively that these instructions are either in the public domain or otherwise exempt. As Defendants have repeatedly emphasized, much of 32V seems to be publicly available.

The point is moot anyway because Caldera, having acquired the rights to UNIX from old SCO, released Unix V32 under a BSD-Style license. This includes the ABI of course, download it yourself and see. The most SCO could require is that their copyright be recognized in the header files and that mention be made that they fall under a different license and not the GPL. Here's the signature on the email about it:

Dion L. Johnson II - dionj_at_caldera.com
Product Manager and one of many open source enthusiasts in Caldera Intl.

Good vga output would make it a nifty little diskless terminal (the proper name for a "small client desktop computer which stores its data on a server on the network").

Some operating systems were designed from the ground up to have diskless graphical terminals, even on serial lines.

My point is that some of these things already exist in some form.

plan9 is 14 years old, it predates Windows 95, let alone NT.

An open source WinNT clone

lol, a clone of a Posix compliant VMS clone with an awful GUI, can't wait!

Perhaps you mean something like per process namespaces and device access through file interfaces controlled by normal permission checking.

Nah, that's just crazy talk.

oh, wait

Zdnet.au mention a bidding round for the new kernel name. Seems it'll land on "Wallaby". Being a little foreign and all, I looked the word up on Google - to see a picture of such an animal. And wouldn't you know... one of the first to turn up was this snoopy fellow.
I'm pretty sure it proves something!

Fanless cases running VIA EPIA chipsets and cpus have been available for some time and are quite useful, especially when running operating systems that allow one to stick a huge monitor in front of them, a keyboard, a 3-button mouse and connect to the massively parralel machines in the quite noisy, but lovely air conditioned, server room.

I can't run Quake on one of these, but then again it's research we're talking about -- if I wanted games I'd buy a PS2.

The only fan I have is, funnily enough, on my video card.

No, thanks. I'll stick with Frederik Brooks' "Plan to throw one away, you will anyway".

50 years of wisdom are not to be discarded lightly.

But, then again, perhaps because people have forgotten this rule we've been stuck with the same OS design for the past 30 years -- people keep adding to it without really understanding the problem. On the other hand the new developments are shunned and soon forgotten.

System software research is irrelevant.

Go ahead, reuse the same code over and over again until it becomes a bloated behemoth which nobody understands, contrary to what are probably the three best rules of software development -- Simplicity, Clarity, Generality.

They should teach kids at school that as soon as they have understood the problem they should rewrite their code to reflect the fact.