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Interview with Vita Nuova CEO Michael Jeffrey
Little-Fat-Sheep writes: "Lots of talk on Slashdot and elsewhere lately about the future of Operating Systems being massively distributed. Well, the technology exists for years now in the two operating systems offered by Vita Nuova: Plan9 and Inferno. OSNews features today an interview with Vita Nuova's CEO, Michael Jeffrey."
click here to read the article without supporting the capitalist pigdogs. no ads. one page. printable, baybee, printable.
Readers of Slashdot. I come before you today with a desire. A desire to rid Slashdot of the one thing that is driving me away: Trolls. As I have seen it put here before, the scum of Slashdot. Let me give you a quick explanation.
I know that this is offtopic and should be rated offtopic, but the statements I'm making here are true and must be addressed at once. I am posting this comment under a new account so as not to burn up the precious karma that allows me to post relavant articles and replies to meaningful stories. Did you read that last sentence? Relevant and meaningful. Two words that are all too often lost in the heightened "signal to noise" ratio that trolls are forcing on the intelligent readers and posters of Slashdot.
I'm no genius. I use windows at work because I have to. I use Linux (Mandrake)at home, but I'm a relative newbie and am still learning better ways to make Linux run. There are many stories on Slashdot that I do not understand. Most of these stories are about systems or technology that I will probably never use. Regardless, I have learned much about Linux from the postings and users of Slashdot. I also use Slashdot to keep me up to date on technology and current events/issues in the technology world. Things like napster, the DMCA, the hype of ginger, and many others.
Here's my point. I should be allowed to read Slashdot, regardless of who I am and what I'm reading it for, without having to worry about pictures of a man's anus being spread open, people telling me about some atm becoming a person, people talking about pouring hot grits down their pants, or people thinking about a petrified Natalie Portman! What's wrong with these people? Don't they have anything better to do with their lives/time than to bother others? I'm sick of people saying that Linux users are gay and communists. I'm neither of those things, and if even if I was, should that lessen my right to read Slashdot in peace?
I've said all that to say this: the trolls must go! I'm not saying that I have a solution. The moderation and meta-moderation systems are great tools. They have filtered out much of the garbage that people spread on Slashdot. Banning people's accounts and or ip addresses has also worked to a limited degree, but are not the answer. I'm also definitely not saying that we should impose some form of censorship, as I, like many other worthwhile Slashdot patrons, am against censorship in all its forms. But something must be done. At first I began thinking "trolls are on Slashdot and I don't like trolls, so I should just start reading a different techie news site," but thats not fair. Before you start the "life's not fair" flames, hear me out.
I certainly didn't start Slashdot. I haven't been around Slashdot for that long (only about 2 years). It would not be fair for me to say "our" website or "we" need to take back whats rightfully "ours". But in truth, thats what you old timers should be fighting for. I'm more than willing to "join the cause." I have been subjected to far too much worthless drivel while trying to enjoy Slashdot. Surely we, and I say we meaning the actual readers of Slashdot could come up with some sort of sure fire way to once and for all retake our beloved site from these people, these trolls. Come on there are a lot of smart people reading, posting, maintaining, and contributing to Slashdot. Surely among all these living clock cycles we could develop something to safeguard Slashdot from the trolls.
Sorry for the ranting and rambling, but I've said some things here I've needed to say for a while, and quite frankly are true. Shall we begin discussions of removing the troll element from Slashdot?
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women!-H.Simpson
The 1st huge ad is in this story.
Slashbot Janitors, YOU SUCK!
Thank you
I was playing pogs and the fucking slammer flipped only like 6 of a 15 pog stack! To top it all off, this mother fucker flipped the last nine, and then his SLAMMER hit me in the fucking goggles. Luckily I was wearing my goggles or I would have gone blind, maybe. Goddamn, pogs own. Get your latest issure of Slam!-Pogger's Resource at a local news-stand now! pogmeister
A distributed OS is fine. What happens to network traffic the moment this is widely accepted? Also, how secure is it? We need to think of security in the light of MS et al's daily patches.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
It looks like a giant swollen pimple!
QUICK SOMEONE POP IT!!!!!!!!!!!
How are you going to mention Plan 9 and inferno withough mentioning bell labs?
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
meept!!!
I HATE GNU by the Dead Kennedys
I Hate GNU
(Fuck YOU!!)
I Hate GNU
(Fuck YOU!!)
DIE!
Then I got caught masturbating to pictures of richard simmons.
I would like to share with you a story - a story of pain, rejection, denial, loneliness, and perhaps, at the end, triumph and a happy ending. This story begins just three short years ago...
I was in my senior year of highschool, and as was the style at the time, I was very much interested in computers. I loved to take them apart, figure out how they worked, write programs with Microsoft's fine development environment, Visual Studio. As was also the style at the time, I loved to read webpages, in particularly, Slashdot.org. Perhaps you can guess what happened next. I began to slowly change - I developed an unhealthy obsession with computers, began to dislike and openly question America's policies, started shamelessly pirating music and software, and most dangerously, got turned on to that most deviant operating system of all - Linux.
Now I know many of you must be shaking your head in disgust at this point - "This must just be another one of those M$ trolls, hardee har har," but please, hear me out. This is very important.
As time went on, I got deeper and deeper in the Linux underground. I progressed through the various levels of "distros," from Mandrake, to Suse, to RedHat, finally to Debian, like a drug user going from harmless marijuana to cocaine and heroin. I thought I was so smart; I began sneering at other people who didn't use Linux - "Clueless Windo$e luzers," I would say. I was changing outwardly as well. I became a loner, hunched over the keyboard late into the night with the lights off, listening to my illegally downloaded music. All my friends left me after I broke their computers trying to install Linux on them. My hair grew long and unkempt, I stopped bathing and using deodorant, calling them "tools of capitalism and American greed." I got fired from my sysadmin job for installing slackware over the Solaris servers, and installing Debian over the Windows desktops. My bosses told me I cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I would not listen. "How could I be wrong, I'm using Linux?" I thought, "They must be M$ shills." You can see how far gone I was. No girls would look at me, let alone speak to me. I was in a world of pain, anger, and confusion.
But, then one day, I took a long hard look at myself. I saw that something was wrong, but did not know what. I must confess, for a long time I denied what I knew deep down inside my heart - Linux was the cause of all my troubles. I saw what I had allowed myself to become. I was no longer a human being, I was a Linux Zealot. Instead of judging people by their thoughts, feelings, and actions, I judged them by their choice of Operating System. And so began the long road toward recovery...
I am still not fully recovered from my affliction, for you see, I have only one desktop machine, and cannot install Windows without losing much of my data. That's right, I am healthy enough to admit it, Linux is not for desktop use. I am planning my next desktop machine purchase, which will be an Apple iBook. The one good thing that came out of my years of torment is that I learned the power of Unix. Therefore, I will use MacOSX - a true Unix with excellent support and commercial software backing, something Linux will never have. By paying for my software from now on, I will be supporting the American economy. I want to help get America out of this economic tailspin brought on by open source software and the dot com bust. More importantly, I will no longer be an operating system zealot. I will be friendly, kind, and generous to my fellow humans, no matter which operating system they use. I am now slowly regaining my friends, and last weekend I actually got invited to a party - my first party! Perhaps this weekend I will ask a cute girl out on a date. Since I have cleaned myself up and changed my attitude, I have noticed a few girls giving me flirty looks around campus. I'm so excited about my new life!
Please, Fellow Readers of Slashdot, I implore you to look at what you have become. Although it will be long and difficult, you too can change. I have faith in that. You can start by saying this with me - "Microsoft is not evil, Linux is not good for the desktop." Repeat that every time you feel yourself slipping. Together, we can right this horrible wrong.
Thank You.
Visit the new Troll site!
on www.goatse.cx
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
The Zenmaster told me:
Without mods,
there are no trolls.
Only posts.
The parent post should be modded +5(Insightful) because it mentions the Dead Kennedys. Thank you.
Visit the new Troll site!
It mentions Bell Labs several times including the relationship between bell labs and Vita Nuova (i.e. bell labs spun off Inferno to Vita Nuova).
-- Find the Truth...
Bought 20 karma points but they don't show up in the user stats !
It seems that the system is already broken.
they shure r perty.
makes me want to go sex up an rs/6000 as we speak.
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
IF  I  ever  meept  Ben  fucking'  Franklin,  I  WILL  KICK  HIS  GOAT!!!!
Free marketing tip (the first one is always free): if you want to sell an operating system (or make it really wanted), please don't name it 'Inferno'. It doesn't bring really good mental images, now does it. Also, 'Plan9' sounds like a warm hatful of geek humor that's guaranteed to provoke negative reactions in more rigid corporate minds. Sure, these are unusual and interesting names, but there are plenty others that don't generate such bad vibes.
But hey, it's your company.
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
It amazes me how long it's taken for these ideas to ferment. I mean I was talking with people about the distributed OS concept back in 96 or so. I have to wonder why the concept has sat mostly unexplored for this long. Perhaps more importantly, I wonder why it's suddenly hot again. Is there some actual practical use for the technology that's bringing it back into the light? Or are people just thinking this is the next logical step of P2P and thinking that it will be hot because P2P is?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Line installed in my ass, the reception isn't coming in too well...
Okay so Plan 9 is cool. Useful ? Probably not as it doesn't have any support or applications of note.
Where as Linux is a poorer OS from a next gen perspective but has the applications and support.
OS/390 is old school but has great memory management, io and SMP etc.
The first two are already open source, the third owned by the Big Blue Linux supporter. Wouldn't it be better to have a directed 2 year plan to create a merged platform ? The reality is that Linux right now is in the Bazaar and to get to that end game we need some form of Cathedral project to guide and drive. But picture the end game, a networked OS, with loads of apps, the best SMP, io, memory and domaining support you can get.
This would be the great killer platform for servers, and a kick-ass gaming platform.
Unfortunately it won't happen because the only people who could really run this successfully would be a combination of Bell Labs and Thomas J Watson. Damn that would be kick-ass, but Big Blue don't seem to want to take the lead in Linux, and the linux community probably wouldn't let them anyway.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
a lot of talk recentlly about massively distributed OSs... but not for the same purposes.
the main talk lately is about distributed file system and processing power and the privacy issues... not technology issues.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I'm a bit confused here. Does Inferno have its own language to be compiled within the VM like Java?
that are such keeners, they can mod a post troll/flamebait/offtopic 0.14 seconds after it happens?
You guys are worse than first-posters.
Relax. It's ok if a post goes unmoderated for more than a few seconds. And don't worry, you don't have to use your mod points right away.
You just described XP, It's the BEST OS ever!
Who needs memory management, IO, SMP or any of that other technical mumbo-jumbo.
We come in peace, Microsoft is your friend!
Bam!
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
One little nit-pick is that the article mentions both Plan9 and Inferno are not Open Source. Also, its important not to look at the significance of these operating systems as in current market saturation, but what new and exciting features they can bring.
Regarding the 'killer platform', im not sure that Holy Grail exists. However the world proves daily that implementation is more important than design, so just pick what works best for you.
In the interview the CEO says "Neither OS is open source". But the web site has downloads for kernel source. Can anyone guess what he was talking about?
-- Nobody should take away Microsoft's freedom to innovate, particularly since they haven't used it yet
From Outer Space (directed by the ever kooky Ed Wood) the worst film ever made? Boy, they sure picked a zinger of a name, didn't they...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
" I believe Inferno achieved what Java set out to do. "
Associating your company with Open Source is corporate poison.
You are correct sir, I have just released MyPenis to the public domain under the GPL. MyPenis is now open source "feel" free to make extensive use of it!
suck one down today - subscribe to slashbot!
From the Plan 9 FAQ:
l
t ml
The Plan 9 release is available for free download at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/download.htm
It includes source of the kernel, libraries, and commands for all supported architectures. It also includes complete binaries for the x86 architecture.
Regarding implementation: You can be the judge of whether this sounds like a good idea:
Subject: What GUIs does it support?
The standard interface doesn't use icons or drag-n-drop; Plan 9 people tend to be text-oriented. But the window system, the editor, and the general feel are very mousy, very point-and-click: Plan 9 windows are much more than a bunch of glass TTYs. The system supports the graphics primitives and libraries of basic software for building GUIs.
A screenshot is available at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/screenshot.h
Subject: How do I cut and paste with a 2 button mouse?
Plan 9 really works well only with a three-button mouse. In the meantime, Shift-Right-button will simulate a middle button, but that is inadequate for Acme's chording.
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
I'm no expert in all things fractal, but aren't fractals supposed to infinitely repeat? If so, then the fractal program for the Inferno plugin doesn't really generate fractals. Check it out yourself....just keep zooming in. Eventually it gets all pixellated.
If I'm wrong, set me straight and mod me down and explain fractals to me again...
hmm.. wow, those are some really hard hitting questions. damn, this interview sucks, it sounds more like an introduction to inferno and plan9 in a very watered down way. it appears as if the author doesn't even under what he is interviewing or hasn't taken the time to develop anything but generic questions.
yawn.
Because you can look at the code does not mean it passes the criteria of the OSD or the FSF's guidelines. Put some Plan9 code in your 'Hello World' app and im sure you will be hearing from someone...
>>Eventually it gets all pixellated
you're reaching the numeric precision of the hardware. Most fractal viewiers out there have this problem. They may do things in 64 bit math or 128 bit math or use their own custom routines, but eventually you zoom in so far the math falls apart.
finally slashdot has got its head out of its ass and started putting in some quality advertising :) . . IMB >> oh yea.. dubbleclick.com . . even better ;) . .but come on lets get serious here, put the images on images.slashdot server, really who does not have ad.dubbleclick.net point to 127.0.0.1 now days, and its soo small, and only every third page load, What would be even better, would be a full page add, that you where forced to look at before you could continue loading the page, even better lets start charging for posting in articles in the main page, that oata be profitable, and while where at it why not moderate the forms a little closer, can't have the sponsor getting bad mouthed, better yet eliminate the forms altogether and start a TV channel call it slash-TV, and have people pay you to put their products on display between comercials, then we could really make some money:P oooohhh money oooh money . . profitiblity orgasmic.
Correction: plan nine ISN'T open source according to Richard Stallman.
- the plan nine license requires all changes be sent back to them;
- you (possibly) can't sell your code for a profit;
- lots of other problems with the license. (see here for Stallman's take on it.)
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
Yeah I know, I talked about the idea with people, heard about Plan 9 and thought, "somebody's on it" and left it alone :).
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
RMS doesn't give a shit about open software. Pick a licence from OSI and ask him about it. Half of them he will disregard as being "not a free software licence." He's been asked about ESR - his response? ESR is a member of a /different/ community - for him, Free Software is either software that has the source available and has NO copyright restrictions on it, or items covered by the GPL/LGPL/GPL compatable licences, and even the latter 2 he isn't happy about.
Please reverify the current licensing. It has been changed since RMS wrote that. Vita Nuova paraphrases the current license as such:
The full text of the Plan 9 Open Source Licence can be found at the Bell Labs Plan 9 site. The licence is similar to many Open Source licences.
The main points are:
-You can modify, copy and distribute the source code as you wish.
-There are no royalty payments on the distribution.
I believe there is a clause, or combinations of clauses, that require you to provide Lucent with source if you distribute binaries only. Sort of looks like a semi-BSDified GPL. Please correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm not completely fluent in legalese.
I thought Inferno was just a VM - didn't think it could run on its own.
>Inferno on the other hand has been designed >such that it can either run as a native OS on >bare hardware or as an application on existing >operating system platforms (Windows >95,98,2000,NT, Linux, Solaris and others).
It's also written in C. Shouldn't a highly scalable OS be OO. Wouldn't that make designing and programming apps easier/quicker?
See Microsoft and modular argument. Linux is modular (not that nice an impl IMO), so are the mainframe architectures. Only have one proc ? Don't install SMP. Don't need domaining, don't use it. Don't need X,Y,Z then don't use them. Having a standard OS platform from which you can build your targetted OS is the approach I was talking about. In the same way as you don't compile the ISA support into Linux if you don't need it.
OSes should be modular, the aim should be to get the best modules available from the best people to create the most flexible platform.
One size does not fit all, just look at the size of the SUSE distro.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Does anybody actually USE Plan9?
......
That's what I thought.
We have customers in 50+ countries in every continent, except Antarctica.
Yet another company that writes off an entire continent. McMurdoans are tired of being the niche-too-small-to-consider.
When we talk about "penguin power" down here, it's got nothing to do with cheap CDs from LinuxCentral.
Why does this article appears under 'Patent pending' topic?
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
I decided to download the IE Inferno plugin and run the demos. I was really impressed with the performance. It really seemed much faster than any java applets I've used. And the download times were very short. It looks like a really cool system. But I really doubt it will be used widely. It's been around for a long time and I would venture to guess that only a relative few have ever heard of it. Too bad.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Here is the pretty much identical article published in Phrack for easy online reading.
Its a good read and shows that while Inferno implements encyption and other security measures, it is not very secure. The author of the article has written a login utility and password cracker for Inferno however his site seems to be down, or temporarily empty i guess, at the moment. It doesnt really cover plan9, just a mention.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
i've responded to this article several times in several forums. the basic summary of the article is "if you mis-configure something you've installed as root, you can make bad things happen". well, gee, thanks. there's nothing specific to inferno here. inferno itself, either installed on raw hardware (like a normal OS) or hosted on top of another OS installed properly, as per the directions is quite secure, and does not have any known holes in it, nor does it expose any in the underlying system. you are instructed to install the installation as a user other than root - the fact that the author of the 2600 article gets it wrong from step 0 sort of taints his findings.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of THESE!!!
Look it up in the US PTO DB.
The small ones say something about downloads failing and inferno terminated.
Bounce says nothing at all.
Press CTRL+ on your keyboard. Press it 10 times.
Get my point?
"128 bits oughta be enough for anyone?"
Exactly.
Java has become a ubiquitous development language on devices as diverse as mainframes and mobile phones. Inferno on the other hand has bugger all.
Like me saying "I believe that Fluffy dinosaurs rule the world" it says more about the gullibility of the believer than the statement.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Private namespaces -> Inferno gives each user/app a private namespace. If you're not allowed to see a file, it'not in your namespace, so there's no way you can even ask to see it. This is a good example of capabilities-based security. This is lightyears past the MS-DOS idea of each disk partition or network share being painfully appearant to the user.
JIT optimized VM -> DIS, the Inferno VM, is based on a memory machine instead of a stack machine (a la Java and CLR/Mono). This allows for more efficient register allocation durring just-in-time compililation. Stack machines are great for writng smpleinterpreters with small memory footprints. Memoery machines are great for easily recompiling into fast native code. If I could, I'd start on an Open Source VM based on DIS. Toasters are great, but I don't want a crippled VM just so that it's easy to run on an 8-bit microprocessor in a toaster. You guys running SPARC, MIPS, POWER, PPC, IA64, etc. CPUs should notice the performance advantags of DIS more than us poor x86 users because the x86 is pretty register starved.)
Distributed resources -> in Plan 9, there is a crippled user account without a password that pretty much can't doanything but present cryptographic credentials that prove it's doing work on behalf of a priveledged user. This would allow your dnet client to run on your CPU farm, but not actually be able to log in as you if it got compromised. As far as I can tell, the system is very similar to Kerberos with more types ofcredentials and tickets that never expire. I don't like the lack of ticket expiration , but it's better security than almost anything else out there. Most Beowulf implementations use rsh for performance, so you need to isolate the Beowulf compute nodes from anything remotely hostile, since rsh gives you a root prompt without a password based on the source TCP port number.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
FUCK you.
I said... FUCK you!!
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
No Adaptec listed in supported hardware. I guess pretty graphics is more important then fast storage!
I would like to highlight some of the good and bad points of Plan 9 and Inferno that were not mentioned in the interview.
/net directory (http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/3/ip.html). You open sockets by writing strings to control files. Sockets are created as dynamic subdirectories in the /net and controlled by writing to additional control files.
/net directory, then it absolutely can not access your disk or any other functionality. If you hide the /net/udp subdirectory, the process will not be able to use UDP, never.
/net, then you can have any number or restrictions or augmentations to this in the form other file systems. You can just bind them as a stack, where the upper directories selectively hide or create new file names to the hierarchy.
m l
m l
The soul of these systems are the protocols 9P, (the new version will be renamed 2000P) and Styx, even more than the actual OS implementations. The protocol is a bit like raising the abstraction level from TCP "transport" layer to somewhere closer to the "session" layer, although the OSI terminology does not fit very well.
First important idea of the protocol is, that all functionality or "objects" is mounted remotedly and bound locally as directories, called "file systems" in Plan 9 parlance.
This means, that naming, user rights management, authentication, encryption and all that which f.ex. CORBA2 provides as complex badly interoperable abstract extensions are there with strict binary interoperability for all heterogenous environments. Of course multiplexing and streaming is there, because you have a set of bidirectional files or "named pipes", if you will.
Note that all this is independent of the programming language. There are C and Java libraries for accessing 9P or Styx objects.
An example: the access to TCP/IP functionality is a
The second major point is process security. The file system name spaces are per process. If you only give a process the
The third point is related to second: inheritance or "stack directories" or "union directories". You can have a base file system like
You can give the stack to the name space of any process. Now some of the original names are visible and data to them goes transparently to the original implementation process. Some names are new, and data is routed to the modification implementation. Some of that may be redirected to the original names after checks or modifications.
And the iplementations can be mounted from anywhere on the network. You can have several machines running several OS' and programming languages with 9P/Styx, and they all are mounted, bound and stacked to one directory, say "/service", for your chosen client process, which does not see the configuration of the system.
For example low level "device" file systems, see
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/3/INDEX.ht
and for higher level file example systems
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/4/INDEX.ht
or in Plan 9
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/3/INDEX.html
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
OK, and the bad news:
It is somewhat difficult to port existing Unix applications to Plan 9. There is a POSIX compliance APE environment, but its use id discouraged in the Plan 9 cimmunity. And the environment is full of diffrent "/services" that you should use instead of POSIX system calls to integrate well.
Inferno VM is currently heavily oriented to one programming language, Limbo. There are projects to run Java on the virtual machine, but they are not exactly production quality or marketable. And the philosophies again clash: you should use the existing "/service" components, not the extensive Java environment libraries. If you are a customer of Vita Nuova, you can get the C source to the Inferno environment, and program in C, too.
Lack of applications is obvious. There are development tools of course, and a rudimentary Web browser, but not much else.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Private Namespaces for Linux
1 2a .htm
http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1782/ddj0112a/01
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi