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Sounds like you would've been a good fit with the TUNES project which, in addition to an infinite amount of armchair pondering, would have provided something along those lines as a result of its metaprogramming goals.

"Not that I've seen. Ever. I have yet to see a free marketeer cheer ANY trust-busting activity."

This is because true monopolies haven't existed for ages - today they mostly exist in the form of faux monopolies and near-monopolies that are actually maintained by law:

http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/microsoft_monopoly.html

Another example is the way the FCC controls and maintains telecommunications monopolies - along with their manufacturing entities - on a local level. Prices are overinflated as the government enforces regulation on markets that have huge margins for competition and huge barriers stopping new business from challenging them.

"Really. So no kids in mills, no rioting workers, no strike-busting with mercenaries. No financial shenanigans ruining the market, no huge inequities between the 'captains of industry' (defacto oligarchy) and the bulk of the people. No snake-oil salesmen selling deadly 'cures' on a national level. No extremely long hours in order to work at all. Common medical benefits - or medicine inexpensive enough - so that workers could pay for injury and sickness (besides the rare Oddfellow lodges). No starvation, no homeless veterans. A paradisical time in our nation's history. When was this again?"

Your first three examples are places in the social environment where law enforcement and the courts should take care of the citizens through property rights, personal liberties, and free speech enforcement. This is the place of government: to uphold the law. I think you'd need to provide specific examples of financial shenanigans in order to uphold that next claim.

The "inequities" you speak of were only possible because of the greatness of these men and women, not greed or corruption. Dollars came from the people voluntarily, and leaders of great corporations deserve their just reward. Snake oil salesmen violate personal rights through undervalued standards and deliberate deception - another place where the courts and law enforcement can intervene on behalf of the citizen. Those types of business would never get their feet off of the ground - UNLESS they were financed and approved by our monstrous government, as in the case of hydrofracking corporations that violate private property rights in order to provide for America's energy dependency, for example.

The poverty you cited occurred mostly because of a lack of entrepreneurialism in the South, in addition to the struggle to fill the hole the freed slaves had left behind. These challenges have been greatly overcome by this point.

"Again, (and again and again) this ONLY works with non-necessities. Luxuries. With strict regulation, business would be able to make money on necessary commodities as well - but in order to have a healthy market, there must be a baseline of necessities guaranteed. Otherwise, misery swells to terrible proportions. It doesn't have to be comfortable, but it does have to exist. Your folk are against any such baseline, and also against restrictions that prevent companies from causing long-term problems for the sake of short term profits."

You're talking about replacing "the ugly corporation" with big government in a market that can be widely and even locally diversified. Take the foods market for example: requiring a baseline would mean forcing farmers to have customers in their local area, forcing consumers to choose specified suppliers, and forcing bureaucracy in between to intermediate for hundreds of millions of people. This bureaucratic necessity would be a huge tax burden on farmers AND customers, inflating prices and depriving the people of more than is necessary in wasteful and arbitrary expenditure. Giving customers a "baseline" through the free market would only require that standards were upheld in a law enforcement fashion: by indirect involvement. This may be a straw man argument, but bear with me as I really cannot see where you're coming from or what you're suggesting.

When you say "non

http://tunes.org/legalese/bugroff.html [tunes.org]

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation devised, in addition to some marvelous software, the GNU General Public License (GPL for short). Or the CopyLeft it is sometimes called.

It is quite a revolutionary document, using the "copyright" tool to to protect your right to use free software.

Unfortunately using copyright to protect free software is a lot like using a Jackal to guard the hens.

In fact, various inconveniences relating to this have resulted in modifications such as the LGPL (Library General Public License) and more recently the NPL (Netscape Public License)

I call these matters mere inconveniences, the real damage will occur when the Jackal's, (sorry, I mean lawyers), actually get to test the GPL in court for the first time.

Thus enter my version.

Its very simple.

Entirely consistent.

Completely unrestrictive.

Easy to apply.

The "No problem Bugroff" license is as follows...

The answer to any and every question relating to the copyright, patents, legal issues of Bugroff licensed software is....

Sure, No problem. Don't worry, be happy. Now bugger off.

All portions of this license are important..

"Sure, no problem." Gives you complete freedom. I mean it. Utterly complete. A bit of a joke really. You have complete freedom anyway.
"Don't worry, be happy." Apart from being good advice and a good song, it also says :- No matter what anyone else says or does, you still have complete freedom.
Now bugger off. The only way to get rid of pushy Jackals is to ignore them and not feed them. The GPL is just begging somebody to take it to court. Can't you just see it. Exactly the same thing that happened when some twit (not Linus) registered Linux as his own personal trademark. People got upset, started a fund, and hired, off all ruddy things, a Jackal to try and defend the chicken! Who really benefits from this trademark / patent / copyright thing anyway? The lawyers. Who made it up in the first place? The lawyers.
OK so the last part of the license sounds a bit harsh, but seriously folks, if you are a :-

Lawyer asking these legalese questions... You should go off and learn an honest trade that will actually contribute to life instead of draining it.
Programmer asking these legalese questions... You have amazingly powerful tools in your hands and mind, use them to ask and answer the worthwhile questions of life, the universe and everything. Stop mucking about with such legal nonsense and get back to programming.
User/reader asking these question... Don't worry. Go off and be happy. Have fun. Enjoy what has been created for you.

The Microsoft monopoly was created by the government's legalization of the ludicrous notion of intellectual property. This encouraged Bill Gates and other Microsoft officials to begin hoarding patents and suing anyone else out of the market.

For a full explanation, have a look at this.

There's little or nothing original that's being presented here. The Phantom people claim originality to the idea of orthogonal persistence, but they are flat-out wrong:

Q: File system?

A: Nope. Sorry. Nobody needs files in Phantom. All the operating system state is saved across shutdowns. Phantom is the only global persistent OS in the world, AFAIK. All the state of all the objects is saved. Even power failure is not a problem, because of the unique Phantom's ability to store frequently its complete state on the disk.

To illustrate the utility and awesomeness of persistence, there's a famous story about KeyKOS, an earlier OS that embraced this notion:

At the 1990 uniforum vendor exhibition, key logic, inc. found that their booth was next to the novell booth. Novell, it seems, had been bragging in their advertisements about their recovery speed. Being basically neighborly folks, the key logic team suggested the following friendly challenge to the novell exhibitionists: let's both pull the plugs, and see who is up and running first.

Now one thing Novell is not is stupid. They refused.

Somehow, the story of the challenge got around the exhibition floor, and a crowd assembled. Perhaps it was gremlins. Never eager to pass up an opportunity, the keykos staff happily spent the next hour kicking their plug out of the wall. Each time, the system would come back within 30 seconds (15 of which were spent in the bios prom, which was embarassing, but not really key logic's fault). Each time key logic did this, more of the audience would give novell a dubious look.

Eventually, the novell folks couldn't take it anymore, and gritting their teeth they carefully turned the power off on their machine, hoping that nothing would go wrong. As you might expect, the machine successfully stopped running. Very reliable.

Having successfully stopped their machine, novell crossed their fingers and turned the machine back on. 40 minutes later, they were still checking their file systems. Not a single useful program had been started.

Figuring they probably had made their point, and not wanting to cause undeserved embarassment, the keykos folks stopped pulling the plug after five or six recoveries.

The notion of a language-based OS exploiting the semantics of pointerless/"safe" programming languages in order to isolate processes, rather than the norm of executing untrusted native machine code in different address spaces, is nothing new either.

If these ideas shift your bits, take a look at some real, interesting work done by real people that have more clue than fashion:

• Coyotos, an OS whose orthogonal persistence falls out of the capability model of security that they embrace. Coyotos is written in BitC, a purpose-built high-level programming language with special focus on formal semantics and reasoning.
• Singularity, a language-based OS in development by none other than Microsoft Research. (Certainly the most interesting Microsoft project that I am aware of.) Singularity exploits language semantics to isolate processes.
• TUNES, a collective wet-dream of what the OS, programming language, and generally computing system of tomorrow should look like. With all due respect towards the insurmountable difficulty and endless complexity of a task like this, it must be said that TUNES is just vaporware.

Bush wasn't reelected, Diebold gave him the election. Diebold's CEO even bragged he was going to give Bush Ohio's vote and Bush "won" because of Ohio's results.

If people are dissatisfied with both parties they should "throw away" their vote on some other party, rather than keep throwing it at Twiddledum and Twiddledumber.

Unfortunately the mass media makes out third parties as weirdos or on the fringe. Take Libertarians, most people thing Libertarians will allow corporations to run a muck and do whatever they want. However Libertarians actually hate monopolies, many large corporations got big by government granted monopolies, and would end the limited liability corporations get now.

Falcon

Do we really want to allow Microsoft to become OCP? I'm all for smaller government, but the whole "free markets solve everything" thing seems incredibly naive to me.

If Libertarians were in charge, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten as big and powerful as they have. Libertarians hate monopolies. But there's Democrats and others to blame for the fear mongering, FUD.

Falcon

Well, maybe in their imaginations. But that "libertarian" was hustling for exactly that kind of rigged market. Which is the only kind of market I've ever seen any "actual" libertarian hustle for in reality.

I, and others, have posted a number of tymes about opening up the airwaves. I and other libertarians are against ALL government granted monopolies. As for other libertarians, read some of the posts in the Libertarian Party's forums on monopolies some tyme. Nobody who supports monopolies can be considered a libertarian. How about this:

"Abstract: We hereby clarify the radical libertarian stance about Microsoft and government, and more generally about monopolies. We explain how the original evil behind Microsoft's monopoly is government intervention in the form of intellectual property privileges, and how any solution should begin by abolishing these privileges."

Or "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights ".

If it gets fast enough, you may just want to use it as your main system memory, rather than swap. Then, suspend-to-RAM = hibernate, and your persistant storage could be something like tmpfs.

Actually, the best solution is a system with Orthogonal Persistence -- that is, remove the distinction between disk and RAM.

In an ideal situation, this means that no program ever actually closes. The closest it gets is the entire system being suspended to save power. All of the reasons this might not make sense to you are based on the way software works now, not on any limitations inherent in hardware or in the concept of software.

It's hard to explain abstractly, but maybe try an example: Google Documents. While it's not instantaneous, because it has to go over the Internet, Google Docs does autosave every document, along with a change history. You can still revert, not to the saved version, but to any version since it was created. If you want to play around with it without saving, you simply copy the document and work on the copy.

Or, consider the concept of a savegame -- for the most part, rather than explicitly saving your game and closing the program, you'd simply pause it, minimize it somehow, and move on to whatever else you were doing. After awhile of being paused, the game might automatically release the audio/video hardware, so it won't be using any resources except RAM. And when that RAM is needed, it'll get swapped out.

Does it have any advantages over a traditional savegame? Well, it's easier to program, but imagine the whole game is coded like that -- rather than having to "load" a level off the hard disk, you simply access what you need. No more "loading" screens.

So yes, probably the first thing that will happen is, someone puts a Windows swapfile on it. And probably, it will be a LONG time until legacy concepts of filesystems and virtual memory go away. But if you get something performing even close to RAM speeds, with persistant storage, you can go a LOT farther than simply emulating a spinning disk, and you could do a lot better than trying to store your swap on an emulation of a spinning disk that runs on something resembling RAM.

A libertarian should support network neutrality because the minimal government intervention necessary to enforce the rules is required for capitalism to function. Libertarianism without this principle devolves into a corporate oligarchy.

A libertarian would do no such thing. Enforcing net neutrality laws in fact supports entrenched economic rights (i.e. de jure monopolies) rather allowing a free market system to work. Maybe people actually WANT a non-neutral system. They should be allowed to choose it if that is what they want. A libertarian would work to remove the regulatory barriers that give incumbent ISPs an economic advantage. With a proliferation of ISPs there would be a choice of carriers to use, and people would pick the service model they want.

This link illustrates the principle as applied to another famous monopoly.

http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/microsoft_monopoly.h tml

Bondage and Discipline programming occurs when the smart people on the central committee decide that ordinary developers are not smart enough to decide how to code on their own. They create a "system" that won't let the ordinary developers make certain kinds of errors. Pascal is the canonical Bondage and Discipline language.

There are 3 flaws in B&D programming.

1. Bondage and discipline programming causes overhead and reduces your performance.
2. bondage and discipline programming won't let you choose the best method to achieve your goal, so your design becomes more difficult.
3. The smart people on the central committee, the creators of the B&D system, are not as smart as they think they are.

Linus Torvalds' criticism of ukernels ( Thread starts here. ) accuses them of the first 2 flaws, but he politely does not mention the third.

The tunes people also have a harsh criticism of ukernels . They accuse it of abstraction inversion There is less criticism of ukernels in academia where it might be a career limiting move (CLM). Bondate and discipline programming seems to be commonly advocated there.

I made a presentation to Austin Linux Group on Tanenbaum-Torvalds microkernel vs monolithic kernel Debate.

Bondage and Discipline programming occurs when the smart people on the central committee decide that ordinary developers are not smart enough to decide how to code on their own. They create a "system" that won't let the ordinary developers make certain kinds of errors. Pascal is the canonical Bondage and Discipline language.

There are 3 flaws in B&D programming.

1. Bondage and discipline programming causes overhead and reduces your performance.
2. bondage and discipline programming won't let you choose the best method to achieve your goal, so your design becomes more difficult.
3. The smart people on the central committee, the creators of the B&D system, are not as smart as they think they are.

Linus Torvalds' criticism of ukernels ( Thread starts here. ) accuses them of the first 2 flaws, but he politely does not mention the third.

The tunes people also have a harsh criticism of ukernels . They accuse it of abstraction inversion There is less criticism of ukernels in academia where it might be a career limiting move (CLM). Bondate and discipline programming seems to be commonly advocated there.

I made a presentation to Austin Linux Group on Tanenbaum-Torvalds microkernel vs monolithic kernel Debate.

That's the gap that no one has crossed. It shouldn't be the job of a VM or special environment, but the operating system itself. While UNIX-like systems are very nice compared to some of the alternatives, I don't think it is the only method of solving the problem at hand, which is allowing users to make the computer do what it is they want it to do. If you have a somewhat intelligent user, they'll point out that it is much more flexible to work with a full language like ruby then it is to work with a shell. When you are programming, you are provided an API you can use, while when you are just meerly using the system, you have a set of programs you can run and that's it. Even if you don't need glue to call upon language B from language A, you still need glue, the programs themselves, to use the functionality from the shell.

Instead of going the UNIX approach, if we look at it from the Lisp machine approach, all of the functionality _is_ available at the user's fingertips, you don't need a glue program to make a really low-level system call or anything like that. There are no boundaries. At the same time, imagine if making a notification show up in the console of your favorite shooter for ever tyone someone talks to you in IRC only took 2 or 3 lines in the OS's native shell.

Take a look at the TUNES project. This is exactly what I have in mind. (I've read some of their design documents after planning out my own "dream OS" and the designs coincided perfectly. no joke)

Consider the h.264 video codec. It cost millions of dollars to develop

So... you think it's a good idea to create a government granted monopoly that causes a hundred times that much economic damage in order to possibly create an incentive for that development? I'd rather just have that money come out of my taxes as a government grant to some University.

I don't even think we need to go that far though - I think the basic premise that patents promote innovation *at all* is incorrect. For the argument I would use, in full, see http://fare.tunes.org/articles/patents.html. If we need to discuss some sort of innovation incentive, we should do that - but patents aren't one of the valid answers.

You are so focused on the big corps, that you've lost sight of the small inventors, writers, entrepreneurs who use the patent system to make sure that they are not trampled by the big guys. Without IP law, what would prevent the big guys from stealing your work and profiting of it as your own? I have a problem with that.

Again, the simple fact that an inventor likes the power that a patent gives them is irrelevant to the public policy decision. In order to convince me that patents were a good idea, you'd need to show that the beneficial effects of patents measurably outweighed the detrimental effects. As far as I can tell, the measurable benefits are mostly a scenario that doesn't work (small inventor uses patents to bully large corporation - in reality, the large corporation makes patent counterclaims).

As for your anecdotes about inventor friends, I'll have to counter with my own anecdote: I am personally an inventor, with an active patent application as we speak. That fact might help me make some small amount of money, but I'd still much rather be inventing in a world where I don't have to worry about other people's patents on every little thing rather than a world where I get a patent.

Here's the strong version of the anti-patent argument: http://fare.tunes.org/articles/patents.html

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

Government granted monopolies are questionable in general - they warp the free market. It's possible that patents are a good economic tweak and it's worth making an exception for them, but I'm unaware of any economic analysis that shows that to be the case.

It's also possible that patents are strictly a bad plan, as is argued here. I'm not 100% sure that he's right, but his argument is no less convincing than any argument I've heard in support of patents. At this point, I'm 100% convinced that patents definitely need to be examined as an economic proposition rather than simply accepted based on the "common wisdom" that they're a good idea.

Presumably patents have worked in the past otherwise they wouldn't be so universally accepted so you'd have to show why they have apparently stopped working.

You seem to misunderstand how laws get made. There are people who make a shit-ton of money off of patents and could care less what effect they have on research & development.

Guessing that patents work because they exist is foolish. There are good arguments that patents are a bad idea - at this point it's time for an economic analysis rather than arbitrary assumptions.

Here's a really interesting project. Though it's not the kind of OS we'll have within say, the next hundred years, it's interesting to see how OSes could be so much more:

http://tunes.org/papers/WhyNewOS/WhyNewOS.html

I tend to agree with Libertarians on this one.

Libertarians in general oppose monopolies when they interfere with personal property rights through de jure mechanisms. If you agreed with Libertarians you would be calling for the repeal of the laws that allow Microsoft to exist as a monopoly.

From http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/microsoft_monopoly.h tml#SECTION_1

Microsoft is CLEARLY such a monopoly because they exist in this position of monopoly due to intellectual property rights. Such monopolies are anathema to libertarians.

Fram a libertarian viewpoint the agreement with Novell is evil incarnate - it is clearly an attempt to use legal mechanisms to enforce it's de jure monopoly over one of its competitors.

Ruby has made some important OO design contributions

It has ?! Like what ?! What's in Ruby that wasn't in other languages ?!!

For patience's sake, this is the problem...All I see are ideas that were in other languages, thrown together in a learn-as-you-go experiment. People think continuations are cool? Then look at Scheme and look at Smalltalk. You can't compare years of development to that experiment. Ruby is rubbish. Compare it to any Smalltalk implementation. Download a Common Lisp IDE (LispWorks, Franz) and tell me how cool Ruby is...When people diss Java, remember to also diss HotSpot. Can your little language optimize code statistically like that? I thought not...

You want new stuff? Look at Factor, Joy, the Mozart/Oz system, or Slate.
Wanna compile at gcc performance? Try Scheme with the Bigloo implementation, or Objective Caml. Bechmarks for Ocaml here (and for SML with MLTon compiler here.- The bechmarks for Bigloo were reomved some time ago).

I'll just post the buzzwords for Factor:

Continuations, exception handling.
Powerful and logical meta-programming facilities. Introspection, code generation and extension of both syntax and semantics is very easy.
Higher-order programming allows code blocks to be treated as data and used as parameters.
Highly minimalist, very consistent design. No layers upon layers of indirection, no confusing corner-cases, no poorly-thought-out features.
Postfix syntax with an extensible parser; values are passed on the stack.
Higher-order programming allows code blocks to be treated as data and used as parameters.
A powerful and very generic collections library allows many algorithms to be expressed in terms of bulk operations without micro-management of elements, recursion, or loops.
A very consistent object model based on generic predicate dispatch.
Arithmetic operations that closely model mathematical concepts, rather than just being a thin abstraction over underlying machine arithmetic. All integer operations are done in arbitrary precision, and exact fractions are supported. Complex numbers and complex-valued elementary functions are integrated.
Damn, that Slava Pestov is one smart dude.

When you see those languages, you kinda get sad that Ruby is such an attention-grabber, but I can see clearly that this is just because of disinformation. With the exception of Joy and Slate (for now, I hope), all the others I cited have pretty workable environments.

And by the way, you don't write LISP anymore, it's Lisp.

Basically all coercion is bad, but the vast majority of people out there is riding some brain-washing wave, so they can't be bothered to check logical arguments. For that reason I sometimes present the simpler, shorter suggestion: just abolish democracy, and live within a minarchist constitution that limits what the remaining state can do. Of course it's biased in some way, but as long as that way is about limiting remaining state power, it should be rather good.

Democracy isn't as different from a dictatorship as you might think. In one case one person wields absolute power (and s/he is good or bad). In the democratic case people elect a government that consists of administrators (i.e. also good or bad people) that usually do whatever pays them the most (or their friends, or their bribesters). For one thing the people don't govern, they merely delegate their power to public admins; and secondly, you don't know if the majority is good, or if they're rabid racists.

By the way, Germany in the '20s democratically elected Adolf Hitler. They also pretty much agreed to Total War.

Maybe it wouldn't hurt to read this:
http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/public_goods_fallaci es.html
if you're not sure about how good the state really is.

• Hurd (now with KDE)
• Haiku
• TUNES
• House
• Squeak

Everybody complains about Linux and Window and all the other operaitng systems about being old an obsolete but I see only a few putting effort in building new operating systems like what Slate can become (in the long term) or what Movitz is aiming.

Edsger Dijkstra on Java (Trouw, 18 Oct 2000)
Interviewer : There is some progress? There are new programming langugages that make everything easier, even ordinary internet users have heard of Java.

Dijkstra : It's embarrassing. Because it is so bad. The only reason Java has been accepted is because it is a product of a company, SUN, that has made enormous advertisement for it. Beautiful programming languages exist, and a good language, like a tool, is just a joy. But industry doesn't want that. Probably because decisions are made by technically incompetent people.

Steven T. Abell on Java (formerly Java Technology evangelist at Netscape)
I came to Java from a different world of programming, the Smalltalk world. For people who program in Smalltalk, Java is a 30-year step back.

Alan Kay on Java (OOPSLA '97)
Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

Donald Knuth on Java
I get secret satisfaction when bad ideas take hold and suck a lot of people in ... like Java (Just teasing.)

If not CSS2 as well... try this page in Netscape and then use IE and count how many more default box-like characters there are...

There is arguably significant evidence that State funding of basic research has been a factor in the advancement of science and the success of developed countries.

"Yes, Grasshopper, it is good that you are learning to Question Authority. But, you should also Listen to Authority's Response, and if it turns out that Authority is Indeed Correct, you are obliged to Admit It."

Lisp is nice, Slate is better.

Hehe. Well this is my IDE The rest of the os isn't too bad.

How about Tunes?

Naturally it was used for many things.

Even still, I think these problems require a radically new way of thinking about the future of computing.

A running TUNES system will have many features that are just unimaginable on current systems (see below). Many of them are seperately implemented as isolated pieces of software on various different systems. Only by basing the system on semantics-based reflectivity can these features truly be integrated, and whatever other features users will develop, to be dynamically combined in a decentralized way, freeing the world from existing rackets.

To sum up the main features in technical terms, TUNES is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethought Computing System, based on a fully reflective architecture with standard support for unification of system abstractions, security based on formal proofs from explicit negociated axioms, higher-order functions, self-extensible syntax, fine-grained composition, distributed networking, orthogonally persistent storage, fault-tolerant computation, version-aware identification, decentralized (no-kernel) communication, dynamic code regeneration, high-level models of encapsulation, hardware-independent exchange of code, migratable actors, yet (eventually) a highly-performant set of dynamic compilation tools (phew).

These are not buzzwords, but technical terms, and you should find precise definitions in the Glossary.

Are you a complete idiot? Don't you see the amazing potential of HURD? Think about it. If you had a system where you could multiplex the whole system without root access, you would still have security problems, but those would be confined to that percentage of the system, and not affect other things. You could donate processors to the whole lan, or the whole internet. You machine is sitting idle? Someone else in your house or business could use those cycles or a defined percentage of them. I think Tunes will achieve this computing ubiquity before anything else You can see on their Wiki that the project is not dead.

Are you a complete idiot? Don't you see the amazing potential of HURD? Think about it. If you had a system where you could multiplex the whole system without root access, you would still have security problems, but those would be confined to that percentage of the system, and not affect other things. You could donate processors to the whole lan, or the whole internet. You machine is sitting idle? Someone else in your house or business could use those cycles or a defined percentage of them. I think Tunes will achieve this computing ubiquity before anything else You can see on their Wiki that the project is not dead.

Riiight, the links: *blush* http://www.tunes.org/ and http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/computer s/tunes.html/

The OS you're talking about is EROS, an orthogonally persistent operating system. EROS doesn't seem to be under active development, but other OSes are. The one I know about is Unununium.

And yes, I agree it is a design issue, not a limitation of our hardware and software.

First, there are two kinds of small languages:
1. small languages like lua, io, and scheme that are small in the built-in libraries and in the total distro. These three are great places to start- both are small, OOPish, allow higher-order programming by passing classes, objects, functions and methods as objects.

2. Then there are languages that are big in some ways, but small in syntax. Some of these are easier to extend than so-called "little languages." The reason is usually that their syntax is small, in an isolated place, easy to get at, and meant to be modified. The two best examples for this are Smalltalk and Lisp. Both of these languages satisfy your other requirements and really kick ass for extention. Unlike the above languages, the so-called little-languages, most Smalltalk and Lisp dialects have big, useful libraries. Unlike a big fat language like perl or C++, having a useful library doesn't mean that the language is a huge pain in the ass to extend.

Both Lisp and Smalltalk have a number of implementations. I am a big fan of Squeak Smalltalk, though systems like Little Smalltalk or even GNU Smalltalk maybe worth checking out.

A lot of people here have bad feelings about Lisp-like languages. It's a shame, since Scheme, ISLISP (OpenLisp is a great implementation) and Common Lisp are all *very* powerful languages. You can be quite productive with them once you get over the part about whining about parens. But Lisp may very well be the best option here, there is a long history of people writing custom-syntaxes and language extensions. Look up Common Lisp macros- power almost beyond comprehension, a lot of fun to play with, and with an elegance all its own.

There are examples of people writing a C-like syntaxes for various Scheme implementations. IIRC, Gambit-C (a Scheme to C compiler) comes with one. On Cliki, there are a bunch of other alternative Scheme syntaxes listed.

To, one of the big advantages to using a language in the second category is that syntax extension/modification is done in the language itself, rather than in C. With that comes the familiarity of the language you're creating and the other benefits you gain by using a high-level language like Smalltalk or Common Lisp.

Just some thoughts...

Does the kernel matter any more? I don't think it does. They're all the same at some level. I don't care nearly as much as I used to about the what the kernel does; it's so easy to emulate your way back to a familiar state.

hehehe, this guy's speech reminds me of this:

A proven 32-bit cutting-edge state-of-the-art industrial-strength Y2K-compliant zero-administration plug-and-play industry-standard Java-enabled internet-ready multimedia professional personal-computer Operating System that is even newer and faster yet compatible, with a user-friendly object-oriented 3D graphical user interface, amazing inter-application communication and plug-in capability, an enhanced filesystem, full integration into Enterprise networks, an exclusive way to deploy distributed components, seamless network sharing of printers and files.

However, it's a big win for Lindows. They get $20 million just for changing their domain name and company name. It's pretty clear that MS would have lost this case. You don't get trademarks to everything that even sounds like what you have a trademark to.

As a libertarian, I'm against trademarks, tradesecrets, patents, and copyrights to begin with. See the following articles:

Against Intellectual Property. Kinsella, Stephan.

Do patents and copyrights undermine private property?

Patents and Copyrights: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs? Cole, Julio H.

Government and Microsoft: A Libertarian View on Monopolies. Rideau, François-René.

Against Intellectual Property. Martin, Brian.

The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights. Long, Roderick T.

Please. This has been promised time and time again. CORBA, XML etc. (these are more IPC mechanisms, but the situation is identical)

Doing manual binding to a VM or what have you (which is what's going on here) is ultimately going to fail the minute a language changes or a new language emerges. Unless you want to restrict yourself to the small semantics representable by *all* languages, it's not going to work. Once you get to that subset of functionally, all languages *are* the same. Just slightly different syntax. Which is usually just a modification to Algol block-style with C's syntax.

The only true solution is by algebraically representing semantics in some manner. Such as what TUNES is attempting to do. Once semantics are mathematically represented, then you can use your favorite language to your heart's content and not worry about loss of semantics or restricting yourself to a subset of all common languages. In other words, you can use call/cc style functions in ML/Scheme and not worry about C programs screwing things up.

But, IMO, this is all one big pipe dream. I'll believe it when I see it.

This is like giving drugs to people with AIDS, its so pointless. Windoze must be ANNIHILATED! There can be no prisoners. Everything connected to Windoze must be eviscerated. It is the tool of evil! It is our #1 threat, according to Georeg W. Bush circular logic.

From Slate website:
Slate is a prototype-based object-oriented programming language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk. Slate syntax is intended to be as familiar as possible to a Smalltalker...

It also features optional type declaration. The compiler is currently based on Common Lisp.

An even better piece of buzzwords, though fabricated, from the TUNES FAQ:

A proven 32-bit cutting-edge state-of-the-art industrial-strength Y2K-compliant zero-administration plug-and-play industry-standard Java-enabled internet-ready multimedia professional personal-computer Operating System that is even newer and faster yet compatible, with a user-friendly object-oriented 3D graphical user interface, amazing inter-application communication and plug-in capability, an enhanced filesystem, full integration into Enterprise networks, an exclusive way to deploy distributed components, seamless network sharing of printers and files.

A work of art, except that it doesn't have "XML" in it somewhere.

Not a troll at all. You're missing the point. The point is not to not have files, or objects, or a sensible grouping of binary data that would compose an image.

The idea is that I should not have to explicity convert run-time data into a DIFFERENT format to store it permanently.

I can load an image and store it as a Java object. In my system, let's call it "Christmas Photo 2002" and reference it by Object #4234235. In a Unix system, in order to save that image, each and every program (and developer) has to manually convert it to a specific (and incompatible!) image format, explicitly page it out to disk, and handle the re-loading of that image into his program later.

IBM did a study, and foudn that one third of development time is taken up by explicitly saving things back and forth to disk.

My hypothetical system would eliminate that. This isn't a new concept, either. Take a look at this OS which supported persistent data in 1979.

The fact is, the Unix and Windows metaphor for using computers is so engrained, even in developers, that nobody will even step outside the Unix paradigm and wonder if there's a better way. (Do file systems really need to be hierarchies? Why? What if they were relational?)

Instead, they'll post articles about how some miniscule differences make their OS so much better than the other. Yay.

Here we come, won't that be great. 10Mfps in Quake4D, milliseconds from start to crash in windows.

Nonsense. What we get is redundancy, and we can actually use it. See, the thing with faster computers is, they allow a greater level of abstraction in programs, both on the programmer and the user side. This has unfortunately not yet happened, since too many programmers stubbornly stick to C and its likes.

Granted, using high-level programming languages does not automatically make programs more stable, but it does give better chances of resuming or recovering from errors, and more importantly, it allows programmers to focus on more important aspects of programs. Best of all: we can use all that extra power for human-computer interface enhancements, such as speech, video or natural language recognition.

Two random links which I'm too lazy to label:
http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
TUNES

Isn't outlawing card counting kind of like outlawing a certain thought process?

Yes.

But this doesn't mean those in charge can't try and succeed to outlaw thought processes. See an example. Another.

I wrote a long comment, but I accidentally deleted it (goddamn windows explorer!) Anyways, the essence is read Steven Levy's "Hackers" which provides a historical background of the first couple of generations of computer geeks. It's toward the end of the book (predating the internet or linux) that RMS appears, fighting to maintain a culture that is under assault by commercial interests that are raiding labs for talent, locking up code under nondisclosure, and promoting incompatibilities to try and get a lock on the market.

In this context, RMS isn't being extremist, he's being reactionary - trying to maintain the hacker credo (free exchange of information) in the face of people who are interested only in money. Some of RMS' own comments regarding this period of history are available online. I think his POV is compromise could lead to corruption of the core principles of hacker thought, just as the original free-for-all homebrew computer culture was subsumed by the likes of Microsoft (another storyline which is covered in "Hackers.) I really do recommend reading Levy's book, BTW, along with his historical novel on the development of modern crypto ("Crypto".)

In light of the history, I think that RMS is perfectly justified in his opinions - just witness SCO vs. the GPL. Some asshole with money trying to steal something the community has created, and then even worse, trying to charge money for what formerly could be gotten for free!

10 years from now, I will hopefully have switched from my current OS to a then working TUNES.

No idea about the hardware though, hopefully something that can play Doom 3 :)

However, there are several (at least 8 plus 3 MIA) Forth operating systems afoot. Including one which is implemented as a Linux kernel thread.