Other Web Browsers for Bell Labs' Plan 9?

SeanIBaby asks: "I was wondering if anyone used Plan 9, and Inferno/Charon for a web browser. Are there any other web browsers for Plan 9, or do you have to code your own? I've noticed that Inferno's company sells Plan 9 boxed sets for $150US. I guess this is because they include the Inferno/Charon binaries with the image, even though they let you download Inferno for free from their website. Plan 9 is free from Bell Labs."

Comments

A Safe Assumption:

[Farley Mullet]

If you cut your question off at "If anyone out there is using Plan 9?", the answer would be a resounding "Nope!". From what I've read, Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.

Re:A Safe Assumption:

[niker]

>>the answer would be a resounding "Nope!"

I look at a system with plan9 on my desk (currently turned off), I read your answer, and I remember this quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to it's size".

This was not meant to be an offense, Farley Mullet, but I do know a couple of people who currently try out the OS, and your comment neglected to reflect that - that was not a safe assumption, but a rather centric one.

Re:A Safe Assumption:

[fm6]

Which begs the question, "Why is this important enough for an Ask Slashdot?" The last I heard of Plan 9 was a story on Slashdot about Plan 9 running on an embedded virtual machine, so it could run applications under a web browser, rather like Java applets. Nothing came of that either.

Re:A Safe Assumption:

[Lshmael]

From what I've read, Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.

1: Listen to others who have not tried Plan 9 talk about it.
2: Do not try Plan 9, but use experience of listening to people who did not try Plan 9 to extrapolate that nobody uses Plan 9.
3: ???
4: Profit?

Re:A Safe Assumption:

[BrokenHalo]

I'm not too sure why your post has been modded as flamebait. Someone's smoking crack. Must be SC....

Never mind. I had actually almost forgotten what Plan9 was until I went back to the site and reminded myself.

Seems to me that Plan9 was a good idea in its time. There was never anything really wrong with it, and for some people it's the best thing since unsliced bread, but it seems most of us have moved on.

Re:A Safe Assumption:

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey this is a site which runs Amiga stories on the front page and has an entire section devoted to *BSD.

At least one could argue that Plan 9 is the "Future" and not "Dead".

Hmm...

[skinfitz]

Plan 9? Bunnies in spacesuits (one might say designed for OUTER space..) called Glenda???

I'm beginning to see a theme here...

What is Plan 9?

[Prien715]

This's the first I'd heard of Plan 9. I went to the website and though the intro was legnthy, it's designed to be a GUI-based OS that implements many of the things Bell sees wrong with Unix. Anyone using out there care to add something?

Re:What is Plan 9?

[fm6]

A "gui-based OS"? A GUI is just a layer on top of the OS. If you want to form any worthwhile opinion about an OS, you're going to have to dig a little deeper than that.

Re:What is Plan 9?

[GigsVT]

Ignoring the old Macs that had GUI stuff in BIOS calls?

Re:What is Plan 9?

[fm6]

You're kidding? No, I guess not.

Location of the binary is an implementation detail -- something isn't "more-OSy" just because it's in ROM. Besides, the very early MacOS wasn't a real OS -- like DOS, it was just a glorified loader. The fact that it was dressed up with a GUI actually supports my argument.

Yes, it's flamebait.

[fm6]

It's also true.

fuck me -are you using the same internet as me?

[Anonymous Coward]

things have moved on dude. I now use Lynx all the time ever since you could follow links to other web pages.

dude, stop smoking da weed and upgrade that browser.

Grammatical Eye For The Dumb Guy

[Farley Mullet]

While we're on the topic of IQ, let's try to rewrite your post with an eye to things like verb tense, sentence structure and the spelling of words like "its":

The Original:

I look at a system with plan9 on my desk (currently turned off), I read your answer, and I remember this quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to it's size".

This was not meant to be an offense, Farley Mullet, but I do know a couple of people who currently try out the OS, and your comment neglected to reflect that - that was not a safe assumption, but a rather centric one.

In English:

Looking at the Plan 9 system on my desk, your comment makes me think of the quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to its size."

No offense intended, Farley Mullet, but I know a couple of people who currently use Plan 9, and this wasn't reflected in your comment. So your assumption wasn't safe, but reflected a certain (limited) viewpoint.

People are often struck by lightning. Sometimes even when it isn't raining. Heck, it could even happen to me tomorrow. But it's still safe to assume that it won't.

Re:Grammatical Eye For The Dumb Guy

[horos2c]

hmm. You, Farley Mullet, are the type of guy that probably likes to go into Chaucer's Canterbury tales and point out all of the mispronunciations.

Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'. Just because his posting doesn't follow the most straightforward syntax doesn't mean that it is 'wrong'..

Re:Grammatical Eye For The Dumb Guy

[Joe Tie.]

Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'.

I should try that when school starts up again. I'll turn in a paper full of missused punctuation marks and the letter u as a personal pronoun and call it style. Yes, many aspects of the English language can be interpreted as correct or incorrect differently by various authorities. However, there are quite a few hard rules which are no more variable than adding one and one together to make two. Dramatic effect and style are one thing, ignorance of some of the most basic aspects of one's native language while at the same time proclaiming his own superiority is something quite different. I'm sure anyone going over this post will be able to find a number of errors, that's why I never make posts proclaiming my own intellectual superiority, I know such a post would be quickly shot down. When one posts that he's better than another - suddenly personal attacks on the author become both justified and on-topic.

I tried it under VMware......

[vertical_98]

I first downloaded the vmdisk that they had available. My version is 4.26 (I think, not at my desk) and it complained about the bios settings being corrupt and resetting to default. long and short, it wouldn't hang at booting the kernel. I d/led the 65 meg ISO and tried to do it from scratch. After a couple of hours, it was finally installed and ready to reboot. Hung in the same damn place.

Now I'm all for hacking and learning and playing with operating systems, but QNX installed a heck of a lot easier.

I realize this doesn't help you too much, but I saw that a lot of people where getting flamebait mods for saying that Plan9 wasn't used by anyone. I can honestly say I don't know anyone that uses it, but I know several people that have talked about it.

Have you tried compiling Mozilla under it? It compiles under just about any other *Nix OS

Vertical

Re:I tried it under VMware......

[delirium of disorder]

Well, mozilla under unix runs on X normally, and although there is an X port for Plan9, most people use a propritary GUI.

Make that would hang at booting....

[vertical_98]

You preview and preview, and spell check and those damn grammer mistakes still get through.

Vertical

Re:Make that would hang at booting....

[urmensch]

grammar ;)

You are quite wrong and so are main assumptions.

[DrSkwid]

There are quite a few users of plan9 nine.

Okay it is probably not more than 100 regular, everyday plan9 is my desktop users but it certainly isn't "nope". But "from my experience" is a really stupid extrapolation.

It certainly is a surprise to see this question on Ask Slashdot when it would be much easier to ask it in comp.os.plan9

All the assumptions in the question are totally wrong.

The VitaNuova Box Sets contain a set or printed manuals. It has nothing to do with inferno being included. Newsflash - Inferno is a free download too !

"Why can I buy OS Z when I can download it for free" can be said of many of the Free OS's.

I think the whole Thread is a giant troll!

You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[DrSkwid]

OpenBSD wants the compilers.
FreeBSD wants the namespaces.
Everybody wants the plumber only they don't know it yet.
GNU/Hurd would love to have a working microkernel OS.
Wake me up when grep, sed & awk and the rest of the bunch work on Unicode!
Then there are the ports - Wily, 9wm, 9menu
Gawk's extensions are lifted from the plan9 way.

The "next big thing" grid computing is old hat to us.

Don't worry, we'll be waiting for you.

Re:You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[jonadab]

> Wake me up when grep, sed & awk and the rest of the bunch work
> on Unicode!

It's called Perl. It works on unicode (since 5.8 really, though
there was tenative unicode support in 5.6), and it has totally
obviated sed and awk -- and would have replaced grep too if grep
weren't too simple to need replacing.

At some point I intend to try out Plan9, just for the diversity of
exposure. I've read a little about it, and from what I read it seems
like it would be more interesting than practical, but I'd like to
actually try it out. Haven't GART yet though.

Re:You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[DrSkwid]

Perl 4 had Unicode support the day it was ported to plan9

Like I said, catch up

Re:You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not intended as flamebait.

How do you talk to the real world? The usual "lies-for-children" protocols like HTTP, NFS, RPC, Slashdot, etc, are available pretty much everywhere these days. Why Plan9, outside very specialist areas like research[1] and play?

[1] "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - attributed to Albert Einstein.

Re:You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[Tony-A]

Don't worry, we'll be waiting for you.

That's why it's an appropriate question for Ask Slashdot.

You can get progress from building stuff on top of what you've got.
You can get progress from getting better stuff to build on top of.
Long term, the second matters more but there is nothing easy about it.

I have two distinct impressions of Unix. It has outlived its betters and it is deceptively simple. It would be surprising if some of that (soul?) were not in Plan 9.

Re:You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[DrSkwid]

Systems research is dead.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/rob/utah2000.ps

Re:You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[Tony-A]

Point made.
Blecht!

"Where is the Innovation?
Microsoft, mostly. Exercise: Compare 1990 Microsoft software with 2000. ...
If systems research was relevant, we'd see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the '70s and '80s. ...
Linux's success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill.
Besides, Linux's cleverness is not in the software, but in the development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS (especially sofware engineering) by any measure. ...
Plus, commercial companies that 'own' standards, e.g. Microsoft, Cisco, deliberately make standards hard to comply with, to frustrate competition. Academia is a casualty."

And ultimately commerce is a casualty.

"There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn't believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding)." ...
Go back to thinking about and building systems. Narrowness is irrelevant; breadth is relevant: it's the essence of system.
Work on how systems behave and work, not just how they compare. Concentrate on interfaces and architecture, not just engineering."

Not dead. Sleeping.
Not your cup of tea, but expect Algol68 to be revived in 2068 ;)

Re:You haven't moved on, you're still catching up.

[jonadab]

> Perl 4 had Unicode support the day it was ported to plan9

Who on earth needed Unicode support in the days of Perl4? Unicode
didn't gain buzzword status until a couple of years ago, right about
the same time as XML. I'm still not sure *why* we need it, other
than that of course everything has to support it these days to be
considered modern and hip. Bah. XML at least is occasionally useful.

Raises not begs - fucktard

[DrSkwid]

And your memory is shit too.

The VM you are referring to is the I.E. plug-in for the Inferno Virtual machine so that it will run .dis programs, and that nothing is about to be upgraded.

Just because you don't see things doesn't mean they aren't there.

Inferno pays the salaries of 6 well paid computer scientists up there in York.
Even Linus needs a day job!

But you are right, why the fuck is this an Ask Slashdot. afaik only 5 or so of the regular comp.os.plan9 people even read slashdot, we could easily have answered the questions with a "mothra kind of works but really we use vnc to do web-browsing"

Re:Raises not begs - fucktard

[fm6]

You haven't had sex recently, have you?

Re:Raises not begs - fucktard

[DrSkwid]

yes, and I'l be doing it again when i finish this sandwich

yes, driver support is a problem

[DrSkwid]

plan9 is less forgiving with hardware

Since the downturn at Lucent no-one is being paid full time to work on plan9 and many in Bell Labs have been made redundant.

Getting a set of hardware together is a barrier to entry but if you look at the supported hardware list you may notice that much of the equipment is old and therefore cheap to get second hand and is often the sort of stuff people will just ditch, S3 Virge's and that kind of thing.

I can honestly say I don't know anyone that uses it

Yes, we are a small minority but growing steadily. We have 13 people in our little irc channel.

But we don't mind, more users would be nice but world domination isn't on the to-do list.
It is a specialised OS with some interesting ideas, many of which are being backported to the stinking corpse that is unix.

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[Basje]

Yes, we are a small minority but growing steadily. We have 13 people in our little irc channel.

Crucify one of those, and you might make it to world domination.

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[DrSkwid]

8)

In the meantime we grew to 14.

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[Richard_at_work]

If you dont mind me asking, what channel is that? I tried plan 9 a year or so ago, and loved it but found it very hard to ask questions around it!

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[F2F]

irc.freenode.net #plan9 (the former openprojects network)

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[Quill_28]

>It is a specialised OS with some interesting ideas, many of which are being backported to the stinking corpse that is unix.

Care to eloborate? You lack tact but serious I am curious as to how plan9 is better than unix(which is some cases I believe it is)?

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[DrSkwid]

private namespaces - *BSD's chroot
user level file systems - Hurd
programmable debugger (debug programs running on a different machine with a differnt CPU)
it isn't POSIX compliant
no root
backups built in
UTF-8 throughout (source code included)
all services should be implemented using a common protocol - 9p
Only 17 system calls

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/index.html

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[RealAlaskan]

>>Yes, we are a small minority but growing steadily. We have 13 people in our little irc channel.

>Crucify one of those, and you might make it to world domination.

That only worked once, and then only because the guy who got crucified turned out to be a ringer: he was God.

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[bill_mcgonigle]

Getting a set of hardware together is a barrier to entry but if you look at the supported hardware list you may notice that much of the equipment is old and therefore cheap to get second hand and is often the sort of stuff people will just ditch, S3 Virge's and that kind of thing.

If you and the other 12 guys could get together and support the hardware VMWare presents, you'd suddenly get tons of potential users, which would inevitably lead to more hardware support.

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[carpe_noctem]

what irc channel is that, per se?

Plan 9 from Bell Labs??

[More Karma Than God]

And all this time I thought that Plan 9 was from Outer Space.

pricing of the Plan 9 boxed set

[forsyth]

the $150 package includes a professionally printed and bound two-volume set of the (fairly hefty) Plan 9 manual pages and (somewhat thinner) papers.

you don't get that with the downloads. obviously you can print off the .pdf from the download; then you'll find that doesn't give the same form factor as the printed manuals in the set.

the boxed set does include a copy of Inferno preloaded on the Plan 9 CD, but that's not the bulk of the cost, if any.

i know i paid $99 for another Free system's boxed set and got one volume with just installation notes and some admin manual pages (both for a previous version!), and i know what i have paid for some other system books here, so the price is not completely silly.

Re:pricing of the Plan 9 boxed set

[Nick of NSTime]

the $150 package includes a professionally printed and bound two-volume set of the (fairly hefty) Plan 9 manual pages and (somewhat thinner) papers.

$150?? Are the pages gilded?

Re:pricing of the Plan 9 boxed set

[forsyth]

there is no gilt but there is no guilt, since there are gems on nearly every page(!)

What about X Windows?

[terbo]

If plan9 supported something such as this, it
bould be easier to 'use' as opposed to 'port'
every application that is needed, and simply
utilize them as network resources.

Google didn't yeild anything positive, and I
don't use it so ...but wouldnt this break a
barrier between program platform needs in a
diverse network setting?

Re:What about X Windows?

[DrSkwid]

X would be considered a virus

In general application porting serves little purpose.

If you want X you know where to find it.

Port!

[photon317]

It isn't all that wierdly difficult to port *nix software over to Plan 9, get porting :)

I haven't touched plan 9 since back around 1996 or so, but back then it shipped with a browser called Mothra I believe.

What is there for Plan 9 and what isn't

[F2F]

i -- a browser attempt by Howard Trickey done sometime around 1996. you can view slightly less complex pages without crashing with probability of around 50%. i know of at least one masochist that uses it regularly.

charon -- the browser packaged with VitaNuova's Inferno operating system which runs native atop Plan 9 (among other OS's). this is your best bet if you want to stick to using Plan 9 only.

Everything else the runs under UNIX/Windows (see Opera lurking in the background?). you only need to have a machine to run VNC on.

links -- two people have started a port of this graphical browser to Plan 9, one may succeed, who knows :)

as for mozilla, there is a slight problem with porting it to Plan 9 -- the browser sources are twice the size of the entire Plan 9 operating system (including the PostScript viewer).

Re:What is there for Plan 9 and what isn't

[SwellJoe]

as for mozilla, there is a slight problem with porting it to Plan 9 -- the browser sources are twice the size of the entire Plan 9 operating system (including the PostScript viewer).

And why is this a problem? Mozilla is big, yes, but why should that be a problem specific to porting it to Plan 9 as opposed to porting it to some other larger OS? OS size to application size ratio is a new "problem" to me, and I reckon you'll have to explain it to me a bit more plainly.

Re:What is there for Plan 9 and what isn't

[DrSkwid]

Rob reckons that 90% of plan9 development was taken up by implementing other people's protocols.

Porting a web browser that has more code than our OS sounds like masochism.

We might want to browse the web with DHTML & friends but not *that* much.

HTML was supposed to be *simple*. It has been trashed for the sake of eye-candy.

And on top is the DOM kludge.

HTML Applications - jeesh, a braindead idea and I should know, I've written quite a few.
Witness the crap that you have to go through to maintain state.

All we really want is an html renderer because HTML is still okay for static interaction.

The web has set back application programming 30 years.
It won't be long before some idiot adds cursor addressing.

Re:What is there for Plan 9 and what isn't

[SwellJoe]

Ah, so it is simply a matter of philosophy. You want small and simple...but it doesn't seem that is what the original poster wanted.

I can certainly see why a lack of interest in a port from the people capable of doing a port would be a problem. ;-)

No point in Plan9

[mnmn]

Want a GUI based UNIX? Get BeOS. For everything else, theres BSD and Linux. Have this unbearable itch to pay cash? Got AIX and Solaris.

Plan 9 is and will always be too immature. The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested (and gotten used to) UNIX hier, and quite honestly, I dont see anything else new there. The niches have already been filled.

Now if people talked about freeing BeOS from the clutches of Palm (like paying for blender), I would be heck of a lot more interested. BeOS is exactly the OS everyone needs right now, a kind of Linux with a really good GUI strapped on top. Beautiful FS and networking and a SINGLE package system.

Re:No point in Plan9

[LWATCDR]

BeOS would be great if it could get out into the OS world. It would make a great compainon for Linux. Linux on the server and workstations and BeOS on home systems and many desktops.

News break... Unix is not the ultimite OS. It is very good and has evolved over the years but in someways it is holding back Computer Science much like Windows is. Very few people are willing to work on anything in OpenSource that is not Linux/BSD/Unix based. I do not blame them. Linux has a lot of tools and apps now. I can use Linux at home for surfing, irc, email, and even writing code. It is good enough. It is actually pretty good.
What I would love to see is something like openMosix. It would be very handy if all the computers at my office where a big CPU pool that tasks could use as they needed. To upgrade just hang some more boxes on the network. An oop based kernel maybe? I would love to see a new OS that has new ideas. The problem is that even I would want it to run my old software.
Linux is a great peice of work. I just have to wonder if we might be missing somthing better.

Re:No point in Plan9

[vasqzr]

BeOS isn't UNIX in any way.

Re:No point in Plan9

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be very handy if all the computers at my office where a big CPU pool that tasks could use as they needed.

This is, as I recall, one of the major features of Plan9.

And for an OOP kernel -- Try the C++ version of L4. L4 is a microkernel, and one of the more active components in HURD development. So you have an object-oriented kernel model (microkernel), written in an object-oriented language (C++, although some would aruge the pointe).

Re:No point in Plan9

[penguin7of9]

The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested (and gotten used to) UNIX hier,

My thinking exactly--where are the punch cards? :-)

BeOS is exactly the OS everyone needs right now, a kind of Linux with a really good GUI strapped on top. Beautiful FS and networking and a SINGLE package system.

Plan9 is a research project. Plan9 actually has some nifty ideas in it.

BeOS, on the other hand, is an object-oriented commercial operating system--well executed, but neither the file system nor the GUI are anything new.

Which one is the right choice for you really depends on your needs.

How long did you use plan9 for?

[DrSkwid]

because it sounds like you either didn't use it for very long or are blind.

The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested
I would humbly inform you that this is the whole point.

plan9 isn't trying to be unix.

and quite honestly, I dont see anything else new there

Like I said, blind.
Open your eyes

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/index.html

Plan9 vs Unix

[Quill_28]

Can some Plan9 knowledgable person give us a run-down?

Major differences good and bad over unix?

I am not worried about current software and hardware support, but rather an overall picture of the us.

Yes, I have read the web-site.

Re:Plan9 vs Unix

[multi io]

[Plan9] Major differences good and bad over unix?

• filesystem namespace, mount tables etc. are per-process, not global
• (really) everything-is-a-file, including
  • network interfaces, sockets
  • display server backend, i.e. one {/dev/bitblt, /dev/mouse, /dev/cons} set; the server re-exports one disjunct such set to each client (which means that the server may be run as a client of itself)
• a single generic protocol (9P) for exporting files over the network. Network transparency of all kinds of services (e.g. the display server) is achieved by exporting the relevant files over the net via 9P

Wily RULES!

[devphil]

I felt obligated to say that.

No, I'm serious. Wily is one of the neatest editors I've ever used. The whole "arbitrary text is active menu-buttons-ish" interface is still quite a departure from the rest of the interface world, and a refreshing one, too.

Re:Wily RULES!

[jovlinger]

I want to like wily. Proportional fonts, funky window handling (like Oberon, back in the day)...

But each time I build it (about once a year), I find that I like nifty, but I need control keys, being able to use it without a mouse, fontification of code...

I've written a few emacs functions to mimick the column layout of wily, so I've got that aspect. I believe the users when they say you can get used or even addicted to mouse chording, but I like having control keys in muscle memory.

now, if only emacs-devel would get off their asses (not that I'm lifting a finger to help) and add Xrender support, I'd be happy as a hog in shit.

Re:Wily RULES!

[devphil]

Heh. This goes to show that tastes differ. I have a difficult time reading source code in a proportional font[*], so I always built wily with a monospaced font, a slightly different cursor symbol, etc. They've a couple of alternative settings commented out in the code; just flip those and rebuild.

As for mouse chords, they're like heroin: you swear that you'll never need them, and then you try them, and suddenly you're hooked. :-)

[*] Except for lgrind/vgrind pretty-printed LaTeX forms of the code. Oh, so pretty.

oh, he was not God

[Anonymous Coward]

Like you could kill God by nailing him to a tree. Don't people ever think?

Re:oh, he was not God

[RealAlaskan]

Like you could kill God by nailing him to a tree.

You can do anything to God that he'll let you do. God let them kill His physical body so that He could come back to life three days later, and show the world that the eternal life He's offering is real. And to fulfill the prophecies in the Old Testament. And to provide a sacrifice for all of us, and show that His sacrifice was sufficient propitiation for our sins. And so on.

Don't people ever think?

Not much. Fortunately, God doesn't require thought for salvation, just faith.

The Wishful Thinking Factor

[fm6]

Amiga has a substantial wishful-thinking contingent, consisting of people who just can't deal with the fact that the platform failed. BSD actually has a lot of users, but you could argue that it's a wishful-thinking platform too. This is a concept that covers a lot of Slashdot content: Mozilla, desktop Linux, open-source alternatives to MS Office, Sealand as a place to stash your data... a big part of the fun in being a Slashdotter is participating in the debates between the Big Idea True Believers and the Wishful Thinking Skeptics. And part of the fun of being a Wishful Thinking Skeptic (like me) is that every once in a while, you turn out to be wrong.

Plan 9 isn't wishful thinking. It isn't even dead -- in order to be dead, you have to be alive at some point. Plan 9 appeared about 10 years ago, as a platform for various advanced OS concepts that evolved out of similar concepts in Unix. It's never found a real following, and really has neither past nor future.

What's really pathetic is that anybody would be interested enough in Plan 9 to actually install it, but so clueless about its current state, they can't even answer "Is there a third party X for Plan 9" without having their hand held. But not as pathetic as Cliff thinking such a clueless question is worthy of anybody's time.

Chaucer on Tape?

[Farley Mullet]

hmm. You, Farley Mullet, are the type of guy that probably likes to go into Chaucer's Canterbury tales and point out all of the mispronunciations.

You know, I probably would, except I don't know how to find mispronunciations in a book.

Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'. Just because his posting doesn't follow the most straightforward syntax doesn't mean that it is 'wrong'.

I suppose that's fair, but at least part of my intent was enforcing the age-old maxim: "if you're going to call someone stupid, check your spelling first" (and to be extra pedantic, I'll point out that you want to use the word "it's" and not "its"). And dramatic effect aside, structurally, the final sentence is a total clunker, from confusing the sense of "offense" to imputing neglectfulness to my comment instead of me, to running two or three distinct thoughts together in one sentence. Style is fine, as is bending grammatical conventions, as long as sense and clarity are preserved (you'll not that in the post to which you're replying I used sentence fragments for effect). Straightforward isn't the issue. Clear is.

Re:Chaucer on Tape?

[buttahead]

and not(e) the spelling. :)

Re:Chaucer on Tape?

[kruntiform]

You made a joke saying that there are no Plan 9 users. Niker responded saying, no, he does in fact exist, and so do other Plan 9 users, and that their smallness of number simply implies they are better. It was a joke. "You don't exist". "Yes, I do, and I'm better". There was no need to go into a grammar rage. What makes you think he is even a native English speaker? It sounds like he is not. His writing was unidiomatic certainly, but it made sense. Yours however (held to more exacting standards) doesn't make complete sense:

I suppose that's fair, but at least part of my intent was enforcing the age-old maxim: "if you're ...

How can an intent enforce anything? Doesn't one intend to enforce something? What do you mean by "but at least part of my intent"? I know what you are getting at, that your actions were justified, at least in part, by that maxim. But it isn't particularly clear what you mean; there is an incomplete thought in there somewhere. Clarity is important after all, as you said.

And dramatic effect aside, structurally, the final sentence is a total clunker, from confusing the sense of "offense" to imputing neglectfulness to my comment instead of me, to running two or three distinct thoughts together in one sentence.

He doesn't confuse the sense of offense; he merely uses it unidiomatically. I don't really see a problem with the idea of a comment neglecting to mention something. What it lacks in strict logic it makes up for by liveliness. You however killed some of that when you recast it from the active to the passive voice.

Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.

Surely the fundamental ideas are already implemented. Which idea are you talking about?

Re:Chaucer on Tape?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, replying to a disrespectful comment which also happens to provide evidence that your original posting was incorrect with an exercise in gratuitous pedantry doesn't reflect well on your own ability to carry an argument; argumentum ad hominem is as much a fault in discussion as poor syntax. While his tone was as immature as his style and form, his substance was nevertheless correct: in this particular forum, you are far more likely to find Plan 9 users than you are in nearly any other community outside Lucent itself.

It's also a bad idea to critique an interlocutor's style in a posting in which you've failed to properly proofread. I won't point the error out myself, because I don't think it is relevant to the actual discussion, and because at a fundamental level I agree with the idea that clarity in style and syntax can only contribute to clarity in communication. I simply wish you were sophisticated enough to recognize that arguments about the style of a rhetorical opponent's comments do not answer to his substance, and make one appear a fool.

By the way, I do have a tape of a performance of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in a reconstructed pronunciation *and* the scars from having tried, and failed, to install Plan 9 on one of my systems. And I'm posting this anonymously because I don't need to flaunt my fluency.

links browser

[penguin7of9]

It probably wouldn't be hard to port the "links" browser (http://links.browser.org/). It's a text mode browser that renders most pages well. There is also a graphical extension for "links" that runs on raw framebuffers and X11 and is probably easy to port as well.

I hope so, I really do

[DrSkwid]

Computer enthusiasts, like the rest of mankind, crave a gentle slope of novelty but we seem to make do with waiting for the next point release of what we already have.

Mozilla bumps up by 0.1 and it's on the front page.

Web browsers should have been finished in the 90's
HTML should be fixed in stone.
We don't need no steenkin extensions.

99% of web pages do just fine without DHTML and Embedded Objects and most can do without Javascript. Do we really need MIDI background music on a fsking web page?

"Oh but I *need* to emebed a video stream in my site."

Hello! that's what URI's and XXX:// transport definitions are for.

makes me so mad

Re:I hope so, I really do

[Tony-A]

Dead aim on a mouse with a bazooka.

That's the cure for Microsoft's problems with worms, but they won't listen, not for a long long time.

gosh - really

[DrSkwid]

VMWare is already supported, numbnuts.

Re:gosh - really

[bill_mcgonigle]

VMWare is already supported, numbnuts.

Yet you replied to a guy who was having trouble getting Plan9 to run on VMWare by saying, "
yes, driver support is a problem ... plan9 is less forgiving with hardware". Did you even read the title of his post? Do you think it was unreasonable of me to assume from his post and your response that VMWare wasn't supported? Or did you just feel like being crass?

Maybe the Plan 9 adoption rate has something to do with the attitude of its proponents.

your world view is too narrow

[DrSkwid]

utf is indeed in use, your world view is not wide enough.

The irc channels with Europeans buzzes with UTF

http://www.xchat.org/encoding.html

like I keep saying, catch up