New GNU Hurd Kernel Released

Anonymous Coward writes "I don't know if there is much interest out there, but GNU Mach Kernel 1.3 was just released a couple days ago. (May 28)." Looking forward to that 2002 release...

Comments

Re:Can RMS be taken seriously?

[doom]

toupsie wrote:

After reviewing the moderated comments on this thread, I have come to the conclusion that RMS has become the joke of the Open Source movement like Milli Vanilli became the joke of music industry. Everyone of the higher modded posts was "Funny".

Actually, the attitude of the average slashdot commentator towards RMS says a lot more about slashdot than it does about RMS.

The slash crowd seems to be a bunch of "technical" guys who can't get beyond personalities.

Hey guys, written any good C compilers lately? Come up with any revolutionary social institutions, like the GPL?

On those two grounds alone, you would think that RMS would be revered at least as much as Linus Torvalds, but no... "RMS, he's that nasty guy with a beard who keeps talking about politics. Let's go get him."

Slashdot losers

[Paul Komarek]

IF YOU AREN'T INTERESTED IN THE HURD, THEN SHUT UP.

Can slashdot posters quit talking out of their rear-ends for even one article?

A long-running project in the open source world just made an announcement. The /. editors decided to carry the story. The comments are filled with jokes about how stupid RMS and the HURD are. I dearly wish there was a "strip all comments labeled "Funny" button.

I'm very interested in how the HURD is progressing, and in TECHNICAL OPINIONS on the HURD. Where are the technical opinions among the comments? Damn few and far between. This is the sort of nonsense that makes slashdot look worse than USA Today (hell, slashdot doesn't even have color barcharts on the front page!).

At one time, I learned a lot about computers and socioeconomic factors surrounding computing by reading slashdot comments. Several years ago, comments included information from computer scientists, sysadmins, and knowledgable hobbyists. Eventually there was a problem where you couldn't find those comments in between the 50 copies of "First Post!". Moderation came, and I could usually find the good posts again.

The comments on this article, however, demonstrate just how stupid the slashdot population has become. My theory is that the huge popularity of slashdot in the US has attracted a readership which closely mirrors the average intelligence of the general US population -- you know, the same population that elected GW Bush for president (motto: "What we need is a clear policy in the Middle East"). The moderation system that once worked well is failing miserably because almost all moderators are as stupid as the posters.

As anyone can tell, I'm pretty pissed that a bunch of whiney losers in diapers, who couldn't spell "algorithm" if they had a copy of CLR on their desk, or explain why CISC was a natural choice for microprocessors in the 1960s, have drowned out any hope of interesting discussion on a technical topic. The comments attached to this article provide some sort of slashdot corrolary to the bikeshed axiom: Since a moron reading slashdot feels compelled to make authoritative posts on every article (to increase their karma?), they will post about the bikeshed color if they have nothing to say about the bikeshed. God help us when the discussion turns to nuclear power plants.

Beyond technical comments, why does everyone feel a need to deride RMS and the GNU project all the time? It seems natural to have some social discussion of RMS and the GNU project attached to any article about the HURD. I can understand why RMS is unpopular. I can understand why some people dislike RMS' campaign to use the name "GNU/Linux" when discussing operating systems which use the GNU foundation but replace the GNU kernel (I guess my feeling on this is clear). What I can't understand is why people put so damn much energy into making RMS a laughing stock.

At this point, it no longer matters what RMS does or says; the slashdot readership seems hell-bent on destroying RMS just because they heard that he was unpopular in some circles. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that Microsoft had a pool of RMS-trolls trying to change public opinion of RMS, GNU, and Free Software via slashdot comments.

I'd like to encourage everyone reading this to do the following:

1) Think for yourself
2) Listen careefully to what people say, in comments and otherwise
3) If you don't have anything useful to contribute, then keep your mouth closed.
4) Be careful with the "funny" moderation tag -- we all need humor, but there's more (or should be) to slashdot than (rightly or wrongly) smacking people down

If we follow those rules, then maybe we'll be able to learn stuff from slashdot comments again. For instance, comments on this article about a new HURD release might include:

1) discussions of microkernel history, strengths, and weaknesses,
2) which microkernels are still in use
3) how the Darwin kernel design differs from the HURD design
4) a reasonable, well-thought-out debate about whether the long term benefits of the HURD justify the current HURD effort in the Free Software community
5) how changes in hardware might affect the expected future value of the HURD, given the HURD's extremely slow development
6) alternatives to monolithic and microkernel designs in principle and practice (I'm not aware of any, but surely someone has something in-between, if not totally different)
7) whether the Free Software and Open Source communities should really be involved with basic software research, or lower its ambitions and simply copy existing, working software

Maybe this post can at least spawn an intelligent discussion of whether it violates the rules it proposes (it probably does, but I'm not going to fix it because I'm still seeing red).

-Paul Komarek