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

Timmy....

[keepper]

Ever heard of the MIT license....?

It's a BSD derived license...

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.h tm l

Re:free probably means..

[Trepidity]

And that's, (imnsho) real freedom, not gpl freedom, as in "free as in speech so long as your opinion agrees with mine."

Why is it continually necessary to provide a GPL dig in every context, even where it's completely off-topic and irrelevant?

One would think the supporters of non-GPL free software licenses are a bit too defensive for their own good. RMS certainly never takes this many opportunities to berate the MIT and BSD licenses (in fact he considers them "free software").

OMG... No more crappy DX8 overlays

[Talez]

Cesium's architecture and abilities are enough to make even the most jaded computer enthusiast start frothing at the mouth. *starts frothing at the mouth* I've tried out "3D" Windows desktops to little satisfaction. Most of them are just crap, buggy, DirectX8 overlays. If this does what it says it does, I dont think I'll ever need another operating system for hobby use. Heh... should be fun when this little sucker is released... I hope it can run on plain old x86 hardware :) Talez

Re:OMG... No more crappy DX8 overlays

[jjshoe]

according to the article it runs on mac's as well as pc's. and by pc's i assume it would mean x86

Article Doesn't Work

[DarkZero]

Unless it's just JunkBuster acting really weird, the article doesn't work. I keep getting the following message:

TCP connection to 'www.slant-six.org' failed: No error.

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:Clock

[DataPath]

Nope... but it sparks like crazy in water. (Cesium reacts like crazy with water, strongly bonding with the oxygen in a combustive reaction)

Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[EccentricAnomaly]

The elimination of the directory/file paradigm seems like a good one as well as the virtual machine... but I don't know about the HTML and XML for all human readable text... and what good is a 3D GUI?

Can anyone think of a good reason to have a 3D GUI? It seems like a waste of compute power.

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[HiggsBoson]

And how long ago would someone have said "I don't know about variable fonts and font sizes for all human readable text. And what good is a GUI?"

There are, of course, a fair number of people who *still* feel that any GUI is a bad GUI, but even the most hardened CLI zealot has to admit that the GUI revolutionized the computer industry. If it were all CLI, computers would be nowhere near as widely used as they are now.

Not to say that Cesium's 3d gui is going to do what those first gui's did (epsecially since I've not even seen so much as a screenshot), but maybe a 3d gui is what we need. Traditional point-and-click has reached something of a standstill. Whether it's KDE, Gnome, Windows, BeOS, or Aqua, it's all still the same basic principles. I've yet to see a really useful 3d gui, but from the (admittedly very sketchy details) it looks like a lot of thought went into Cesium. Maybe someone's finally come up with something that actually adds value.

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[javaman235]

Actually, I think a 3D GUI is a great idea. Consider your existing desktop as it is, but it is being rendered on a flat 3d, plane, exactly in front of you. If the 3d engine is written intelligently, this won't take a whole lot more resouces than you existing desktop does, because it is outputting the same thing to your monitor...the BEAUTY of this system however, is that a programmer has the ability to do incredible things with the GUI, because that 3d functionality is there, at such a low level...things like taking a window and zooming out to infinity on minimalize, or renering it partially transparent when it loses focus...the possibilities are limitless.

OF COURSE things like this would take resources, but you can bet that the MIT guys will think of this, and give you options to balance your GUI kewlness factor against your system resources, like any OS from Windows to Linux does.

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[Anonymous Koward]

"but I don't know about the HTML and XML for all human readable text... "

sorry..but that is IMHO one very obtuse statement.

you ever open a .txt with IE or moz or Konq or Opera or whatever? I thoroughly enjoy hyperlinked help files and text (read any win32 game manuals or help files lately?) as they are quite efficient and just damn pretty....not to mention (I will probably get flamed for this one): go ahead and download some ebook or whatever that format is that is in html...

Damn nice eh? Ever read The Hobbit or LOTR with html, pics, bookmarks, etc? Doesn't sound like you have...oh yeah...btw it works in CONSOLE MODE *NIX (links/w3m/lynx)

you need to think about what you've said, course I could be wrong :)

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[kubalaa]

The mouse made the 2D GUI possible, and even it is far from intuitive. (Remember Star Trek IV -- well, seriously, some beginners find mice very confusing.) There is no such equivalent for a 3D GUI, except maybe the spaceball or an expensive glove, neither of which is ideal.

People keep getting this mistaken impression that because our universe is 3D, people think in 3D. We're creatures of the land, we live essentially on a plane, and our thinking in the third dimension is mostly limited to whether something is above something else. That's why windowing schemes with a fake third dimension (layering) work so well for us.

You could also ask yourself why multi-dimensional graphs haven't caught on. Most people are hardly capable of grasping a true two-dimensional plot, much less three or more.

We think in two dimensions.

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"

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[dopplex]

If the GUI made use of hardware acceleration, isn't there a good chance that it could be less resource intensive than current ones? After all, I hardly think that my Geforce3 is being stressed overmuch by KDE...

Or am I wrong and is hardware acceleration at work under some layer of many current GUIs? If not... Why not? Are there any current GUIs that make use of OpenGL (for example) to speed up rendering performance and reduce drain on processor? It seems to me that for a system with a 3d accelerator, there are a lot of reasons for using the processing power on that 3d card for some purposed other than gaming. Currently I'd say that my card is going to waste 95% of the time... Probably more. Why not use those cycles?

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[babbage]

"[....] And what good is a GUI?"

...right, and people came up with good reasons to use a WIMP [windows, icons, menus, pointer] interface, and that answered the question. We're still waiting for an answer to the original poster's question.

Parroting Jakob Nielsen & Edward Tufte here, it's worth noting that conceptually, most problems we deal with are N-dimensional, where N is a very large number with probably several trailing zeroes. Going from a crude, vaguely 1-D interface like the command line to a somewhat less crude 2-D interface like the WIMP interface is a good aid & worth doing. Going from that 2-D interface to 3-D isn't as helpful.

For one thing, it doesn't really do much to flesh out a rendering of that huge N-D problem space. For another, it's bloody confusing in pretty much every implementation yet conceived. Even if we could get a decent visualization of a 3-D space on a flat monitor plane [hint: we can't, and no video games don't count], the input devices aren't suitable for interacting with a three dimensional space anyway. A mouse has no concept of elevation, and devices that do, like those silly VR gloves, don't work well enough to be useful.

It's my firm belief that a 3-D interface will never really be viable on contemporary hardware, because both the input & output devices are not designed for or capable of rendering such a visualization acceptably. Even if it were possible, or [more likely] if people were to migrate to say holographic displays and some sort of "tri-axial" mouse, you hit an even bigger problem: it's hard for people to conceptualize what's going on as the number of dimensions goes up [one is easy, two is common, three takes work, and four & higher we just can't do] and i've yet to see any argument or sample implementation that makes the marginally better mapping onto N-D problem sets worth the tradeoff of all the extra conceptualization effort required to understand such a scheme.

If contemporary 2D guis seem to be stagnating, it's probably because they're approaching a kind of maturity. That isn't a bad thing. After 20 years or so of mainstream deployment, we're getting a pretty good idea of what works well and what doesn't. I like that I was able to sit down in front of BeOS for the first time and realize that everything I'd learned with the Win & Mac interfaces was going to help me here. I don't want some kind of radical shift in how the display works, unless I know that in return for the considerable effort that learning it will require (including unlearning much of what I've gotten used to thus far) I'm going to get at least an order of magnitude more productivity out of the new interface.

And that just ain't gonna happen.

It's a nice pipe dream, but we don't even have anything good enough on the drawing board, and that's not by accident. And this article, in case you didn't realize it by now, is troll fodder. Your leg has been pulled... :)

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[Spyffe]

I'd like to take issue with the approach you're taking to the problem. Essentially, you assume that modern hardware is pretty much going to stay constant in its abilities, and that current users will not be able to learn fast enough.

However, as the graphics card industry has shown, if there's a need the progress will come. If there are people at MIT running crazy 3-D interfaces and giving demos and generally wowing the public, then the commercial world will latch on to that craze. Business lives on the opening of new markets.

Furthermore, I think you assume that the target audience for this software is Joe Excel, who burnt out his brain cells for weeks learning basic VBScript (ugh...). I would contest that and say rather that the target audience is computer enthusiasts, and possibly scientists or sysadmins.

The learning ability of Joe Excel can be quite good, if the material is engaging. Witness that practically every computer game brings new quirks in the interface and look-and-feel department, and that the user base adjusts. We (gamers) shifted from 2-d (Lode Runner, Mario) to 3-d (Quake, F/18 Korea) very quickly.

The trick is, in short, to make this technology exciting. A cube with a different Mozilla on each face is not exciting - we need to make a UI which is so much like a game that people will enjoy it. I think it can be done, and if the software is there, even on some MIT God-box, the software - and the users - will come.

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[babbage]

By hardware, I'm referring specifically to the I/O devices attached to a typical desktop computer. I think the computer itself has great capacity for novel interface schemes, but the ools we use to interact with that display -- a 2D monitor, a 2D mouse, and a keyboard -- are fundamentally not well suited to 3D work. Fundamentally. If we replace those devices, the computer itself could go farther, but there is so much currently invested in the existing scheme and it has so much momentum behind it, that I really think change will come very, very slowly. That's not to say that an alternative couldn't emerge on the fringe, and move to the mainstream if it does well, but keep in mind that doing so would mean that all that I/O hardware would need to be replaced, the Windows & Macintosh would need to be at least partially subjected to a fundamental rewrite, etc.

The gaming audience is an interesting one. Quake is *not* 3D, just as my television is not 3D. It is a crude, but vaguely convincing rendering of a 3D space on a 2D plane. For some uses -- games, movies -- that's okay. But if I'm trying to find a file on my computer, I don't want to have to rummage through some sort of silly Quake inspired labyrinth to do it. If I have a rogue proceess thrashing my system, I don't want to have to fire up the Sysadmin version of Doom to go frag it. The way forward is *not* to relentlessly flog out the 3D space on a 2D plane metaphor, but to come up with better abstractions that allow us to better interact with that N-D space through hardware that we either have currently or could viably have in the relative near term.

The fundamental point you're missing is that 2D is only marginally farther away from ND than 3D is, so both 2D and 3D have to take on abstraction layers to cope with that, and 3D additionally has to tackle conceptual boundaries and hardware shortcomings. In other words, to go from 2D to 3D you have to do a lot of work, but you're not addressing the core problem: abstraction of the ND problem space, which is still substantially as complex as before.

I have yet to come across a 3D interface proposal that begins to address this problem, and until it does the scheme isn't worth the trouble, IMO.

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[clearcache]

...ok, ok so this is a hoax...BUT, a 3D GUI would be nice for on-the fly prioritizing of processes...would add new meaning to the words "background" and "foreground"...simply raise or lower the window above your desktop and that process has its priority rasied or lowered.

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[matrix29]

3D Ring Mouse-
$99
Just wear it on a finger and it's clickable. http://www.worklink.net/ringmouse.html http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~vr-systems/pics/vr/ring. htm

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[smcv]

Having access to all the capabilities of your 2D monitor is a good thing too. Since your monitor displays in 2D and you basically see in 2D (assume your eyes are close together :-) this seems like an optimal number of dimensions to be using. "3D" games and OSs are limited to rendering 3D objects onto a 2D screen, but even if you had some sort of holodeck or something, where all 3 dimensions are rendered, you'd only see 2 at a time anyway. (OK, your eyes *are* far enough apart to sort of see in 3D, so perhaps I should call distance perception another half a dimension).

Also, what do you generally use layered 2D GUIs for? Apart from the obvious (being able to display graphics easily), one of the main advantages of, say, Windows over DOS or [some Unixish OS]+X11 over [same Unixish OS]+console is that you can *visually* leave things in the background. It's a nice intuitive metaphor.

(In the case of Windows, it's a larger advantage for Win95 or later, which can actually cope with *running* your multiple tasks if it feels like it :-)

OK, so DOS had background printing, Unix shells let you do "make mybigproject &" to run a background job, and some Unixish OSs (I'm sure Linux isn't the only one) have things like Linux's virtual terminals, but there's a certain usability advantage to "physically" leaving (say) your e-mail client in the background while you start up your browser/word processor/text editor/shell/whatever to retrieve something you want to paste into your e-mail, and being able to see bits of it "in the background" partly hidden by the new window.

Indeed, I know at least one Linux user whose only use for X is to run several terminal emulators at a time and have a screen size not limited by the usual 80x25. (Or so he claims... I know it's the games really :-)

Re:Cesium employs RadioActive-X

[javaman235]

yes, i would propose the use of 3d harware. If something like cesium were to actually be made, I would just take one machine made by an open source freindly manufacturer (like IBM)that comes with a nice 3d card and target it exclusively, and let anybody who wants to mess with porting drivers and such do it. This would be the only hope for avoiding the hellish driver quagmire (sp?) that Linux has had so much strugle in.

Coooooool....

[krmt]

Well, here it finally is. We've been waiting for how long now for a big clean sweep of the PC? Throwing out everything from the file/folder/desktop heirarchy to plain-text formatting is a fascinating move, one that I'm sure we've all thought about at least one time or another, but had no way of going about it. I really hope this pans out.

The immediate problems that I see are

1. The UI will scare people. Unfamiliar == Scary.
2. Hardware support. Hopefully drivers will get out there fast.
3. Very new programming model. People can't build off of years of UNIX experience as with linux.
4. People like what they've got, be it windows, linux, mac, or both. Change is scary.
5. Is the VM slow? Probably not, but we won't know until it's out.

That said, I really hope these hurdles can be overcome. I'm betting ideas from this will be incorporated in to the more traditional OS's in the long run, but who knows? I'm certaintly going to check it out and maybe give it a spin on a spare partition (if that's even possible yet). A 3d GUI! I can't wait.

Re:Coooooool....

[eomir]

The UI will scare people. Unfamiliar == Scary.
I assume you are referring to the 3d gui. The article makes it seem as if the 3d gui is sort of optional. It is slashdotted now, but I remember reading something like, "anything from a text console to a 3d gui." Either way, this definitely looks like a great step for operating systems.

Re:Coooooool....

[SixTwelve]

The article makes it seem as if the 3d gui is sort of optional

&ltSlant-Six article&gt that can present the output of programs as anything from terminal text to a 3-dimensional Hollywood-style GUI ... depending on what the user chooses to see and what the hardware can handle. &ltSlant-Six article&gt

cool that. Windows and too many html coders are going to find this user power way too hard to deal with, but to hell with 'em.

Re:Coooooool....

[the_quark]

Dagum it. Where's "-1, Gullible" when you need it?

Re:Coooooool....

[krmt]

No shit. Mod my ass down. I got suckered like a lot of people. I don't happen to work at MIT, and I never bothered with a search (of course, the /. editors didn't either, so I'm in good company). The whole thing should have sounded too good to be true, and I should have realized it from my own post, talking about everyone having thought about this but no one having any idea as to how to do it.

Ah well, fuck it. I can still dream that someone will come up with a good 3d GUI one day...

OMG! No more crappy DX8 "3D" desktops!

[Talez]

Cesium's architecture and abilities are enough to make even the most jaded computer enthusiast start frothing at the mouth.

*starts frothing at the mouth*

I've tried out "3D" Windows desktops to little satisfaction. Most of them are just crap, buggy, DirectX8 overlays. If this does what it says it does, I dont think I'll ever need another operating system for hobby use.

Heh... should be fun when this little sucker is released... I hope it can run on plain old x86 hardware :)

Talez

Re:OMG! No more crappy DX8 "3D" desktops!

[cloudmaster]

Until I have a 3-D *display* and an intuitive way to navigate 3 dimensions, 3D "environments" are just another waste of time (IMHO). I can already have windows in front of, behind, below, above, left, and right of other frames, so my present "2D" setup is a fine way to not waste otherwise useful resources.

That said, more OS's with more OS developers that are free to collaborate with other OS people is generally a good thing for everyone, so I hope this goes somewhere. It'd sure be nice if the article was somewhere I could read it, though, as the page linked to just comes up with a worthless entry page... :)

Re:OMG! No more crappy DX8 "3D" desktops!

[Andrewkov]

Yeah, when I want a 3D deskop I just turn off my computer and look at my desk.

Slashdotted

[Knunov]

The story has been Slashdotted already. I am posting it here for the benfit of fellow /.ers and EZ Karma points:

The Advanced Operating Systems Group, a branch of the Lab for Computer Science at MIT, has begun planning for a public release of their formerly unknown operating system known as Cesium.
Currently at version 4.2 (version 1.0 was finished in 1993), Cesium's architecture and abilities are enough to make even the most jaded computer enthusiast start frothing at the mouth. As an assistant to one of the lab's directors, I was invited to a private presentation given last week to some MIT staff members as part of the planning process for its eventual public release. I was given permission to write this sneak preview.

The primary goal of Cesium's creators was to fully abandon the "historic principles" that have shaped most contemporary operating systems. Concepts like "desktop", "folders", "files", etc., have all been thrown out the window. The results, while unusual when compared against the de facto standard of Microsoft Windows, are nevertheless fascinating and potentially very useful.

Cesium comprises five main parts, or "Overmodules". These overmodules are made up of semi-independent modules, which can be replaced or updated at will in order to add, remove or modify system functionality.

The Platform overmodule is the only platform-specific part of Cesium. It serves as a virtual machine, allowing the OS to run almost identically on a variety of platforms. The AOSG Lab has a distributed Cesium system made up of a seemingly random batch of Mac and PC machines, and Cesium has also been successfully tested on some handheld devices.

The Storage overmodule is one of the more unique ideas behind Cesium. Instead of using a traditional filesystem, all data is stored in an object-oriented database (OODBMS) that is written through the Platform overmodule directly to a hard drive. This allows for queries and operations that would not normally be possible within a traditional filesystem. In addition, it eliminates the concepts of files and folders, opting instead for child-parent relationships between any data stores.

The Program overmodule serves as interpreter, compiler, and API for Cesium software. After translating code into an intermediate language called "Cilantro" (which is cached for future use), it passes the code to the Platform overmodule, which then executes it. Cesium currently supports C, C++, Java, Perl, Fortran, Lisp, COBOL, and numerous smaller languages.

The Presentation overmodule works with the Platform overmodule to give programs access to a powerful and platform-independent visual interface that can present the output of programs as anything from terminal text to a 3-dimensional Hollywood-style GUI called "Tripwire" (which does shadows, transparencies, textures and light rendering better than most video game engines) depending on what the user chooses to see and what the hardware can handle.

Finally, the Security overmodule handles access issues, providing administrators with user maintenance and permissions functionality that rivals anything offered by mainstream operating systems.

The most interesting parts of Cesium, however, are often the little things. For example, all human-readable text is assumed to be HTML or XML, instead of Notepad-style plain text, and formatting can be customized with cascading style sheets. The default text editor that comes with Cesium, therefore, handles such things as bold, italics, tables, graphics, colors, etc., without trouble.

Another interesting little tidbit is that Cesium was intended to be well documented from the very start. Error messages are dynamically generated and context sensitive, meaning that almost any error comes with a plain English description of exactly what happened, how it probably happened, and how to fix it.

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.

For further information, stay tuned to The MIT Laboratory for Computer Science website.

Re:Slashdotted

[gnurd]

C, C++, Java, Perl, Fortran, Lisp, COBOL, and numerous smaller languages

well we knew it would have LISP, but time to get Python on this baby.

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:free probably means..

[Capsaicin]

Why is it continually necessary to provide a GPL dig in every context, even where it's completely off-topic and irrelevant?

Hmm, maybe because the item ends with the sentence it will be interesting to see just what "free" means here

Mirror

[redhotchil]

Site seems slow, heres a mirror:
here

Never heard of any such Cesium project...

[plam]

... which is fishy, because I'm sitting here in my office on the sixth floor of the Laboratory for Computer Science, and the operating systems dudes are on the fifth floor. There is also no mention of Cesium on the projects page.

I couldn't actually read the original page, slant-six being slashdotted and all, but it sure doesn't sound like an LCS initiative. In fact I don't see any mention of any such operating system on the web.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that. I'm not sitting in the building, but I know several folks who work there. None of them have mentioned any work covered in the article. I also don't understand what the purpose of keeping an OS project secret would be in an academic enviroment. Remember publish or perish? I think this a hoax.

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

[Cato the Elder]

I didn't find anything on the web either, although of course project names get changed a whole bunch.

But the article was supposedly written by a
"Harvey M. Dunkirk" who says he's an assistant to one of the lab's directors.

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

Mighty fishy--I welcome a clarifying comment from anyone with more first-hand knowledge.

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

[RubberDuckie]

Interesting that there seems to be no other mention of this Cesium OS elsewhere on the web. Anyone see a quick way to inflate web site hits going on here?

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:Never heard of any such Cesium project...

[ideut]

Timothy is a fucking retard.

Here's why.

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

[plam]

I also don't understand what the purpose of keeping an OS project secret would be in an academic enviroment. Remember publish or perish?

Actually there's a whole bunch of reasons which make it hard to deal with a large system in an academic environment. Publish or perish is certainly a major contributor. But large systems just have so much icky overhead to make them work that, in terms of work-to-reward ratio, it's almost never worth it to do a complete system. Or feasible; we don't have enough people to write large quantities of production code. Successful systems projects (wrt an academic metric for 'successful'), for instance, the self-certifying file system use parts of other systems that people have built. It's a lot easier that way, and it's really useful when those other systems are free software.

Of course, there are major minuses to not having a system you can actually use day-to-day. A lot of the microkernel research, I'm told, was done by people who didn't 'eat their own dogfood'. They would boot up the system, run their benchmarks, then shut it off. This didn't capture problems which occur only after a few days of uptime.

By the way, you can check out what the operating systems dudes are actually doing at their website: Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group.

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

[Hal_9000@!!!@]

I would also have to agree with that.

First of all, I don't think MIT is known for keeping people a floor up in the same building in the dark for 8 YEARS on an OS. Why would they?

Second, there are no references to Harvey Dunkirk on G except for someone who died in the civil war.

Finally, a test message to hdunkirk@mit.edu, the email address given on the story page, doesn't exist. In the words of MIT:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
hdunkirk@mit.edu
(reason: 550 ... User unknown)

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to pacific-carrier-annex.mit.edu.:
>>> RCPT To:
... User unknown
550 5.1.1 hdunkirk@mit.edu... User unknown
-

So, I think we have a hoax on our hands.

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

[singerkd]

The email address for the article was hdunkirk@mit.edu which still doesn't exist when trying a finger. Also executing "vrfy hdunkirk@mit.edu" directly on their email server returns unknown user.

When it sounds too good to be true...

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

[kemster]

No listing of any "Dunkirk" in the Alumni directory, no Athena locker for him:

~%add hdunkirk
hdunkirk: Locker unknown.

and nada on the finger @lcs either. Oh, and nothing about either "Dunkirk" or "Cesium" at The Tech. Seems like vaporware with a vaporcreator to me.

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

[Thagg]

Plam sez: > ... which is fishy, because I'm
sitting here in my office on the sixth floor of
the Laboratory for Computer Science...

Perhaps this is fiscal April Fools Day? Those fiscal holidays are so hard to keep track of.

thad

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

[Mr. Piccolo]

Not to mention that there's no such thing as the "Advanced Operating Systems Group" listed at the Laboratory for Computer Science homepage. Is there one?

I smell a hoax.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

heh, pretty creative way to troll slashdot. Use a little-known website that allows story submissions and trick them into posting it. After they do that, turn around and submit a 'story' to slashdot and use the story that got submitted on slantsix to get the slashdot editors to put your submission on the main page.

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

[Fizzlewhiff]

Add to all the above the latest footnote to the article on Slant Six.

Editor's Note
Felix Abraham Truman, 10/29/2001 8:54:42 PM
Some of the comments posted about this article have led me to believe that it may be either inaccurate or blatantly false. If any of our readers from MIT can cast some light on this issue, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

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

[speederaser]

Yep. Time to wipe that drool off your chins, folks. Did a search on the MIT website for "cesium". No hits. Even though the article claimed updates and more info could be found there. No links anywhere to a Cesium project.

And "finger dunkirk@mit.edu" got me "No matches to your query." also.

This is smelling like a hoax.

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

[Myuu]

Why if it weren't for you meddling kids...!!!

too bad...the fact that the guy pulls up as a civil war guy seems to be more proof.

That project sounded like the closest I'd get to Communication OS from Serial Experiments Lain.

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

[Zeinfeld]

The email address for the article was hdunkirk@mit.edu which still doesn't exist when trying a finger. Also executing "vrfy hdunkirk@mit.edu" directly on their email server returns unknown user.

That means nothing, I never bothered to get an Athena account when I was at MIT except for a brief period when I had a student who I could not give a lab account to. LCS and AI accounts frequently have bizare names.

However an assistant to the lab director should be able to name him, there are only two labs in the building after all and both labs have only one director. The position of 'assistant' to the director is secretarial.

There was no such project when I was at the lab. Some of the project bears a passing resemblance to Oxygen, however that has long since been public.

There have been several O/S developed in the building. None was developed in secret. A secret project could not get students to work on it.

There have been non-public projects going on in the building. However those are effectively long term consulting for various (military) agencies.

An O/S is simply too large a project to be performed as a secret project. It is a packaging job, there is absolutely no value in an O/S developed in absolute secrecy.

There is no-one on the faculty who comes to mind as a specialist in O/S research. There are plenty who have made significant contributions to specific areas of O/S design. ITS, Multics, Genera were all open collaborative efforts.

Another point that leads me to doubt the story is the absence of any mention of security which has been the principle O/S related interest for the building in recent years.

Finally, LCS is not in the habit of announcing its projects in obscurantist web journals.

The whole thing smells bad. It is just not the way the lab has ever worked. The idea is to get your ideas 'stolen', that is another word for 'used'. If you don't want to share your ideas then join the NSA

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

[CeramicNuts]

or, perhaps the conspiracy runs deeper. what better way for timmy to discredit an up-and-coming competitor, in this case slant-six, by revealing a clearly bogus story posted on said competitor's site.

slant-six looks stupid, slashdot looks trolled. the majority of us who have just heard about slant-six for the first time are left with a negative impression of slant-six. but since slashdot is trolled regularly, nobody is suprised with the "editor's gaffe". so no harm done to timmy and company!

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

[Salamander]

There is no-one on the faculty who comes to mind as a specialist in O/S research.

Frans Kaashoek might be pretty annoyed to hear you say that.

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

[Zeinfeld]

Frans Kaashoek might be pretty annoyed to hear you say that.

Last I heard they were doing bespoke kernel design. There are plenty of faculty who work on O/S related research, but there is a huge difference between designing a component and designing a complete O/S

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

[Salamander]

Look at the original statement you made:

There is no-one on the faculty who comes to mind as a specialist in O/S research.

FK and others might not have written a complete OS from interrupt handlers through office suites, but it's utterly absurd to say that they don't qualify as "specialists in OS research". Stop being a typical Slashdotter, admit the error, and move on.

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

[Zeinfeld]

Don't be a typical slashdotter, read the whole of my original statement, not just the portion you selectively quote.

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

[Salamander]

I did read the whole thing, asshole. Why would you think otherwise? Because I didn't respond to every other point you made? Ridiculous! Don't try to act all aggrieved, as though your comment was taken out of context; it was absurd regardless of context - even in a context where I agreed with the rest of what you were saying. Context is not the issue here. The issue here is the way that you, in your classic "I teach at MIT" arrogance, have refused to accept that anything you say could have been in error even when the error is waved in front of your face. I pity your students.

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

[Mr. Fred Smoothie]

Most mail server admins disable VRFY as an anti-spam measure.

MIT business plan

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Release Next-Generation OS
2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:MIT business plan

[Mr. Piccolo]

Duh, 2's the same as it's ever been:

1. Release Next-Generation OS
2. Continue Charging Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars for Computer Science and Engineering Education
3. Profit!!!

Re:MIT business plan

[tabacco]

So where do the underpants fit into the picture?

Performance issues?

[George Walker Bush]

virtual machine, an object-oriented database-driven filesystem, and a 3D GUI mean that this isn't your father's operating system

Especially not in the area of PERFORMANCE, I'll bet!

slight prob

[jjshoe]

slight problem, its not plain text, html or xml
look back

The coolest thing ever to happen on an OS

[Uttles]

Another interesting little tidbit is that Cesium was intended to be well documented from the very start. Error messages are dynamically generated and context sensitive, meaning that almost any error comes with a plain English description of exactly what happened, how it probably happened, and how to fix it.

I have nothing else to say, that in istelf is all I ever wanted from my OS.

Re:The coolest thing ever to happen on an OS

[unformed]

But OS's already tell you to how to fix it: "Contact your software vendor."

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...:)

Imagne...

[MrSeb]

You'll have to have a GeForce3 card to show the desktop.

But, hey, atleast you'll be able to shoot the icons with a rocket launcher or another Quake3 weapon of your choice...

Re:Imagne...

[tabacco]

That could be kinda nice after an app crashes.

"Give ME a BSOD will you? Well take THIS, Mr. video Driver!"

Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

It =is= your father's operating system!

It's called OS/400. Other than the 3d GUI, those are the base features of the AS/400 software. The virtual machine and OO database file system have been there from the beginning.

Re:Actually...

[daviddennis]

I've tried it. It has perhaps the worst learning curve of any system I know. You have to learn about 300 pages worth of concepts to write 'hello, world'.

Of course once you do that, there are a lot of really neat things about it, but sadly I just didn't have the time to learn it :-(.

D

Interesting, but how will it talk to everyone else

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Well, from the details in the article, it certainly sounds promising. I'm glad someone's finally going "very public" with ideas to replace the underpowered filing systems we're using now, for a start. It'll be interesting to see how their OODBMS system works out.

That does raise an obvious question, though. Given that we're all used to filing systems where you have a lump of data in some form and you give it a name, and beyond that, it's just a hierarchical arrangement, how does that translate to/from their world? Converting from PC <-> Mac <-> Linux is no big deal (although even then we have details that may get "lost in translation") but they all follow a similar paradigm. How do you map from such a system onto an OO set-up? Given that they mention supporting an office suite, clearly a necessity for any mainstream OS today, they must surely have considered this issue in some detail.

Re:Interesting, but...

[ChannelX]

depends. 1.0 was finished 8 years ago. Was ReiserFS out then? How about 3dwm? virtual machines have been around forever. i think you are looking at it just a tad too simplistic.

Modern Operating System Design Directions

[TechyImmigrant]

This highlights an interesting split in the direction of modern operating systems research.

In the one corner we have MIT with Cesium that implements files and everything else in the form of an object oriented database.

In the other corner we have Bell-Labs/Lucent Plan 9 that implements databases and everything else in the form of files.

Plan 9 makes programming things easier since the file api lets you do most things. I wonder how much MIT's system makes things easier to do? I always found databases a pig to interface to (except in plan9).

Simpler IS better..

Next-gen OS? Sure...

[meta-monkey]

How come there are no pictures at the slant-six story, and no mention of this project on the website at http://www.lcs.mit.edu/ ? How come a search on google reveals...nothing? Do you really think MIT could develop the most fantastical OS ever for and keep it a giant secret? They said version 1.0 came out in 1993...so where is that?

Also, why would a university bother to write an office suite for this project? How exactly does that qualify as new research, worthy of publication leading to a master's or Ph.D.? I don't think any grad student actually interested in graduating would waste his time on such a thing.

hey, timothy, next time do some fact-checking before you post this stuff...

one more thing

[jjshoe]

i forgot to mention one thing in my previous posts...

quake lives on!

only five video games, and quake one is one of them. what does that tell you?

quake rules :)

OO / child-parent relationships

[A nonymous Coward]

In addition, it eliminates the concepts of files and folders, opting instead for child-parent relationships between any data stores.

Doesn't sound too hard to make up a traditional ftp repository.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Oztun]

This allows for queries and operations that would not normally be possible within a traditional filesystem. In addition, it eliminates the concepts of files and folders, opting instead for child-parent relationships between any data stores.


Maybe I'm uninformed but this doesn't seem to describe things already found within ReiserFS to me. I thought ReiserFS was just another JFS.

Is this for real?

[David Ziegler]

This sounds great and all, but like someone else pointed out, there's absolutely no mention of this anywhere on the MIT website, and a quick scan of the MIT website and directory for Harvey Dunkirk (the author, and supposedly an assistant to one of the lab directors) turned up absolutely no hits. I'd love to be wrong, this sounds cool, but this sounds really fishy.

Wow

[WhiteWolf666]

That was a brilliant hoax---

No mention of it on LCS website, no evidence of any release in 1993 on google....

Doesn't exist.

Sure got my hopes up, though. I was looking for a cool new toy like that.

hoax? features?

[matman]

I have a feeling that this is a hoax. Even if it is, there's some hope for the proposed features.

DBMS filesystem: A filesystem is a database... there are two major things that most filesystems today lack (so far as I can think of), that more modern database systems could provide. One, is that databases can be indexed fairly easily, providing for fast searching. Unfortunatly, indexing on many columns (in RDBMS) can actually take a lot of disk space... maybe more than many people would be willing to accept. I also wish that filesystems could hold much more meta-data. What I envision, is a filesystem which provides meta-data fields dynamically, based on mime-type (stored seperately - not in filename). Imagine meta-data for image/jpeg to include compression level, height, width, or even a thumbnail version of the image, or meta-data for audio/mpeg to include the info that's now stored in ID3. This shouldn't necessarily mean slowness, or excessive disk useage - especially if you can turn extended meta-data off for particular parts of the filesystem.

Visual interface: While 3D sounds cool, I'm not convinced. A monitor (currently) is a 2D object, and merging a 3D environment into a 2D display is going to cause as much - if not more - metaphore 'clash' as the 'desktop' metaphore. I think that some of the best/most interesting display technologies can be found in things like Aqua which uses display PDF and Berlin which uses 'fresco' to provide similar features like resolution independance, good printer output, vector based stuff, etc. Until we get holographic display, or maybe even good VR stuff, I'm not betting much on 3D interfaces except for very specific applications.

Security: They didn't really go into this much, unfortunately. Unix security is nice and simple (which is a mixed blessing); sometimes you need more control. It's also nice to have things NOT run with excess privilige (this is hard in some situations - like SSHD for example). Projects like RSBAC (rsbac.org) address some of these issues.

Current projects like Linux already have lots of hardware support, and people support; any new OS, no matter how revolutionary is not likely to take over too quickly. This Cesium project, should it exist, will have had to create all drivers internally without help; the Linux community hasn't even been able to support enough hardware to make everyone happy - I don't know how Cesium would. (not that wide hw support would have been a goal necessarily)

Evidence that this is a hoax

[yerdaddie]

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.

No matches to your query.
carsonr@arsenal:~/notes$


The penultimate line says it all. The email address for the author is bogus, as is the article. Additionally, the LCS folks I know haven't heard about this. Smells like BS to me.

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

Sounds like a major hoax.

[Airneil]

No mention of this on any MIT website I've looked at...

Cesium? Come on...

Uses "Tripwire" as a name for a GUI?

"Hollywood style"?

Looks like someone took some computer terms, sprinkled heavily with jargon and made something up.

Re:Sounds like a major hoax.

[NECTROLL]

Maybe it is Bin Laden spreading propaganda and code words for the next attack! It is more likely to be that than a real OS.

isotopes of cesium

[brer_rabbit]

this page lists the half life of cesium isotopes. Apparently they need a new entry for the half life of Cesium OS when slashdotted...

buzzwords arn't revolutions

[Xiphoid Process]

its how it all works together that counts.

Re:Interesting, but...

[pimpinmonk]

Yes, you might say that they're reinventing the wheel, but by the sounds of it, this is a reinvention of epic proportions!!! Think wooden 18th century wheel to sweet 19" aluminum one!!!

Comments from LCS

[angio]

OS research at MIT happens primarily in the PDOS (Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems) research group these days.

I'm a grad student in the PDOS group; I certainly haven't heard of this project, nor have my colleagues with whom I've checked. This story could use a bit more background checking; I strongly suspect that it's completely bogus. If you want to see the real research going on in operating systems at MIT, check out the PDOS web page, the Networks and Mobile Systems page, and the Advanced Network Architectures sites.

Re:Comments from LCS

[hey!]

Sure, but "Cesium" is a much cooler name than "PDOS", which sounds like some kind of Pathetic Disk Operating System.

You can think of some cool taglines too -- "Cesium: Just Add Water And Watch The Flames". Or the fun you'd have explaining to your British colleagues that it is c-e-s-i-u-m not c-a-e-s-i-u-m. Or the late night BS sessions where you dream up acronyms that spell C.E.S.I.U.M. ("Cooperative Environment for Serving Information something something").

Re:Comments from LCS

[JibbaJabba]

This story could use a bit more background checking

Sorry, but it has to be said .... BACKGROUND CHECKING?!? On Slashdot?!? BWAH-HAHAHAHA!

Re:Interesting, but...

[Milican]

Yeah, I hear ya... I thought RiserFS was just some gimmicky marketing tactic too cuz PalmOS was out with dB file system some time last century.

JOhn

interesting anagrams of ...

[jaiteend]

Harvey M Dunkirk...

HARVEY DRUNK KIM
HEAVY DRINK MURK
MY VERA HURD KINK
HA DRUNK VERY KIM

Sorry, but since this one is sounding more and more of a hoax, someone had to do it.

Re:hoax? features?

[Arandir]

A filesystem is a database...

Which makes me wonder, what filesystem does the database reside on? Inquiring minds want to know.

Unfortunatly, indexing on many columns (in RDBMS) can actually take a lot of disk space...

So there actually IS a traditional filesytem underneath it all? Or are all the index files stored in the same database they index?

halloween scare

[Alien54]

I think this a hoax.

I can see this being a scare, an april fools joke in reverse, just in time to give certain Microsoft execs a heart attack.

sort of like a halloween scare. Trick or treat, like earlier memos from earlier years.

Here is the text, site /.ed

[JohnnyBolla]

The Advanced Operating Systems Group, a branch of the Lab for Computer Science at MIT, has begun planning for a public release of their formerly unknown operating system known as Cesium.
Currently at version 4.2 (version 1.0 was finished in 1993), Cesium's architecture and abilities are enough to make even the most jaded computer enthusiast start frothing at the mouth. As an assistant to one of the lab's directors, I was invited to a private presentation given last week to some MIT staff members as part of the planning process for its eventual public release. I was given permission to write this sneak preview.
The primary goal of Cesium's creators was to fully abandon the "historic principles" that have shaped most contemporary operating systems. Concepts like "desktop", "folders", "files", etc., have all been thrown out the window. The results, while unusual when compared against the de facto standard of Microsoft Windows, are nevertheless fascinating and potentially very useful.
Cesium comprises five main parts, or "Overmodules". These overmodules are made up of semi-independent modules, which can be replaced or updated at will in order to add, remove or modify system functionality.
The Platform overmodule is the only platform-specific part of Cesium. It serves as a virtual machine, allowing the OS to run almost identically on a variety of platforms. The AOSG Lab has a distributed Cesium system made up of a seemingly random batch of Mac and PC machines, and Cesium has also been successfully tested on some handheld devices.
The Storage overmodule is one of the more unique ideas behind Cesium. Instead of using a traditional filesystem, all data is stored in an object-oriented database (OODBMS) that is written through the Platform overmodule directly to a hard drive. This allows for queries and operations that would not normally be possible within a traditional filesystem. In addition, it eliminates the concepts of files and folders, opting instead for child-parent relationships between any data stores.
The Program overmodule serves as interpreter, compiler, and API for Cesium software. After translating code into an intermediate language called "Cilantro" (which is cached for future use), it passes the code to the Platform overmodule, which then executes it. Cesium currently supports C, C++, Java, Perl, Fortran, Lisp, COBOL, and numerous smaller languages.
The Presentation overmodule works with the Platform overmodule to give programs access to a powerful and platform-independent visual interface that can present the output of programs as anything from terminal text to a 3-dimensional Hollywood-style GUI called "Tripwire" (which does shadows, transparencies, textures and light rendering better than most video game engines) depending on what the user chooses to see and what the hardware can handle.
Finally, the Security overmodule handles access issues, providing administrators with user maintenance and permissions functionality that rivals anything offered by mainstream operating systems.
The most interesting parts of Cesium, however, are often the little things. For example, all human-readable text is assumed to be HTML or XML, instead of Notepad-style plain text, and formatting can be customized with cascading style sheets. The default text editor that comes with Cesium, therefore, handles such things as bold, italics, tables, graphics, colors, etc., without trouble.
Another interesting little tidbit is that Cesium was intended to be well documented from the very start. Error messages are dynamically generated and context sensitive, meaning that almost any error comes with a plain English description of exactly what happened, how it probably happened, and how to fix it.
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.
For further information, stay tuned to The MIT Laboratory for Computer Science website.
This article has been read 1584 times.

Re:Interesting, but...

[curunir]

Virtual machines may have been around a while, but no one's ever implemented them below (or as a part of) the OS layer. They've always been an application running on top of an existing OS.

Moving the VM to below the OS level would truly allow the "write once, run everywhere" claim that Sun made about Java. The current problem with Java code running everywhere is not incompatability with the underlying machine, it is incompatability with the underlying OS.

It also significantly lowers the bar to writing your own OS. I'm not sure about the rest of you, but assembly and low-level c code make my head hurt...OO code doesn't. Very similar to what the Linux Kernel + X windows allows. Do you think we'd see so many WM's if they had to implement the entire OS themselves? I'm looking forward to playing around with the Platform module to see how hard it is to write my own OS on top of that!

The famous AOSG

[srichman]

The Advanced Operating Systems Group, a branch of the Lab for Computer Science at MIT...

Besides, doesn't anyone else think it's weird that a lab that has supposed been around for a decade isn't mentioned anywhere on a .mit.edu website?

Re:The famous AOSG

[angio]

Oh, yeah -- I should have mentioned, there's no such group. :) The admin assistant doesn't exist either. *shrug* Obvious hoax..

(You may, if you'd like, verify that I exist. http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~dga, not that it's a particularly exciting page) -Dave

Re:hoax? features?

[mclearn]

Why do you think the database would require an underlying filesystem? Many DBMSs use raw disk access in order to maximize speed. I know, because I've inadvertantly crushed a few partitions because they appeared to have no underlying filesystem on them.

Re:hoax? features?

[matman]

Oh, one other nice thing for filesystems would be transaction logging for consistency.

I think we should need a new license

[Ghoser777]

We could call it the sex license (SL). You can do whatever you want, as long as you play by the rules. Of course, you don't know the rules are, and you'll probably get screwed over in court anyway (as opposed to where you would prefer to get screwed over).

F-bacher

ouch

[Rubel]

"cess-ium" -- what a load

Object Oriented Database Driven Filesystem

[Aurelfell]

This has been long over due. I'm sick of NTFS, Linux was close but not quite there, and don't get me started on Fat32. Anyway, I guy has to wonder if it will include and API to allow us to query it directly using SQL.

MIT's Cesium

[Phantom_24]

How come MIT's web site says NOTHING about Cesium?!? If it's supposed to be SO secret (and how can it be if there up to version 4) how come they don't have any info on the OS ?!?

This is an obvious hoax

[KidSock]

I don't know for sure and I hope I'm wrong but this is likely a hoax. Remember the light emmitting diode CPU thing? This is one of those concept articles of the ideal operating system. Sounds great and it's good for inspiration but I doubt such a Utopian OS exists. I wish it did but we would have heard about it already. I just hope MIT doesn't get pissed off at these guys.

folder / file analogy

[SixTwelve]

Throwing out everything from the file/folder/desktop heirarchy

Is it just me? I really can't see a distinction between the folder/file relatoinship and the parent/child data relationship.

hardware support..

[josepha48]

What hardware will it support? What drivers will it support? Will it be vesa 2.0 expectant for the grafics?

I'll be honest I have not got a lot of respect for the 'academic' types at MIT so I'm not holding my breath for this one. They all seem to think about 'can I do it', but never what is really important and should it be done adn what are the benifits. OODBMS file system. Uh most databases are slower than filesystem access, unless it is a palm style set up. Now that could be neat, a paln type desktop where there is no 'desktop' just icons to do stuff with.

Well see.. go ahead and moderate this down, may your penis fall off or your uterus fill up with yeast and drop out..... ewe that is so gross!!

cough...

[gnurd]

cough...bullshit...cough...

I figured slant-six might be a humor sight, but...

[LoveMe2Times]

when looking on their about page, they claim:

"Slant-Six magazine is a valiant attempt to revive the principles that guided the magazines of old: thoughtful writing, original content and high standards."

Which makes me wonder why they're posting a story that is so obviously a hoax. Really, how many people needed the MIT readers of /. to verify that it's a hoax? I mean, MIT CS Labs has done some cool things, but a complete OS lightyears ahead of its time compatible across multiple hardware platforms and taking into account real world concerns like an office suite??? And in secret! And did I mention real world concerns in an academic lab? Like my subject says, I assumed it was a humor site, but now I'm just not sure. I'll be curious for a follow up from the slant-six people explaining what's up.

Re:free probably means..

[aka-ed]

Why is it continually necessary to provide a GPL dig in every context, even where it's completely off-topic and irrelevant?

The same thing that makes it "necessary" for a moderator to call his post "redundant" when it is only (at worst) annoying (for the reasons you state).

That is, both moderators and posters are free to abuse their priviledges.

99% probability it's a hoax folks!

[GiorgioG]

I searched google for "Advanced Operating Systems Group" and got 5 hits, none appearing to do with MIT. I also did a search for "Cesium OS" and found absolutely no relavent hits. I also searched deja.com (newsgroups). Nothing found.

Total Vaporware++

Re:Interesting, but how will it talk to everyone e

[Winged Cat]

Well, if the hoax comments are true, it'll have to use the stable, third-party-developer friendly, fully documented interface from Microsoft.

You know, vaporware.

Dunkirk a new Slant Six member

[brgomeistr]

Adding more to the paranoia of the article, did anyone notice that Harvey Dunkirk just registered as a member of Slant Six today!

Website:MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
E-Mail:hdunkirk@mit.edu
Member since:10/29/2001 3:09:40 PM

overmodule?

[ajmfreefall]

who the hell at MIT would use a word like "overmodule"? That was enough evidence to suggest that this is a ridiculous and untimely hoax which will hopefully spell the end for Slant-Six (whatever the hell that is).

secret research?

[Tom7]

OK, what kind of academic research institute does research in *secret*? I think I have to go with others here in thinking that this is a hoax...

Re:secret research?

[Mister Attack]

Well, it certainly is a hoax... but MIT and its affiliates do, in fact, carry out secret research. Lincoln Lab was up here recruiting last week, and you had to be a US citizen to apply, because you had to be able to get a security clearance. Ballistic missile defense is a bitch like that.

PAY ATTENTION EVERYONE

[Migelikor1]

THIS IS A COMPLETE CROCK.
The man doesn't exist
The department doesn't exist
The project doesn't exist

It's pretty sad that there are still new comments appearing talking about this system as a reality. In the last few days, we've had the completely wrong iPod slashback, now this. Come on editors AND readers, do a little research before posting. More readers should have caught the fake, and it shouldn't have been here in the first place.

Re:PAY ATTENTION EVERYONE

[p3d0]

Ok Mr. Smartypants, settle down. So some people got taken by the gag--it's not the end of the world.

Anime!

[Mt._Honkey]

Does this sound like the OS from Lain to anybody?

Re:Anime!

[Myuu]

Haha! I realized that too and even noted that in one of my posts. Comm OS is so 31337 ^_^.

Maybe this is a lesson

[q-soe]

Look, as someone who likes slashdot and comes here several times a day i dont like to be seem as critical, but this story is an indication of whats happening on /.

A few minutes web work would have shown that this group doesnt exist, the person mentioned doesnt exist and the email address doesnt exist, thus this is a hoax which worked very well i would think.

The most depressing part of this is that is see posts with people arguing authoritatively about what is wrong with this OS etc etc when discussing an OS that doesnt exist ?

All im asking is that the editors actually check out stories they post before they do so - its a matter of respect for the people who come here.

NOTE - im posting this under my user name in the full awerness that someone brave and wise (enter sarcasm mode)will likely mark me down for being offtopic etc etc - but as this topic is a load of bull how can anything be off topic ?

Re:Maybe this is a lesson

[__donald_ball__]

Hear, hear. Bogus stories like this reduce my ever-lessening desire to read slashdot even further. The lead articles are less technically interesting than they used to be, the (participating) audience is less intelligent, and the editors don't seem to be willing to put in the effort to check stories for truth or to see if they've been posted before. This week. Geez. (You could even make a good try at doing a duplicate story check programatically.)

Re:Maybe this is a lesson

[Zog]

While I think it is true that editors should check out stories better, you bring up an interesting point:

This has actually brought out real discussion - a thing I haven't seen in a long long time on slash. Maybe something like this should actually be considered - randomly putting out false stories simply for discussion. Once people stop ranting about it (as I'm sure they would at first), it could actually be a way to be a little bit thought-provoking, and would make /. a lot more useful.

But anyway, that's all for now.

NOTE - I'm posting this as me because I have no real need for karma, and my thoughts are written above as comments, and I'm not interested in hiding from them.

Re:Next-gen OS? Sure...

[RevAaron]

Fact-checking? On slashdot? Surely, you jest! And timmy seems to be the best at just posting before he even looks at the link!

*cough* SUCKERS *cough*

[baptiste]

LOL - Unreal. First, Slant-six has an open submission queue. And Mr Harvey?

Harvey M. Dunkirk
Website: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
E-Mail: hdunkirk@mit.edu
Member since: 10/29/2001 3:09:40 PM

LOL - A posting member < 24 hours old - ROFLMAO!

HOAX

Drivers and Apps

[vlad_petric]

For an OS to become mainstream (as the author of the article implies), it needs two things:

1. Good support for x86 hardware (large variety of peripherals)

2. Applications (desktop, server), satisfying the needs of a large number of the users.

Without these - it's nothing but a niche OS.
It took Linux a good number of years to get passing grades for #1 and #2. It's true that the development for Cessium started a while ago, however nothing indicates that they've reached a critical mass

More than that, there is very little room in the market for a revolutionary OS. As a matter of fact revolutionary OSes were one of the easiest ways of wasting money in the last decade (e.g: OS/2, Plan9, BeOS ...).

I do think it's a great research OS. Acceptance, however, is a totally different story

Raven

MIT Circle Jerk

[ignatzMouse]

I can just imagine the people at MIT 50 years into the invention of the book: Let's throw all our preconceptions out the window. Why does the writing have to be readable? How about a book made of water? This left to right restriction is a complete waste of time, text should be able to go any which way. Think about how much more information we provide if we get rid of spaces! This sounds like the typical mental masturbation fostered in galapagos-esque academic institutions. Usability is about creating simple rules that work and then sticking to them. Forcing every user to start from scratch may be interesting in the same way that the cultural revolution was of interest to Mao, but it has no place in real world computing.

Re:MIT Circle Jerk

[javaman235]

Hey, smart response....

First, we all know that this is a hoax at this point, but you brought up some points that I wanted to comment on.
Your right that its the rules and common definitions that define a "vernacular" that a human uses to work with a computer, mostly through a process of symbolic reduction of computer functions and attributes. (e.g. a logical grouping of files is reduced to the symbol of a "folder", so a human has a conceptual idea of what it can do, and what its for.)

having a "new" OS that abandons the establish vernacular in this sense is always a bad idea, as it will confuse the human...Just like if you met someone who knows a lot of new terms, but can't communicate the basic english idioms that define your speech.

Where you deserve to be corrected IMHO is on the idea of "sticking to basics". Computers have an incredibly limited symbolic vocabulary that they share with humans, and humans can handle new things being added to language all the time...In fact we love it! We call the new additions "buzzwords".

Anyway, my point is that we don't have to sit here and cry because its a hoax...There's no reason that computers have to stagnate forever being as they are, never radically changing. If you want "celsium" so bad than freakin write it! Else just add the features that you particularly want to your favorite OS, and wait for the changes to add up!

While I do think this is a hoax

[im@peacewithouta.gov]

Especially because of this tidbit at the bottom of the article:

"Editor's Note
Felix Abraham Truman, 10/29/2001 8:54:42 PM
Some of the comments posted about this article have led me to believe that it may be either inaccurate or blatantly false. If any of our readers from MIT can cast some light on this issue, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!"

What I find most interesting is that most of the hoax busters refer to the research they did by scouring the Net. Granted, it's a computer related project, but has the eye of the Net become so omnicient that we believe nothing exists outside the Wire?

"Hello, Navi"

Re:While I do think this is a hoax

[aka-ed]

A bogus email address as the only means for contacting the author would make the email system the natural first place to check, and bounced mail certainly is a large clue here.

Also, when speaking about the MIT Lab for Computer Science, it makes sense to look for some web trace of the supposed OS.

The thing that cinches it, though, is internal evidence: the reference to a full-featured office suite and "CesiumQuake." Who in their right minds sees MIT spending time and expense on such coding projects?

Timothy, and Slant Six's editors, should've caught this one just based on that.

Evidence it might be real

[rlwhite]

Well, I agree with most people here that the lack of information directly from MIT is fishy. The author's invalid email address, no mention of the Advanced Operating Systems Group on the LCS site, or any mention of Cesium.... Strong hints of a possible hoax.

But a closer look at LCS is rather interesting-

1. Work on exokernels. Doesn't seem groundbreaking giving Java's history, but fits the description for Cesium's platform module. Nice slide show in the documentation. http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/exo/

2. Work on OODBMS. Applicable to Cesium's storage module. Apparently named Thor, which is mentioned as a module in the exokernel work noted above. http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/pubs/pdf/MIT-L CS-TR-626.pdf (warning- 95 page thesis in PDF)

This is just what I managed to turn up quickly that could be applied to Cesium in the manner the article described. Is Cesium real? I don't know, maybe some student got wild ideas after hearing snatches of project reports in a meeting or something, but it looks more real after searching the site. Take a look before you judge.

A Hack

[ThreeToe]

I think the hackers at MIT have just perpetrated a new hack... but this time it is on the slashdot community! Funny nonetheless...

Oh great...

[sdo1]

Cesium... must be an OS that locks up all the time.

-S

Tripwire?

[diablovision]

"The Presentation overmodule works with the Platform overmodule to give programs access to a powerful and platform-independent visual interface that can present the output of programs as anything from terminal text to a 3-dimensional Hollywood-style GUI called "Tripwire" (which does shadows, transparencies, textures and light rendering better than most video game engines) depending on what the user chooses to see and what the hardware can handle."

Tripwire!? It was so revolutionary and new that they had to name it after an existing, well known security tool?

This has got to be completely made up.

Re:Linking directly to an NT server

[silicon_synapse]

That's enough to make a grown man cry

Re:Interesting, but...

[Russ Steffen]

but no one's ever implemented them below (or as a part of) the OS layer.

Quick! Somebody better tell IBM's AS/400 people that they're selling a machine that doesn't exist. Horizontal microcode indeed!

So its a hoax... Doesn't mean it can't be Real

[hooded1]

I think we can all be sure that this is a hoax. But so what. This cesium actually sounds like a good operating system idea. I think it's the responsibility of MIT to start developing it. :)

.

Re:So its a hoax... Doesn't mean it can't be Real

[javaman235]

hehehe "but we HEARD you guys would develop it, so doesn't that mean you have to???"

poor MIT. Your right though, it is a good idea.

Learning from kerberos

[supabeast!]

"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."

Hopefully MIT learned from Microsoft's "embrace and extend proprietarily" approach to kerberos, and will release it under a license that keeps Microsoft from doing so again. On that note, anyone who is involved in the politics that play on MIT's dean and directors should keep an eye out for the handiwork of the devil, ie Microsoft sending in the clowns to stop them from releasing software under a "proprietary" license.

slant six?

[rabbits77]

Maybe the first clue that this story is a hoax is that the only reference is some sort of campy obscure web page? Like, MIT releases cutting edge OS and gives these guys the scoop? Yeah, I'm sure that many advanced CS researchers seek the academic prestige of being mentioned on slant six.

Not a hoax.

[Byteme]

Here is the screenshot you all are looking for:

Cesium 2.12 Screenshot

but what about this

[igotmybfg]

Well, I've read that this appears to be a hoax. In the interest of keeping an open mind, have you considered:

1. This operating system really is so ground breaking that MIT has been keeping it secret for 8 years?

2. MIT made the writer change the name of the operating system in his article? Change his own name? Change the name of the components?

peace

Even if it is false...

[zoombah]

It's still a fascinating, damn good idea. I'm being honest when I've been thinking of a similar OS design, though I haven't ironed out particulars. Anyone care to make it a reality?

Re:Even if it is false...

[javaman235]

I've thought about it too...I assume your a programmer:

What do you think about a file system abstraction layer (FSAL) that allows for the treatment of all files as objects? I found the Object oriented FileSystem an inspiring bit of the hoax.

An object oriented FileSystem would mean files that have methods, and properies as metadata, and implementing it as an abtraction layer would mean not limiting existing functionality, but extending it, particularly if it can reference physical files and hold metadata.

Can you imagine that when GIMP is installed, instead of defining internal functions for, say, resizing a jpeg, you simply associated the functions with the object that corresponds to a JPEG itself , with a reference to the particular module that contained the functions. From here, ANY program the needed image processing capabilities could call ANY method that the GIMP has DIRECTLY on the file object without ever digging through the thousands of lines of code that the Gimp has and copying it!!! (provided that the GIMP module with the given method is in the FSAL's DB.)

Hoax or not, that is simply one of the most powerful things I could imagine happening to open source...Every new piece of code being instantly available to new programmers as an instatly accessable, ever growing API, accessible just through reading what methods are registered with a given file type.

Re:Even if it is false...

[TheShadow]

I agree. An object oriented OS would be a really good thing. Maybe there would be code reuse if the whole system was built around that concept.

I really like the idea that application programmers won't have to worry about file structure and mundane things like that anymore. They would just create persistant objects on the "file system," across the network, where ever.

A remote object system built into the OS (like CORBA and RMI) would make network programming trivial.

Well, if there are others that are truly interested, I'd be willing to maintain such a project.

Re:Even if it is false...

[javaman235]

I really wish this thread had more visibility...Its buried beneath so much slashdot crud.

But the idea is solid. I like the notion of persisent network file objects, and DB as filesystem. Its neat to think of checking certain file dependencies through SELECT statements, and being able to grab it off a remote "filesystem" if the user needs.

I know this works too, because I have already used it at a smaller level to great advantage, through object/component oriented content management systems through PHP/Java/MySQL. Unfortunatly, my Linux/C skills are just not strong enough to do this as it should be done...Yet I profoundly hope this idea gets out there and gets heard enough to inspire action, because its needed!

Re:Even if it is false...

[TheShadow]

It's all relative. As hardware gets faster (10 Gigabit Ethernet, 2Ghz CPUs, etc, etc) we need to take advantage of it somehow. Will there be speed sacrfice, sure. Will applications become less buggy due to code reuse... I hope so. Will apps become smaller due to code reuse... yep. Will software be written/debugged/released quicker... I'm sure it will.

And I'm not sure about your comment about adding a layer that nobdy can understand. What's not to understand about getting a reference to a graphic object and then telling it to render itself by simply passing it to a window object?

Everyone needs to get out of this "I have to move every single bit myself" attitude. Let's start thinking a little differently for a change. Why not? It would at least be fun.

Re:THIS IS NOT REAL

[rat71]

This is a "hack".

Food for M$

[dakoda]

I read recently that ms coders are now working on the next version of windows, which is supposed to have a 3d gui. upon reading this, i was curious as to who had produced a 3d gui for them to steal. haha only serious, this article pops up. given ms's track record for stealing ideas, this seems likly to be next. =(
or, maybe, there are lots of 3d gui's around, and i am not up with the times *shrugs*

Harvey Dunkirk

[heptapod]

For those who are interested, the only hit for "Harvey Dunkirk" on google is at a Civil War veteran website

Re:Interesting, but...

[Detritus]

How about the UCSD p-System? It ran on the Apple II, IBM PC and directly on a mutant version of the LSI-11, among others. Most of the system was written in Pascal, compiled into p-code, and interpreted by a p-machine. That work was done over twenty years ago.

Re:Cesium...

[martyn s]

Cesium is not liquid at room temperature.

anyone notice...?

[Technodummy]

the first hit on "Cesium" in Google is: Songs of Cesium

on this page is a mention of Cesium Chloride... which (correct me if I'm wrong, I never did chemistry) I think is salt...

maybe we should take this article with a pinch of it...

the only software called Cesium that I could find is: clock and timing software for the Palm

Re:anyone notice...?

[psxndc]

Common table salt is NaCl: Sodium Chloride

psxndc

Re:anyone notice...?

[andrewscraig]

Yes, but CsCl is another form of salt. It is an alkali metal which has formed an ionic bond with a non-metal...which if memory serves correctly is the definition of salt (been a long time since I've done chemistry).

Re:anyone notice...?

[p3d0]

Cesium Chloride... which (correct me if I'm wrong, I never did chemistry) I think is salt...

Boo-urns. You're no geek!

Salt is sodium chloride. Cesium chloride is a salt I guess, but it's not table salt.

Re:anyone notice...?

[ConceptJunkie]

OK, here's the geek take:

Cesium: melts in your hands, not in your mouth

Rick

Were you saying "Boo" or "Boo-urns"?

Re:anyone notice...?

[psxndc]

Hence my prefacing it with "Common Table Salt". I thought the same thing, but wasn't sure so I did not answer "The only salt is NaCl". ;-)

psxndc

Re:anyone notice...?

[p3d0]

I was saying "boo-urns".

Harvey M. Dunkirk ***member since***

[bigcitymike]

look how long harvey's been with the site:

This page lists the current staff members of Slant-Six, ranked by how many articles they have published. (he's last #19)

Website: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
E-Mail: hdunkirk@mit.edu
Member since: 10/29/2001 3:09:40 PM

i smell a troll

Reader corrections shouldn't lessen responsibility

[ToastyKen]

I'm thinking that perhaps the /. staff posts stuff more cavalierly without fact-checking precisely because its comment structure allows for easy reader corrections. I know that whenever I see an iffy story, I go to the comments to see if there have been any corrections, and there usually are. Because of this, I can't really say "I'm not going to read /. any more!"

Fact is, for people like me who read the score 4/5 comments, /. remains a pretty reliable news source, if you take those comments into account. This, as I've said, probably contributes to editor slacking, since they feel that fact-checking isn't necessary. However, there is a significant portion (majority?) of /.'s audience that does not read the comments. You can say, "This is their own fault," all you want, but some people just choose not to spend more time than is necessary to get a brief glimpse of the news. For these people, /. is spreading uncorrected misinformation, and it is doing a disservice to its readership.

I think that, if the editors don't want to spend the time to fact-check, they should at least post immediate update/corrections to the article, visible on the front page, when a glaring error has been made as in this case. That way, the people who don't read comments can at least be informed of mistakes.

Another indication of Hoaxiness:

[Bonker]

all human-readable text is assumed to be HTML or XML, instead of Notepad-style plain text, and formatting can be customized with cascading style sheets.

Chicken and egg problem that no real MIT OS guru would allow himself to be caught in. If every document is considered to already be HTML or XML by the OS, how do you create HTML or XML above the OS layer? Use a text editor? Ah, but all text is considered to be HTML or XML at the OS level.

Sorry guys. There are some really great ideas here, but the article is really just a troll. It's just an interesting wishlist of OS feature desires.

Re:Another indication of Hoaxiness:

[goonies]

Also, how shall I save my HTML docs for the web if this nice OS saves everything into a database?
Remember? No more files or folders the article said.

Just my 2 cents.

Which site am I on?

[Mulciber 1]

Unconfirmed rumors? Immature editors? Man, I thought I had accidently clicked my bookmark for The Register for a second there...

so then...

[magicslax]

Well, it was a hoax. However, it seems quite a few of us saw features we like in this 'utopian operating system,' albiet features that would take ages to implement. Beyond being bullshit, this could be conceptual thinking in the right direction. Innovate. Conceptualize. Fool. Good times.

Does it run Blazemonger?

[Krokus]

...or is it meant to succeed it? :)

WHY IS IT IMPLAUSIBLE?????

[vikool]

Why all these comments about it being a hoax....is it so difficult to design an (futuristic) operating system whose specifications are known by all...the article..describe the specs of the the OS..not in details..but to gave an idea..i'm sure..MIT.or any university for that matter..if they were working on it for 8 years...should def be able to design such an OS...

Re:joke I saw on the web...

[vikool]

HAHA.....hahaha

A Hoax?

[freebsd45]

What shit! This is supposed to be news and stuff that matters. A hoax is not what I come here for. I'm deleting /. from my bookmarks. Commander Taco: Cut off my account! I'm not coming back.

It's almost assuredely a hoax...

[Repvblic]

The 'editor' of S6 questions the validity.

Happy Halloween hoax?

Well....

[mindstrm]

Reiserfs does not use an RDBMS based filesystem.

3D desktops are a novelty still. There have been projects long before 3dwm.org

An virtual machines were done a LONG time ago by IBM.. .sun is new.

And the guys at MIT have done nothing; this is a hoax.

Big Deal!

[jeeryg_flashaccess]

So this bogus article wasted 5 minutes of you dull day huh? Who cares! It was an INTERSTING read that made me want to know more. Who knows, maybe somebody will make the OS in spite...

Enough "content control" bitching! Move on.

Step Three:

[Tekgno]

Step One:
We wet out pants over it (I know I did :P)

Step Two:
We realised it was a hoax

Step Three:
Are we going to do something about it?

This sounds very cool, the OODBMS for starters is cool, it saves so much wasted space; the practicalities of the 3dGUI are a bit suspect but
all the other details are good.

Personally, I think it would be good to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch every so often. It is about time that somebody created a new OS FROM SCRATCH. It would be a mammoth undertaking but in the end we would have something beautiful, the next generation of OS.

(If I don't stop in a minute I'll cream my pants again :P)

Cesium?

[gblues]

So, does it explode if you try to give the GUI an Aqua theme?

Nathan

[Meta] Re:Maybe this is a lesson

[slamb]

NOTE - im posting this under my user name in the full awerness that someone brave and wise (enter sarcasm mode)will likely mark me down for being offtopic etc etc - but as this topic is a load of bull how can anything be off topic ?

I'm really tired of people talking about how they are taking a stand and will get moderated down by some coward. You aren't opposing the Slashdot majority view at all. People have wished for the editors to do basic journalism since Slashdot was created, and it's never happened. Your post is fairly redundant.

If I had mod points right now, though, I wouldn't moderate you down for being redundant. I rarely actually mod people down for that, though I tend to vote "unfair" in metamod when Insightful/Interesting/Informative are given to posts which state common views without adding anything new or relating very closely to the story (for example, most RIAA-related posts).

I would, however, moderate you down as "Troll" solely because of that damn moderation comment.. Get over your crusader dreams.

database

[zephc]

you just described BeFS, whch can have arbitary new metadata tagged on to any file/directory (like artist name, song name, song length, and stuff that doesnt exist normally on BeFS filesystem entities (node, date stuff, etc., are all the base/required file metadata)

a 3D GUI ala seen in Lain sitting on BeOS, with a fast VM (java, or whatever) would be a good catharsis for the ppl disappointed by this hoax =\

Re:database

[matman]

Well, please, excuse my ignorance :) Cool.

Didn't Katz say something about this sort of thing

[Pathos78]

Isn't this a manifestation of that 'infocalypse' thing people have been going on about for so long? Y'know, where the only thing you do all day is read email, or story submissions. Everything comes so thick and fast that you can't devote the time required to do a perfect job, so you end up pissing off a larger and larger percentage of your readership and let more and more errors creep through...

Just as the early mod system had to be extensively reworked and eventually dumped in the laps of the people causing the problems in the first place (to the chagrin of democracy fans everywhere), maybe this is less a lesson than a wake up call?

Or maybe just a bad week on /....

3D-OS thoughts and applications

[thebigbadme]

Anyone remember the movie Hackers? Just a quick ref...
Anyhow it seems as tho if one had a 3-D layout of their computer navigating would be similar to traversing the "real" world. Truely this might be the answer to right-brained computer users. A Left brainer can take the 'standard' gui and use it to the fullest extent as if they were given writen instructions to a new location... Where as a right-brainer type would fair much better off by having a map drawn, or being able to 'walk' around in a city.
Me thinks that the use of a non-traditional navigation device would be in order, something along the lines of a joystick (ideas anyone?), also this would be a great time to switch over to a new keyboard (I loved that pyramid shaped one).. You know, if you're gonna have to re-think the way a computer is used, might as well do it all at once. I'm interested to see how this turns out.
New acronym?: GIDBOS
Graphically Integrated Data Base Operating System

Very efficient hoax.

[David Hume]

This was also a very efficient hoax. "Harvey M. Dunkirk" has been a member of Slant-Six since "10/29/2001 3:09:40 PM." See: Slant-Six Information for Harvey M. Dunkirk. The Slashdot story was posted by Timothy on October 29, @06:58PM. Four hours from start to successful completion.

Re:Interesting, but...

[nomadic]

But it's worth noting that most of what they offer is already available under Linux. As far as I'm concerned, they're re-inventing the wheel.

Hell, Linux is the king of wheel reinvention...

We have enough OSs thank you

[iggyflashbulb]

If these bozos^H^H^H^H^H intellectuals were as smart as they claim to be they'd realize this is the 21st century and that the world needs better applications, not obscure OSs.

They ought to work on writing a decent text editor for linux.

Please mod me down as flamebait. I would like that a lot.

Re:free probably means..

[Trepidity]

Clearly that wasn't intended to be a pro-GPL and anti-MIT-license dig, but a comment wondering out loud whether this would be free in the free software way (regardless of which particular free software license) or "free" in the "source is available free of charge, but it's not free software" way that is becoming so common lately. Presumably the author was not aware of MIT's habit of using the MIT license for their software.

Which is what I mean when I say that the supporters of non-GPL free software licenses are a bit too defensive for their own good.

Re:free probably means..

[Trepidity]

I don't see how RMS has ever advocated forced labor. There is no forcing anywhere - you have a choice to labor or not. If you choose in your labors to use my code which I chose to license under the GPL, then you must follow my conditions. If these conditions are onerous or otherwise unacceptable to you, you are free to not use my code at all in your labors. There is no forcing, merely a quid pro quo offer of code in return for modifications.

it's a joke but it sounds interesting :)

[kipple]

..doesn't it? think about it: db-style os, 3d or text gui, such and such....

..time to rewrite linux from scratch? :)

cheers

Re:3D-OS thoughts and applications (It Exists)

[RupertJ]

Several years ago, a couple of people from SGI created a 3D "File System Navigator" for the IRIX O/S. It was used in the movie "Jurassic Park". Slightly dated appearance, but cool nonetheless.

You can find it at http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html

--Rupert.

Well, with a name like that....

[X]

....I guess that answers any question as to it's stability!

haox, so he says in a replay

[nempo]

by Harvey M. Dunkirk

The guy who wrote it.

I made it up! Harvey M. Dunkirk, 10/30/2001 2:07:27 AM Thats right, I can't believe anyone fell for it. Muhahaha

his reply.

Re:haox, so he says in a replay

[zephc]

actually that was a different (second?) account ... http://www.slant-six.org/display.asp?type=u&id=har vey vs. http://www.slant-six.org/display.asp?type=u&id=Dun kirkH

71 to 20416

[Knunov]

At the bottom of the story on Slant Six there is a hit counter. When I first read the story it stated:

This story has been read 71 times.

After the Slashdotting, I went back and just a few hours later the counter read:

This story has been read 20416 times.

Behold the power of /.

Save it for 4/1

[shibboleth]

Save it for 4/1. And if you're going to waste people's time, at least make it funny.

Hoax, but...

[dasmegabyte]

HTML for all text? 3d built into the subsystem? Virtual Machines and OODMBS?

Sounds to me like a beefy version of Java3d, which while not an OS, I've always thought should be the basis for one. Who doesn't want a natively multi threaded high security OS with the "metal" LaF and true object oriented design? Plus, by devoting all system reources to the VM, we might actually get Java that could respond on an older system...

Re:Next-gen OS? Sure...

[donabal]

Lots of projects, grand in scope, have been kept secret for months, years, decades and then released.

Some of these things were truely fantastic. Some of them were also just things that helped out NASA and found commercial application.

Hell, there's an uber-secret project going down at CalTech that I've only heard rumors about for years. And only one article written about it.

Oh yea. Just because somethings has been released at version 1.0 doesn't mean that people should have access to it. It's simply stable enough to "use". I don't even want to see the operating system until its fully-functional or able to be dealt with.

Give them time. Has MIT ever given you a project that has disappointed?

--donabal

remember MULTICS?

[peter303]

MIT LCS other "big" operating system? OS by committee that did everything and nothing well. Used by Honeywell. Was a negative inspiration for the bare-bones OS from Bell labs wil parody name UNIX.

Is it me, or did everyone miss this

[cjf242]

In the original post from timothy you will see these words " Yep, it's a hoax. Fun! Tricks are neat!"

Seems like a lot of people do not read things to the end.

Hamilton 95

[Whip-hero]

Not that anyone will actually read this, but when I was in college, my friends and I got involved in a Usenet hoax lampooning the (then) soon-to-be-released Windows 95 OS. People on the various warez newsgroups were frothing at the mouth looking for advance cracked copies of Win95... they actually expected someone to UUENCODE >30 1.44 MB floppies and post them onto the newsgroups.

Someone on these groups made a posting about a "new" OS that blew Win95 out of the water - it was called Hamilton 95 (Ham95). The feature list was very interesting. The best part is that we told people they could ftp the whole thing from warez.dsnet.com, which was mapped to 127.0.0.1 back then. :)

Seize

[srichman]

You can think of some cool taglines too -- "Cesium: Just Add Water And Watch The Flames". ... Or the late night BS sessions where you dream up acronyms that spell C.E.S.I.U.M. ("Cooperative Environment for Serving Information something something").

I don't know about that... Making people say "seize" ("To come to a halt") every time they mention your OS has to have some bad subconscious effects...

Re:Seize

[hey!]

That reminds me of the poet Andrei Codrescu, who when learning to drive had problems selecting a car. The Chevy "Citation" seemed like tempting fate. The Dodge Dynasty (break it down to Die-Nasty) was even worse.

Cencium

[Limoges]

I have only one thing to say! Well actually I don't, I have several things to say, but, think Final Fantasy the Movie! The Trip Wire GUI could resemble the interfaces found in Final Fantasy the movie. With design like that to look forward to... hrm what can I say! Bring it on! Beyond the look of the interface, consider how flexible a 3D environment could be. We will no longer be restricted to windows that only resize, minimize, and close. We will no longer scroll just up and down, left and right! Imagine being able to scroll in and out, eliminating the need for multiple desktops! The ultimate concept behind a truly 3D interface will allow programers to do whatever they can imagine, and not be limited to what the OS has available in its limited API selection of windows, and boring mouse clickers. Essentially, if you want windows, you can have them. If you want text, you can have it too, and you can have the ability to dip your hand into the ocean, reach in for a sea shell, and pull a file out, only to open the file from an application that is in a glass bottle, all in the same environment, all at the same time. Crazy, but possible! 3D GUI's will allow for infinite interface abilities and could truly revolutionize the way we inter face with computers. The only thing that stinks is that I am hearing reports that the OS is a hoax and that MIT has no plans to release such an OS. So if they don't, maybe some one else will read these articles and save us with a similar concept!

So it's a hoax...

[sqlrob]

So What? Wasn't Parrot (the Python / Perl merger)a hoax last year? IIRC, it went into alpha or beta recently.

How long before someone thinks this is cool and starts implementation?

Re:So it's a hoax...

[cmowire]

The story of the whole Parrot thing was:
1) April Fools Day hoax from the Perl and Python people creates a merged Perl / Python language called Parrot.
2) Perl 6 wanted to abstract the interpreter for bytecode from the rest of the system.
3) Perl 6 decided to name the bytecode interpreter "Parrot", in reference to the afformentioned joke.

Attention: Hoax

[DaveWood]

Even Slant-Six has acknowledged it. Check their front page.

http://www.slant-six.org/default.asp

And here is the proof...

[Kommet]

It's a hoax (damnit, I wanted Cesium to replace my BeOS RC5.0.3 installation) and here is the tacit admission of such.

Now, who wants to work on this OS for real? I suck at OS coding (as I haven't done ANY coding in 5 years), but I'll gladly be a beta-test space-monkey for you!