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Bell-Labs Releases New Version Of Plan 9
F2F writes "Plan 9 from Bell Labs Fourth Release was announced yesterday marking a major overhaul of the entire operating system. VMware images are now supported, together with hoards of new hardware. The operating system now sports a new security model (on top of the old one, which was already quite secure), new network-resident secure storage system and improvements in the thread library, among others. See the release notes here: release4 notes or simply go to the download page at: plan9 download." T. adds: erikdalen sent in these links to critiques of the Plan 9 license from Richard Stallman and Nathan Myers.
Washington -- The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops.
The administration is turning to that approach after concluding that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed and that a proxy battle using local forces there would be insufficient to bring a change in power.
But senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions. These include avoiding summer combat in bulky chemical suits, preparing for a global oil price shock and waiting until there is progress toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Until recently, the administration had contemplated a possible confrontation with Hussein this fall, after building a case at the United Nations that the Iraqi leader is unwilling to allow the kind of highly intrusive inspections needed to prove he has no weapons of mass destruction.
That schedule seems less realistic now. Conflict in the Middle East has widened a rift within the administration over whether military action can be undertaken without inflaming Arab states and prompting anti-American violence throughout the region.
In his public speeches, President Bush still sounds as intent as ever about ousting Hussein, making it clear that he will not let the Middle East crisis obscure his goal. But he has not issued any order for the Pentagon to mobilize its forces, and today there is no official "war plan."
Instead, policymakers and operational commanders are trying to sketch out the broad outlines of the confrontation they expect. Among the many questions they must address is where to base air and ground forces in the region. Even before Bush's tense meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Thursday, the Pentagon was working on the assumption that it might have to carry out any military action without the use of bases in the kingdom.
The planning now anticipates the possible extensive use of bases for American forces in Turkey and Kuwait, with Qatar as the replacement for the sophisticated air operations center in Saudi Arabia, and with Oman and Bahrain playing important roles.
NOT LIKE AFGHANISTAN
As to any war plan itself, the military expects to be asked for a more traditional approach than the unconventional campaign in Afghanistan. Such an approach would resemble the Persian Gulf War in style, if not in size, and would be fought with even more modern weapons and more dynamic tactics. "The president has not made any decisions," a senior Defense Department official said. "But any efforts against Iraq will not look like what we did in Afghanistan." In terms of diplomatic reaction from the region, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their senior aides contend that Arab leaders would publicly protest but secretly celebrate Hussein's downfall -- as long as the operation was decisive -- and that ousting him would actually ease the job of calming violence between Israel and the Palestinians. They believe that warnings of uprisings among Arab populations are overblown. "It has been the consistent drumbeat from our friends in the region that if we are serious, they will be with us," said one administration official in this camp.
But at the State Department and among some at the White House, counter- arguments are posed that efforts to topple Hussein would be viewed by Arabs as a confrontation with Islam, destabilizing the entire region and complicating the broader campaign against Osama bin Laden and his network, al Qaeda.
SAUDI SUPPORT UNCERTAIN
The reaction in Saudi Arabia already is critical.
The United States would need permission to use Saudi airspace adjacent to Iraq, if not Saudi air bases, officials said, but it is unclear whether Bush took up that subject with Abdullah when the topic of Iraq came up.
NO TURKISH TALKS YET
Turkish officials, for their part, said that no negotiations on basing American troops for a new campaign against Iraq had yet taken place. U.S. officials confirmed that, calling such talks premature. Kuwait's position, too, is uncertain. At an Arab League summit meeting in March, Iraq agreed to recognize Kuwait and pledged not to invade again in exchange for a declaration that an attack on Iraq would be considered an attack against all Arab states. But American officials said they could rely on Kuwait, whose very survival is owed to U.S. military power after Iraq invaded the country in 1990.
Senior administration, Pentagon and military officials say that consensus has emerged that there is little chance for a military coup to unseat Hussein from within, even with the United States exerting economic and military pressure and providing covert assistance.
AN IMPOSSIBLE COUP
"There have been at least six coup attempts in the 1990s, and they consistently fail," said an administration official. In each instance, this official said, dissident Iraqi officers "sent signals to us, 'We're ready for a coup,' and the next thing you know these guys are murdered or it fails or people have cold feet at the end and leave the country."
"It's a horrific police state," the official said. "Nobody trusts anyone, so how can you pull off a coup?" The parallel strategy in Iraq would involve the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south. But Hussein's military -- although only one-third its pre-Gulf-War strength -- is strong enough to defeat any confrontation by proxy, officials said. Officials said the nascent plans for a heavy air campaign and land assault already included rough numbers of troops, ranging from a minimum of about 70, 000 to 100,000 -- one Army corps or a reinforced corps -- to a top of 250,000 troops, which still would be only half the number used in the Gulf War. Other than troops from Britain, no significant contribution of allied forces is anticipated.
Moving tens of thousands of troops to a region with access more limited than in the Gulf War could be a logistical challenge, officers said. The modern American military has never fought the kind of dangerous and complicated urban battles that might be needed to oust the Hussein government. Dealing with Hussein's suspected chemical and biological weapons would require pre-emptive strikes by precision weapons, as well as an element of heavy deterrence.
While the Pentagon has focused on how to remove Hussein, the White House is also mindful of the effects of a war on oil supplies -- either because the fighting itself would disrupt the flow of oil, or because Saudi Arabia and other Arab producers would feel obliged because of pressure at home to cut back on exports to the United States.
In November, Bush ordered that the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve be filled to capacity. A review of the delivery schedule for the reserve shows that many of the largest monthly deliveries come between September and January, another reason for pushing any offensive off to early next year.
That's HORDES, as in the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, meaning lots, not HOARDS as in a secret treasury. Also, for future reference, probably LOSE not LOOSE, and FAZE not PHASE are the words intended.
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Real geeks don't need breakfast. All they need is Mountain Dew.
That was funny. Too bad very few slashbots will get it.
Do yourself a favor and check out a new month-old internet site called Serence. Since April 2002 they have had a free / no ads / no spyware download for your Windows desktop called Klipfolio and this thing is great. According to the site statistics 3400+ slashdotters have already downloaded the Slashdot Klip and after joining them today, I can see why. (No, I don't have any personal vested interest in this, I just think it's cool.) The Slashdot Klip stays on your desktop and downloads the XML feed from Andover/Slashdot containing current article headlines, alerting you when there is a new one. Klips from a few dozen other founding news sources with XML newsfeeds are also available in a scrolling, dockable, resizable, skinnable package. In the lower left corner of the previous link you can suggest a new klip feed to Serence you'd like to see - a great thing for you to do, the more sites that use this, the better for all of us. You can even start up your own personal Klip feed! Rack up your favorite sites in one desktop package and you are really in control...click on a headline, up comes the article, click on the site symbol, up comes the home page. Like any dot-com, Serence's success depends on market penetration and this is one idea I think deserves to be slashdotted so it has a shot at succeeding...
Offtopic? Not really, the article I'm posting under went out as a Slashdot Klip headline. And what good is maxed out karma if not to risk it in spreading the word about a cool new Slashdot feature?
Look, BSD is dying, BeOS is dead. Why? Too much of operating systems is not requested. People understand better the simplest concepts. One of them is "us or them". Today it means either Microsoft or Linux. Everybody else - stay away from the big battle.