Slashdot Mirror
Athena: A Fast Kernel-Independent GUI OS
Per Wigren writes: "I just found out about Athena OS which got me really amazed. It's a 100% OO, kernel-independent GUI OS with an XML-based scriptinglanguage called DML that allows the user to edit the OS itself, as well as creating simple applications and extensive GUI interfaces! It's extremely fast! It started an Amiga Workbench-clone desktop with draggable screens in less than 2 seconds... Download is less than 1M ... I honestly think Athena has potential to obsolete both Gnome and KDE ..." Take note of these words from the FAQ regarding Athena's terms: "[O]pen source may be something of a misnomer from a purist's point of view. Linux users should note that Pandora has nothing to do with the GPL or any other public licensing scheme."
This posting inspired me to check out Athena, and I must say, it's quite impressive. While it has a lot of speed and stability issues, which are to be expected at this stage, it's a very promising project, one I intend to keep an eye on.
The flexibility of the interface is very cool, especially considering how (relatively) simple the language is for creating your own GUI. The occasional mysterious crashing, redraw lag when moving windows over icons, etc. do make it impractical to really use at this point, but it's fun to play with, and has lots of potential.
If you ask me, Athena's going to be a Big Thing(tm) in the fairly near future. Do yourself a favor and try it out. The download is small, it installs easily, and it's got that cool "getting in on the ground floor" feel to it.
Shouldnt we call KDE/Gnome operating systems by itself? What term should we give them?
The term I've always used is Desktop Manager. As you indicated 'Window Manager' isn't only wrong, it's misleading. Desktop Manager on the other hand seems about right; icons, panels, backgrounds etc. Of course they work well with other apps and allow you to set your WM and such, but they don't actually do the work.
As for what an OS actually is... IMHO the definition of OS requires that the project to be the primary center for device IO AND the spawning of new processes, et al. However, with microkernels and dual-boot this definition might further be confused.
Telltale signs:
1. They suggest they can precisely mimic just about any kind of UI. Sure.
2. They are running against something -- particularly OO and C++. Why not tell us more about how they are good instead of why the status quo is so bad.
3. These guys know how to build UI's and they put up all their docs in web pages with 'Back' links and no 'Next' links????
If this thing ever gets 1% market share of anything I'll be astounded. Looks like pre-IPO hype to me.
that is only part of the sentence, the full statement, in response to an faq about athena being open source, states /. presents the facts in an unbiased manner! go slashdot!
"While as much as 1/3rd of the source code is publicly available for Athena and Pandora combined, we prefer the term 'open system' in this regard. Because of the strict distribution rules and terms and conditions, calling it open source may be something of a misnomer from a purist's point of view. Linux users should note that Pandora has nothing to do with the GPL or any other public licensing scheme."
they also mention on another page that
"Athena is currently available for free download from official distribution sites. Please note that unlike the GNU/GPL licensing schemes often used in Linux products, Athena is 100% commercial, and we do not allow Athena to be sold or distributed by third parties unless they have been given the right to do so."
got to love how
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
maybe free isnt the way after all? welcome to your post blinder years
Yes - this definitely looks like "just another window manager for X" Take a look at the way menus work in the supposed "perfect Amiga workbench emulation" - anyone who has ever used Amiga workbench knows that the menus appear in the SCREEN title bar (like Mac OS!) The fact that the menus appear in the app window (X or M$ Windows style) is a giveaway to me that all these guys are doing is skinning X apps and that their XML super configurable GUI is not really all that super configurable.
What sane-minded person would actually script in a markup language. XSL sounded like a really good idea until you actually had to try using it. DML just takes it one step further into hell.
If you're gonna do conditionals and have variables, use a proper language! Its just madness otherwise. This whole infatuation with XML baffles me. Its not even that great for marking up - it just creates lots of fat noise in the document.
Here's a simple rule: A program with no lines of code has no bugs.
All XML does is add noise and lines of code to an already hard to read document. Just say no! XML = Hard drugs (you certainly need to be on them to do any XML work).
Yours - Rabid at Christmas
Side point: KDE supports the Mac/Amiga-style menus for KDE apps.
Well, why not if it's useful. World is large enough to have competitors even for allmighty GNOME.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
they've certainly demonstrated that ability well by relying not only on linux, but also on x86, and X11.. doesn't seem very independant,
That says exactly nothing. They had to start from somewhere, right? And if their inner workings are not dependant by OS (I don't know if they are or not - they are only source of info on this) they could do it on the other OSes later. Though facts are I have yet to see achieving a true platform-independancy without a lot of ugly hacks on the way and a ton of compromises (like, the core works on Linux, Solaris and Win32 but multimedia is Windows-only and this funky module works only for Linux, etc.)
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Most OS API's are C or C++, so they already do reference counting to manage their objects
:)
How using C or C++ means using refcounting? Ans yes, refocunting is pretty good and efficient memory management strategy, but has its own problems, like circular links, etc. Garbage collection memory managers, like Java, don't have these problems (they have their own
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Well, I don't know about platform independent and stuff, but first thig I saw trying to run it was:
(**) SVGA: 24bpp not supported for this chipset
*** A configured device found, but display modes could not be resolved.***
Fatal server error:
no screens found
Seems to be a long way to go until we reach at least particular-hardware-dependency problem. Then we might start talking about kernel-dependency and stuff.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Well, C and C++ don't have automatic memory management, so you need something like reference counting.
Believe me, I'm well aware of the pros and cons of various stategies for managing memory. I'm just saying that the "breakthrough" these guys have come up with, isn't a breakthrough.
sigs are a waste of space
There have been environments where everything is an object for decades.
Lisp machines were essentially objects all the way down. (For loads of fun, read up on Symbolics and their Genera operating system & development environment).
Smalltalk-76 and beyond were also objects all the way down. Check out Squeak; it's a modern implementation of Smalltalk-80.
The nice thing about Smalltalk and modern Lisp systems is that it isn't just the human interface that's object-oriented; everything about them is object-oriented. It's very powerful, particularly when combined with the fact that most of these systems also have their source code available.
Say you suddenly need to be able to reverse strings. In many Smalltalk systems, you just add an instance method named 'reverse' to the String class. Bam! Now you can send the #reverse message to any instance of String and it will be reversed. If you implement it correctly (relying on the public interface to String rather than any private implementation details) you can even send #reverse to any subclasses. And all without taking down a running system. This is a trivial example; you could do the same kind of tricks with the scheduler and the file system in a Smalltalk-based operating system.
I guess my point here is that you probably shouldn't give these "Athena" guys too much credit; instead, look at Common Lisp and Smalltalk systems for truly pioneering work in object-oriented systems.
--
Christopher M. Hanson
President
First, I'd like to know just how much "Open Source" code was lifted, and from where
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything that suggested any open source code was lifted, just that 30% was available as open source. That could be because they put some earlier parts of the project in the public domain, not an uncommon practice in Amiga-land.
Also, could they pick a new name before it comes out, please?
Agreed! I thought it was a story about the Athlon processor at first!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
- I didn't read the white paper, but what you describe sounds [like] the ResizeTool object we use in our own product...
Now that my post has gotten a couple of responses, I realize that by the end of the day, there will probably be two dozen examples of things that this is "like". Yeah, it's kind of like your ResizeTool and it's also reminiscent of the Decorator Pattern as the other poster pointed out.Fine. Maybe I'm insane and DML is the pinnacle of OOP. Go ahead and embrace it... love it... touch it! Lieben Sie das DML! Now is the the time on Slashdot when we dance!
Sure looks like they require X11 & Linux to me. BTW: What about the Alpha & SPARC I have at home? I note that it requires an Intel processor.
This looks like a closed, proprietary window manager. Maybe someday they'll port it to other systems, but note that up-front about "Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows systems" Hm. for an Operating system, it seems you need another OS in order to run (Linux, Mac, Windows). So, again, other than semantics, how is this an OS? I know the talk about "stand-alone" versions, sometime, maybe. Gee, right now, they don't even support 3D (something my GNOME box supports right now with OpenGL). BTW: Why do I want a GUI OS? What if I want to run it on my server & reflect back?
Oh, and I suggest reading the definition of Open Source. Key test: Can I fork the code? If not, whatever they release won't be Open Source (GPL or otherwise). Why should I depend on someone else to keep the system up to date? How do I know that if they currently support something, they will in the future? As someone else noted, look at the QT issues that finally resulted in TT GPL'ing QT. Why shouldn't Rocklyte expect a similar reaction to their proposal (in addition to all of the other ones)?
Sorry, nothing here that remotely interests me. Good luck, and I suspect Rocklyte will desparately need it.
1. Sell HW, support & professional services (Red Hat, Mission Critical Linux, VA Linux, IBM, Progeny, Stormix, Cygnus, etc). Yes, you can make a profit at this (Cygnus was profitable before they were bought by Red Hat, and all their products are GPL).
2. Dual-license (yes, you have to keep the sources separate, so they eventually drift apart, unless you require folks to assign copyright to you, and are good enough that they don't fork it).
If you want to sell proprietary software, the Open Source revolution will eliminate you. If, however, you look at where you can make money in the Open Source revolution, you may be rewarded (assuming your other business skills work).
> How can I sell open software without making it free
Short answer: by selling it. Oh, you want guaranteed profits. Nope, can't get that. See the Open Source definition at http://www.opensource.org/osd.html. Yes, you can charge, but you are limited because those downstream also have the right to do so, and can undercut you. If you don't give them this right, it's not Open Source. So, you charge for the packaging, support, etc. Note that the FSF sells tapes / CDs of FSF software. Key is you charge for services besides the continued selling of SW (support, custom modification, custom apps, etc).
Remember, fundamentally, if it can't be forked, it isn't open. Others have tried to get around this (Sun in particular), no one would play. If you want the benefits of Open Source, you have to accept the Open Source way.
For an example of a company that has created Free (libre) software, check out Digital Creations at
http://www.digicool.com/. Note that Cygnus Solutions made money on gcc / egcs (totally GPL'd) before being bought out by Red Hat.
Remember that there is basic level of support (e-mail, newsgroups) and more detailed / guaranteed levels of support (what companies expect).
> you lose control of your product
In a way - you give up mandatory control of your software(allow forking). Of course, all the Open Source projects I know are either run by the people who started them, or they voluntarily gave it up, so giving up the mandatory control doesn't mean you necessarily give up control, as long as you play nice in the community.
> unless you're willing to give up major parts of one of them
Well, you need to give up thinking that software is a product, which you haven't yet. Think of the services around software as the product, software is the enabler.
The point I was making is that just because it's Open Source doesn't mean everyone's going to download it. You can sell the packaging, testing, QA, support, etc. However, everyone else can as well. NOTHING in the GPL or Open Source Definition prevents you from selling software, it merely prohibits you from preventing others from also selling it, or giving it away.
Do a little research before you post. You are thinking of AtheOS, totally unrelated GPL operating system that _does_ have it's own domain (AtheOS.cx) with a webserver running atheos, and it is more stable than some other OS's I could mention - especially when you consider that it is in it's infancy.
Dr.Whiz-Bang
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Why, pray tell, does the title of the homepage read: "The Athena Operating System" and "Athena is Rocklyte Systems next generation, object based operating system for the consumer market." (emphasis mine)?
Regarding distribution, this is a pretty simple policy that prevents third parties from distributing the software on CDs or from web-sites without our permission.
The reason so many are upset about this is because the right to redistribute is kind of accepted as part of the basic definition of open source (or Free Software, as RMS would have it). This is made pretty clear here. Of course, you're perfectly at liberty to license your product in any way you wish. It's just that it doesn't really fit under the label of Free Software.
Although judging from some of the posted remarks, it could also be interpreted as an evil plot designed to destroy the Linux community from the inside, eating it away like a cancerous cell to ensure that Microsoft can still reign supreme - because after all, Rocklyte Systems is just another corporation out to get you all while you're tucked away in your beds.
I'm sorry you've been treated this way--there are a lot of losers hanging around this place with nothing better to do than formulate screwball conspiracy theories.
True. Although, with the scripting component, it seems more like a cheap knock off of a Smalltalk environment.
Well, maybe if Windows were more Unix-ish.
Athena! Didn't they have that strange web browser
for a while?
That browser that was such a piece of shit but
I always accidently installed it for some reason
or another and then reached for a shot gun but
at the end decided that uninstalling it was the
best approach.
Well, I certainly intend to play with it... because I code mostly for myself, not for the "common good." It seems that it could be a lot of fun to hack on something modern, fast and object-oriented... all of which X-Windows is *not* (and by extension, Gnome and KDE).
Supporting whatever flavor of open source politics you happen to be into is not the only reason to code. Maybe if more people realized this, we could get some cool new stuff to play with instead of stacking more cruft onto "cool" GPL projects that, in many cases, should have been scrapped years ago.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
Do yourself a favor, and check out Window Maker!
/* The full version for Linux will be freely available for download, so I don't see the project's commercialisation as being a major factor here. */
I do - I don't use Linux, I use another UNIX-style OS, but I'd like to give this a try. Those of us who don't fall into the Linux herd can't do anything with it, and that's why commercialization is bad for me. I don't have any moral problems with it, it's just a matter of practicality - I can't use StarOffice at the moment either, although it's free.
-lx
I had the same question...
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
You seem to have rebutted the non-technical criticisms. Could you address the technical ones?
I AM, therefore I THINK!
There are five reasons I like linux:
#1 It's more stable than the competition
#2 It's OPEN SOURCE
#3 configuration files are human-readable
#4 It's FREE
Other than that, face it, it's just another Unix, with all the sucky "features" of Unix like the all-or-nothing security (e.g. "root user" and suid) and using the same character for the root directory and the subdirectory separator, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. nearly ad infinitum.
DevFS, elimination of root, a Novell-like protection & attribute syntax, ReiserFS, these would be improvements. Making the configuration files XML would make the system worse. If they aren't going to be optimized for human readability in raw ASCII text, then you may as well have a registry like windows.
--Charlie
- non-free
- uses non-standard scripting languages
anything else?Squeak can also be concidered a "virtual os", but uses smalltalk instead of a XSL deriviative (and XSL is a horror to acctually code in). Squeak's extremly cool, *everything* is an open objekt which you can interact with and change. It's not tied into any OS or Platform, if the system can run the squeak smalltalk interpreter, it works.
Try it out, it's really cool (and completly open, unlike this crap). It runs on Linux, Win32, Win CE, MacOS, MacOS X, OS/2, DOS, BeOS, NeXT, most commercial unices and a few PDAs. (hmm.. who have i left anyone out? :)
-henrik
Dude! Occam's razor!
Perhaps, depending what MS would let you do with the source. I suspect that it would be quite restrictive. Windows will probably never be GPLed. And Microsoft's direction seems to have been getting even more expensive - you nearly have to pay every time you need to install the OS... It's going the wrong direction, IMO.
So, Athena, although it looks neat, continues in the grand tradition of enticing users to give up another bit of their freedom. Really, what is it besides a proprietary add-on (with an "in house" proprietary kernel in the future) to existing kernels?
No thanks.
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
The link in the article shouldn't be confused with the other goat like, .cx resembling link we all know and love.
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
MIT is a place of geeks, run by geeks. Thus, I doubt they would the lawyers for a frivilous lawsuit... Yes, this product is called Athena... yes, their computing cluster network is called Project Athena.
Are they at all related? no.
Would slashdot consider a lawsuit of this nature frivilous? yes.
Hence, I highly *HIGHLY* doubt MIT would sue over the name.
What about the "It's just a WM" arguments?
Your requirements page mention that it requires an X server - so this is just a WM then, right?
Whatever the reasons for such hostility
Well, the reasons are pretty simple: you put up a buzzword-compliant website for a window manager, heralding it as the second coming of Jim Butterfield.. frankly, it insults the intelligence of the people who visit it. (I, for one got the distinct impression that you are a bunch of con-artist marketdroids trying to pass yourselves off as professional programmers.)
Now, this description may seem pretty harsh, but you should realize that this reaction is prompted by your propaganda.. if my impressions are incorrect, it's because your website (the only source for information) created them.. (of course, judging from the other posts here, I'm not the only one who got this impression.)
OK big guy, enlighten me.
Show me what you can do? Perhaps in JSP? Something like this?
You seem capable of constantly missing the point. You seem reasonably intelligent, see if you can understand what is going on here. This is pretty much totally unlike anything that has gone before, and your cheap shots do you no credit.
Anyway, thanx for the heads up for Netscape, I will get around to fixing the HTML at some stage soonish.
Unfortunately, right now, Netscape ain't a top priority, and it pains me, but thats the way it is for the next few months. You and I both know that it is the inferior browser, and has little penetration in the corporate market where IE and Outlook rule.
Priorities for us are finishing the implementation and getting it used in the real world. Our intention is to GPL the code once we port the implementation to C. The parser is pretty radical so this is going to be a fun task.
If you bothered to try learn what is going on, then you may understand why the demo's are impressive. Right now, you can't see the wood for the trees.
It is an XML dialect (well, would be if we bothered with a DTD), it does conform to XML standards, and it is demonstrably useful.
There is more, if you care to continue, mail me.
Well, the whole things looks good. Now if only config files, etc... can be moved to XML. But, the name Athena is probably a bad call. Athena has been a project at MIT for a long time (since the early 80's.) Athena is the multiplatform computing environment used at MIT and other places. It includes AFS, a network filesystem, and a suite of utilities and programs to make it all work right. There are also facilities for Kerberos account management. Anyways, calling Athena OS "Athena" seems like it would cause a lot of confusion in places that use the other Athena.
<SarcasticPost intent="funny">
<Setup>
A default httpd.conf on RedHat 7 is ~40k. If
that grows to two times it's file size because
it's converted to XML, that makes it ~80k.
</Setup>
<Delivery>
80KB!?! Whatever shall we do? It's not like
we can handle that in RAM? Sheesh! That
might even make a dent in modern CPU L2
caches! Oh the horror! We'll drown in excess
info!
</Delivery>
<Reason>
OK. Back to the real world. Lines of data in
httpd.conf will not go up appreciably.
<Listen>80</Listen>
does not take up that much more room than
Listen 80
</Reason>
<Rant>
Quit trying to save that last 2k of space on
stupid details. Computer time and space is
cheap. Developer/Administrator time is
expensive. Oh, I forgot, eveything should
still be written in Assembly because speed and
space are paramount.
</Rant>
<Footnote tone="condescending">
Once again. XML is data. HTML is formatting.
The reason that HTML mail is hard to read is
because you have a gratuitous amount of
formatting information. The tags are no
harder to read than the custom syntax
currently found in config files.
</Footnote>
<SarcasticPost>
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
<script static src="utilties:memory_monitor.dml"/>
that's not legal XML; you can't have a bare attribute. You must say static="static" And the ampersands in another of their examples will cause all sorts of dreadful problems:
<variable name="myvars" &x="10" &y="20" &z="30"/>
There are XML-compliant ways to handle this sort of thing; too bad they didn't use them.
It is quite easy to use on the server side, just use an API like Xalan, and call about three methods and give it a Writer to send the data to. We are processing documents in batch mode so we dont have to worry about the speed. We are in fact using moderately complex style sheets, they work fine. I like that I can have an outside vendor continue to tweak them without them having to mess up our code. Im sorry I havent worked with DSSSL, but maybe you are taking your bad experiences with that standard and interpolating them onto XSL. Im not saying XSL is so mature and wonderfully perfect but converting XML to other formats is a very redundant task, and to have to write custom code and recompile every time a tag changes is ridiculous....my experience is that once you do something with code, no matter how clean and simple it is, its 10 times more difficult to get someone else to maintain it once youve moved onto other projects. Xsl, whether or not you think its ugly, can be effectively messed with by all sorts of non-programmers and scripter types who flee in terror at having to type "javac" for something.
XSLT can just as easily be used on the server side, to act as a language-neutral template that is read by your perl script, PHP script, servlet, etc. to produce the final output. It does not preclude the usage of those technologies, it simply moves the nitty-gritty about text formatting into a separate document that is much easier for programmers and not-such-programmers alike to deal with, without breaking your application.
For people dealing with very large and varied sets of XML formats and multiple display formats (as industries like publishing do), it is infinitely more maintainable to have the conversions to HTML, plain text, PDF, other XML, etc. written out as a set of XSL sheets instead of your proposed solution, i.e. one rat's nest of perl script after another. XSLT is barely a scripting language, and is rigidly defined, which means looking at one XSL template or another for the first time is far less of a crap shoot than opening yet another perl script or Java class that does it in yet another non-standard, confusing, error-prone, and inflexible way.
very interesting. My current project deals with XML documents, and I was going full-on converting them to Java objects so that I might have the most flexibility in displaying them. I intended to display using JSP, although I am the original co-creator of the now-defunct Freemarker, so I know where youre coming from with the Webmacro thing too.
As it turns out, we are converting bits and pieces of our XML to java objects (business-specific objects, not DOM objects...to display DOM directly in a template or JSP would violate abstraction of business rules, IMHO), but at the moment its a pain to write parsers to populate the objects, you write the same code over and over again. I have found very few packages to automate this process, and they are not flexible enough, and also Sun has a plan for a generic xml->object deserialization format, but thats a specific set of XML tags (ironically youd use XSL to convert from your own tagset to the java-centric one!). I looked into making some kind of API that takes an object that maps tags in various relationships to properties and methods, but I think by the time Im halfway done with that theres going to be something up on xml.apache.org that does it better. For a large chunk of our XML, we just need to display an HTML document, and we have a tag vendor doing lots of that effort; i trust them much more writing XSL sheets for me instead of coding our java objects and JSP pages. So the data that we need more run-time flexibilty with is still being converted to Java objects, but the mass of these docs (and they are big! huge dtds too) are just going to pump through XSL. I think its the issue of the right tool for the job.
How about Desktop Orientated GUI?
Really, no pun intended!
...that someone thinks they can shove down our throats. You'd think they'd have learned from the Java experience that people do not want to be tied to a single programming language. Of course, they don't know what an OS or what Open Source is either.
The new Amiga made the smart move of pushing an assembly-level language, so people could use compilers for their preferred language. The new Amiga also didn't cloud their position on "open source".
I hope we see more things like the new Amiga and less like this.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
.. are condemned to re-invent it, poorly.
Java, GNOME, and now this.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
the red pen has a point about your HTML.
Just a simple validation check at validator.w3.org shows at least six parsing errors for your original link. Writing invalid HTML and blaming it on Netscape is inexcusable. It takes seconds to run HTML through a parser, and using Netscape as a scapegoat for poor markup shows bad taste.
No offense, but this HTML stinks. You have mixed CSS and HTML style tags, valid under HTML 4 Trans. but not the goal of HTML, and you do not enclose attribute data in quotes. You use tables for formatting, and I don't even see how it's needed!
Saying nothing about your technology, it would look a lot more impressive if you wrote your pages in XHTML Strict and did all formatting through CSS. After all, why should people trust your "advanced" XML when you cannot even master XHTML, the simplest form of XML?
You are dumb and lazy. They have DML examples on their website. It's XML.
EverCode
Well it says at the top, but you are right on the part. But hey, if their parser don't care, then it don't matter much to them anyway.
You would think that the people to came up with all this fancy DML stuff would actually want to create valid XML, but maybe they know something we don't.
For example, that might be valid under the spec because it could be interpreted as . Doubtful though.
EverCode
"Since XML won't automatically take over every single program and tool, that will give admins and users 50 001 different formats"
Unless you're running MacOS X where XML does take over every single program and tool. There's something to be said for a company that anal retentive (in UI).
DB
And that is precisely my problem with GNOME and KDE. They are bloated and annoying.
I had a lot of fun playing with AmiWM simply because it's small and simple but still usable. The problem with it is that it seems to no longer be actively in developement.
I personally welcome ANY competition for GNOME or KDE, commercial or not. I don't like either of them, really, and competition can only be good.
No number of themes or color schemes in the world can make up for some of the just plain terrible "features" of a GUI.
Athena might totally suck, it would be hard for me to say right now. But the idea of personally changing things about the GUI through a scripting language does have a certain appeal to me.
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
A Java vs. POSIX debate. Don't be silly.
If I wanted to program the Z-80 or the PIX microcontroller, I would maybe use assembler, but soetimes even some sort of BASIC would do. Why, you, "speed freak", ask? Because of the shorter time to market. If the speed achieved is enough, then BASIC will do, even on a Z-80.
Today, however, the CPUs are much more complex, deeply pipelined and use al sorts of code optimization. Assembler is theoretically still the way to produce faster code, but the time required to produce that code is much, much longer. I'd much rather leave the optimization to some compiler to do. But even better, I think a good (Java) interpreter will achieve better (runtime) optimization. This is even more true with multiple CPU systems. Today if I want to design an application that will run rather fast both on an L class HP-UX with 2 or 4 PA RISCs, and a Netra with the same number of CPUs, I will chose Java. Shorter time to market, rather good optimization.POSIX compliance does ot completely save the day, Java serves me much better.
In the end, of course, all depends on what you are doing, and where. Oh, and on -how-, too! I have seen a lot of stupid and a lot of good code. If you use a stupid algorythm, your code will be slow, duh!
Sigged!
See there you go again... making stupid comments that don't say anything. Yeah, I've heard of C++. Ok, so maybe it's not the best OO language in the world... but you are making a comment about a concept "object oriented programming" based on one (arguably crappy) implementation of it.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
That's great... just say no and don't back it up... I'm really interested in hearing your reasoning for that 'No.'
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
since this thing not only requires linux and X11, i don't see how this is more than a fancy xml-programmable window manager. it may become more in the future. but calling a window manager an OS is a major exaggeration.
for it to be an OS it would need to allow me to log into it, and create an environment where i can run programs without them being aware that they are actually on a different system (the linux host). i have seen nothing of that in the description.
The real problem with Linux these days is its past, it's past being base on POSIX UNIX holds it down like a body in the lake wearing cement shoes. While I'm not totally sure this is the way to do it, (should nix X11 entirely), we have to give them some credit for trying to get rid of a big chunk of bottlenecks and weakensses apparent in the current versions of linux.
The GUI in linux sucks and always will until someone gets rid of X11 and XFree86. What they call it isn't important. What is important is the modernization of what I still think (even with all it's weaknesses) is the greatest OS. Get rid of all the old code and start working on the future.
-Mark
You're not paying for the OS silly. Retailers have agreements about that. You are paying in terms of choices. Things like no dual boot options on machines with the "free" Windows".
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Only currently does it allow a download for Linux. It only requires X11 in reality. Other than that, I agree.
What? I'm sorry, when did that happen? I must have missed that.
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You seem to be saying that you are using code from FSF, but are currently hiding it from view. If you would show your code, people would see that half of it came from the FSF, and they would obviously have copyright for the code they wrote. I don't think this was what you intended to say, but this was how it came across (to me). It's really quite simple:
- If you are using code from FSF, then you mostly have to use the GPL for all of your code. Not doing so is stealing from the FSF.
- If you are not using FSF code, you don't have to hand over anything, whether you choose to go with the GPL or not.
Countrary to what you seem to believe, the GPL doesn't force you to hand over your copyright to anyone. Hence, copyright-assignment should be a non-issue in choosing your license. You are of course free to dislike the GPL for any reason you like, but it does not force you to give away your copyright, so please don't use that as the single reason for not choosing the GPL.Thanks //Johan
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
One advantage of using this feature is that you can create a stylesheet for displaying a specific format of data. This stylesheet is cahced, so when you look at each "recipe" entry on a site, you only download the recipe data, not the decoration. The gains are deminished as the data size of the data gets larger or the size of the decoration gets smaller. It certainly shouldn't be used all over the site.
-no broken link
... Its not worth anything to us :)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
That "XML and HTML" was probably intended to give clueless people a general idea of what it looks like. You know, the kind of people who have no idea what XML is and would be unable to recognize the difference between XML and HTML anyway.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Ok, I thought it was funny. I'm going back to work now. *sigh*
It runs on top of X you idiot.
Matt Newell
http://web.mit.edu/is/athena/
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Mine is all the time, but then I've finally come around to the conclusion (after argueing year ago that this wasn't the case) that the user interface is the most important aspect of an application and should be designed first.
With widows domination, and the only commercially feasible way to develop a new OS for a machine being to start by porting a unix, operating systems are stuck in a deep rut. Instead of building a system that fails to suck, we're having religious wars about whether linux/unix or windows is the lesser of the two evils.
You're OS is a breath of fresh air.
I don't know if some of the philosophies you are using are the best, but that's because I haven't considered them before. This is good, it means the OS is outside the windows/unix square of thinking.
I've given up reading the slashdot comments, most of the negative ones are clueless (not a real OS, is just the same as <insert completely different technology> etc) except for open source - I respect your right not to make it open source, but read some of the posts - there are many options (for instance the way trolltech works) and open source is important for hobbyist appeal (which I imagine is very important if you're not a commercial development platform).
While they mention it may soon come with it's own kernal (and hense be a standalone OS), kernal abstraction gives you the added advantage that it can run on top of Linux, Mac OS, or Windows, saving you all the dual boot crap that comes with more primitive operating system archetectures.
Personally I'm hoping it's because the GUI is the thing people identify with and they need it to look pretty for investors, user interest etc.
PS Sorry about the state of this post, I'm drunk.
So where in the definition you provided does it say a kernal is an operating system? I can see it in the bit of text you provided at the bottom, but not in the Free Online Dictionary of Computing definition.
Lets drop the kernal is an OS thing, I stand by my original position that Athena is an operating system (which is still a pretty silly thing to argue over).
You should hire some lawyers. MIT might sue! Ever heard of Project Athena, you lusers?
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
CSS actually makes sense--just describe how you want your tags to be rendered and off you go. Semantic content and presentation are completely separated, and simply. If browsers actually *supported* it instead of wasting all their time half-implementing crappy ideas like XSLT, web developers could finally get something done...
Really, when was the last time that a client needed to do reformatting outside of font resizing?
See, once HTML became a language for presentation rather than semantics, everything went to hell, and *that's* what gave us the 100MB browsers. XML and stylesheets are just plaster over this fundamental cock-up. (Ok, that's a little harsh on XML, which may have other uses.)
Moderators: anybody going to take care of this? Hello?
======================================
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Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
Yeah, too bad QSSL ran themselves into the ground with the RTP huh?
My god, the marketing rejects of the world have gotten together and formed a new 'OS'!
Why dont you just be honest and say that your business plan requires commercial licensing, its preferable to the patronizing lie about rights.
And about business plans- it is true the old manufacturing paradigm has much more profit potential. But that may be what kills it.
Compared to it's predecessor, stinkymeat looks nifty...
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
hear hear!!
I saw the article and thought "Hey! a new OS, let's check it out..."
Then I was left wondering why an "OS" had another OS in the system requirements...
I hate to be one who bitches and moans, but for crying out loud guys!
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
I may be all the praises from "Anonymous Posts" I don't know.
Two misses do not make a hit!
Strange, I felt like flaming then because I thought you were confusing it with a window manager then I re-read the site and realised they confuse it themselves, they write that it's mostly X11 compatible as if to suggest its its own GUI server (or client from the X point of view :-) but also say its games performance is limited by X - suggesting it runs on top of X like a wm.
Also one of the requirements is a "X11 window server" - do they really mean server or do they mean client?
Am I confused or have is this just a hyped up window manager?
no sig.
Hmmmmm. Letting people edit the OS using DML - that sounds like a Really Good Idea! How many people know how to "edit" an "ordinary" OS kernel like Linux without pulling the rug out from underneath themselves in the process? We used to do this on Lisp-based OS's like Smalltalk, and yes it was cool, but also dangerous if you broke the wrong pipe or shorted the wrong wire to ground...
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
Yes, the project is commercial - but so are many Linux ventures (Loki, Red Hat - need I go on). The full version for Linux will be freely available for download, so I don't see the project's commercialisation as being a major factor here. I'm sure that there will be people that will want to see otherwise, but commercialism != evil corporate domination.
What do you expect? These are people who criticized KDE for using a commercial closed source toolkit QT to build their WM. Unless you've been living in a hole off-line for the past 2 years of so you should expect that kind of treatment. Stop whining.
Regarding use of the word "Operating System" - the Linux release available for download is in fact promoted as a Run-Time Environment. The download page is pretty clear on this, to quote the link: "Athena Run-Time Environment (i386 Preview)". This naming convention only applies to the Linux release. Other platforms are a different matter entirely - the exact reasoning behind all this will become clear as time moves on.
Requires Linux, Mac OS, or Window means that your product is not an OS. It sounds like you product is more like WM/API than anything else. Or perhaps Directory Opus for the Amiga. Something I would pay for for the PC. Yet you're splashing Athena Operating System across the title page. There is and inconsistancy, in what you are saying, and telling us that it will be obvious and/or explained later, or burying the details in some whitepaper doesn't cut it. /. readers don't buy it, and neither do suits.
As for open source, the policy on this is pretty clear and you should see somewhere between 25 - 50% of the project's source code available to the public. I've noticed a few people quoting certain areas of the website and twisting it as if to make out that we have some sort of evil attitude towards open source. While we don't use the GPL for our product, this does not mean that we hate the idea of publicly available source code. Using the GPL would have caused major problems for the project that would have meant handing over many of our rights over to the Free Software Foundation. It simply wasn't an option, but that doesn't make it a bad project.
Personally I don't care if you source code is open or not, I don't have time to fix other people's software, I do that at work. If I can't deal with the bugs in a piece of software, Trash it. But you have to tailor to Licenses to your audience, to some, very vocal people in Linux community think that Open source is too stiff and demand GPL. Others think Open Source is good enough. Many more just thing Free, (as in beer), is adequate. Unfortunately those who thing Free is good enough are usually not driving Linux technology, fortunatly they are probably driving Linux's market share.
Because of the scarcity of development tools on Windows. (Scarcity meaning that 'most' people don't have compilers.) Free, ( and non nag-ware) is usually pretty good for Windows releases of software.
Regarding distribution, this is a pretty simple policy that prevents third parties from distributing the software on CDs or from web-sites without our permission. That's all - a pretty basic expression of copyright. Although judging from some of the posted remarks, it could also be interpreted as an evil plot designed to destroy the Linux community from the inside, eating it away like a cancerous cell to ensure that Microsoft can still reign supreme - because after all, Rocklyte Systems is just another corporation out to get you all while you're tucked away in your beds. Sheesh.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Before we jump on the XML bandwagon, I think some things need to get cleared up. Those answers may be out there, but they definitely haven't gotten to everyone writing and using the parsers.
(yes, I know about the tags, but I don't want to spend all night writing in HTML, previewing to figure out how
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[an error occurred while processing this directive]
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"In theory? In theory, communism works! In theory...." --Homer Simpson
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
... but its problem lies in its stability. AthenaOS used to have it's own domain and it used to run a webserver on AthenaOS... there was something on /. awhile back about Athena's lack of stability. Maybe rocklyte.com is running Athena? I'd check now but netcraft is down (and I'm on my windows machine).
I'm sorry. I know this is off topic, but the HURD does NOT WORK YET! If you actually are using it, then you kick ass and should be famous. I'm really getting tired of hearing about how great it's going to be like MacOSX, but at least I have seen and used the public Beta and Darwin on various machines. I have yet to hear of anyone using HURD. I do, by the way, understand how you feel about Linux. I can't understand why people use it either, except that they don't want to use windows. For servers, which is the only real use of Linux, I prefer FreeBSD. It's faster, more stable, more secure and easier to install, and on top of that, has Linux binary compatibility. What more can you ask for in an OS? Oh yeah, a GUI other than X. Some day the day may come.
Someone stole my old sig.
Reading /.'s article might lead you to believe
that the FAQ is making a general statement about open
source..they are not, they are making a statement about
their product only. Here is a better quote:
That confused me at first, thinking that the were dissing open source but I don't think they are.
Kinda puts a new twist on the arguments in the Micro$oft case... Maybe now Micro$oft can say that, instead of being part of the OS, that it actually is the OS!
I think I missed something...
i just tried athena on an 433 with 128 megs of ram and it lagged like quake3 on a 300 baud modem. i thought CDE was bad...
"Finally, our proprietary scripting language, the Dynamic Markup Language (DML) features as the "glue" that links both products together. Based on XML and HTML technologies, you can use DML to build complex applications, user interfaces and interactive documents using the same methods that pioneered the development of the Internet"
That implies that DML is based on XML and HTML. Traditional HTML is not XML based. Thus this leads to the conclusion that DML is a XML and HTML like language and not a XML language as implied there. Also it's proprietary (smirk).
Trust the source!
*ahem* actually the problem here is the point that without at least a minor margine for 'open' source the code at the base is kinda pointless..I mean, it'll get out moded fast... and the fact that the white sheet reads as if to state that the people who worked on it didn't even know what they were doing...*shrugs* maybe I"m expecting too much from a documentation..
.sig under construction
Apple's OSX use XML based config files... kinda cool and kinda alot of text files.
.cig
I am merely saying that I doubt that this project could be a serous competetor to GNOME or KDE in its current non-open source state. The fact that it cannot be redistrubited is itself a major stumbling block, so yes, it could be a wonderful '2end best', but there already is a 'best' in GNOME or KDE which can be freely modified and redistrubited.
The problem is that it isn't open source, no matter how fast/cool/etc it actually might be. Thats why GNOME was formed, to create a totally free GUI, one which is totally under the GPL.
Remember that Windows 95 did look pretty nifty when it came out...
Based on the fact that little is known about it, and it's not 100% open. Real opinions based on a beta would be more helpful. Has anyone tried that yet?
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
okay so what did i miss? isn't this kind of like the passed up JavaOS (runs on any platform) or the new AmigaOS? Had this been based around Mach instead of the Linux kernel it might fit the bill of an Operating System a little bit more. i think the term "operating environment" may make a little more sense in this case, and makes this whole thing kinda lame. it's sort of like saying, let's make something like Xwindows with it's own scripting language (*cough* or java *cough*). Xwindows can run on any platform for the most part, but applications do have to be recompiled unless ran remotely. everything relies on the Xwindows libraries and such. The interesting part, however, is the fact that by running on multiple kernels, you're going to see different performance issues. There are going to be lots of optimization issues they have to worry about, especially since they're not entirely open source. I mean try running this on QNX4 (not the free downloadable version) with the kernel's priority turned down to 26 and this turned up to 27. if this code doesn't explicitly idle, the entire thing will lock when attempting to do pretty much anything related to memory or process allocation. Or Fsys running at a priority lower than 27. Sure this is very unlikely, and the average user would never have this setup (or use QNX4) but compare the differences in performance and the way the "OS" will work with windows 3.1 or 3.0. What about securities and getting around security issues of the native "kernel." How well will it adapt to things that are quickly becoming common to any OS like Video Overlays and 3d Acceleration (which also uses overlays). Are they going to attempt to write a wrapper around OpenGL that's object oriented (god knows that would be difficult). Or would they just say, we don't need Hardware 3d Acceleration. What about audio acceleration, which is becoming much more common through more advanced DSPs found on some newer soundcards that provide audio effects. Yet these are implemented in completely different ways on different "kernels" if implemented at all. 3d sound is another. My point is --- what's the point of attempting to abstract a UI from an OS. it's been done before (*cough* XWindows, javaOS, Inferno *cough*) and in cases like XWindows it's becoming incredibly difficult to even write applications that truly aren't dependant upon a specific operating system. For example, some XFree drivers only exist on linux (i810), and beyond that, when using hardware overlays, while i haven't looked at the new XFree source, i seriously doubt that it's copying the images from the video overlays to send across a network so i doubt that those 3d applications and accelerated movie displaying programs are even portable like Xfree was meant to be anyways. As we grow more media dependant for things like streaming audio and video and we desire higher framerates for watching our movies and games in, i just don't see where this type of thing will be useful in the near future. i can understand something similar on the hardware level where motorola, amd, mips, and intel decide to come up with a common opcode set that is translated by their processors into the appropriate microcode. much like the transmeta chips do or the pentium pro+ plus chips that translate x86 opcodes into it's internal microcode.
Ars-Fartsica asks:
What if the client wants to get the data displayed in a format they can control?
Who wants this?
Here's a short list off the top of my head:
* Visually impaired
* Batch software
* Different departments within an organization who need to access the same data in different ways
Yes, in each case, there is a better way to do it than XSL, but there are times when having the single interface that XML offers is worth the awkward programming of XSLT.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
> Now, Loki obviously doesn't(and in some cases,
> can't) release source code in a Free manner
For most games this is true, although Quake-derivatives have partial source released (SoF, for instance), and there is OpenUT, etc.
More importantly, though, all our tool/library source is availble, usually through GPL or LGPL. http://cvs.lokigames.com is our public CVS server.
m.
Loki Software, Inc.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
- Well, we know a *little* bit about XML.
... Here is a bit of fun, as is here and here.
Wow. You've generated XML documents straight out of "XML for Dummies." Better buy a ticket to Stockholm... I think there's a Nobel Prize in your future. - ...there are things that [Language P] can do quite exquisitely simply that are practically impossible in other languages, or quite clumsy
I hope you're not under the delusion that any of those sample XML documents are more than trivial to generate in other languages.nil
- For people dealing with very large and varied sets of XML formats
... it is infinitely more maintainable to have the conversions ... written out as a set of XSL sheets instead of ... one rat's nest of perl script after another.
Well, as a Java bigot, I am dedicated to eliminating Perl rats' nests wherever possible! In fact, I'd agree with your statement 100% if I'd ever had to deal with XML documents. I don't have to deal with XML documents and I've never seen anyone who did (with the exception of certain specific publishing applications).My data is always in the form of some kind of Java object or collection of Java objects. I suppose that if I were a Perl programmer, I'd have some Perl arrays, hashes or object containing my data instead.
An XML document in a file or a memory buffer does me almost no good whatsoever, so the closest I'll ever have to an XML document is the JDOM tree resulting from parsing the source document. This JDOM tree is, of course... you guessed it... a collection of Java objects. Again, if I were a Perl programmer, I could use Perl's powerful text munging to stay closer to the original XML, but I'd still end up parsing stuff out of it.
Seeing as how my data is not in XML documents, but in Java objects, I have a variety of standard, non-confusing, error-free and flexible ways of turning it into HTML, WML, PDF, TeX, MIF or some kind of XML. WebMacro is a personal favorite.
XML is a useful data description and interchange mechanism, but things got way out of hand before people finally figured out what they really wanted to do with it. During this time, I saw several systems that operated on data by passing it around as XML documents. This might make sense in a server-to-server context, but within an application, it represents a fuckload of unecessary parsing and reconstituting of XML documents. If I already have the data in a format that is convenient and accessable to my programming language of choice, why the hell would I turn it into an XML document, unless I was exporting it to some "black box" on the end of a socket connection? Because it's trendy?! No thanks!
XSL and XSLT are predicated on the idea that my data will be in the form of an XML document while I'm working on it. In practice, it turns out that this is extra effort. If I find myself in the position of being given existing XML documents that need only to be converted to another kind of document, I'll revisit XSL, but I tend to work on more dynamic data than that.
- Protium-XML will be immediately familiar to persons conversant with XML (or to a lesser degree, HTML).
Huh? This is like saying that LISP is "immediately familiar to persons who use parantheses." Bollocks. Do you know anything about XML or do you just like acronyms that start with "X"? They are cool, aren't they...- Perl, Coldfusion, Java Servlets, PHP and Microsoft Active Server Pages,
... none of these offer the speed, ... of ... Protium-XML...
Protium-XML runs as a CGI-bin application on a webserver.
Do you know anything about web servers? Do you realize that you're re-inventing JSP with taglibs? Except with really crappy performance?Fuck, why am I bothering? I can barely read your fucked up web pages on Linux Netscape. You don't even know HTML, you freak losers. So, to answer your conditional, you are not crazy; you are butt stupid. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I've finally come around to the conclusion ... that the user interface is the most important aspect of an application and should be designed first.
You could well be right, but since an operating system is not an application, your view doesn't apply to Athena.
Furthermore, whether or not the UI is the most important aspect of an application surely must depend on the purpose of the application, don't you think? If the application's main purpose is to control, manage or process things by itself with only occasional user control or none at all, then a pro-UI argument misses the point entirely.
And finally, UIs are not all GUIs, so (in the general case, not necessarily applicable here) a blinkered focus on the graphical regardless of requirements can also entirely miss the point. As has been pointed out many times in the past, graphical input specification typically lacks the power of linguistic specification by a huge margin. So, while I'd have to agree that when a user interface is applicable then it is usually important to keep UI issues in good focus, it is far from true that this always entails a focus on GUI issues. In fact, from a S/E point of view, I'd say that when a GUI is part of the product then the key focus should be on the interface layer between GUI and the core application. Without such a clean separation, graphic and core sides will always severely constrain each other during development of either, and the product will suffer in all areas.
Just how much any of this is relevant to Athena I can't really tell, but if they're really just a high-level abstraction layer as you suggest (and hence potentially very useful) then they should stop calling their product an operating system. And if it is not just an abstraction layer but really an operating system then my original statement still holds, I believe: a focus on GUI issues at this level is a mistake.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yeah. Or Smalltalk. Smalltalk on crack.
- Yes, the project is commercial - but so are many Linux ventures (Loki, Red Hat - need I go on). The
full version for Linux will be freely available for download, so I don't see the project's
commercialisation as being a major factor here. I'm sure that there will be people that will want to
see otherwise, but commercialism != evil corporate domination.
OK. Redhat etc. are corporate, but they return to the community. You do not. Hence the hostility.- Regarding use of the word "Operating System" - the Linux release available for download is in fact
promoted as a Run-Time Environment. The download page is pretty clear on this, to quote the link:
"Athena Run-Time Environment (i386 Preview)". This naming convention only applies to the Linux
release.
How is this even a runtime (not Run-Time, that's not a word) environment. A runtime environment implies its own binary (crossplatform?) format. You seem to be running pure Linux binaries. Oh yeah, with whatever APIs you call to make them AthenaOS binaires. I forgot. Just like my GNOME apps are really binaries for GNOME/OS. Right.- Other platforms are a different matter entirely - the exact reasoning behind all this will
become clear as time moves on.
Ummmmmm. Voodoo. You don't say.- As for open source, the policy on this is pretty clear and you should see somewhere between 25 -
50% of the project's source code available to the public. I've noticed a few people quoting certain
areas of the website and twisting it as if to make out that we have some sort of evil attitude towards
open source. While we don't use the GPL for our product, this does not mean that we hate the idea of
publicly available source code.
If you claim to be open at all what possible reason would you have not to be all open? Because competitors could steal your code? No (if you think this, then you don't know shit about the GPL). Because it is less secure? No (see last parenthetical comment). Because:- Using the GPL would have caused major problems for the project
that would have meant handing over many of our rights over to the Free Software Foundation.
How does using the GPL hand your rights to the FSF?? If you assigned them your copyright also, then it would, but that's not a requirement of the GPL.- It
simply wasn't an option, but that doesn't make it a bad project.
No, non-GPL != bad project. Project that claims to offer a crossplatform, kernel independent, GUI-based OS ( JAVA!!!!! ) but whose features above a WindowManager/Desktop Environment (i.e. GNOME/KDE) are pure vapor, while maintianing closed source == bad project.- Regarding distribution, this is a pretty simple policy that prevents third parties from distributing the
software on CDs or from web-sites without our permission. That's all - a pretty basic expression of
copyright. Although judging from some of the posted remarks, it could also be interpreted as an evil
plot designed to destroy the Linux community from the inside, eating it away like a cancerous cell to
ensure that Microsoft can still reign supreme - because after all, Rocklyte Systems is just another
corporation out to get you all while you're tucked away in your beds. Sheesh.
Redhat does it and is more succesful than you'll ever be. I'm sorry P. Manias, but you really do insult this community, and hence, you will fail (not with a bang...).There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
... and you have Mozilla. Of course it doesn't (not yet at least) it's just a partial reimplementation of the wheel. Basically what they do is wrap a subset of the OS with their class library. Doing so they created an application framework. Application frameworks are very usefull for creating applications (duh) and there are several good ones available. I fail to see why this should be labeled an OS. If we label this as an OS be sure to also label Java, Mozilla and python as a OS.
:)
Some technical remarks:
- what's the component model?
- what about securtity? I can just see people downloading this nice DML scripit that says it loves you
- what about applications? Surely the demo's look nice but there's more to applications than pretty screenshots. We just saw with mozilla how long it can take to develop a fully featured application (and believe me 2 and a half years is nothing).
- There's all this talk about object orientation, where's the language? At some point they actually recommend ansi C for the job!
Sorry for being so cynical but I really don't see the point of all this. Nor do I see any actual new stuff, just reinventions of the wheel. BTW did anyone notice what the faq says about opensource and what feature of the system is mentioned first? It's sort of conflicting.
Jilles
no hope to get rid of that one.
greetings, eMBee.
--
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
Of course there's the old saw that a human with a sufficiently large piece of paper and a pencil can do aught a 'puter can, but it's also understood that this is not always practical, or even really possible given the term of years left to a human.
Well, maybe, and then maybe not.
Perhaps we are completely crazy ... but check out Language P an XML compliant server side scripting language.
I don't feel as strongly about XML as you do; I think it has value as a markup language -- it's a worthwhile goal to give clients content formatting capabilities -- it achieves reasonable division of labor, allowing specialists closer to the user to make content presentation decisions. What if my client is visually impaired? What if my client is a software agent that doesn't care about visual presentation at all?
I think XML is a great format for word processing and spreadsheet document storage. I can directly access the file's content without having to bring the whole spreadhseet program into memory and deal with the arcana of whatever IPC mechanism the programmer built into it.
What escapes me is why people want to use XML for things that aren't markup. Sure it's easy to parse, but so are non-left-recursive grammars, or "ini" files for that matter. Probably the best example of XML being used in this manner is Apache's configuration files. While that implementation clean enough, it doesn't confer any kind of special benefits that I can see over an INI style file.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For example, all config files should be XML
ICK.
NO.
Have you ever read HTML e-mail in a text-mode-only mail reader? You're destined for minutes of fun fun fun trying to extract the text you want from the crap Hotmail/etc. wants to put in. What a blast.
What I like about Linux configuration is that I can do it at the console, from my parents' machine several cities away, and not have to worry about blowing a config option or wasting time trying to reproduce XML tags. I type, save, it's done, any mistakes are clearly my fault.
There are already 50 000 different formats for text-based config files in Linux/*NIX. Since XML won't automatically take over every single program and tool, that will give admins and users 50 001 different formats, and that one will be much less readable in the event of a necessary quick fix.
XML's great for some things. It's great if the user/admin will never actually edit the config file, but use a tool instead. Unfortunately, I like to get down and dirty with my config files, and I don't feel like digging through tags 'n crap to dig out the option I want to edit. Not to mention the bloat XML can cause...I can forsee situations where XML tags could bloat a config file by as much as 2x. Again, as long as the user/admin doesn't need to ever touch the actual config file, XML can work. Beyond that, kill it.
For comparison, I also hate Netscape/Mozilla's "prefs.js" file - ugh.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
XSLT is a great boon to Web developers and designers because it gives you a layer between what designers can touch and what developers can touch that acts as a sort of neutral zone. It also allows you to port your site between content management systems with fairly little pain.
For info on where this goes in the real world, check out XSP from Cocoon. This is a Java-based system, but there are XSP-based equivalents for other languages, namely Perl's AxKit.
Both of these technologies are Apache-specific, and in their early stages. I think for AxKit, the database interaction is the weakest link, but there's enough good mod_perl/DBI code out there that I don't see that as a big deal.
What I like about Linux configuration is that I can do it at the console, from my parents' machine several cities away, and not have to worry about blowing a config option or wasting time trying to reproduce XML tags. I type, save, it's done, any mistakes are clearly my fault.
Why can't this be done with XML config files? XML isn't some binary format, it's TEXT!
There are already 50 000 different formats for text-based config files in Linux/*NIX. Since XML won't automatically take over every single program and tool, that will give admins and users 50 001 different formats, and that one will be much less readable in the event of a necessary quick fix.
You're an admin a decade from now and you're used to the new BIND configuration. You find an old Linux 2.0.x box running the old version of BIND. Now you'll have to look up the docs and learn it. Rather than with our theoretical XML translation engine (from XML to format X) taking care of that. (Oh, bind8? Alright..)
I respect that you like the less complicated scenario of native config files, and in some cases they are more suited to the config data at hand (ie no `tags and crap'), but XML does give some order to it that some people will like..
--
while($s ne "just another perl hacker"){ $s.=["a".."z"," "]->[rand 25] }
Portability - the ability to have the code allows the userbase to reimplement (ie, port) the code to another platform - that may or may not be currently supported. Porting of code may happen now, while the code owner still exists, or even in the future, long after the owner is gone, or even after the hardware no longer is manufactured. As long as the code exists, future support and upgrades are always possible.
Security - by having full access to the source code, the userbase may easily see if and where the code may provide a security breach, and actively fix the problem. This is especially important in a server environment (though I tend to think that no sane admin would be running Athena on a server).
The first issue will keep your company chasing new hardware platforms, while the second will keep it from becoming a business platform (though that didn't hurt M$, of course, people are less naive today - or maybe that's wishful thinking)...
Personally, I would love to run Athena - but these two issues make me believe I should, at minimum, take a "wait-and-see" attitude. I am sorry that there is lashback at corporations, but the public is waking up to the fact that corps don't exist for the people, they exist for the $$$.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If it can't be distributed by third parties does that mean I can't mirror?
actually that's exactly what a kernel is - an operating system.
How we know is more important than what we know.
the definition of a operating system is:
operating system (OS): The low-level software which handles the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the
user when no application program is running.
The OS may be split into a kernel which is always present and various system programs which use facilities provided by the kernel to perform higher-level house-keeping tasks, often acting as servers in a client-server relationship.
Some would include a graphical user interface and window system as part of the OS, others would not. The operating system loader, BIOS, or other firmware required at boot time or when installing the operating system would generally not be considered part of the operating system, though this distinction is unclear in the case of a rommable operating system such as RISC OS.
The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around the machines on which it runs.
from the Free Online Dictionary of Computing. So as you can see, the definition of an operating system is different in different contexts, and from a Computer Science perspective, the operating system is the piece of software which provides an interface to applications that is independant of the hardware that it is running on. This is exactly what a kernel does.
How we know is more important than what we know.
oh yer.. but we're on slashdot. I say Athena is a middle-ware.. surely we can both agree on that?
How we know is more important than what we know.
It is an interesting way to tackle certain problems: rather than writing a whole operating system to abstract away the complexity of working with the hardware, you get another operating system to do the heavy lifting, and all you have to worry about is interfacing with the [hopefully well documented, or better still open source] API. And since Moore's Law is on your side, you can get away with this layered approach without too much of a performance hit, freeing you do work on more interesting high level problems.
This is all assuming, of course, that the underlying OS is more of an assistant than a straightjacket -- we want enough rope to not only hang ourselves, but to do so in a cool variety of ways :) -- and then you get into some other interesting-yet-pointless-and-kinda-boring questions about the difference between one of these "new operating systems" and pre-existing layered techniques like, say, Flash in web browsers or Gnome on top of X-Windows. Yeah, I'll agree that it's a stretch (at best) to call Gnome or Flash an operating system, and yeah I'll agree that there might not be so much difference between those plugin components and this idea.
But so what? If what you're dealing with is some kind of extension to existing tech that makes it in fact something pretty fundamentally a different thing, does that not make it any less interesting? Put another way, if you're into cars (which I'm not, but this is the best example I can think of), is a souped up hotrod any less impressive than a factory built sports car? The Porsche/Linux may be a more impressive machine for being designed so well from the ground up, but at the same time, the rebuilt VW-Bug-with-the-911-engine/Athena goes just as quick, and it's impressive to see what people can do with that platform.
I dunno, it's an interesting but probably unresolvable question. If Athena can be made to run on it's own, as BeOS can, that'll win it some cred points. I'm not sure if that matters though -- if they can accomplish some of their design goals while working inside the sandbox, it's still going to be an interesting achievement. I'm all for seeing people do new & interesting things with too-stale platforms like Windows & Linux...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
No, I never said platform independance is a "load of bull" I said that "compile once, run everywhere" is a pile of bull. There's a difference. Given well-written POSIX apps, and well written POSIX implementations, you don't have to modify code when porting between OSs. In practice that might still not be true, but as POSIX compient OSs like BSD and Linux penetrate the market, I'll bet that both apps and implementations are going to improve.
I'm fundementally against the idea of Java. I don't think that the best way to implement apps is through I virtual machine. I think that API level compatibility is a simpler, faster way of doing things. Of course, I'm a speed freak and despise anything that is less efficient than it could be. While you might want to turn this into a C++ vs. Java debate, I'd say its more of a POSIX vs. Java debate. And from what I've seen so far, POSIX seems to be winning.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Okay. Field this one for me. How can I make commerical and OSS work together? It seems, that according to the GPL, source must be freely distributable. That means I cannot really charge for a product without doing some "sell the support" bull. If you can teach me how to release a GPL product that must be payed for (per copy) just like any other product, then I think you're "commercial!=prorietory" arguement has some merit. Otherwise, it's just smoke.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Sell HW: Might work, but not all apps can work like this. It also depends on the quality of the HW you can make.
Sell support: Most people except a minimum level of free support for their products, free or not. Also, user groups, email, and the internet are negating much of what profit you might make from software.
Dual-license: Plausible, but it still requires that you make software free to some users.
You still don't answer my question. How can I sell open software without making it free. I want to be able to charge for each copy of the software the user buys, but I want to give them the freedom to modify the software for their needs, and distribute those mods to other users. There doesn't yet exist an OSS solution that does this (OS-X comes close, though) and the GPL certainly doesn't seem to allow this.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's the problem. You're saying that it is possible to mix commercialism and open source. I'm saying that its not. By opening your product, you let competitors in, you lose a lot of revenue (because people like CheapBytes cut into your profits) and you lose control of your product. I think it is pretty much impossible to reconcile open source and commercialism, unless you're willing to give up major parts of one of them.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
People said the same thing about C and ASM. Its still not true, well optimized ASM is still faster than well optimized C. Given equal optimization, Java will always be slower than C. However, you get to the point where it really doesn't matter because the underlying machine is so powerful that the couple of percent difference is neglegible. I dislike Java for different reasons, mainly that compile once run everywhere is a load of bull, and most of Java's core (ie not stuff like the class libraries) can be replicated with good portable objective C code. (Does such a thing exist?) I think the POSIX way is absolutely the correct way to go. Most new OSs these days support POSIX, to some extent, and porting between implementations is a piece of cake. If POSIX was expanded to include GUI features, cross platform issues porbably wouldn't be a Java benifet aymore.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thirteen megs? I find that hard to believe. BeOS uses libc, and it takes up less than a meg.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, the project is commercial - but so are many Linux ventures (Loki, Red Hat - need I go on).
Now, Loki obviously doesn't(and in some cases, can't) release source code in a Free manner, Red Hat surely does. Your company will not be doing so. Don't compare yourselves to them.
The full version for Linux will be freely available for download, so I don't see the project's commercialisation as being a major factor here.
I don't expect you do release your source code under a GPL-like license, but I would expect you to at least understand why a lot of people want it. A *lot* of open-source type programmers use commercial software that often costs thousands of dollars - they arn't out for a free lunch, obviously. They want things to be Free(notice the capital "f", which I'm using to refer to free as in freely modifyable, redistributable, etc., etc.). In this case, your project's commercialism *IS* a problem. Since you won't be Freely distributing your source code, that goes against the ethics of many people. Just because you're giving something away without charging for it doesn't mean that's good enough.
I'm sure that there will be people that will want to see otherwise, but commercialism != evil corporate domination.
Personally, I don't equate commercialism with evil corporate domination, and I apologize for those here that do. However, I've grown up in corporate North America. I see it all around me. I've been burned so bad and so often that I never want it to happen again. And it does. Again and again. I'll never use your desktop if I can avoid it, because you have the control. If you end up being sucessful enough to cause me harm, then you very well could. I don't want to be in that position ever again(even though I know I can't avoid it), and if I can use a Free alternative, I will.
Using the GPL would have caused major problems for the project that would have meant handing over many of our rights over to the Free Software Foundation.
Since your problem is with giving rights over to the Free Software Foundation, why don't you take the GPL and modify it accordingly? Use a GPL-like license, which will allow the "people" to take it, modify it, redistribute it, all Freely.
Now, if your problem is with THAT, then leave the FSF out of it. It has no bearing on your comments otherwise.
Now, you talk about evil plots and the like. Come on! Please. Like I said before, I've grown up in this world, and I don't like it. I can lose my house because someone in the bank had a bad day. With a few button presses, I can lose all my credit. They have POWER; unadulterated, unshakeable power. Too many commercial entities these days are nearly beyond control. Any sort of control. They're so close it's not funny. Right now the only things govenments have that corporations don't is armies. How long will it be before that changes? What will happen then? The government will *finally* move to do something to protect its people(using military might, if necessary), and find that there's nothing even IT can do.
But this isn't evil. It's just the way it is. It's the status quo. Your company isn't evil.
But remember this: just because you don't set out to screw people, doesn't mean that people don't get screwed.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
But besides that there is still something which puzzles me. Netware (remember?) also was considered to be a full blown NOS (Network Operating System), it just needed DOS to boot it. After that DOS became obsolete and could even be removed from memory. A proven fact IMO since you could basicly use -any- DOS version around, despite its (lack of) capabilities. Netware could even be made to run under OS/2.
So now I wonder if this is the same for this program. What I've read so far makes me pretty convinved that this is indeed far from being an OS but I still wonder if it is possible that it only needs to 'boot' in order to take control over the system. If that would be the case then they can indeed call this product an OS since the booting procedure of an OS is totally irrelevant to the question if it is indeed a full blown OS.
1. Qwartz 2. MacOS X 3. IE 5 4. Yes 5. Yes 6. Better than anything you've seen 7. Yes 8. Yes 9. MS-Office 2001 10. It's X (=10) :o)
I think you were describing MacOS X, werent't you ?
Not for Christmas, but maybe for Valentine's day.
Stéphane
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
You can get the source code to the core java APIs and the platform specific C/C++ code; you just have to sign an agreement stating that you won't release or post the source code in any form.
I was interested in Sun's implementation of the CORBA ORB in JDK 1.3, so I downloaded the source code. Interesting stuff to look at -- mind numbing at times, too. Then again, people looking over some of my code from five years ago would say the same thing.
-----------------
I suppose this might be a post of the glaring obvious, but I don't see why anyone would bother to work on this thing. An individual "hacker" with a few free hours and a wish to mess about with some code might work on KDE or Gnome or any of a thousand "cool" GPL projects. Heck, I build on your work, you build on my work and we all enhance the "common good". How is working on Athena enhancing anyone's "good" other than the company who owns this software? It seems about as benevolent as working on a project to enhance Microsoft Windows and then handing the source over to Microsoft to use/sell as they wish afterward. "Merry Christmas", indeed...
Sure, this might look "cool" but as I said there are thousands of worth-while "cool" things around to work on. Would you prefer to spend your free time and fun coding efforts on a project under GPL, or would you rather spend your time enhancing a product for Rocklyte so they can sell the fruits of your (free) labour? I know what my choice would be.
Somehow, unless this company has a huge change of direction in a very big hurry, I can't see it getting very far. Maybe if they had a Windows enhancement that they were trying to sell it would go over better with their "audience". Flogging this thing to the hard-core that is the Linux crowd seems a bit out-of-bounds to me.
As I said, this might be a blinding flash of the obvious....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
You can see the SGMLness shining through in the current XML committee strategies - the underlying notion that XML, like SGML, must be a world unto itself with all imaginable functionality fulfilled through an associated standard (like SGML had the truly loathesome DSSSL).
So what you get is a design-by-committee concept of a programming language expressed as XML...notwithstanding the fact that truly good portable cross-platform programming languages already exist - perl, java, php, etc, ETC, ETC. Of course these languages, unlike XSLT, actually implement most of the programming concepts of the 1960s, like object-orientation. Added to which, all of these languages, even in the worst case, provide performance that XSLT will never match, and a higher degree of readability that XML is capable of (try reading any mildly complex XSL template without getting a headache).
I could go on and on...unfortunately the XML standards bodies have run amok, defining standards for any silly design idea their committees can come up with...its SGML all over again.
Who wants this?
Really, when was the last time that a client needed to do reformatting outside of font resizing? Its amusing to take the high road to that place where clients receive display-agnostic content and render it according to stylesheets, but guess what - there's no demand for this functionality, and imagining a perceived demand is what is going to leave us with 100MB browsers.
No, it cannot - ever read any moderately complex XSL style sheets? Go to XML.com and check some out and report back to me on their "ease of use".
a separate document that is much easier for programmers and not-such-programmers alike to deal with, without breaking your application.
It seems to me that you are indirectly claiming that XSL is readable. Are we talking about the same standard??
Look, I've worked in the SGML and XML document translation industry for years. DSSSL didn't fly and XSL won't fly, so don't preach to those markets because I know how they work. XSLT was dead on arrival, much like DSSSL. I don't know of anyone doing volume tranformations that is even remotely considering this dud technology.
There is already software to address this, and the best solution is at the OS level anyway - if they can't see small text, then it makes sense to increase the font size of ALL text on their screen, not just their browser. Sorry, web client-based solutions are not the way to go here.
Batch software
Access a database directly, you'll get better performance.
Different departments within an organization who need to access the same data in different ways
People have been dangling this out for years, and still no one can come up with a compelling case where it is worthwhile to implement, or where it is actually needed - Oh, over in accounting they need to see the headline in helvetica, not times! These are non-issues.
Naturally we shouldn't be overly concerned that Athena doesn't meet a "proven" (here, POSIX) standard--we aren't all using FORTRAN or writing real-time [deterministic-time] algorithms, are we?--, but shouldn't we take a moment to consider the fact that Athena's FAQ says: :) operational behavior on ANY level of what you're doing...short of writing bits out to a file (but you're getting nowhere near the FS--or any hardware for that matter). Forget HAL: this is HAL:THISMACHINE:HARDWARE:PERIPHERALS:OUTPUT:VISIBL E:MONITORS:ENVIRONMENT:WINDOWS:MYWINDOW:PLEASE:PRE TTY:PLEASE:LET:ME:NEAR:A:SET:METHOD(&MyAthenaApp.m ywindow.mypallette.color, GREEN); Not that this isn't useful, but what if their idea of green isn't your idea of green? Just dig around the standard, right, it's bound to be there somewhere? ;-)
:)
["Does the Pandora Engine support POSIX compliancy?"]
"No. It's not practical, or even possible to implement most of the POSIX standard" (my bold)
because:
"POSIX was designed for procedural systems, so given that the Pandora Engine is object based..."
Now, it is of course a Good Thing (for easy, modular programming) to have a heavily OOP'd, high-level 'environment', (we can't even say OS anymore[1]) that can easily optimize later whatever tasks it does allow the application to run. However, the fact should worry us that the developers say it is not "possible" to run functions on a low enough level to ensure any kind of guaranteed (or "realtime"
"Pandora does not use a separate interface for game development (such as a DirectX style API)"..."Currently we are missing 3D support (OpenGL for example)"...Hmmmm...correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that their "object based" methods are the only things programmers will have available, without even the Standardizd (eg OpenGL) niceties we can use to get around protected architectures once they're implemented?
Oh well: "there are plenty of existing engines that can be ported when the need for a 3D engine arises."
But I wonder...does "can be ported" mean "We can't exactly use them, because of how commercial we are, and we're not allowed to port GNU stuff, but, we assure you, we'll have really, really similar-sounding naming schemes..."
Anyone see a different take on this?
[1] Athena on BeOs on WIN2K on Linux??? Oh the thngs we do.
The level of cluelessness that you refer to has everything to do with one thing: KARMA.
A lot of people post nonsense comments to go along with stories like this in an attempt to raise their precious Karma.
Most of the people that posted comments to this article probably didn't read the links... it's all about getting your post out early so that you have a better change of being moderated up. And I know what I am talking about here... after I KarmaWhored my first Slashdot account up to the maximum of 50, I opened up another account... and did the same in only two months of posting comments.
The facts are: Slashdot is broken. It's moderation system invites users to post assinine comments in a blatant attempt to post something "clever" enough to get moderated up. The only people who really get what Slashdot has become are the bonifide trolls and goats.cx posters.
The content of the stories have become less important to the average Slashdot reader then getting moderated up.
For example: The person who originated this thread, TheAncientHacker, and I recently engaged in a series of posts to another Slashdot article. While it was an interesting series of discussions, the truth is, my original comment that started the thread was posted for one reason and one reason only: to get moderated up. I reached that goal. The truth is, I had NO IDEA what I was talking about. Any quick, half-witted comment that makes a jab at Microsoft is destined to be moderated up on Slashdot -- especially if you happen to be one of the first 50 people to get your comment appended to a story.
Why, you may ask, would I do such a thing? Simple. I have a goal of getting as many Slashdot user accounts created as I can, getting them maxed out at 50 karma points and then auctioning them off on ebay. Just to prove a point that the current moderation system in use by Slashdot JUST DOESN'T WORK.
This question was most probably asked the most during M$ trials. Along comes Athena (oh pls, MIT's Athena is an established name in the industry) and gets a story up here with it being refered as an Operating system. Now, if I understand it correctly, rocklyte's work is along the similar line as the GGI project or X or maybe even along the lines of Gnome/KDE. Why would they then wish to call it an Operating System? Has it gone so far that the meaning of operating sytem has been clouded? Shouldnt we call KDE/Gnome operating systems by itself? What term should we give them? Window managers? (Surly not). Shells? (Maybe a bit more technically correct). But opearting systems? Sure it does IO, but at IO at what level should be concidered to be worthy of the operating system title?
Trust the source!
First, I'd like to know just how much "Open Source" code was lifted, and from where.
If it's from X, well, that's cool (BSD-style). If it's from the Linux Kernel, that would probably not be cool (likely just GPLed). I guess we'll see when it comes out, but the reference to 'strict licensing terms' makes me a little leery.
Also, could they pick a new name before it comes out, please? Between MIT's Project Athena, and AtheOS, I'm confused already.
Until then, that's the most kick-ass version of twm I've ever seen, and at the moment it looks like they went through a lot of work to implement essentially a new version of Enlightenment on top of Linux; until they expand their platform support a bit I won't be that impressed.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Reading their blurb, there seemed to be something missing, something unsatisfactory. Then I realized that I just didn't relate to Athena at all because they appear to be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, as far as I am concerned. I can think of many areas in which operating systems need improvement, but fancy GUIs is not one of them. My work is never constrained by inadequacy of the GUI interfaces I use, even when there is a graphic element to it --- a key benefit that stems directly from the fact that on Unix systems X11 is not actually part of the operating system per se but merely provides a sort of viewport.
OK, so there are a few non-GUI aspects to the Athena product, but the overall focus is so strongly tied to their GUI in virtually all areas that it raises the question of whether they are addressing a real requirement. Operating systems do a lot of things and managing graphics visuals and graphic-oriented input is only one of them, and a fairly peripheral task at that, arguably one that should be abstracted out rather than permeating the design.
Without clear separation of concepts you lose traceability of design requirements and hence of product quality --- this applies almost universally. In the fullness of time, the end result for Athena is going to be a fancy GUI system and a poor operating system, I'd venture.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
But you didn't follow the rules! You must give all your work away for free, along with the copyrights , especially to teenagers who don't have the skill to type 'make install', but need all the sources anyway.
It is very important that when you use the word 'operating system', you only refer to versions of unix. You must understand that linux is superior to all other unixes, but that the operating system that was the great pure evil and the companies that were the great satan in the eighties (IBM, HP, Sun and SGI) are now cool. Some people even seem to think Apple is now coolish, because it does something with a free unix.
Examples of things that are NOT and operating system: windows (32 bit patch on a graphical userinterface for an obsolete interrupt handler ripped off from cp/m), the driver software of gamig consoles (no unix shell), NT (a vms rip-off, which wasn't a real OS anyway, because we don't understand how the shell works).
If you don't follow these rules, you are not showing your dedication to linux and open source. Remember how compaq were slagged off for offering the linux binaries for the DEC fortran compiler free for download? "Where are the sources?!!" and "This is a deliberate attempt to torpedo the vastly superior but non commercial gnu f77 project" and "How dare they pollute linux with a compiler for an inferior language"
If you are still reading: I was quite impressed with the athena demo. I hope it will run independant of X11 soon.
The real news here would be the project's host ISP. All those HUGE screenshots, and not yet slashdotted? They must be screaming out a pipe the size of AOL's.
Well, I agree with some of your points, but...
download XML documents, and an associated XSL document would turn it into something displayable on the client side. God forbid a Perl, Java, PHP, or ASP program on the server do this for you
What if the client wants to get the data displayed in a format they can control? Surely you don't suggest implementing everything on the server? Perhaps clients should be spared the processor cycles necessary to change font sizes too, since the site designer obviously knows what's best for everyone.
OK, a little harsh maybe. But you see my point. I think the concept of getting raw data from the server and being able to present it client-specifically is an awesome idea. You can always provide a suggested style for the user to view the data as you intended, but why would you stop those who want it from displaying it in a custom format?
you will see an example where they make a widget resizable by attaching "resize" objects to it. "resize" is an object?! Diagram that, UML-mongers!
Actually, this is a really cool design pattern called Decorator. Read up on it, it's actually a useful idea for some applications.
1. No one cares that it's commercial. We care that it's proprietary. Free software is about freedom. If we can't make it better, fix it when it breaks, share it with our friends, and use it in our businesses, then we don't want it.
2. If you say "Open Source", you ought to read the definition at http://www.opensource.org/osd.html. Also, using the GPL does *not* turn over the copyright on your project to the FSF or anyone else. Since I know you're smart enough to read a license and understand it, I can only assume you're lying in a cynical attempt to manipulate the Free Software community.
3. Preventing 3rd party distribution is not how Open Source works. If you're going to be honest, tell us you don't give a shit about Open Source, that you think it's a flawed business model, and that we're all a bunch of commies. But don't lie to us. We hate that.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Just in case anyone is curious.... here's the book to read if you want to improve your oo code 10 fold. It includes the above mentioned "decorator" pattern as well as about 20 others:
Design Patterns
This is the book that helped me move from writing Hello World type of oo applications to truly far reaching, extendable, and maintainable apps. Also, it made my applications more modular and therefore made the workload more easily distributed across a team of people... something that is very important to OSS developers and also something that they don't really teach you in school very well.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
It is a personal belief of mine that all of the tools and config files of Linux distros should be upgraded. For example, all config files should be XML, and tools should be easier to use.
This Athena OS takes this idea and makes an attempt in doing it. However, it simply is not gonna work because if does not have the 'charisma' to succeed. It is already getting bashed with the first posts on Slashdot.
My major technical qualm is with DML. This effort parallels the XPFE (XML,JS,CSS) GUI framework that is used in Mozilla. It would be so much better to use this Mozilla technology because it has a better chance of succeeding (ask me if you want some reasons).
Anyway, life goes on, and maybe something else that is better will crop up soon.
EverCode
Isn't a kernel defined as any abstract layer immediately above the machine? And an OS is generally defined by its kernel. Assuming it really existed, a kernel-free OS would require all binary software to already be in machine instructions (i.e. no OS, a contradiction) -- or that a copy of the "kernel"/OS be part of every software component(pretty useless).
These guys are playing a simple game of symantics and not calling their kernel what it really is.
Not to be confused with AtheOS, which has already been discussed. It also started as an AmigaOS clone.
Is anybody else confused? I am.
Images are just an excuse to upgrade your 1200 bps modem to a 28.8.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
How does this compare to Eazel? Isn't Eazel going to be the best?
Seems to me they are trying to do roughly what SashXB from IBM is doing, just less well, using less standard components, and in closed source form.
I can't believe these guys have gotten very far with their code. Otherwise, they'd realize a few things:
1) This document could be used to describe Win32, NeXTStep, BeOS, etc. (except without the B.S. about not having a kernel).
2) API's are not necessarily procedural as they describe. Certainly BeOS is a good example of this, as are the standard Java libraries.
3) OO languages do not "translate" down to procedural code. They can and do compile down to binaries, depending on the implementation. Binaries, btw, are written in the CPU's native instruction set, and there is basically no other way to do it (besides using an interpreter which is -gasp- written in binary). I can only imagine these guys are talking about the Cfront compiler which implemented the original C++, or the various freeware Eiffel and Sather compilers I've seen. Certainly there are other ways to go.
4) They are essentially saying that reference counting is better than automatic memory management. Certainly that is debatable, but guess what? Most OS API's are C or C++, so they already do reference counting to manage their objects. This is not a revolutionary concept.
5) This is an "operating system", but it relies on something else to provide hardware abstraction. Guess what, it's NOT an operating system then.
6) This project does what Taligent, Java, Oberon, Smalltalk, Inferno, etc. have either tried or succeeded in doing. Revolutionary? I don't think so.
But finally, by FAR the clearest indicator that this thing is not going to make it is that they don't have a very clear set of requirements. If you look at their "Goals", they are entirely "OS designer-centric" rather than based on some final result that the end user of the system is going to get. This is a clear sign that this is just an academic exercise with no real purpose. They don't even make a clear case for the problem that's out there which they are trying to solve.
sigs are a waste of space
- What if the client wants to get the data displayed in a format they can control?
... I think the concept of getting raw data from the server and being able to present it client-specifically is an awesome idea.
Yeah, but that's not the concept behind XML/XSL. It is, to some extent, the concept behind XML; the server delivers raw data for whatever purposes the client needs it. However, if I attach an XSL or XSLT document, then I'm telling you how I want it displayed. The issue is "where is the presentation layer"? If I deliver you HTML, that question has been determined: I'm at the presentation stage. If I deliver you some kind of XML, then I have no idea how (or if) the data is to be presented to a human.Your point is quite valid, but the issue of how data is delivered and presented is artificial. It was created by people who forgot that not all clients are web browsers and not all transports are HTTP. (Actually, they probably never knew, because they got out of school in 1996 and went to work at Microsoft.) "Web" designers who use a Model-View-Controller design don't have any problem delivering an "XML version" of their data, where appropriate. The XML+XSL was a clumsy one-size-fits all approach. "It's for browser! It's for middle tiers!" Oh I see... I'm a server and I don't know what I'm serving to or why, I just spray whatever data you want into any socket connection that comes my way. That works great until you start serving data that has some value (like account information or a telnet session or email for a particular recipient). Then the server has to be a little more careful about what data is sends and what it is willing to do on behalf of the client.
- Actually, this is a really cool design pattern called Decorator. Read up on it, it's actually a useful idea for some applications.
No it isn't. Adding a resize object to a widget in order to make it resizable is not a Decorator pattern. A proper use of the Decorator patter would be to create a DecoratedWidget base class that contained a reference ordinary Widget. The DecoratedWidget would pass through ordinary Widget methods and subclasses of DecoratedWidget could add "one-off" methods such as resize() without creating zillions of subclasses of Widget.This design pattern is heavily used in Java, particularly when doing a lot of AWT (GUI) programming (something I avoid, but I've done enough of it...). Decorators are particularly useful when your language doesn't support multiple inheritance (like Java). Java, in particular, supports a mechanism called an "interface" which is like a pure virtual object. You can "implent" as many interfaces as you'd like, but you have to provide method implementations for all of each interface's methods. Often, for an inteface "Foo", there will be a class called "SimpleFoo" that you can use in a Decorator pattern to provide the base functionality for implementations of Foo. Read up on it.
This seems to me very similar to what the new Amiga OS and Java VM are trying to accomplish: platform independence through implementation of a virtual environment on top of different operating systems. It seems like hardware, according to Moore's Law, has finally progressed to the point where it seems feasible to run an "operating system within an operating system". For many people this may seem like a disgusting waste of clock cycles, but we have only to look at BeOS to see that new operating systems running on raw hardware is no longer feasible. Supporting the plethora of device drivers is simply impossible with the exception of a few: Windows by virtue of their monopoly, Linux/BSDs through open source, and MacOS because it runs only specified hardware. For commercial companies, I think, their last best chance for innovations in operating system environments is through something like this.
.NET, but I believe that to be a false promise to lure developers while not delivering. I'm placing my bets on the Java which already has a great headstart but only needs the improvements in GUI performance.
This is definately a sign of the increasing tendencies of software torwards homogeneousness and platform independence. Even Microsoft has caught on with the
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This seems like nothing more then a typical 'cute' idea that gets some work done on it until people suddenly come to the realization that thats all it ever was. The XML aspect of it does indeed make it fairly appealing and flexible (is it just me, or do people actually think that DML DTD is actually a language in itself?), but its overall closed sourceness and other nuisances take away just about any real appeal. This is nothing more then a company wanting to make themselves appear open source friendly while in reality not releasing anything very useful. And as for their claim of being kernel independant, they've certainly demonstrated that ability well by relying not only on linux, but also on x86, and X11.. doesn't seem very independant, does it? That might not be such a bad thing though, do we really need another abomination like oracle running around, in graphical form?
I always knew that Athena was going to get a hostile reaction from some sectors of the Linux community, but many of the comments I've been reading are just a little extreme (well, a lot). Whatever the reasons for such hostility, I have a few points to make:
P. Manias
Rocklyte Systems
The remaining ones are about whether they should call themselves an OS and whether they should use the name Athena. Is Slashdot now News for Editors?
How about some actual discussion of the technology involved? Are there no nerds left on here?
Have you ever seen one of those situations where someone takes a smattering of technical knowledge and industriously recreates something that already exists... but does it badly? (If you haven't seen this, Microsoft has a whole catalog of products to illustrate this point.)
There is so much cluelessness on the Athena OS site, it's really hard to figure out where to start, but getting down to the core technology: DML is stupid. DML is the "Object Oriented GUI language in XML." Buzzword compliant? You bet? Useful? Not!
XML is a rotten format for programming languages. Anyone who's worked with XSLT knows what I mean. XSLT (related to XSL) is, essentially, a programming language that converts XML documents into other XML documents and XSLT itself is (drum roll please) an XML document. Why? 'Cause XML documents are sooooo late 90's -- and in the late 90's, you could sell shit-on-a-stick if it was XML-compliant. If you've ever seen an XSLT program/document that did anything vaguely complex, you immediately think, "Fuck! I could do this in 10 lines of..." Perl? PHP? Java? Visual Basic? All of the above! There is no language that is not preferable to XSLT.
The idea that spawed XSL/XSLT was that in "the future", browsers wouldn't download HTML, they'd download XML documents, and an associated XSL document would turn it into something displayable on the client side. God forbid a Perl, Java, PHP, or ASP program on the server do this for you -- no, let's make the thin client fat again, by giving it the responsibility of not only rendering, but organizing the data. Proof positive that this was a dumb idea what that Internet Explorer 5.0 proudly featured a robust implementation of this idiocy.
So, already, we have the case that anyone who isn't laboring under the deficits inflicted by a head injury has figured out that you really don't want to force any kind of programming language to look like a valid XML document. So what is the big deal with "Athena OS"? Oh, it's a programming language that is XML-compliant. How clever.
This "XML-compliant" programming language causes you to do really weird things architecturally. If you read the whitepaper, you will see an example where they make a widget resizable by attaching "resize" objects to it. "resize" is an object?! Diagram that, UML-mongers!
Piled on top of basic Bad Technology(tm), are numerous statements that indicate that these guys have never looked at any other system. Their claims about the flexibility of their design are laughable to anyone who has seen Motif widget management or Java AWT LayoutManagers (GridBagLayout is a bear, but it's incredibly powerful). Seriously, they try to sound like they've invented a better mousetrap, but you start to wonder if they've ever seen a real mouse. Like, where did they get this gem:
- XML and HTML standards are defined by their respective organisations and have no direct association with Rocklyte Systems or the DML standard.
It's like they don't even know where HTML and XML come from... but whereever they're from, it's not Rocklyte Systems and we want to remind you of that. This is just laugh-out-loud funny.- Java
...but six years too late and not nearly as good.it may become more in the future. but calling a window manager an OS is a major exaggeration.
for it to be an OS it would need to allow me to log into it, and create an environment where i can run programs without them being aware that they are actually on a different system (the linux host).
i have seen nothing of that in the description.
greetings, eMBee.
--
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX