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The shift key doesn't work in Plan9 OS. j/k

Actually, I'd have tried it by now if Plan9 would boot (without problems) on any of the three computers I've tried it on...

The fact that the sun is yellow isn't the kind of information being discussed. The 1948 paper by Shannon in the Bell Systems Technical Journal is the seminal work; or look at this 1995 short course in Information Theory by MacKay at Cavendish Laboratory. While you're at it, stop trolling.

here's a little transcript:

% cd /mail/fs/mbox
% lc
Directories:
1 113 128 142 157 171 186 20 214 229 243 258 272 287 300 315 33 344 359 373 388 401 416 430 445 46 474 56 70 85
[...]
% cd 318
% lc
Files:
bcc date filename info messageid rawbody sender type body digest from inreplyto mimeheader rawheader subject unixheader cc disposition header lines raw replyto to

Directories:
1 2 3
% head raw
Return-Path:
Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for rog@vitanuova.com
id 1021665470:10:17045:138; Fri, 17 May 2002 19:57:50 GMT
Received: from psuvax1.cse.psu.edu ([130.203.4.6]) by punt-1.mail.demon.net
id aa1016828; 17 May 2002 19:57 GMT
Received: from psuvax1.cse.psu.edu (psuvax1.cse.psu.edu [130.203.6.6])
by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server) with ESMTP
id 27DA4199BE; Fri, 17 May 2002 15:57:13 -0400 (EDT)
Delivered-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Received: from acl.lanl.gov (plan9.acl.lanl.gov [128.165.147.177])
% head body
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--upas-mbyuptynpdsmbjuyeermihdgur
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hi,

If you seek excitement and thrills you need to look no further than
Plan9 -- it gives you everything and then some, but in a good way (or
% cd 2
% lc
Files:
bcc date filename info messageid rawbody sender type
body digest from inreplyto mimeheader rawheader subject unixheader
cc disposition header lines raw replyto to
% cat mimeheader
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=iostats.jpg
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
% page body
reading through graphics...
%
"raw" contains the raw data that makes up the message. "body" contains the data after the encoding formats have been applied (hence in that case /mail/fs/mbox/318/2/body is a jpeg file, viewable directly by any usual jpeg viewer).

the beauty of this scheme is that it hides the underlying storage scheme from the mail clients. if i wish to change things so that the underlying storage format is many files [currently it uses a traditional mbox format], none of the mail client programs have to change.

plus i can use grep, diff, shell scripts, etc directly on the messages in my mailbox. procmail eat your heart out.

Pretty useless in it's current form. Yes, it's a cool idea, but it's slow, ugly, and it doesn't find things very well at all.

I did a search for "Hank Hill", and after clicking through a few hundred Javascript alerts I got such fine choices as:

Terry Love's Plumbing and Remodel advice
The director of Bell labs' buisness personal page
A page called 'Movie Reviews', giving the most generic movie reviews I've ever seen
And a guide to Snow Hill, Maryland

Yes, on Google and Teoma, etc., you can find this links... but not in the Top 10 links! The idea is good, but the search isn't.

AWK was created by three people, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan; they happened to do this at Bell Labs.

reference

Ed was in fact based on an earlier program QED, written at Berkeley by Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch. And ed itself was written by Ken Thompson.

reference

UNIX, I will grant you, was designed by a 'division of bell labs'. But really, one out of three? That's a pretty low accuracy rate. I guess if you sound authoritative enough people will believe and mod up.

The names behind ed/qed and awk are some of the most recognized forces behind early development of computing systems. I mean, even the _article_ about qed was written by Dennis Ritchie. Perhaps not all _lone_ inventors, but there's not much difference for practical purposes between three and one.

Just because some things were created by people working for bell labs doesn't mean that they were created by the telephone monopoly.

"...the role of the lone inventor is over"
Tell that to Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Moolenaar, etc etc...

Shannon's Law says that for a given signal to noise ratio, there is a maximum error free bit rate which can be supported. Recent advances have shown that Shannon's law applies on a per antenna basis. If your transmitter and receiver each have 'n' antennas, it is possible to transmit 'n' times the information which one tx/rx antenna pair can transmit. To my knowledge, there is no limit on how large 'n' can be. Researchers are currently trying to figure out if there is a limit.

Repeating myself in different words. It not only matters at what frequency you radiate (frequency diversity) and when you radiate (time diversity), it also matters where you radiate from (spatial diversity). Since available time and frequencies are limited, it was thought that spectrum was limited. Add space (of which there is lots) to the equation, as recent advances did, and the available spectrum becomes unlimited (though new boundaries may show up with more research).

This is not pie in the sky stuff. Space-Time coding techniques allow such capacities to be realised. Bell labs have already demonstrated a working system in the lab.

John

You know, it's amazing how many people must have actually gone and searched google for bell labs tts:

http://www.bell-labs.com/cgi-user/tts/voicestts-nj ?voice=bigman&text=i+appear+to+have+been+slashdott ed.

Perhaps we broke it, and they wont be able to use it for Big Url anymore :-/

Just think where we would be without Lucent (well, Bell Labs in particular)....

They have invented, among MANY other things...
"the transistor, the laser and wireless technologies."

90% of the tech you love and can't live without originated at Bell Labs.
You know...computers...unix...voice communication...redundant/fault tolerant data networks...etc...

Oh, and for the patent lovers in tha house...

"Bell Labs averaged one patent per business day from 1925 to 1995,
and since March 1996, patents assigned to Lucent have been issued at a rate of more than three per business day."

(Disclaimer - I do realize this is off topic a little, but I want people to think about how much great tech comes out of there!)

here's an example from an expert. Dennis Ritchie wrote the following code in the Sixth Edition of UNIX back in 1975:

/*
* Switch to stack of the new process and set up
* his segmentation registers.
*/
retu(rp->p_addr);
sureg();
/*
* If the new process paused because it was
* swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
* to savu(u_ssav). This means that the return
* which is executed immediately after the call to aretu
* actually returns from the last routine which did
* the savu.
*
* You are not expected to understand this. <------------ *ahem*
*/
if(rp->p_flag&SSWAP) {
rp->p_flag =& ~SSWAP;
aretu(u.u_ssav);
}
/*
* The value returned here has many subtle implications.
* See the newproc comments.
*/
return(1);

1. write comments for code in blocks, describing the function of the code to follow (ex: right before a nasty looking "for" loop, explain what it does)
2. use variable names that communicate meaning; the code will end up commenting itself this way

Move everything to Plan 9. Just rewrite the apps you need. Nothing to it, really, you could start now and have everything done by June 1. Unless you're not a real computer guy.

It's not just an interesting twist, it's quite close to the root of the issue. More specifically, it is symmetry breaking that makes design patterns necessary.

My annoyance about RedHat is that they continue to insist on using wu-ftpd, even though, time and time again, remote root exploits are found with that !@#$ program. I really wish RedHat would just let go and use something decent, like Chris Ferret's vs-ftpd.

The sys admins who know wu-ftpd can install a third party RPM; the majority of RedHat users would be able to install a ftp daemon without worrying that some script kiddie would break in to their system.

Bad design: Yep, and the internet has the same problem. Mainly, the assumptions that Dennis Ritchie and the UNIX team made 30 years ago don't apply today; if you want to see a redesign of UNIX for the 21st century, look at Plan 9, which, alas, will not catch on because UNIX is "good enough".

Petty politics: This is common for almost any volunteer project; you should see the kinds of petty politics for the volunteers which run church or 12-step programs. Open source is no different.

Yes, I have an account, but this is not important enough to log in for.

the single letter is not any sort of limit, the postfix can be arbitrarily long.

you have it the wrong way round, by the way, it's 8c, 8l etc.

and it's the loader not the linker. The unix type compile pipeline is not followed.

see How to Use the Plan 9 C Compiler by Rob Pike

Only because you asked so nice, here's me:
Kick my ass?

It's good to see your use of tired old word of the day vocabularly.

2.2 No right is granted to Licensee to create derivative works of or to redistribute (other than with the Original Software or a derivative thereof) the screen imprinter fonts identified in subdirectory /lib/font/bit/lucida and printer fonts (Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Sans Italic, Lucida Sans Demibold, Lucida Typewriter, Lucida Sans Typewriter83), identified in subdirectory /sys/lib/postscript/font.

The Plan 9 License has changed since RMS registered his complaints about it.

The "agree to provide" clause no longer says "if used for any purpose" but rather "if distributed in any form, e.g., binary or source". This is basically what the GPL does too.

The "reasonable charge" clause is followed by a sentence that says you can charge whatever you want for products or services you've added.

. .

Well, I'm currently downloading the VMWare Virtual Disk Image of Plan 9. It says it's the latest version, let's see . . But at least that ought to solve any hcl problems ;)

Plan 9 has the best OS mascot ever.

Not to mention that it needs to be beaten by a big honkin' pretty stick.

Not to mention that it needs to be beaten by a big honkin' pretty stick.

no, they're mostly Plan 9 systems.

with virtual file systems being de rigeur this is exactly the sort of application plan9 would be good at.

But we're stuck with 23 char filenames until the eagerly awaited 9p2000 as I discovered the day I statrted to move my mp3s over, doh!

Funny, but Bell Labs thinks it still belongs to Lucent . . . Bell Labs' own site has a rather prominent Lucent logo on it, and the Avaya Labs site states that "It's a brand new research lab, but it can boast of a rich, 75-year-old heritage from Bell Labs". It's a spin off . . .

From prior Bell Labs ...

• www.research.avaya.com

• www.research.att.com AT&T

• www.bell-labs.com Lucent Technologies

And another unrelated Bell Labs with different mission;
at times major news agencies have mistakenly used their logo :-)

Where's the next PARC, Bell Labs, IBM ?

I know all of these still exist in name at least, but they sure seem to be mere shadows of what they used to be...

And, no, I don't think it's MSFT

Balam

> LSD was discovered in the 1930's in Switzerland. Unless the Berkeley you are referring to is NOT the University of California.

YM 1941, by Albert Hofmann, a chemist in the employ of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Fun fact #1: He was actually looking for obstetric medicines based on the ergot fungus, and accidentally ingested a quarter milligram or so on one of them. When the acid kicked in on his bike ride home, he thought he'd poisoned himself and was going to die soon.

Fun fact #2: Unix as near as I can tell was spawned at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and not Berkeley at all. Blame this guy.

And was Steve Vai actually from Berkeley, California? I didn't know that, and his official site didn't illuminate much on that. Seems to me he might have gone to the Berklee School of Music, which is actually in Massachusetts somewhere iirc.

Oh yeah, fun fact #3: I nicked my sig from some guy's post on alt.folklore.computers 'cause I thought it was funnier than it was accurate.

> LSD was discovered in the 1930's in Switzerland. Unless the Berkeley you are referring to is NOT the University of California.

YM 1941, by Albert Hofmann, a chemist in the employ of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Fun fact #1: He was actually looking for obstetric medicines based on the ergot fungus, and accidentally ingested a quarter milligram or so on one of them. When the acid kicked in on his bike ride home, he thought he'd poisoned himself and was going to die soon.

Fun fact #2: Unix as near as I can tell was spawned at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and not Berkeley at all. Blame this guy.

And was Steve Vai actually from Berkeley, California? I didn't know that, and his official site didn't illuminate much on that. Seems to me he might have gone to the Berklee School of Music, which is actually in Massachusetts somewhere iirc.

Oh yeah, fun fact #3: I nicked my sig from some guy's post on alt.folklore.computers 'cause I thought it was funnier than it was accurate.

The lifting algorithm (one way of computing the wavelet transform; actually, the simplest to understand and one of the fastest) works by splitting the original signal into two (in the case of a 1d signal) subsignals. One of these is the "trend" signal. It's sort of a compact version of the original one. Using only this signal, the original signal can be reconsturcted pretty well, but not perfectly. That's where the other signal, the "detail" signal, comes in. It contains the information needed to reconstruct the original signal perfectly. If the trend signal is a good prediction of the original signal, the detail signal will be very small, and can be compressed well.

But, there's no need to stop there. The whole process can be applied to the trend signal again, and even to the detail signal if it's necessary.

I'll give a more concrete example, the Haar wavelet transform. In this case, the trend signal is simply the averages of the original signal. So, if we start with

1,3,4,5

The trend signal would be

2,4.5.

If we were to reconstruct the signal with only this information, we'd get

2,2,4.5,4.5,

which is not too bad. The detail signal would contain the information needed to get from this to the original signal; differences between pairs of consecutive terms will work (Note that these pairs shouldn't overlap; that would just be redundant. Therefore, the detail signal, as well as the trend signal, are each half as long as the original one). So, the detail signal in this case is

2,1.

It's easy to see that if the original signal is constant, the detail signal will be all zeros. It's possible to construct different ways of making the trend and detail signals such that the detail signal will be zero if the original signal is linear, for example.

A good paper about this (that explains it better than I do!) is Building Your Own Wavelets at Home

Bigger is better to a point.
I find that with a large color monitor (or LCD) and my glasses I get a very anoying spherical aberrations which cause the colors to appear as if they weren't converging on the edges of the screen. I used to deal with this problem with a very large Blit like terminal (letter sized, black/green, high res, designed by Pike & crew). Now I have a 1024x768 15" LCD.

I've found the best thing to keep my eyes sharp is long drives in the country where I can focus a long way away or flying around in small planes.

You mean like plan9?

Origins of Unix

It had an extra blank,this works: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/seanq/venti-fast .pdf

SPEKE

SRP

PAK

SNAKE

All of those are much slower than the equivalent C code.

Proof? Of course, there cannot be one, but if you like benchmarks, compare the Great Computer Language Shootout. Though C "wins", I wouldn't exactly call it "much slower".

They all use byte-code or generate C code, then compile the C code.

Wrong. For all languages I mentioned there are native compilers available. For all (AFAIK, not sure about Standard ML), there are also bytecode compilers available, for some also compilers to C.

BTW, nobody would ever be so stupid to first generate bytecode, then C out of this (At least I hope so). Oh, and assembly isn't what you compile to in the end, thats why there are assemblers.

None that I know of generate assembly language directly.

If you talk of generating native binaries directly, you surely should try to get to know more. Here are a few:

• OCaml
• Standard ML of New Jersey
• MLton
• The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
• NHC 98
• CLisp
• CMUCL
• Stalin

I was just about to ask this myself. There doesn't seem to be a suitable topic for interviews pertaining to Plan9, Inferno, nor Vita Nuova.

Perhaps they should consider creating such a topic if only to showcase the Plan9 mascot, Glenda. By far the most [endearing|1337|funny] mascot among the open source OSes.

I think that most of corba/dcom/rni etc. are particularly over complicated. They place a burden on the programmer in the wrong place. It's worth checking out plan9's approach to distributed computing. Authentication is taken care of by an authentication server. Once you've got an authentication ticket then you can access networked resources by binding remote services into your local namespace. Rights are granted by the usual mechanisms of usernames & groups.

The familair paradigm of users and groups has been deliberately leveraged because that's what is familiar, after all it's stood the 30 years test of time. This extends to which processors on the network you an run processes on etc. etc.

It's worth studying if nothing else.

yeah, that's the reality. Of course the poster was suggesting that Microsoft can do nothing. This is obviously bunk.

I feel slightly sorry for Microsoft. I used their products in a LAN environment and these features did actually come in handy. They've been exposed by a transition from (relatively) trusted clients to untrusted clients which is a massive paradigm shift. Unix, oth, has had untrusted clients in mind since not long after it's inception (that security was not in mind at the start still reveals itself and plenty of situations).

Of course MS are hobbled by being a desktop OS provider. Thin clients booting across a network where real file permissions and a sensible built in backup procedure protect the time sharing device from malicious clients make the most security sense I think.

Sounds to me like Plan9!

I love that little bunny.

it's Denise Richie's system design and it has no place on my home machine

that would be Dennis I presume ;)

and you know what, he agrees with you. These days the successor to Unix (plan9), in which Dennis was very much involved, doesn't have a root user. Root was deemed a silly thing. A plan9 terminal will let anyone log into it (with a bit of file editing). type "disk/kfscmd allow" and you get to scribble away on the local FS to your heart's content. Access to network resources (particularly the file server) requires authentication from the authentication server which protects you from me and me from you.

plan9

woohoo my first post in the Apple sections and it's about plan9!

/me looks forward to his iMac arriving but has to wait 3-5 weeks for Apple UK to deliver it!

cut:{1_'(&x=*x)_ x:"\t",x}

cut gets function, 1 drop each, where x equals first x quantity, cut x. When X gets tab join x.

r..o:`zero`one`two`three`four
r:r..o[1]
r..c:`radio
`show$`r

Hmm... I'm no expert, but neither, apparently, is this guy.
A) All languages share a common runtime: Assembly. Just because I can run LISP and C on the same computer/runtime doesn't mean that they're similar. CS is all about abstraction. Of course you can have the same underlying structure, you can have different underlying structures too. That's the beauty of abstraction!
B) Java and C# are not the logical successors to C/C++. They're more like a smalltalk with a C-syntax and some trade-offs for efficiency. In terms of providing system calls and API's that are cross-platform... Well, even more like smalltalk!!
C) Remember, C++ started out as a preprocessor for C. Any "C++" code just became C code that was uglier to look at. The difference between procedural and object-oriented isn't that big a deal, other than it's often easier to think in OO and easier to implement a language that's procedural.
For a more interesting observation about the same problem that comes from Rob Pike (big UNIX guy at Bell Labs, co-wrote the UNIX Programming Environment) go here: Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant. It makes many good points about how cs is more the same than different now as compare to 10, 15 even 20 years ago!

If you look at the Bell Labs page which someone linked in a lower comment, then you'll see that's it's not really emitting from a broad range of light.

There are lots of layers of slightly different sizes, and the size of the layer largely determines the color (wavelength) of the light emitted. In effect it's like there are lots of lasers on different frequencies located in nearly the same space. Since they are all firing at the same time the net effect is a broad distributed band of coherent light, but you can still make out individual peaks.

Bell Labs has a page up on a Quantum Cascade Laser at http://www.bell-labs.com/org/physicalsciences/psr/ qc/ with info about its design, applications, and other related info from a few years ago.

Where is the MFL (Mother Fucking Link) for this
extreme claim. I thought the first laser came a little after the WII.

Suck my anus fool! Mr T.

Has anyone heard of Plan 9 or Amoeba? Plan 9 is open source and is developed by Bell Labs (i.e., the same people who introduced Unix). Amoeba was developed by Tannenbaum. These have been around for several years and have not caught on yet. I think the reason is because there is nothing to be gained by the home user. Why would someone want people around the world using their computer when they were away? Just thinking about the security risks alone would make me skeptical.

When the First transistor was made, who would have predicted how we'd be using them now?

This thermometer probably isn't too useful on its own, but just shows that stuff you can build from 'big' components can also be done in nano scale.

I wish I was working in nanotech....

The Plan 9 operating system already supports a lot of the concepts quoted in the Slashdot story summary.

Jeff

isnt this similar to what plan9 is trying to accomplish?

plan 9 from bell labs

Tom Limoncelli presented a paper on this exact subject a few years ago. It's entitled Tricks You Can Do If Your Firewall Is a Bridge and covers a number of useful things you can do with bridging firewalls.