MIT To Release Next-Generation OS "Cesium"

snowphoton writes: "Slant-Six magazine has an article about Cesium, a fascinating (and soon public) operating system from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. A virtual machine, an object-oriented database-driven filesystem, and a 3D GUI mean that this isn't your father's operating system." This article doesn't address licensing, except to say that it "is due to be released by the end of the year for free," so it will be interesting to see just what "free" means here. Update: Yep, it's a hoax. Fun! Tricks are neat!

Comments

Clock

[TalShiar00]

I bet the system clock is always off

Cesium...get it....cesium...as in the atomic clock..

You are right that was not funny.

Re:Never heard of any such Cesium project...

[Tim Macinta]

However, no such person appears in the LCS directory--and "Support Staff" is listed for some of the people there.

Also noteworthy is that running "finger dunkirk@mit.edu" turns up nothing (you can look up a person's info by fingering their last name at mit.edu). MIT's finger database is usually very reliable and thorough.

Re:Slashdotted

[Luyon]

Cesium is due to be released by the end of the year for free, bundled with approximately 200 software applications including HTTP, FTP, NNTP and SMTP servers; a fully functional office application suite; graphics and audio software; and four video games including CesiumQuake.

This is by far my favorite part of this troll: while most people would consider, say, NetHack a noble effort for game porting on a unreleased-brand-spanking-new OS, we're going to release it with QUAKE.

Re:Evidence that this is a hoax

[zerocool^]

Where did you get that?
I got this:

finger hdunkirk@mit.edu
[mit.edu]
Student data loaded as of Oct 29, Staff data loaded as of Oct 27.
URL data loaded once a month.

Notify Personnel or use WebSIS as appropriate to change your information.

Our on-line help system describes
How to change data, how the directory works, where to get more info.
For a listing of help topics, enter finger help@mit.edu. Try finger
help_about@mit.edu to read about how the directory works. Please see
help_url@mit.edu for questions about the new URL field.

All your base are belong to us.
carsonr@arsenal:~/notes$

~z

Re:The coolest thing ever to happen on an OS

[the_quark]

What I really hate is when I'm writing some software, and working with something I've never used before, and the error message I get is "contact the software developer."

I'm left sitting there staring at the screen at 3 AM blankly thinking, "Heck, I *am* the software developer, and I have absolutely no idea what to do myself, much less if some helpless user contacted me..."

Oh well, at least I can't be in much closer contact with the developer...we're sitting in the same chair...:)

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[MasonMcD]

How about a *four* dimensional GUI! That way, when you perform a search, you don't just get measly 2-D directory information, you get "file found: /root/etc/west 10 feet/last Tuesday"