Japan, China & South Korea May Develop OS

v1x writes "Reuters reports that Japan, South Korea and China are set to agree to jointly develop a new computer operating system as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software. It is said that if the plan matures, the three nations are likely to build upon an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and develop an inexpensive and trustworthy system."

Comments

China making open-source software !?!

[Blaine Hilton]

It seems like if they want the most bank for the buck they should just work on Linux and create their own distribution. Something like Redflag Software Co., however I doubt countries such as China would be interested in something so open as Linux. Unless they had other motives such as installing filtering code deep in the kernel or something to block access to content they don't want you to see.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[msgmonkey]

What difference does it make if the filtering is done at the ISPs'..

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[Luguber123]

Easy now! They are commies, not microsofties. ///
My other mother was a cluster of beowulf clusters.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[timeOday]

I doubt countries such as China would be interested in something so open as Linux.

I can't imagine they'd start from scratch when there's code lying around to build upon. But that doesn't mean their modified version will be open source. Somehow I don't think the GPL will stand in their way.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[NightSpots]

I can't imagine they'd start from scratch when there's code lying around to build upon. But that doesn't mean their modified version will be open source. Somehow I don't think the GPL will stand in their way.


Especially when there's code around with an extra 10-20 years of maturity under a more friendly (BSD) license.

Exhibits:

1
2
3

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[spiritraveller]

There's always the potential for getting around the ISPs' filters by using proxies and other tricks.

If they really want to control what their people see, the way to do it would be at the user level. For example, they could make it much harder to use Freenet in China. They could also make it communicate with a gov't computer if the user tries to do something bad.

OTOH, something tells me there are more important purposes for this, eg having an operating system that works especially well with Asian languages.

I don't think S. Korea and Japan would be all that interested if the only purpose were to increase China's totalitarian abilities.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[shking]

...however I doubt countries such as China would be interested in something so open as Linux.

"'Tis better to be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt." -Samuel Johnson

According to this article, Red Flag Linux was created by the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Chinese government's Ministry of Information Industry is Red Flag's second largest shareholder.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[Eviscero]

I suppose we should be concerned. They might develop an OS that will: 1) Attack a deep water port. 2) Attempt to take over the world. 3) Run kids over with tanks. 4) Supress the truth. 5) (China Only) Use the profits to finance a massive disinformation compaign. (Including 'political re-education classes') Be afraid, be very afraid.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[shokk]

Patience. They'll build on the GPL, not release it, join some future trade organization, and end up forced to cooperate with licenses some time in the future. Could be quite a boon once the code is forced to be released.

And don't forget that all that information will want to be free. Someone somewhere would leak it anyway.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[You're All Wrong]

They'll have a problem with (6)'s dichotomy

6a) (Japan) The init process is a god.
6b) (China) There is no init process. All processes are equals, so long as they are prepared to be killed to protect the init process.

YAW.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[I Want GNU!]

You should read The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig. One of the things he talks about in the book is economic reasons of why entities (such as companies or countries) might "give away" their intellectual property under an open license. One argument would be if they forked an open project and kept a secret version, they would have to spend a lot more resources if they wanted to use updates to the project. IIRC, another reason is that it enhances value of assets they have in other ways. Maybe if they give away their source code it enhances the value of their computers significantly enough so that they don't need to keep it proprietary.

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[Zork the Almighty]

Better yet, they could call it "Rinux".

Re:China making open-source software !?!

[whorfin]

Just like their membership in the WTO and their status as Most Favored Nation by the US forces them to not commit heinous human rights violations, and to actively enforce intellectual property rights?

Will it support

[bersl2]

Windows apps, a la Lindows?

Re:Will it support

[yerricde]

I too was under the impression that the Lindows distribution contained a customized version of the WINE compatibility layer.

Re:Will it support

[Paul d'Aoust]

yeah, we all were under that impression, until Lindows started shifting their focus to Windows 'data compatibility' as opposed to 'executable compatibility'. It was disappointing to us all, as we were expecting some nice yummy stuff to be contributed back to the WINE project.

I think what happened was Lindows just saw it as a too-formidable task, and shifted their focus a bit. Now they're focusing on a couple of things: data compatibility, like I said before (e.g., documents, instant messaging protocols), and family-friendliness (e.g., ease-of-use, parental controls).

Strange

[Henry V .009]

If Japan were really planning on doing this, they would do it themselves. China would as well, I believe. I wonder who is really behind this effort?

Re:Strange

[Xerithane]

If Japan were really planning on doing this, they would do it themselves. China would as well, I believe. I wonder who is really behind this effort?

Why in the world would you possibly think that? There are many, many reasons why they would want to do this together. China has cheap programmers, first. Japan and China have very good computer science people. And yes, there is a purpose for that distinction. The CS people develop the innovative portions of the system, and the programmers write the code that makes it all work.

Just for the language support alone it benefits both Japan and China to work together to try to replace the buggy Chinese/Japanese character input systems available. I'm not too familiar with the Windows end, but the Linux jserver/freewnn line is good but far from perfect or ideal.

How did you get modded interesting? "I wonder who is really behind this effort?" Uhm, Japan, China, and South Korea. Take the tinfoil hat off boy.

Re:Strange

[Lemmy Caution]

Japan views China as its most important future market, more important than the US. Unlike the US, Japanese manufacturers consider their entire global market before begin design and production (the US model is "build now, localize later.") This means that they are going to co-engineer their systems from the beginning.

Re:Strange

[Henry V .009]

Working together might be an intelligent thing to do (except for the problem of everyone speaking different languages -- I sure as hell would not ever want to run any tri-national coding project). But I think you are underestimating national pride and how much everybody hates the Japanese over there. It could be a Japanese originated PR-type thing. Reading the article, I notice that it is Japanese Government ministers announcing the project.

The plan is to be proposed by Japanese Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma at a meeting of economic ministers from the three nations in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, it said, adding that agreement was seen as likely.

Agreement is "seen as likely." What the hell do they mean by that? It sounds like the classic Japanese government made-up project. Now, if this were the bureaucracies pushing it instead of the politicians, there would be some real power behind the idea. But you have to remember the character of Japanese government.

Re:Strange

[Rahga]

Members and freinds of Nikkei, I suppose.... Really, this just sounds like anti-Microsoft news, and a marketing hackjob where they take Linux or BSD stuff and wrap their own buzzwords around it, fending off pre-prepared Microsoft anti-linux propaganda that would usually follow announcements such as this one.

Re:Strange

[Rahga]

Yeah, this will go slightly off topic and into the vaguely humorous zone... but man... at least producers in the United States try to do localization right before deploying the product. It seems lake Japanese industry is comfortable with the fact that the rest of the world accepts that their products aren't going to be properly localized 90% of the time, but they can get away with it because of overall product reliability and quality.

Re:Strange

[dnoyeb]

Speaking for the auto industry, this is completely untrue.

Re:Strange

[Xerithane]

Working together might be an intelligent thing to do (except for the problem of everyone speaking different languages -- I sure as hell would not ever want to run any tri-national coding project).

My guess is that most of the people involved speak technical English. At least enough to keep the project going.

But I think you are underestimating national pride and how much everybody hates the Japanese over there. It could be a Japanese originated PR-type thing. Reading the article, I notice that it is Japanese Government ministers announcing the project.


Granted, South Korea has some bitter feelings. Especially amongst the older generation. Saying that everybody hates Japan is just fucking idiotic. You are just another Slashdotter who likes to refer to "The Island of Japan" as some mysterious place with 50 foot robots that blow up Tokyo and is filled with blue haired school girls. Please, shut the fuck up about Japan because you obviously don't have a clue as to what you are talking about.

Agreement is "seen as likely." What the hell do they mean by that? It sounds like the classic Japanese government made-up project.

In case you haven't noticed, a lot of the trade projects work. Especially the tech projects.

Now, if this were the bureaucracies pushing it instead of the politicians, there would be some real power behind the idea. But you have to remember the character of Japanese government.

Wouldn't the Trade Ministry be considered a bureaucracy?

Re:Strange

[broohaha]

Granted, South Korea has some bitter feelings. Especially amongst the older generation. Saying that everybody hates Japan is just fucking idiotic. You are just another Slashdotter who likes to refer to "The Island of Japan" as some mysterious place with 50 foot robots that blow up Tokyo and is filled with blue haired school girls. Please, shut the fuck up about Japan because you obviously don't have a clue as to what you are talking about.

So, the guy is generalizing just a tad. But so are you (about what he knows).

Let's not discount the intense feelings even middle-aged Koreans have towards Japan. They may not hate them, but there is some level of distrust.

Ever manage a division where you have to have your engineers in Korea work well with your engineers in Japan? It can be a managerial headache trying to keep both sides happy and working well at the same time.

Re:Strange

[Henry V .009]

Wouldn't the Trade Ministry be considered a bureaucracy?

If you want to insult me instead of presenting a rational argument, that is fine. But get your facts straight first, you dumbass. Trade minister is a cabinet post. Hiranuma is a big-time LDP honcho.

Re:Strange

[ErikZ]

For those of us who aren't up on the personalities of governments around the world, would you mind describing the character of the Japanese government?

Re:Strange

[Henry V .009]

Not a problem. A good article on Japan in general that touches on the subject was published by The Atlantic in 1998. Two books that I would recommend are Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr, and Embracing Defeat by John Dower. Dogs and Demons explains the current corrupt system that has emerged in Japan, and Embracing Defeat (won a Pulitzer too) chronicles how it got that way after Japan's defeat in WWII.

Basically, the problem is that the bureaucracy that exists now is exactly the same one that existed in the pre-War government. The U.S. only replaced the politicians. After the war, many of the top-level bureaucrats were the same ones that had been appointed by Emperor Hirohito before the war. Today the bureaucracies are enormously unresponsive to public sentiment. Their main organizational purpose is to maintain the same percentage of funding as a part of the budget that they had just after the war. So they invent things for themselves to do. Pointless building projects, that kind of thing. Kerr relates a couple of projects that were simply so stupid (tearing up historical neighborhoods for no reason) that the public was able to stop them through dedicated protests - only to find out later that the projects simply got quietly rescheduled a couple years into the future and proceeded apace. The current breed of Japanese politicians are even worse. You hear about corruption scandals every week that only take place in other Western democracies once a decade. Organized crime owns a substantial part of the economic and political pie (again dating back to reconstruction under the Americans). Basically, the politicians only exist to peddle influence. They have almost no real power. The real power lies in the hands of bureaucracies, organized crime, and corporate leaders. In that order.

Re:Strange

[willtsmith]

Granted, South Korea has some bitter feelings. Especially amongst the older generation. Saying that everybody hates Japan is just fucking idiotic.

This is certainly a relevant perspective. I would suspect a younger generation don't have as many wounds as the older. However, it's the older guys who run things over there.

I would suspect that any techie knows enough english to keep things humming. This would be the strongest link rather than trying to resolve the differences between Chin, Kanji, and Hangul scripts. However, in a way it would defeat the point.

A nationalistic or regionlistic effort would be inclined to embrace the native languages instead of foreign ones. At the very least some framework for introducing native language source code would be relevant.

Myself, I'm Euro-American, but I know that I would be somewhat resentful if I had to learn Russian, Chinese or Arab in order to write software modules. I suspect that this feeling would be present in these governments (though using kanji would probably be unacceptable to Koreans).

Otherwise, why not just use linux and do some research on better keyboards. But hey the keyboards would be different for each language anyway.

Re:Strange

[willtsmith]

All the Japanese consumer electronics I've ever used have been translated very nicely.

Apparantly, it's "hip" to include English in local Japanese advertising, products and signage. What your probably see are indirect imports with hastily (and incorrectly) translations that were never meant for native English speakers.

The Japanese have far too much pride in their product to allow mistakes out the door.

Re:Strange

[Srin Tuar]

try im-ja, its a gtk+ input method for Japanese. I thinks its alot better than the XIM stuff..

Re:Strange

[jrumney]

I've come across very few Chinese or South Koreans who hate the Japanese. Sure, there are a few vocal groups demanding apologies and compenstation from the Japanese Government, but even among their supporters, there are very few who hate the Japanese on a personal level. I'm sure you can find some, just as you'll find Japanese who hate Chinese and Koreans, and white people who hate blacks, but such views are thankfully the minority in any culture.

Chinese, Japanese and Koreans have been cooperating on an increasing number of projects over the past few years. I have no doubt that this has a high chance of succeeding.

Re:Strange

[jrumney]

at least producers in the United States try to do localization right before deploying the product.

They do? They can't be trying very hard then. The Japanese do a vastly better job at localisation than US companies in my experience. I remember some trade wars during the late 1980s where US car companies were complaining about Japanese requirements to have the steering wheel on the right hand side. Japanese car companies had been producing LHD vehicles for foreign markets for years without complaining about it being an unfair burden. More recently, the US complained that requiring labelling on GM foods in Europe and Japan would increase their costs because they couldn't use the same labels as on their domestic products (overlooking the fact that US consumers might also be interested in what they are being fed). I have never seen a food product from any other country that does not have localised labelling for the market they are selling into.

Re:Strange

[Lemmy Caution]

You're right, the auto industry is a big exception.

Re:Strange

[forgotmypassword]

Working together might be an intelligent thing to do (except for the problem of everyone speaking different languages -- I sure as hell would not ever want to run any tri-national coding project).

Umm, you know that they can read each others writing? The chinese characters represent individual words that translate the same to and from japanese.

Only written Chinese is a single language. There is no such thing as spoken Chinese - their so called 'dialects' are actually completely different spoken languages.

Re:Strange

[Henry V .009]

No they can't. You can puzzle some Chinese meaning from a knowledge of written Japanese (which I have), but you are very limited. The meanings of the characters have diverged to some extent over the centuries. And besides, Japanese is written with a combination of Kanji and Kana, which would make the reverse process even harder.

Re:Strange

[forgotmypassword]

Other than the kokuji, with practice, a Chinese person can read Japanese when they use the Han characters

That or my Chinese friends are lying to me

Re:Strange

[Henry V .009]

I highly doubt that they are able to pick up all that much. The grammars are unrelated. And the non-Kanji characters (non-Han characters) make up a good portion of the text. Many Kanji characters are also only there to give pronounciation of Japanese words, not meaning. For me, I can puzzle out Chinese street signs and make a stab at the meaning of a few things, but it is impossible to actually read Chinese. And Chinese writing is completely written with the "Chinese Characters" so it easier to go from Japanese to Chinese. Korean means nothing to me, but I have never even begun to study it. There might be some calligraphic transformations that I could learn to make it simpler.

So it is pretty clear. Your Chinese friends are lying to you.

Re:Strange

[ErikZ]

Wow! Nice reply! Thanks!

translated

[redcaboodle]

The three nations are likely to build upon an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and develop an inexpensive and trustworthy system.
Aka: They are going to take Linux or BSD Sources, change some strings and compile them into their own kernel.

Wonderful...

[militantbob]

Instead of corporate lethargy and resistance to change...

We'll have government beaurocracy and spy agencies trying to include sneaky backdoors!

Seriously, though, this doesn't excite me very much. Kinda like China's CPU... and DoD's Linux... although they may make interesting contributions and suggest different approaches to security. And I haven't read the article, so I'm wondering whether it'll be a joint effort with separate translations, or if they'll just go with English.

Not to mention...

[Channard]

.. an OS with East-Asian language support built in. If it's halfway decent, I can see it being used in cybercafes all over the globe. It'll sure be a lot easier than, as I've some Japanese travellers have to do, log on at a cafe, trying to install Japanese character sets/keyboards . They'll be able to send emails in their native language/character set right off the bat.

Re:Not to mention...

[The Cydonian]

Ummm, I don't know what you're point is, but MS Windows.cn or .kr or .jp already has built-in East Asian support, although, obviously, English language users are not likely to install that immediately.

Let's give credit where it's due:- Win XP has some pretty impressive i18n effort on; all of it, at least in the languages I read/write, sticks to standards for once.

License

[nepheles]

Released, too, under a virulent license like the GPL? Would the governments have to release sources of their modificiations?

Re:License

[Hard_Code]

"Would the governments have to release sources of their modificiations?"

Only if they give a damn about US copyright law. Which is probably not the case for at least one of the aforementioned parties.

"0h nos! China h4s st0le our sourze!"

Re:License

[mickwd]

"Only if they give a damn about US copyright law. Which is probably not the case for at least one of the aforementioned parties."

Why should any country other than the US have to give a damn about US copyright laws ?

Do they care about our (i.e. other countries') copyright laws ?

Re:License

[temojen]

Signatories to the Bern Convention do. This includes Japan and South Korea, but not China.

Re:License

[mickwd]

"Signatories to the Bern Convention do."

That would be Bern, Switzerland ?

It's an internation treaty that signatories to it must comply with, not "US copyright law".

Re:License

[110010001000]

Yes, they must comply with the copyright laws of the countries represented in the covenant (US Copyright, France Copyright, etc). Why is this so hard for you to understand?

Re:License

[iantri]

Err.. no. That would me the DMCA applies in Canada, by your logic. The Berne (there is an 'e' at the end) Convention sets out a set of basic set of rules that protect copyrights in the member nations.

Wikipedia article

Re:License

[110010001000]

Yes, and this would be true. You would need to comply with the DMCA in all matters concerning copyrighted material in the U.S. If the material is not copyrighted in the U.S. then it would not apply.

Yes indeed!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a ripe time to force some huge donations from the behemoth!

Before...

[mgcsinc]

Before everyone comes out to commend this as countries embracing open-source software, it needs to be pointed out that the obvious result of the effort would moreover be the creation of a system with the real, ubiquitous support for the unique Asain languages, in which Windows has always been lacking...

Re:Before...

[bratmobile]

You've got to be kidding me. Windows 2000 and Windows XP have some of the best Asian-language support on the PLANET. How much of Linux/FreeBSD supports Unicode? Very, VERY little. Even the FIRST versions of NT supported Unicode in EVERY aspect of the system -- file naming, font rendering, etc. Windows 2000 and XP have support for Asian IMEs, right-to-left languages (like Arabic), etc. Far, far ahead of any of the free *nixes. Only MacOS compares.

Re:Before...

[Lemmy Caution]

Asian language support in (US/European distributions of) Linux has been poor and inconsistent at best. Windows and OS X are far superior in this one regard.

It is also somewhat "unfixable," except in small - individual desktop suites (Gnome, KDE) can fix it, but a lot of general system-wide improvement is unlikely.

Re:Before...

[Vexalith]

I can tell from your previous posts that you're an obvious Microsoft apologist - but separating fact from bias - Unicode support works perfectly well on this Linux box and all of the others I've ever used. International HTML characters render correctly, I can enter unicode characters into any modern application (e.g. those based on GTK or QT).

Internationalisation has always been a responsibility of the application programmer (strings don't magically translate themselves, well at least not yet!) - so don't blame Unix systems in general just because your particular program doesn't come with a specific language translation. Microsoft can pay people to do this work, whereas opensource has to find someone with the skill and the free time to provide and update translations. Fortunately this situation will improve as more of the world "turns on" to open systems.

Re:Before...

[antiMStroll]

I don't see the confict. Open Source by design enables developers to modify it. If these countries chose Open Source because it allows them to alter it to meet their needs, then they are supporting Open Source in the purest form possible, because it works where centralized proprietary solution hasn't.

Re:Before...

[noselasd]

You are somewhat correct. It supports Unicode. But so does my Redhat box. What windows/linux lacks is language support in applications. There are _heaps_ of application not using unicode, and not internationalized.
The same goes for Linux/*BSD's.. However, these OS's have a nice feature. The OS itself, and most applications are opensource. Hence they can add the support and whatever they need themselves. You can't do that with properitary software. This is really opensource vs properitary, not a linux vs windows "feature".

Re:Before...

[mgcsinc]

Reminder: Discussing the unicode, etc., support of linux is completely off topic; these goverments are creating their own open-source alternative to Windows, not a distro of linux...

Re:Before...

[Troed]

Several of the tools ('less' etc) that came with my RedHat 9 do not show the Swedish characters aa and o correctly.

Re:Before...

[TomV]

Correction: Discussing the Unicode, etc., support of various Unices is completely on topic; the suggestion is that the JCK governments may base their own alternative to Windows on Linux or BSD, in which case the Unicode support of Linux / BSD at present is an important indicator of how much work they will have to do, and thus of how much incompatibility with mainstream Linux / BSD may result, or of how much Linux / BSD might benefit from their work.

Re:Before...

[drinkypoo]

The reason Macintosh completely dominated the Japanese market (until recently) is that they were the first OS to really support appropriate input methods and localization.

Re:Before...

[jrumney]

Dream on. Macintosh has never dominated the Japanese market. Fujitsu and NEC have had it sown up since the early days of PC-98.

Re:Before...

[CaptnMArk]

This is generally a big problem with Linux...

Things are often done at the wrong layer just because it's easier to do.

Let's hope the new X fork will help some in this regard.

Re:Before...

[celorfin]

I can tell from your previous posts that you're an obvious Microsoft apologist - but separating fact from bias - Unicode support works perfectly well on this Linux box and all of the others I've ever used. International HTML characters render correctly, I can enter unicode characters into any modern application (e.g. those based on GTK or QT). Problems, In China they use GB code for character set, in Taiwan they use Big5, and in Japan it's Shift-JIS. Only few applications are using Unicode. And the truth is, Windows (2000 and XP) has excellent support for all these different character sets. You can use a English version of Windows XP and have no problem using software form those countries provided that you install asian fonts while installing XP.

Re:Before...

[cryptochrome]

I suppose that would be a good reason to use Darwin as a base for their own OS. It already has been designed with international languages in mind (read: the super complicated many thousands of glyph based CJK languages, with their complicated input schemes) via Unicode. And yes, it can be compiled for PC hardware, but of course then you aren't taking advantage of all of OS X's nice features and optimizations.

So what do we know about these countries?

Korea: Big producers of basic computer hardware. Not particularly rich. Significant economic power in the region. Limited OS options for their complicated language. Probably annoyed by spam and other insecurities. Has hardware production expertise.

Japan: Biggest technophiles in the world. Massive computer hardware industry, but not CPUs, which are almost exclusively american. A very expensive place to live. And deep in an economic recession. Dominant economic power in the region, along with America. Xenophobic tendencies. Limited OS options for their complicated language. Probably annoyed by spam and other insecurities. Has high-tech production and programming expertise.

China: Rapidly growing economy, nonetheless dominated to some degree by foreign investment. Non-democratic. Wants to be the dominant power in the region, and has the numbers to do it. Biggest software and media pirate in the world. Government tries to rule with an iron fist, and has invested heavily in firewalls to keep the people from reading bad things about them. Oddly enough, this country is the hub of spam distribution thanks to all the insecure sendmail servers. You'd almost think they were doing it intentionally. Has announced intentions to develop it's own chip for internal use, presumably including spying ability for the government and a heavily subsidized price to keep American chipmakers out. Needs an OS. Lacks expertise. Probably the force behind the operation.

Re:Before...

[AstroDrabb]

You should really stop pulling on Billy Boy's peter so hard. It is really messing up your ability to think clearly. Maybe try to base your statement on facts. Linux has very good UTF-8 support. The benefit in Linux is that toolkits such as QT and GTK both support UTF-8 which makes applications written in those toolkits UTF-8 compatible. This is not the situation under MS Windows. MS Windows may support UTF-8 at a lower API level, however it does not propegate into the applications. I edited some guys asp page from my Linux workstation at work and saved it in UTF-8 with DOS line endings. IIS choked on the file. Saving the file as plain ole ascii fixed the problem for IIS. So even MS and their own application suite does not support unicode across the board. GTK and pango can handle a lot of different character encodings including left to right and right to left. Red Flag Linux has far better Asian language support then MS Windows hands down. The big problem with the way MS did their unicode support is that an application NEEDS to specifically handle it by making differnt calls between similar API's.

Unicode string in SQL Server require special coding:
"SELECT N'Hello'"
API calls are broken into one that handle ascii and ones that handle unicode such as
SetWindowTextW
SetWindowTextA
This required people to make programming changes and to code specifically for unicode. This is a brain dead way to do it IMO. It should be transparent to the programmer. Maybe next time base your statements on facts and personal knowledge instead of blind ingnorance.

Re:Before...

[You're All Wrong]

What happens when you do
$ man iso
?

I happily get: ...
305 197 C5 A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE ...

and my man is using less as the pager, which I'd have thought was pretty common. (I'm FreeBSD and debian, maybe RedHat differs?)

Are you sure it's not your terminal that's the problem?
What do
$ perl -e 'print chr(197)'
and
$ perl -e 'print chr(197)' | more
do?

YAW

Re:Before...

[Troed]

[troed@knut troed.se]$ man iso
No manual entry for iso

To get the programs to work I force my language settings _to_ US_en from UTF8 - then everything's ok. RedHat's stance on this is that non compliant programs aren't worthy of their distribution (pine) - but some obviously are.

Re:Before...

[Mr Europe]

But somehow I'm convinced that Linux+GNU is the most affordable base for the new system. Also the fact that it is said to be open source supports this.
I expect us to see a new Linux-distro approaching from the east with a good support for Asian languages.

Re:Before...

[Tsujigiri]

Problems, In China they use GB code for character set, in Taiwan they use Big5, and in Japan it's Shift-JIS. Only few applications are using Unicode. And the truth is, Windows (2000 and XP) has excellent support for all these different character sets.

Hmm, but is it that these countries use Windows 2000/XP because they support GB/Big5/Shift-JIS or do they use GB/Big5/Shift-JIS because of the high quality support in Windows? Logically using Unicode would allow uniform support for all three languages using a more common underlying display mechanism (minus the differences in things like entry systems). Would not the unified development group look for a common/flexible text rendering system that handles all three equally.

Also, would not the reason that few applications are using unicode be that if windows is the majority platform, and if Windows has a history of strong GB/Big5/Shift-JIS, that there would be more windows developers used to programming for GB/Big5/Shift-JIS. If this new Linux based OS uses unicode as it's primary text rendering system, new software developed for it would be in unicode, presumably, as the developers will be learning new skills for programming in Linux, adding a switch to unicode would just make sense.

Re:Before...

[You're All Wrong]

Bollocks, that was supposed to be man iso_8859-1.
I don't know if that was /. or I who cocked up, but I do know that it ripped the ring off my Swedish O.

Phil

Re:Before...

[Troed]

Doing that I get a lot of garbled characters in the manpage. (I.e, where there's supposed to be "special chars" I get garbled ascii)

Design by Committee? That's go far.

[ccady]

A framework for developing the system would be set up during meetings by government ministers in mid-September, followed by committee meetings involving private-sector specialists from each of the three nations in November.

1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail.

2) An operating system controlled by a government is eventually going to be oppressive and restrictive.

The question is;

[TyrranzzX]

Will it be open source?

Will it be an os designed to screw people over? (as in, drm, tcpa, etc)

Will they simply steal OSS and release it with few changes without honoring the gpl?

Will it be in other languages and availabe to foreigners?

These people are notorious for stealing ideas, and in most cases, modifying them into something better then claiming them as their own. I don't trust foreign companies and goverments any more, and in some cases, less, than I trust my own(US). What is the community to do if they steal it and start selling it stateside?

Re:The question is;

[rde]

Will it be open source?
My guess is 'yes'. Two reasons:

THey'll want business to use it. And businesses will be unwilling to use anything that they suspect has a backdoor. The source'd have to be visible for them to trust it

It's being done by three governments, not one. That makes it a lot harder for any, ahem, idiosyncratic code to make it in, and again, OSS is the best way of ensuring this.

Will they simply steal OSS and release it with few changes without honoring the gpl?
How do you know microsoft isn't doing that right now? I'm not suggesting that they are, but there seems to be a prevalent attitude during this discussion that china=evil, japan/rok=irrelevent, USA=land of free (if not Free). Japan and ROK are both WTO members, and China really wants to be. It's unlikely they're going to contravene those rules without good reason. Besides, if it's open source, the question goes away.

Will it be in other languages and availabe to foreigners?
Who cares? Seriously. If you've got Linux, BSD and Windows, you're more or less covered. Again, if it's open source, etc, etc

These People, etc
I guess we'll have to just hope that they act honorably, just like all American companies do.

Re:The question is;

[Vexalith]

Software piracy is a big enough problem in Asia that I suspect a government would be unwise to attempt to sell its product to its public when they'd just use it without paying anyway.

Hopefully it will also be distributed open source, but I guess only time will tell. It's interesting to consider how compatible Chinese Communist ideals with OSS (more compatible than Capitalist Democracies?).

Re:The question is;

[Kinniken]

Japan and ROK are both WTO members, and China really wants to be. It's unlikely they're going to contravene those rules without good reason. Besides, if it's open source, the question goes away.

Actually, Chiana was admitted in the WTO recently. However I somehow doubt that for a country to be in the WTO guaranties that it will respect its rules ;-)

Re:The question is;

[michrech]

What is the community to do if they steal it and start selling it stateside?

Turn them over to SCO. I'm sure that they will believe that these horrible people are stealing their IP and will want to sue them when they are finished with IBM and all of us Linux users!

Re:The question is;

[drinkypoo]

1. THey'll want business to use it. And businesses will be unwilling to use anything that they suspect has a backdoor. The source'd have to be visible for them to trust it
2. It's being done by three governments, not one. That makes it a lot harder for any, ahem, idiosyncratic code to make it in, and again, OSS is the best way of ensuring this.

I have an opposite view from yours. The government can just mandate its use - this seems easily possible in China - or do something slightly sneakier like simply make it harder for any other OS to do business in their country. Also, having three governments doesn't make it harder for compromised code to make it into the OS, it makes it easier. Three times the government, three times the likelihood that they'll all agree on a backdoor and have it implemented.

Re:The question is;

[moncyb]

When I saw his post, I was going to make my own SCO comment. He says he trusts foreign companies less than US companies, and foreigners "are notorious for stealing ideas, and in most cases, modifying them into something better then claiming them as their own." Isn't this exactly what SCO is doing (minus modifying the product into something better)? ...and what about half the patents at the USPTO, don't they fall into the same category? That statement is absurd.

Re:The question is;

[WhaDaYaKnow]

THey'll want business to use it. And businesses will be unwilling to use anything that they suspect has a backdoor. The source'd have to be visible for them to trust it

<dr_evil>
Riiiiiiiiiight
</dr_evil>

Re:The question is;

[Linker3000]

Open soy source surely? Bwahahahahahaha (Sorry, it's been a long day...)

Re:The question is;

[michaelnz]

These people are notorious for stealing ideas, and in most cases, modifying them into something better then claiming them as their own.

Your post has so many levels of ignorance to it that it hurts my brain. Do you let 20 year old stereotypes determine your opinion of everything you read? Japan has long been an industry leader in software and hardware development. China also (despite fearmongering anti-Communist views still held by many Americans) is moving towards being one of the largest technology markets in the world.

But let me guess, when an American takes a Japanese product and makes it better it's innovating. When someone in Japan takes an American product and makes it beter it's stealing thanks for clearing that up.

By the way, using a phrase like "These people" is in bad taste for the beginning, maybe have someone read over your posts in the future to make sure they're not flaimbait.

Re:The question is;

[shaitand]

"# THey'll want business to use it. And businesses will be unwilling to use anything that they suspect has a backdoor. The source'd have to be visible for them to trust it"

Then how to do you explain businesses running windows? I'm curious because I can't figure it out myself ;)

Re:The question is;

[Catharz]

I'd guess it will definitely be open source and definitely Linux based.

I'm working for a small company in Australia and we've been doing quite a bit of work in Japan (I spent 2 out of my first 6 weeks of employment there). We're currently working on proposals for a number of large projects all over Japan. Our products have historically been Windows based, but they're pushing for Linux solutions.

I don't think the system will be designed to screw people over. If it was only China, I'd be suspicious of that, but not with Japan and South Korea involved. I think it will probably honor the GPL and it will probably be available to foreigners. But I think much of the focus of this will be to produce a system that is built for asian characters. From my understanding, Chinese characters are used to some extent in Japanese and Korean writing systems. So they will reduce effort by collaborating on it.

From the discussions I've had with Japanese people I know, it appears they don't trust the USA as long-term business partners and don't trust Microsoft products. I think the EU will be pushing for a lot more OSS for exactly the same reasons. You don't trust them, and they're doing this (in part) because they don't trust you.

Re:The question is;

[Rogerborg]

You don't trust Japan? The USA has one meeeellion lawyers. Japan has under 17,000. You work it out.

Re:The question is;

[SnowZero]

Just make sure not to distribute ISOs or Theo will come beat you up. Remember Open < Free, and that goes for *BSD.

Re:The question is;

[jungzhang]

Japan and ROK are both WTO members, and China really wants to be./ China is WTO member Now.

Oh yeah, right. The next thing you'll tell me is

[kfg]

an OS to compete with Windows will be made in Finland.

Pull the other one.

KFG

heh.

[Frederique Coq-Bloqu]

It'll probably end up being a Windows clone so that license fees will not have to be payed to Microsoft. However, Microsoft itself being a behemoth takes years to make new versions. Remember how long it took them to create the NT line that lead up to Windows 2000 and XP? I can't imagine these three countries being any more efficient. Though I will give them credit for their workaholic culture.

Re:heh.

[drinkypoo]

If they just put all the effort into linux, wine, and localization, then they could stop there, and the whole world would benefit. Extra points for working on Mono and/or DotGNU.

Hopefully they will write it in a better language

[smiff]

All I ask that they please write it in a language other than C or C++. Linux has tons of security holes. Most of those security holes exist only because the software was written in one of the least secure languages in the industry.

A programming language is an interface between the machine and the programmer. If a language makes security holes nearly impossible to avoid, you need a better language.

makes sense

[ramzak2k]

My friend at work from china is a PS2 freak and was mentioning how most of his favourite games are japanese and arent even available here. It seems like China, japan and (south) korea share a common font and any game made in japan enjoys a huge market within those countries.

By making an OS together, they could probably build one from scratch with their native language support without English as the intermediary anywhere in the processes.

Re:makes sense

[ctk76]

They do not share common fonts. China in the old days was the dominant force in the region, and Korea and Japan had to study Chinese just like they are studying English now as their second language. Few Chinese characters that Korea and Japan incorporate into their publications have different pronunciations in each country, and are completely unintelligible to each other. Average Koreans and Japanese will recognize enough Chinese characters to play video games, but I assume they'll have to still rely on the Unicode standard if they want to get anywhere with the OS.

Re:makes sense

[doricee]

First off, chinese is not phonetic, its a bunch of pictographs so the pronounciation is irrelavent (well almost, but I'll ignore that). Fact is it's unintelligible between different regions of China. It doesn't matter if the Koreans say it differently from the Cantonese, the character almost always has the same meaning.

Second, in South Korea you're basically illiterate if if you can't read chinese. By the time you reach college text, nearly 60% of words are in chinese characters. That doesn't count chinese words written in Hangul (native korean characters). From what I understand this is also true in Japan.

It makes sense for Japan and Korea to want to work on this considering that their languages incorporate large amounts of chinese.

On another note.
Though english is important for recent additions to the languages, it's phonetic. Most english words are changed quite a bit and are not written in english characters (except when going for style points). Basically they're no longer english words, but rather words derived from english. A bit different from the chinese which is often unaltered. (some chinese words are converted to native words)

An OS brough in part by Red China?

[Freston Youseff]

Where do I sign up!?

Re:An OS brough in part by Red China?

[vonsneerderhooten]

Where do I sign up!?

Don't worry pal, they've already signed you up.

Re:Why not linux?

[mesmartyoudumb]

wow..misreading the word "upon" made me look like a jackass. :-p

MS's Nightmare

[linuxislandsucks]

welcome to MS's nightmare all developing nations working together to do linux based OS to not only get users but alos developers...

so when is the Redmond ligths out party?

Re:MS's Nightmare

[Ageless]

I'm sure Microsoft is shaking in their boots. Bill Gates is probably lying in his golden bed crying to his wife about how the mean ol commies are going to overthrow his empire.

Oh, wait. That's stupid. What he's actually doing is laughing at how much publicity and extra sales of Windows this is going to generate when it fails like everything else.

Re:MS's Nightmare

[gad_zuki!]

>so when is the Redmond ligths out party?

Not soon, but this will hurt them significantly. I can really see the next version of Windows coming out with some kind of linux emulator so Windows based business can have the best of both worlds. Its the same in the Mac world, they have to emulate Windows too.

Whether this kills Redmond is a tough question. Many CS/IS/IT programs here and abroad are in many ways MS proprietary based, many developers know nothing but windows, etc. I think if MS fails it will be just like when they broke up Ma Bell. It took roughly twenty years before the break-up meant a competing local service provider worth the effort to go with. There's just so much mental wealth infrastructure to dismantle and rebuild first.

The nice thing about these articles is that no matter what OS they go with instead of Windows it means good news for standards. When China, Japan, Russia, Germany, etc are all using non-windows machines then then standardizing protocols will be very, very important thus putting a massive roadblock into MS's only real profitable innovation: embrace, extend, and extringuish. This means more competition, more companies, smaller businesses, and a healthier tech market for all.

Re:What's a little monopoly to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a little monopoly to do, you ask? Why, steal all the money and flip over the game board of course! Hotels scattered as far as the iron can see.

Could we see it in the US?

[jc42]

I wonder if Microsoft would be able to block its sales in the US, as people have mentioned here for other interesting systems developed in Asia.

Let's see; what was the name of that high-reliability open-source OS that that the Japanese are using for things like autos? What ever happened to the notepad computer running linux that was announced over there several years ago, but which is only available in the US with Windows installed?

(What, me paranoid? ;-)

So.....

[bratmobile]

Microsoft might lose, what, $20 in revenue? Piracy is so bad in Asia, it's a wonder anyone can sell any legit software there, at all.

Re:So.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooner or later US will demand Asian countries to reduce piracy. So this mean that Microsoft will lose billions of future revenues.

Re:So.....

[caluml]

Speaking of monkeys....
Look at the monkey, funny monkey, little red monkey, acting so fidgety...

Whoops!

[Freston Youseff]

Must post in Plain Text Mode in order to show my tags!

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Timesprout]

They will probably write it in Engrish

Is this going to be the Eighth Wonder of the World

[leoaugust]

A framework for developing the system would be set up during meetings by government ministers in mid- September, followed by committee meetings involving private-sector specialists from each of the three nations in November.

It looks like a good plan, but I hope the execution is not flawed.

First, how good can a product be whose framework are "set during meetings by Governmment ministers followed by private sector specialists" .... it seems like a classic mistake of the horse pushing the cart rather than pulling it ...

Second I hope these government ministers are not so secretive that they end up producing another "black box" like Windows ... which does no good to the concept of open source ...

Third I hope the don't start writing the programs in Chinese in the hope of avoiding the best virus and worm writers - who I doubt would go thru the trouble of learning Chinese to be able to penetrate this new system ...

Fourth I hope these "private sector specialists" are not clones of Bill Gates ... after all who doesn't want to rule the world ...

Fifth One Great Wall of China is more than enough. We don't want a "Great Wall of China, Japn, and Korea," and no matter what they say, it is NOT going to be the Eighth Wonder of the World ...

Great

[nepheles]

This sounds nice and ideological. In keeping with that, it'll be Aspect-Oriented, written in Lisp, and written by smiling students straight out of image libraries

Sushi Linux?

[niko9]

Hmmm sushi! apt-get install unagi-roll

Faired to fetch http://http.us.debian.org/debian/main/fish/raw/raw lib/unagi_4.2.1-11_all.deb Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer) [IP: 208.185.25.38 80]
E: Unabre to fetch some archives, maybe you are a stupid round eye or try with apt-get instarr caucasianlib0-2.0-dev? /jokey joke/

Re:Sushi Linux?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Unagi isn't served raw.. it's deliciously braised.

Re:Sushi Linux?

[Gantic]

Sushi is to South Korea as Sushi is to England

Re:Sushi Linux?

[vonsneerderhooten]

just dont forget to 'make makewasabi'

-D

Re:Design by Committee? That's go far.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It is not "design by committee" - it is policy making by committee.

2. It is not "a government", it is multiple governments which don't all always agree on everything.

Establishing *infrastructure* is beneficial for everyone, so cooperation like this should be welcomed. You might see policy development being slow because of government involvement, but that's how it is when large organizations are involved.

Unicode, Unicode, Unicode

[heironymouscoward]

My company spent a lot of time making a Unicode version of one of our larger web applications, and it does well in the Japanese market. Japan (and I guess Korea and China) are largely excluded from the Western market (as consumers) because of the complexity of supporting their character sets (Katakana, Hirigi, and Kanji in Japan alone).

So Japan, Korea, China share the need for coherent Unicode support in their software at OS and application level. This is something missing from anything one can put together today in the West, either using Windows or Linux.

So this move makes sense, though given the history between these three countries, somewhat unlikely. Perhaps after the successful football world cup, someone has been thinking...

Anyhow, I've said several times that it seems an obvious thing for governments to do, especially ones outside the reach/grip of the US hegemony: invest in local open source, both to encourage the development of local IT and to save money by buying less American junk. China, India, Brazil: these are the countries where the likeliehood of a serious home-grown OSS "industry" is most likely.

Before the "destroying value and US jobs" mob get here, I'll just add my voice saying it's a good thing and all success to them.

Re:Unicode, Unicode, Unicode

[danila]

So Japan, Korea, China share the need for coherent Unicode support in their software at OS and application level. This is something missing from anything one can put together today in the West, either using Windows or Linux.
How about MacOS? I've heard it's built to support Unicode from the group up. I don't know about input support, but anyway, may be Asian countries should just Switch?

Re:Unicode, Unicode, Unicode

[rabidcow]

So Japan, Korea, China share the need for coherent Unicode support in their software at OS and application level.

I suspect that word "coherent" is the key to answering my question, but what's wrong with Unicode support in Windows? Modern versions (NT-based) all use Unicode internally, and Unicode applications are arguably supported more efficiently than ANSI. (although afaik most applications still tend to be ANSI for now)

Before the "destroying value and US jobs" mob get here, I'll just add my voice saying it's a good thing and all success to them.

Well, it's good for them, yes, and why should they care about US jobs? Whether or not it's good for Americans is a much more complex and irrelevant issue :P

Re:Unicode, Unicode, Unicode

[IM6100]

You're kidding, right? MacOS only runs on expensive hardware from one company. There's no way in hell the Asian market, particularly places like China and Korea, could afford an Apple computer.

Re:My Develop OS?

[cioxx]

Rumor is, the name of the operating system is going to be the following symbol:

^_^

Sounds like a mafia swindle to me - Apple/Sun???

[adzoox]

Why wouldn't the "Oriental Community" just USE Linux on a non PC platform like Sun or Apple?

Why wouldn't they even consider Mac OS X? The Xserve is a very cheap solution to deploy. eMacs are sub $800 iMac CRTs (still made for edu & gov) are sub $700 iMac LCDs are sub $1000 - G5's are looking like they will be the 4 year without obsolescence computer and could possibly be a long term 7-8 year solution - as most Macs are.

This sounds like to me that some "out of work linux" lobby has managed to hoodwink Asia into some FUD.

Can anyone say WHY 1/4 of the world's population NEEDS a proprietary system? I can understand a move away from an insecure system, but not away from standards are commercially produced hardware and software.

Re:Maybe Linux isn't Free enough

[Karn]

Maybe if you people read the article, you would see that it says they are likely to go with an existing open-source system such as Linux.

Re:Design by Committee? That's go far.

[zsau]

2) An operating system controlled by a government is eventually going to be oppressive and restrictive.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, owned by the Commonwealth Government of Australia, has recently been criticised of being biased. *Against* the Government.

It's offical ...

[pherris]

From the article:

... the three nations are likely to build upon an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and develop an inexpensive and trustworthy system.

Number of Linux Distributions Surpasses Number of Users

Design by Committee? Alan Sherman

[CGP314]

A committee is a group of individuals who all put in a perfectly good color and it comes out gray.

Too many cynics....

[quandrum]

1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail

Why is it going to fail? Has a committee never worked? Isn't this what happens more or less in large companies, ones that build large software systems? For every Linus, there is probably hundreds of incredibly complex pieces of code designed by committees of programmers and managers.

2) An operating system controlled by a government is eventually going to be oppressive and restrictive.

WHY?! Please, take off your tinfoil for a while and go out for some air. not everyone is out to get you. Maybe they just want to offer their citizens, and especially the companies in their country a compelling alternative to American made products with poor support for their languages.

Re:Too many cynics....

[PCM2]

WHY?! Please, take off your tinfoil for a while and go out for some air. not everyone is out to get you. Maybe they just want to offer their citizens, and especially the companies in their country a compelling alternative to American made products with poor support for their languages.

Uhhhhh...yeah. Which China have you been reading about?

Re:Too many cynics....

[drinkypoo]

Too many cynics.... (Score:3, Insightful) by quandrum (652868) on Sunday August 31, @09:40 (#6838946) 1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail

Why is it going to fail? Has a committee never worked? Isn't this what happens more or less in large companies, ones that build large software systems? For every Linus, there is probably hundreds of incredibly complex pieces of code designed by committees of programmers and managers.

Let's just take a quick flyover past the primary commercial operating systems and see if an operating system designed and built by committee works.

• AT&T Unix. Written by a small group. Works.
• DOS. Written, more or less, by one person. Works.
• Windows 3.1, a shell on top of DOS, not really an OS, but does many of the things that an OS does today, like talking to hardware (through drivers.) Mostly doesn't work.
• Windows NT, designed and written by committee. Has been known for unreliability, instability, and insecurity, but mostly works. Emphasis on mostly.
• MacOS 6. Written primarily by a small team. Mostly works.
• MacOS 7. Written by a larger team. The worst pile of shit ever prepared by Apple.
• MacOS 8. Essentially an attempt to fix everything wrong with MacOS 7. Mostly succeeds. Mostly works.
• MacOS 9, nothing to see here, move along. Mostly works.
• Mac OS X. Based on Unix and NeXTStep, an OS designed and executed by a fairly small group of programmers, which worked. OS X also works, though it's taken a lot of patching to get to something stable (10.2.6.) Works.
• ALL COMMERCIAL UNIXES/UNICES: Based on either AT&T Unix, or BSD Unix. In other words, they didn't write them themselves.
• Linux. Originally written by one man. Enhanced by zillions, but still guided by that one man. Works.
• Assorted BSD clones; Based on code from 4.3, 4.3-lite, or 4.4-lite, or some combination thereof. Work.
• Let's have a blast from the past: AmigaDOS. Written by just a few people. Worked pretty well, though it was hardly stable.

There's some other significant operating systems I haven't mentioned here, like QNX for example, because I don't know much about them :) But look at the list, every OS built by a large committee has failed; Every Commercial Unix is based on either SYSV or BSD4.4 these days, except Linux which is both commercial and noncommercial, and anyway I address Linux above (though perhaps not satisfactorily for some, and certainly oversimplifying the situation.)

Let's also talk about what happens when large organizations attempt to get together and try to make an operating system: Project Pink. Now everone say it with me: HAHAHahahAHAhahAHAHAHA! Get real. This has about as much chance to fly as an airplane made out of gauze, popsicle sticks, and chewing gum. The only way it could really succeed (especially based on my list above) is to base it heavily on something that already exists, for example Linux+Gnome.

Cooperation is good

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

I think the OSS movement should get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - getting China to cooperate with Japan is not easy.

I spent some frustrating months trying to swap files back and forth with a Japanese company. If we had been able to convince our respective corporate IT departments to use Linux, it would have been a lot easier.

Re:Cooperation is good

[jvalenzu]

I think the OSS movement should get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - getting China to cooperate with Japan is not easy.

Yeah, those pesky Chinese hate having Nanjing raped. Imagine the ingratitude! Hopefully this will lead them to be a little more enlightened to the lessons of the Melian dialogue.

Re:Cooperation is good

[Overly Critical Guy]

This was China and Japan's deal. They cooperated willingly of their own volition. What does OSS have to do with that?

Re:Cooperation is good

[Jun81]

IT is in projects like this that company can put behind their past prejudices and start on a new foot. After all the new generation may not remember the grudges of the last, and even if the outcome of this cooperation is a failure, everybody still has something to gain

China has RedFlag Linux

[Fuyu]

Whatever happened to China's Red Flag Linux? They have Server and Desktop flavors available.

Re:Design by Committee? That's go far.

[gyratedotorg]

doesnt freebsd have a committee?

oh yeah, i forgot that bsd is dead. =)

And what about...

[It's the tripnaut!]

the impending doom that is the SCO lawsuits?

Given that we have GNU/Linux.....

[3seas]

Besides all the comments that say it won't happen there is the possibility that some interesting things might come of such a project.

They are allowed to do such a thing, or at least try.

It is possible that they start from scratch but can avoid all the hard lessons learned by others. And they don't seem to have political constraints to deal with as TinyOS did.

The Japanese are well known for their technical abilities and expertise and long term perspectives. China is known for their numbers of people that can follow direction. And South Korea is known for their ability to imitate product look and feel.

Is it possible that such mindsets can produce a rock solid OS that is easy to use and safe from attack?

Probably! So lets how they are open source, so we all can learn from them.

Government OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me being too old or is there AdaOS written all over the article

There is small OS in AdaOS waiting to get out.
Yes, and it's called Linux

Anonymous Cowards Unite

(karmacollectortag)

China and OSS?

[TheWart]

Maybe I am just cynical, but how can China really be embracing OSS when they are the ones with the infamouse 'great firewall'?

In my opinion, they would simply make it so that they (the govt.) are the only ones who handle security etc, so no outside info can get in.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[i7dude]

christ...this is like saying people jump higher wearing nike's than they do in reeboks.

their design paradigms need to be re-evaluated...every language you program has the SAME end result...machine code. programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.

bottom line, c and c++ provide the flexability for system programmers to control every aspcet of thier code...if a routine call is flawed...then write a new one that isnt...or learn to program better...dont blame it on the damn language.

Re:Oh yeah, right. The next thing you'll tell me i

[SmallFurryCreature]

And you are right, that is a joke. Linus Torvald never wrote the linux the kernel as competition to anyone or anything. He wrote it for fun to see if he could pull it off. He released it to see if anyone wanted to help him get some utitlites running on it.

The only OS mentioned is Minix and he refers to it that if you are tired of everything just running under Minix you might give his kernel a try. Hardly a rousing sales pitch except to geeks.

That is btw Microsofts biggest problem with linux. Where MS got to meet growth targets and keep market share. Linux is free of all that. If one person still enjoys tinkering with it it has met 100% of its goals.

Remember that it is companies like Redhat and Suse that can fail. Linux cannot fail. Neat isn't it.

Disclaimer I am talking about the kernel here. The GNU part has of course always had higher ambitions according to its founders.

What are you talking about?

[That_Dan_Guy]

Funny, my wife has no problems using Windows 2000 to read and type Chinese on her computer. Previous versions certainly sucked (I have first hand experience on this having lived in Taiwan for 5 years and had to set up both Linux and Windows computers. And until a few years ago getting it working under Linux was no walk in the park) but the support for the very large variety of input methods for Chinese is pretty impressive.

Re:What are you talking about?

[Xerithane]

Funny, my wife has no problems using Windows 2000 to read and type Chinese on her computer. Previous versions certainly sucked (I have first hand experience on this having lived in Taiwan for 5 years and had to set up both Linux and Windows computers. And until a few years ago getting it working under Linux was no walk in the park) but the support for the very large variety of input methods for Chinese is pretty impressive.

I think Chinese is the best so far under Windows. Japanese under Windows is pretty lacking, and Linux currently beats it out (using jserver, freewnn) and Mac OSX is the leader.

I have a Taiwanese coworker who was struggling to setup Chinese (Traditional) input on his Windows machine. It took him about 3 days to get everything working smoothly, but he'd never added Chinese input to a US windows install.

I would welcome an operating system that is secure, efficient, has a decent UI and has great internationalization.

Re:What are you talking about?

[rant-mode-on]

Funny, my wife can't type a word of Vietnamese of Win2K. Can't say we've tried it with XP, but I'm not about to fork out any cash for Billy boy just to find out.

I think the M$'s support for Chinese is a strategic one, given the number of Chinese speakers in this world. Their medium term goal was never to make money from Chinese implementations. Just let piracy spread the dominance until such time as they can afford to pay, then start to squeeze them. Its just that a number of Asian countries are trying to preempt that squeeze.

And good luck to them.

Mind you, Linux sucks in this department, but its not completely impossible.

Re:What are you talking about?

[rant-mode-on]

"Linux sucks in this department" refers to Vietnamese, not Chinese. Sorry if this wasn't clear.

Apple could make a big win here

[Offwhite98]

I think Apple could provide a poweful BSD base for the new OS along with good Unicode and Graphics support. If they could convince these 3 countries to start with MacOS X or Darwin they would take a big step forward for market share. Of course there is the issue of hardware costs along with the OS being proprietary or not. I am sure one goal of this new asian-based OS is that they will not be reliant on the US for software. In the very least they could work closely with the development efforts of this new OS to ensure it is MacOS X compatible so they would have an existing set of applications ready to use from day one.

Also for Linux, it is somewhat dated already and I sincerely believe that. But I mean this more in a sense of desktop Linux vs server Linux. The X Windows system is lacking in many areas and other efforts like the open source Berlin or Apple's Quartz is a big step forward. The constant duality of KDE vs Gnome is always an issue. Sure it is nice to have options, but it can also be difficult to understand for new users. When MacOS X came out I was a little upset that there was no theme support, but I quickly accepted it and realized that I should be using the applications instead of making the display look different every other day. And changing the look and feel only serves to confuse users and make tech support more difficult.

Apple was bold enough to scrap OS 9 and move forward with OS X (based on NextStep) because they knew it was a better starting point. I hope China, Japan and South Korea decide they want something better than what Linux and X11 provides.

Re:Apple could make a big win here

[Lord_Scrumptious]

It's highly unlikely they would use MacOS X or Darwin. I doubt they want to be reliant on Apple hardware. Remember, there are PC component manufacturers in China and Korea. It makes sense to create an OS that works with the wide range of PC components already available (or under development) from existing manufacturers. A much better prospect for adoption and growth. Working with Apple will no doubt tie them into certain ageements (or constraints depending on your point of view). I don't think they'll find such a scenario particularly appealing.

The three countries certainly have the expertise to produce an OS, and of course, they understand the intricacies of their own language (and the associated problems of computer support for their languages) better than anyone else.

Destroying Value and US Jobs

[tjstork]

Yet again an Asian country is deciding to use government action to fund an attack on an existing market. Why is our government never going to do anything to respond? Why is it that we have to compete with a culture that lets its people work for 2 cents a day cloning other people's products with government money?

The US should not even trade with these people.

Re:Destroying Value and US Jobs

[tactical_geek]

The White House doesn't want billions of US dollars flooding back into the domestic economy by pissing off the Chinese.

Re:Destroying Value and US Jobs

[glgraca]

The US might not allow it own citizens
to work in such conditions, but it certainly
knows how to profit from doing it to citizens
from other countries.

Stop reading the NY Times and watching CNN
and go read "Open Veins of Latin America" by
Eduardo Galeano.

OK, so I'm an idiot...

[bersl2]

You don't say! Well, I feel like a moron...

-1, Stupid

Re:Sounds like a mafia swindle to me - Apple/Sun??

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone say WHY 1/4 of the world's population NEEDS a proprietary system?

To control their destiny? To not have their infrastucture held hostage to foreign export controls? (Can we say PS2/PGP/Supercomputer/Clinton/USA? There, I knew we could.) And since when did American hardware/software (less than 1/20th the world's population) define 'standards'? Standards should be in the data, implementation is still free and open. That's why we have Macs, Suns, StrongArm and PCs. Right?

A 1995 Mac is still a viable platform? Slowly backs away, smiling and nodding, making no sudden moves.....

Japan, South Korea and China

[billcopc]

This may seem like bait, but if these three countries really do work on a joint effort, don't you think they're going to deliberately ruin the software out of hatred for one another ? They may be geographically close, but they're night and day when it comes to politics and century-old grudges that have lost their meaning. There's a reason why most of them are still stuck in the dark ages: it's because they're too busy infighting to realize the whole world has passed them by.

Hiragana not Hirigi

[heironymouscoward]

I know it, my brain skipped a beat. Does that sometimes, it's a software problem.

Thank you for pointing it out.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, what do you suggest? C#, VB, or COBOL perhaps?

Can Theo Speak Chinese?

[Genady]

In other news Theo De Radt (the shill of OpenBSD) today announced that he was moving to Japan to adivse the tri-country coolition on security matters. The West sighed in relief.

OS X...speaking of obvious

[djupedal]

...redundant, of course, but so is the lament for Asian language support :)

I bet they'll call it Rinux

[Lobo_Louie]

heh

This is old news

[WindBourne]

About 1 year ago, this was announced and spoken of. It was at the time thought that it would be Linux with wine.
It is Linows for the far east.

Funny thing is, it will work and will allow other countries to compete against the near monopoly that the USA has on software unless the US software companies start moving to Linux. But MS is trying to stop that with help from a number of friends in high (or low ) places.

progress

[sstory]

I hope they do for Linux what Apple did for BSD--give it an effortlessly-useable GUI. That's the sort of thing the open source community has not shown itself capable of doing. Although commercial interests Red Hat and Mandrake have made progress in this area.

FRAGEMENTING THE OPEN-SOURCE MOVEMENT

[reporter]

The most important issue is that creating yet another open-source operating system defeats one of the key value propositions of Linux. Namely, there is only one dominant open-source operating system: it is Linux. It can run on almost any platform. If you write an application for Linux, you can practically run it anywhere with, at worst, a quick re-compile.

By contrast, UNIX failed to gain significant marketshare against the onslaught of Windows because there were simply too many incompatible operating systems called UNIX.

If this Japan-China-Korea operating system (JCKOS) gains any significant share in Asia, then we will have 2 incompatiable operating systems: JCKOS and Linux. JCKOS will be similar to Linux but incompatible with it.

What could be the motivation for this stupidity? Japanese society, as a whole, is a Western society, and Japan has slowly been moving from a 2nd-rate Western nation to a 1st-rate Western nation like the United States of America (USA). Unfortunately, due to Japan's proximity to Asian countries like the brutal totalitarian regime called China, there has always been a tension between (1) Japanese bureaucrats who lean towards Asia and (2) Japanese bureucrats who lean towards the USA and the rest of the West. The Western Japanese have usually prevailed over the Asian Japanese. A key example is the USA-Japan defense treaty.

Unfortunately, occasionally, the Asian Japanese prevail in certain matters. We, Slashdotters, should send an e-mail to the Japanese embassy in our Western nations and tell them that this idea for an independent JCKOS is hurtful and harmful to the open-source movement. Also, do the Japanese really want to work with a brutal totalitarian regime like the Chinese, who have routinely beat and kill Tibetan nuns? (reference: Amnesty International and Tibet Online).

... from the desk of the reporter

Re:FRAGEMENTING THE OPEN-SOURCE MOVEMENT

[Dot.Com.CEO]

It's open source. They can do whatever the hell they want with it. If you don't agree, you shouldn't write to the Japanese embassy, you should write to Linus and everyone who develops open source software and ask them to abandon the GPL since it will fragment the open-source movement.

Also, Japan has long, LONG been a "first rate" Western nation, by whatever means you might chose to rate nations. It actually performs better than the US on most indicators. Learn your facts.

Re:FRAGEMENTING THE OPEN-SOURCE MOVEMENT

[Jagunco]

Have you thought they may be thinking about the userland, not the kernel itself? In other words, they may create a linux/*bsd distribution to fit into their end-users needs.

Re:FRAGEMENTING THE OPEN-SOURCE MOVEMENT

[decoder]

Also, Japan has long, LONG been a "first rate" Western nation, by whatever means you might chose to rate nations. It actually performs better than the US on most indicators. Learn your facts.

Isn't Japan in the East? So that would make them an Eastern nation, no? :-)

Re:FRAGEMENTING THE OPEN-SOURCE MOVEMENT

[xoboots]

uhh, hello. Open-source does the right thing of promoting BOTH co-operation and competition. It is a mistake to think that open-source = new world monopoly. Indeed, it is the new world monopoly BREAKER.

There is a HUGE difference between values and politics -- open-source represents a value system while your comments represent politics. Sorry, but politics are utterly wasteful attempts to control others and it is a disservice to try to paint open-source with that brush.

Will this really work?

[imsirovic5]

Asia is heavily divided, and there is lots of mistrust going on between those countries. I know in my MBA program students from Japan, South Korea and China barely even talk to each other due to historic tensions and conflicts. I am wondering what level of cooperation will there be between those countries in developing this product? Will they be able to cooperate sufficiently to make anything meaningful?

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the whole point. Windows and Linux have hundreds if not thousands of people who have viewed every line of C code and these bugs are still there.

If their first priority was security then they would use Ada.

recalls me something

[gerbouille]

anyone remembers PC98 japanese standard ? i hope they will succeed this time ...

It's called global competition.

[mfh]

It's called global competition, and it's been going on for decades.

You know your computer was probably manufactured in China or Taiwan, right?

And your TV.

Maybe your car. Hell, maybe even your fucking toaster.

The point is, if you feel so strongly about this kind of thing, there are plenty of things you can be doing (or avoid doing) to vote with your wallet.

Peace,

Bill Gate's Response

[GeoSanDiego]

28FEB2003 ZDNet: "Microsoft signs pact with Chinese government allowing them to view Window's source code." 31AUG2003 Reuters: "China, Japan, Korea to develop Window's replacement." 31AUG2003 Bill Gates: "Doh!"

Re:Bill Gate's Response

[Sri Lumpa]

Seeing these dates the cynic in me is thinking:
Cause, I want you to meet consequences.

Size does matter

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO is a small U.S. company fighting a large U.S. company in a battle they can't win. China is a world super power with over one billion people and nuclear weapons. Do you really think China cares?

No justifications given

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that "Linux is dated" is as absurd as saying packet-based communications (invented in the 1960s) is dated. Linux is updated more frequently than any other OS except perhaps FreeBSD. Linux updates with new features and bug fixes are being posted in real-time, literally every few minutes, by people posting new patches on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Some parts of the architecture of Linux like packet-based communications are old because they work very well and because new functionality can be created in higher layers of the OSI model.

Saying the X-Window System is "lacking in many areas" without identifying the areas you think are lacking is baseless criticism. Berlin is unfinished and has a tiny selection of applications compared to the X Window System. Apple Quartz is proprietary; nowadays we should prefer open-source.

Re:No justifications given

[Offwhite98]

I say Linux is dated for the DESKTOP due largely to both X Windows as well as the fact that it is based on many old ideas which have been changed and improved in newer systems. Think of it in terms of Apache 1.3 vs Apache 2.0. The new model does threading and can chain many handlers together to create a response. These features were not easily added to Apache 1.3 so they started with a new model.

For Linux, it sure can do server-based services, but it does not make it automatically a perfect OS for the desktop. The requirements for a web server, database server or desktop with multimedia capabilities is all very different. MacOS X made certain adjustments to allow it to work well for a desktop. For example, I want to play mp3 music while I read email without the music cutting out due to lack of processor priority, so it has been given a high priority and it never cuts out.

For both Linux and X Windows I am certain it will come to a point where there are too many patches or extensions and starting with a well designed alternative will become necessary. I can already see how difficult it is to get a windowing system set up on Linux involving many software and font libraries which constantly change and need updating in order to use the latest applications. Just because there are constant changes to an OS does not mean it is a good thing.

There is also a good deal of value in a system which was designed and built so well that updates are not needed very frequently. For the past 4 years Linux has changed very rapidly to add support for various devices and filesystems and those systems were not designed by a collaborative group of software engineers. They were mostly created by independent groups who were not working together or even working with the same OS. Sure the open source model can produce quality software through this bazaar, but one look at software archives for Perl (CPAN) you will find many solutions to the same problem and not one seems to solve the problem entirely. If the software is designed and the plans documented it could lead to a tighter implementation which does not require frequent updates which cause conflicts among systems.

As for X Windows, I would suggest it is lacking in terms of consistency and quality. What font libaries or windowing system should I use and what just works? What video card should I use and what should I avoid? Whenever I consider a Linux or BSD desktop I always have to be very careful with the hardware I use or it will not work well. In the past I found Linux to be extremely stable as a server, but when X Windows crashes and takes me back to the command-line that is just as bad as a full crash because now I am only one step away from the BIOS. I want total stability, not just kernel stability. Why X Windows crashed could be due to the graphics card, but what I know now is that I am very satisfied with MacOS X because I do not need to think about fonts or graphics cards. It just works and I can go about reading email, visiting various websites and listen to music.

So Linux is dated by the fact that better solutions have appeared which resolve many of the problems that exist with Linux and Linux cannot simply use a patch to make it all better.

Re:No justifications given

[zenyu]

I say Linux is dated for the DESKTOP due largely to both X Windows as well as the fact that it is based on many old ideas which have been changed and improved in newer systems. Think of it in terms of Apache 1.3 vs Apache 2.0. The new model does threading and can chain many handlers together to create a response. These features were not easily added to Apache 1.3 so they started with a new model.

MacOS X made certain adjustments to allow it to work well for a desktop. For example, I want to play mp3 music while I read email without the music cutting out due to lack of processor priority, so it has been given a high priority and it never cuts out.

I think you should give 2.6.0-testX a try. This version is in large part a complete rewrite of some major pieces of the OS. One of these is the scheduler. It can play that mp3 music file without any skipping while you are compiling mozilla, playing a video game and recording the Sopranos in the the background. And it can do all this without nasty hacks like the one where Windows XP starves everything but the thread running the foreground task's windowing code, or something like just running your mp3 player at a higher priority. (It's very interesting reading how it does this, it basically figures out what a task is doing and schedules it based on this. It also just has more time slices, and borrows the reentrability of drivers that Windows NT tries for.)

Though on second thought you must be a troll because every OS from Solaris to BeOS to MacOS X is severely dated when compared to Linux. Though I hear Windows 2006 has borrowed some Linux ideas, maybe it will compare favorably to 2.6.0...

Re:No justifications given

[Offwhite98]

If I have to try an alpha kernel to get what MacOS X has provided for over a year now, I see no point in trying it.

I do now want to be a QA tester. I want to use software which works, and so do most users.

Re:No justifications given

[zenyu]

If I have to try an alpha kernel to get what MacOS X has provided for over a year now, I see no point in trying it.

The point is MacOS X doesn't provide it, but you can get it in Linux with 5-10 minutes of work. If you just want to use the MacOS X hack just do "renice -10 xmmsPID" you could even put create a stupid little SUID script for it and make your xmms icon point to that instead of the binary. But I haven't encountered any skips with xmms since long before MacOS X was shipped.

I do now want to be a QA tester. I want to use software which works, and so do most users.

Troll. Troll. Troll. The TCP/IP stack is still not working in MacOS X! They took an old buggy FreeBSD stack and didn't patch for the known bugs before releaseing MaxOS X. And they still haven't, even though they've been sent patches. It has an off by one error in the MTU calculation that slows everything down and generates excessive network traffic when the host on the other end never gets the ACK it was supposed to and retries after the timeout. I lost days of my life dealing with this mostly because I couldn't believe such a serious bug existed in a TCP/IP stack in any software in this day and age. You may not be a "QA tester" but that seems to be mostly because you are oblivious to serious bugs in the software you use.

Re:No justifications given

[Offwhite98]

Exactly. I want to be oblivious to bugs in the software that I use on my desktop. If I do not notice a problem then it works well enough for me. I do software development for a living and do not intend to debug and resolve issues for the software on my home desktoop when I get home. And when I chose to start using MacOS X I decided that I was done writing scripts to make it work as I want. I make my comments on the Apple Discussions site and wait for improvements in the next release. I do not hack away at code and submit a patch. At home I intend to be a normal home user and not a contributor to the software.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[timmyd]

You're totally ignoring that humans are writing the code. No one can always right perfect code--so why choose a programming language that lets you make those errors?

if a routine call is flawed...then write a new one that isnt

huh?!? then it's already to late. the whole point is to write something that doesn't have flaws the first time. You are only going to be able to totally eliminate things like buffer overflows when you use a programming language that doesn't let you have them.

An all-Unicode Gnu/Linux?

[Animats]

A reasonable first step, and one suited for such a consortium, would be to go through all major open-source software and convert it to 100% Unicode-enabled, put all the text into resources, and provide resource files for each of the national languages. Then check all the code back into the major open-source projects.

Bubba Thinks Audio Video

[Arbogast_II]

Obviously with the economies they have, Japan, China and Japan are going to want an OS that does a good job of consumer electronics audio video. Linux at the moment is weak at audio/video and user interface. Windows is also inadequate (although more adequate than Linux) at these tasks.

The article states they might build on Linux. That would make alot of sense. The guts of Linux are solid, it's the user experience that is weak. Laying a 21st century Audio/Video/UI over Linux to create a new OS would leave the current Windows/OSX/Linux/Unix systems behind in the 20th century, to which they all basically belong.

OS sucks

[nepheles]

Open-source sucks

Re:Is this going to be the Eighth Wonder of the Wo

[Daniel Dvorkin]

...how good can a product be whose framework are "set during meetings by Governmment ministers followed by private sector specialists" .... it seems like a classic mistake of the horse pushing the cart rather than pulling it ...

Oh, absolutely. How fortunate we are that the Internet was designed and implemented by the private sector, without any of that nasty government interference!

Agree

[tjstork]

The monitor is ViewSonic, which is a private label of a screen made in Japan.

The car is a Chrysler, but my next car will be either a Ford or a GM.

I avoid buying things made in China. However, since Walmart has no problem waving the flag while it subdizes the export of US jobs, I guess sometimes I do get stuck.

I vote with my wallet, and I vote with my vote as well. Free trade is a joke.

Re:Agree

[thebigmacd]

ViewSonic is a California-based company headed by a Taiwanese native, James Chu. They have only one office in Japan, but two in China and three in Taiwan. Daimler-Chrysler is a European company, which owns Mercedes-Benz and Maybach. It has "strategic partners" [partially owns] Fuso, Mitsubishi, and Hyundai. They build vehicles in 37 coutries, including Mexico, China, India, and Indonesia. Ford owns Mazda, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Aston Martin. They own assembly plants in Thailand, the Phillippines and Malaysia. Many Ford engines are Mazda-built in Japan. GM owns Isuzu, Suzuki, Fuji/Subaru, Fiat, Holden, Saab, Opel, and Vauxhall. I cannot begin to count the number of GM-owned plants in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as South Africa (HUGE human rights problems there). Most "import" vehicles from Honda (Odyssey, Accord, Pilot, Civic), Nissan (Altima, Quest), and Toyota (Echo, Camry) are assembled in Canada and the US anyway. Most current "American cars" are partially manufactured off-continent, as much as the "imports". Although not all of the places I mentioned are places where people "work for 2 cents/day", it clearly shows that anyone who buys an "American car" in order to support American employment is ignorant beyond help. The vast majority of assets and employees of Chrysler, Ford, and GM are offshore. How does reality manage to escape you?

Great...

[moosesocks]

But will it support my hardware

Well good news however it works out.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Of course it would be great if they would build upon work already done. Be it Linux BSD Tron Minix or whatever. Even if this is nothing more then an attempt to get Gates to fly over to lower prices it is good news.

1. Great news. With the funding of three big goverments Linux gets all the little things that volunteers are bad at. Documentation, help files, support, QA, easy of use, standarization.
2. Good news. They create a new opensource OS. With a big portion of the world then not using windows standards for exchanghing information will have to be set and obeyed by all sites unless they want to stop communicating. So no more MS only sites. No more single platform document formats. Note that PDF can remain closed as it takes the time to port its aps to the different platforms.
3. Okay news. They create a closed source OS. Pretty much the same as above but without the benefit that any improvements can be used by the whole world.
4. Not bad news. This never pans out china keeps working on red flag, japan keeps using tron. At least it shows that goverments are getting fed up with the current situation. The longest journey begins with a single step. Let this be the first one.

Please understand that I do use windows and think it to be a wonderful OS, for certain tasks. As a game machine it is without equal. Sure games crash but then they push the system to its limits and lets face it game producers are hardly know to produce bug free code itself.

For every other task I have gotten fed up with microsoft. I am now running a 2003 machine and it is just as crash prone as xp as 98 as 95 as 3.11 and as dos was. My linux desktop has not had single crash. Oh opera crashes all the time but I do a "killall opera; opera" and it is back exactly where it crashed. Try that with IE or for that matter with Mozilla.

I don't want to see MS fail or driven into the ground. I want market forces to force them to stop adding eye candy and now fix the bloody core itself. Has anyone else noticed that 2003 wich supposdly should have new buffer overflow protection has so far been affected the same as all the other NT's out there?

Perhaps you can compare it to the american car industry wich kept making its cars flashier with more and more chrome attached while they became less reliable and ever greater gass guslers. Enter the japanese with tiny boring cars that worked and they forced the americans to finally change.

So the east to the rescue again. I will belief it when I see it, they haven't even gotten a logo yet everyone knows opensource needs a cute logo, but for now I prefer to be positive.

mmm What about the penguin from Evangelion, Pen Pen as the logo? Pen Pen

OS is good

[nepheles]

Good. Open-source rocks

Re:Design by Committee? That's go far.

[dmayle]

1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail.

What? You mean like Multics? But that's everywhe... oh...

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[J. J. Ramsey]

"All I ask that they please write it in a language other than C or C++."

Please.

Yes, the world would arguably be a better place if applications were written in higher-level languages. But system-level stuff like operating system kernels? A relatively low-level language is required. Heck, some of the stuff that operating systems do requires assembly.

But Linux is obsolete...

[00_NOP]

Use the HURD, microkernels are the way of the future :)

Joking aside, I hope they don't use Linux - it would be good to see this scale of effort into something new, hell maybe even a microkernel based OS.

Linux is doing fine without them, and maybe they could increase the competition...

Right wing argument that holds no water

[00_NOP]

1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail.

2) An operating system controlled by a government is eventually going to be oppressive and restrictive.

Of course if this were true then TCP/IP (yes I do not it is not an OS) would be obsolete and the Internet would have long since been abandoned.

Right wing libertarians need to do better than spout this "government is evil" tripe. It's a sort of trotskyism in reverse, and it's just as boring and stupid.

If Japan drops out....

[mousse-man]

we have SpamOS, the world's first spam-promoting OS.

(I haven't seen any non-spam mail from these two countries yet).

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

I could not agree more on that one, C had some appalling design decisions from day one.

An interesting alternative way that was tried a few years back was by a company called Prime. They wrote their OS (Primos) in Fortran. I used to program on their machines back then and it worked surprisingly well.
The company lasted around 15 years but then foundered for various reasons:

• They sold minicomputers and the market died a horrible death when mass-market PCs became available which offered somewhat less performance (back then) for 1/1000 of the price. The economies of scale.
• Just when they were having to tackle this threat (the mid 80's), another company launched a very hostile takeover bid. The measures that Prime took to fight this company off sucked away so many resources that they were doomed.

Pity, they made good machines.
I know very little about BEos. Was in *nix compatable? (not necessarily a plus, *nix's design is not perfect) and was it written in C? (probably yes).

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what you're saying is that there is no advantage in using one programming language over another? REALLY?

Why aren't we writing everything in PL/I, FORTRAN 66, ALGOL 68 and COBOL today instead of C and C++? After all, as you point out, its all machine code at the end, right?

Oh, its those language features.

Well, maybe there is a reason for picking one language over another after all. Gee, who would've thought that a language with specific features can actually assist you in the process of writing reliable software.

The bottom line is that C and C++ as languages, not to mention the various implementations and libraries, have some serious issues when it comes to writing reliable software that methadology changes alone aren't going to cure in a practical sense. You admonition to just "learn to program better" as a work around for the problems in C isn't helpful. Your suggestion to rewrite the C library, apparently on a routine for routine basis when you figure out its broken, just points to how bad off things are.

There is at least one other (more actually) language that offers the low level control of C, the object orientation of C++, more buit-in safeguards in the language to help catch bugs and prevent stupid errors: Ada 95. With GCC supporting it maybe more people will try it. It is a better language for software engineering, but I doubt that it will ever really be popular. Most people would rather just hack away than attempt to do any serious work in the design phase.

C is powerful, but like a chainsaw it makes it too easy to cut your own leg off. There are other tools just as powerful, and a whole lot safer for all involved.

Re:Sounds like a mafia swindle to me - Apple/Sun??

[shking]

A 1995 Mac is still a viable platform? Slowly backs away, smiling and nodding, making no sudden moves.....

It sure is! I'm typing this on a 1995 mac (Powermac 7600). 2 years ago I upgraded the processor to a G3 with a simple daughtercard swap. It's currently running the latest OSX release. It has 560mb of ram (out of a possible 1GB), 18GB scsi and 60GB ATA-133 hard drives and a year-old CD-RW. I also installed a cheap USB card to connect my digital camera.

Huhh huh hhuh huh...

[pr0ntab]

I wish our government would pay us to work and develop an OS that doesn't look like swiss cheese.

ps the software you hawk on your website is retarded. Nobody wants to be insulted by a puppy for playing checkers poorly. I wish some Asian would make a better one running off a tamagochi or some shit.

Re:Yep

[Paul d'Aoust]

you are bad.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Detritus]

But system-level stuff like operating system kernels? A relatively low-level language is required.

They could write it in Ada or Modula-3. I can't think of a reason why you couldn't write 99.9% of an operating system in Ada. Compiler and computer technology has advanced quite a bit since the days of UNIX V7 and the Portable C Compiler.

All your base are belong to whom?

[yerricde]

The Japanese have far too much pride in their product to allow mistakes out the door.

If you claim that Japanese companies consider exporting Engrish to be an embarrassment, then please explain the quality of text in the opening cut scene of the Sega Genesis version of Zero Wing.

Get over it, ass-nugget...

[SvnLyrBrto]

Less than 20% of the population of Japan was even BORN at the time of WWII. And, I suspect, neither were you. And OF that 20% that were alive during WWII, the bulk of them were toddlers at the time, and had nothing to do, whatsoever, with the war.

Mention "Nanking" to the average Japanese person of my generation, and he/she'll probably just think it's just some new Pokemon. These are not the same warmongering types as their distant ancestors. I *DO* have a handful of Japanese friends my age; some born here in the US, some immigrants. And they are the nicest, most non-violent, people you could imagine; and have sort of an innocence of the evils of the world about them. Certianly, they are far more virtuous than YOU, as your own post proves.

And the country as a whole has have made an astoundingly admirable transition from wartime imperialists to exporters of Pokemon, Hello Kitty, and Dance Dance Revolution; and cars end electronics superior to those you'll find anywhere else. Truely a much better example of "swords to plowshares" than you'll find anywhere else.

cya,
john

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Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[dvdeug]

programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.

Of course, the programmers who created C didn't, because they created gets, which is unusuable unless a buffer overflow is part of the design.

if a routine call is flawed...then write a new one that isnt

I bet you wouldn't mind if you were driving a car, and tried to put into the wrong gear, it blew up. There are so many buffer overflows that cause major security holes that could be fixed by using a different language. Good engineers build things that take into account human failability.

Linux already supports the Japanese language.

[reporter]

Linux already has Japanese language support. Emacs under the "Multilingual Environment" (MULE) already supports the Japanese language. "kterm" can already display Japanese characters. Furthermore, you can build any new Japanese-language application on top of Linux. Specifically, the Red Hat distribution of Linux already has the full set of Japanese character fonts.

There is no good engineering reason to build an independent operating system (OS) -- i. e. one which is independent of Linux. However, there seem to be political reasons.

... from the desk of the reporter

Re:That's backwards

[bmac]

The open source proponents don't believe that working on free software is giving the chinese anything. (Or IBM for that matter)

Of course they don't believe that (nor is that their intent), but what people believe is actually often very far from the truth. Open source software is giving the software to *anyone/everyone*. If they steal it, use in a proprietary product and don't acknowledge it (you think the Chinese govt is going to abide by the license(s) that OSS incorporates?), the only recourse is to sue, and I don't think that the open-source movement has the resources for all that. And as a low-level programmer, I don't want to be the one who has to try to figure out exactly what compiled modules are stolen by disassembling and comparing - yuck!

My point is that we software folks tend to be rather socially conscious (broad overstatement, I know) - even Bill Gates gives *tons* of money in charity each year. I would rather see the results of our hard work go to creating a source of money to promote the free flow of information (here in America as well as in countries like China). Giving our technically superior work to those who abuse others only hurts ourselves in the process. Ne?

Peace & blessings,
bmac

Re:Sounds like a mafia swindle to me - Apple/Sun??

[adzoox]

And if China, Japan, et al want to sell here ... they darn well oughta have a standards based sytem we can understand and don't have to develop custom APIs and interaction with.

Saw a note that California, if it were a country .... it would be the 4th largest GDP in the world!!!

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[einhverfr]

Cool, what do you suggest? C#, VB, or COBOL perhaps?

I suspect that the parent poster would appreciate a completely secure kernel written in.... ForTran... No buffer overruns but of limited utility....

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Linker3000]

CTLR-ART-DER

Re:What's a little monopoly to do?

[RoundSparrow]

Yha, great example.

Netscape invented the tag, Microsoft browsers do not even support it.

China can be trusted with intellectual property?

[GeoSanDiego]

28FEB2003 ZDNet: "Microsoft signs pact with Chinese government allowing them to view Window's source code."

31AUG2003 Reuters: "China, Japan, Korea to develop Window's replacement."

31AUG2003 Bill Gates: "Doh!"

Re:Is this going to be the Eighth Wonder of the Wo

[michaelnz]

Third I hope the don't start writing the programs in Chinese in the hope of avoiding the best virus and worm writers - who I doubt would go thru the trouble of learning Chinese to be able to penetrate this new system ...

Why does it matter to you what language they write their programs in (although from what I know most Chinese programmers write their programs in the same programming languages we do). Chinese does not seem suited for prorgramming in, and most Chinese programs do speak English.

Fifth One Great Wall of China is more than enough. We don't want a "Great Wall of China, Japn, and Korea," and no matter what they say, it is NOT going to be the Eighth Wonder of the World ...

What is this? They want to make their own operating system, that's all. It's not the beginning of these countires shutting themselves off from world trade. I personally doubt the usefulness of such an initiative, believing the best OSs come from programmers, not governments. But could you imagine the value of an operating system designed for Asian languages? Imagine if you were using an operating system that had been translated from Russian. It might be workable, even decent, but it would never be quite perfect for you. The same applies for these languages, although even more so with Chinese character sets.

I understand Korea's desire to be involved but it makes less sense to me because their language is completely different from the other two. Perhaps they're hoping to make it a compatible with all Asian languages? Cool.

Wired.

[dance2die]

Let's not forget about the fact that the South Korea is the most "wired" country of all. With their communication ability, they could probably insert more reliable communication functionality into their OS.

"Steal" Isnt accurate

[nurb432]

Different country, different set of copyright rules... And remember its the 'goverment', they can change the rules as they please.

Doubt it will be released as OSS, they cant have the hidden anti-freespeech and backdoor controls revealed, can they?

Re:"Steal" Isnt accurate

[SnowZero]

Actually the US lengthened its copyright to "bring it in line" with the EU, which has had longer copyrights for a while. However my guess is that it was just a convenient excuse available at the time.

A credit to our race

[Hao Wu]

Indeed. Developing a fully-functional and modern Operating System would be a great achievement for all of Asia, whose peoples sorely lack contribution to programming worldwide.

If Japan is involved...

[Grummet]

....it won't be inexpensive.

I have been living and working here in Osaka for ten years and throughout that time have yet to find a government group that does anything "cheap". Everything is done as a "marunage" which means jacking up the price by hiring a company which hires a company which hires a company to do the work. Most likely most of the work for this will happen in China. I worked at a company that sold the equivalent of an 80 dollar US ...it won't be trustworthy.

because the government will make sure there are all kinds of neat little "secret" ways to get access. That is to say the committee in charge of security will most likely have lots of LDP party members who have never touched a computer involved and they will be saying things like "now, its gonna be used by the government workers and the public be so we gotta be able to have remote root access!"

Sound familiar to anybody?

Re:If Japan is involved...

[Grummet]

Ok, ok so we aren't supposed to respond to ourselves. So shoot me.
The wife walked in and caught me slashdotting and I panickt and hit submit!

Anyway...
The company I worked at sold an 80 dollar piece of software to Japanese government groups for 3,500 dollars. Ridiculous. And they paid!!

Shit!
Here she comes again....!

Yeah right

[Darth Gambit]

Like China, Japan, and South Korea can agree to anything other than hating each other

Ypu cnnot steal an idea

[axxackall]

These people are notorious for stealing ideas

At some poit Isaak Newton discovered that an apple falls down due to gravity. Moreover, he describe his idea mathematically. For centures all people use that idea for their work. Do they steal Newton's idea?

For one more time: no one can steal any idea from you as it doesn't belong to you. The historical fact of discovering the idea belong to you. But the idea - not. It has been existing in this Universe always, before you. And it will be existing forever, even after you.

But for one thing I am very glad about your post: you call software as ideas:

"These people are notorious for stealing ideas, and in most cases, modifying them into something better then claiming them as their own".

That's right. Software is just one or another notation of various computer-related ideas. Therefore, it is not possible to steal the software.

So leave them alone. If they want to use software, modify it and even sale modifications - no problem. All they have to do is just follow licenses and copyrights. If they will modify Linux and sell it along with the source code of their modifications - what's wrong with it? RMS will be just happy. And I don't see any reason why they would not want to open source their modifications? Especially in a socialist/communist China, where all IP belong to the People :)

Had to be said

[FxChiP]

Following the fact that it's at least mostly communist countries developing this, the obvious (yet horrible, as my karma will take a gigantic hit) thing to do is something that is not favored, I guess...

In Soviet Russia, OS develops you!

I can see it now....

[charlieCoolly]

SCO files lawsuits against the countries of China, Japan and Korea! Anyways, all joking aside, they are gonna have one tough task up ahead of them. Even though Japanese borrowed characters from the Chinese, they are used in totally different ways. In Chinese, each character represents a certain sound, and that's it. You string together words like you normally would (phonographic), the only problem being that there is about a zillion characters. Japanese, on the other hand, is ideographic. Each group of characters is read differently depending on the context. So each character can have several different phonetic sounds associated with it, depending on the other characters immediately preceeding and following it. And that's just Chinese and Japanese. I don't even know the complications that the Korean writing system would bring to the table. The best idea I can think of off the top of my head is to map each base character, ones that are most frequently used to create other characters, to each key on the keyboard and use some sort of shifting to access them and string them together.

I hope its in English

[brownaroo]

I hope our future Asain Masters care about us. No Really no troll.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[You're All Wrong]

I looked at that site - I run linux, I have none of those vulnerabilities. Apart from a handful of kernel vulns, those are all applications with bugs, not _linux_. phpsysinfo is _not_ linux (grabbing a random vuln off their list).

If I have a CGI script that contains the line
print `$FORM{'REQUESTED_COMMAND'}`;
or a C/C++ equivalent routine, then would you say it was a "security hole"? It permits the remote execution of arbitrary code, so surely it must be a security hole?

There is no OS, and there can be no sufficiently functional OS, that is invulnurable to that "security hole". If you show me such an OS, I'll show you an OS which is unable to run simple CGI scripts, and thus not sufficiently functional.

YAW.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[You're All Wrong]

"""
Of course, the programmers who created C didn't, because they created gets, which is unusuable unless a buffer overflow is part of the design
"""

Bullshit. What makes you think that every piece of code that uses gets will suffer buffer overflows? Why can't a forked pair of tasks have an internal and private interface using gets? I can give you a 10 line example that you won't be able to exploit if you're really stuborn.

Of course, I'd never use it myself, I typically don't trust the coders on the other side of the interface to code themselves out of a wet paper bag, so paranoia is generally worth it.

Just because it's broken doesn't mean every usage of it causes something to break. Even broken matchsticks can be used to separate tiles when renovating your bathroom.

YAW.

Re:Is this going to be the Eighth Wonder of the Wo

[shaitand]

The point isn't whether the people involved work for government or private sector. It's that "ministers" instead of "specialist" are laying the groundwork for the plan.

At least that's a valid point... hopefully that's what he was aiming for.

Shouldn't this be

[Cnik70]

filed under the 'one more group trying to reinvent the wheel' I cannot see why they simply do not use a flavor of Linux. They can easily modify the source to fit their specific security needs, and they will not have to waste years catching up with the rest of us.

Re:China can be trusted with intellectual property

[Jesus IS the Devil]

WTF is this? This guy posted the same exact thing twice in this topic, and both have been modded 3+ funny.

I think this guy is a karma whore. :rolleyes:

open source influence or everyone hates microsoft?

[xoboots]

Could it be that open source is bringing together nations that have historically been deep, distrustful enemies? Now that's a feather in the cap! OR is it simply that everyone hates Microsoft and the enemy of my enemy is a my friend?

What about a name? I saw someone suggest Asianux. Assuming they base it off a linux or *BSD kernel ("all your base are belong to us" will finally be realized) I suggest they use this to underline their rejection of SCO's claims by calling it AUX.

woah.

[lone_marauder]

China, Japan, and South Korea, getting together for anything? I know some Chinese folk, and the hatred between those three groups is palpable. They must really perceive U.S. interests, as represented by the proliferation of Microsoft software, as extremely threatening.

The other scenario would be that the screaming incompetence of Microsoft, as evidenced during the last few weeks, is a more powerful force than years of bitter intercultural hatred. It would be funny to see MS spin this - with XP you can fly, but Win2003 will bring about world peace!

Spruce Gouse

[zenyu]

Project Pink. Now everone say it with me: HAHAHahahAHAhahAHAHAHA! Get real. This has about as much chance to fly as an airplane made out of gauze, popsicle sticks, and chewing gum.

It flew once, hundreds of inches above the water. So there. ;)

Re:Yep

[Phishpin]

As Japan, China, and South Korea all have different written languages (I don't know by how much they differ tho), it seems they would have to settle on one particular language.

And for the life of me I cannot think of a programming language that is actually written in a Far Eastern language at all. If there is one, I would like to know how it compares to C, java, etc.

Your definition of enlightenment is slavery

[tjstork]

I bought my Chrysler before the merger.

What's ignorant? Of course I know that companies are outsources and overseas out the wazoo. But I need a car and so I try to buy the car that is a compromise between what is best for me and my community.

I used to work for RCA. Believe me I know that there has not been a picture tube manufactured in the United States since RCA went down the tubes 20 years ago. Still, were there a decent screen made in the USA, I would buy it.

The issue for me is that I was a staunch believer in free trade - I supported Reagan in a liberal high school, and I believed that at some point the promises of a better society would happen. They simply have not. None of the promises of globalization and rampant capitalism have yet to materialize despite having 20 years to run this experiment.

I'm waiting for the world to get a better standard of living, but, every indicator out there shows the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and at a rate higher than they did in the supposedly oppressive 1960s. It used to be that everyone could afford college, and now it is moving more and more out of reach. It used to be that everyone could afford a new car, and those are moving out of reach. To own a house, both the mother and father must work.

There used to be a notion in the United States, that, if you worked hard enough, you could get ahead. That was the American dream. Now, if you work hard enough, your job will get shipped overseas. I can't understate the corrosive effect that this will have on our society, and if you can't see that, then you are the one that is ignorant.

Re:Your definition of enlightenment is slavery

[ndogg]

The issue for me is that I was a staunch believer in free trade - I supported Reagan in a liberal high school, and I believed that at some point the promises of a better society would happen. They simply have not. None of the promises of globalization and rampant capitalism have yet to materialize despite having 20 years to run this experiment.

Have you ever wondered why? There's no accountability for wrong-doing in free trade, no responsiblity, and no motivation for ethicality.

Free trade, as with all political theories, is good in theory, but never in practice. Political theories all have this problem of thinking that humans are flawless. I have no idea where that train thought within politics came from.

It used to be that everyone could afford college...[and] a new car

Becareful with what you say. That's not true, and never has been. Perhaps you never knew a family that couldn't, but there certainly always have been, obviously in very impoverished nations, and even in the US.

This article ought to make you happy since now those nations can internalize their software industry without the US, and so their economies and the economy of the US won't intermingle so much. The economies will become more independent.

Perhaps it's time more places internalize more industries so that economies can work more independently, rather than rely on each other. The more they rely on each other, the more that failure can affect each of them. Not only that, but then workers don't have to worry about competition from abroad.

Of course, that doesn't help impoverished nations without any infrastructure. They'll still be poor, starving, and without medical care. All political theories are particularly bad at solving that problem.

There needs to be some political theories that take into account both impoverished nations and flawed humans. Of course, I'm sure that it, too, will fail in practice.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[Anonymous Coward]

programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.

So, apparently it is your contention that, over time, none of the programmers working on the Linux kernel, NFS, NIS, RPC, Apache, Sendmail, emacs, Xwindows, samba, ftpd, Windows NT, IIS, etc., etc., etc., have actually known what they are doing since all of them have produced all manner of security problems?

this is like saying people jump higher wearing nike's than they do in reeboks.

No, its not. Its more akin to saying that you are safer in a car that has seatbelts, airbags, antilock breaks, and a proximity warning system than in an old beater without any of the above. C is the beater, it provides few safeguards against all manner of programming problems.

Process only gets you so far. If all that mattered in the real world was process and all-knowing programmers, we would still all be writing almost all software in FORTRAN and produce it defect free. Last time I looked, most software was written in C/C++ and bug ridden. ( BTW - Don't kid yourself, people have done a heck of a lot of system programming in FORTRAN over the years.) If you can't identify the weaknesses of the C/C++ languages, particularly when writing large software systems, you don't know what you are talking about.

I find it ironic that you think that the "design paradigm" of programs needs to be looked at, but apparently not the "design paradigm" of programming languages, or the effect that their use has when used to produce programs, especially large software systems. Apparently you believe that there are no practical differences that result from using FORTRAN, B, BCPL, C, COBOL, ML, Basic, Pascal, Module 2, Occam, Ada, forth, Prolog, or Lisp since they all produce machine code. Right.

Before you spout off again, try spending some time perusing the material at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. You might learn something.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[dvdeug]

Of course, the programmers who created C didn't, because they created gets, which is unusuable unless a buffer overflow is part of the design

Bullshit. [...] YAW.

So there exist some rare situations where someone could possibly trust the other side enough to use gets, which most programmers wouldn't use and would gain you nothing over fgets, these situations being rare enough not to justify adding a function to the standard C library.

At best, there's a minor technical flaw in what I said; that hardly makes it bullshit or what I said all wrong. Plonk.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[mark-t]

In fact, there is no such fucking thing as a "secure language" or "non-secure language."

Not entirely true. Any language that innately supports sandboxing, such as Java or Python, could be considered "secure".

Although it'd be a bitch to write system level code inside a sandbox.

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[i7dude]

No, its not. Its more akin to saying that you are safer in a car that has seatbelts, airbags, antilock breaks, and a proximity warning system than in an old beater without any of the above. C is the beater, it provides few safeguards against all manner of programming problems.

no matter how safe the car is...it wont help you if you are a shitty driver.

I find it ironic that you think that the "design paradigm" of programs needs to be looked at, but apparently not the "design paradigm" of programming languages, or the effect that their use has when used to produce programs, especially large software systems. Apparently you believe that there are no practical differences that result from using FORTRAN, B, BCPL, C, COBOL, ML, Basic, Pascal, Module 2, Occam, Ada, forth, Prolog, or Lisp since they all produce machine code. Right.

i dont recall, even once, arguing the fact that some languages are more adept for tackling certain types of problems...although, you cannot argue that c has been the language of choice of most system designers (using words like most means that i am acknowledging the fact that other languages have been used to write os'). i was just speaking out against the original posters instance that by using a different language...the result would be more secure systems...which is pure bullshit...you may be solving one set of problems...but there will always be new ones to complain about.

dude

Re:Is this going to be the Eighth Wonder of the Wo

[shaitand]

Well the article is vague about what the private sector specialists are specialists OF but I should hope they would be better qualified than politician like a minister of anything.

Re:Sounds like a mafia swindle to me - Apple/Sun??

[shking]

All those improvements mean its no longer a 1995 Mac

Bullshit! I bought the machine in '99 (when it was almost 4 years old) because it was expandable. Although it shipped with only 32mb of ram and a 1GB scsi disk, it was built to accept up to 1GB of ram. It was built with the CPU on a daughter card for easy upgrades. It was built with 3 empty PCI slots. It's got the original motherboard, case & power supply. Sure, it's a better machine, but it's still the same machine. All I did was plug in stuff it was built to accept:

1. add more ram & hard disk
2. swap the daughter card for a faster one (akin to replacing a graphics card)
3. plug in some PCI cards to add ATA and USB

Finally! An OS to run Ada & COBOL

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

ADA and COBOL were both developed by comittee rather than by a company. And, Man, do they suck.

programming language written in aFar Eastern langu

[baconevi]

There were some efforts to create a korean programming language and its environment including the compiler in south korea a decade ago. One of the commercial product released in 1994 but died a few years later was called "SEED" named in the hope that it would be a starting point of such products. It wasn't an innovative programming language as it's an ordinary procedural programming language in which all the keywords were korean and all user-defined words could be written in korean language. Just check out seed.giffor its screen shot.

Made in JApan...Made inChina...

[peter303]

30 years ago these meant inferior products. This still applies to software. Who would pay money for this stuff?

Re:MAC OSX

[SnowZero]

Reread the summary, they said "inexpensive" not "expensive".

Re:programming language written in aFar Eastern la

[jo42]

> seed.gif

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /bacon/seed.gif on this server.

Peckerhead!

Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[psykocrime]

Sure, it *could* be considered "secure," but are you telling me it's not possible to write exploitable, insecure code in Java or Python?

Java and Python give you mechanisms to help make your code more secure, but I still disagree that it makes sense to label the language itself as intrinsically secure.

FYI

[mirthworks]

China already joined WTO

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Hopefully they will write it in a better langua

[You're All Wrong]

"""
to justify adding a function to the standard C library
"""

I'd like to see your evidence that fgets predates gets.
For some bizarre reason I don't think you have any.

YAW, who has no problem having the last word.