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Driving Plan 9
Glenda_lives_on writes "OSnews has an alternative OS review on Plan 9. Plan 9 is a research OS produced by Bell Labs. It was open sourced a few years back, and has enjoyed a revival of sorts. Los Alamos National Labs is continuing to favor Plan 9 for their new generation of super computing because its the fastest thing out there. I have downloaded and ran Plan 9 before. In fact the Plan 9 live cd sits here on my desk. Its not an operating system for noobs however, and lacks some graphical refinement. Plan 9 is a very cool and a interesting test drive however. Its definitely worth the price of admission (free) for exploring, and education."
The "everything is a file" metaphor of Unix was revolutionary at the time, and Plan 9 taking it a little further really does little to advance the state of the art.
What was good about the "everything is a file" metaphor was not the "file" part, but the "everything is a...." part.
What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system. It would be something like a Lisp OS but with an object database type file system. I think some have existed in academia, but I've never looked into them.
Really cool how _everything_ was a file.
To start a program on some machine, he would cd to some directory corresponding to the machine. I don't remember exactly, but this directory had files corresponding to "exe", "stdin", and "stdout" among others. To start a job, the program was just copied to the exe file. And then if you looked at the "stdout" file, the output from the running job was there. Now you can imagine how launching a job on thousands of machines and collecting the output becomes really trivial.
I got the impression that this was sort of like the Linux /proc filesystem, but expanded to work seamlessly across a cluster and with more functionality.
Hi Ems2, I am the author of the referenced Plan 9 article and I can safely say that 640X480x8 was the default window size that came up.This is fact and not opinion.I think I mentioned that it was easily changed to a higher resolution, either by Rio or by simply typing 800x600x8. I now see that there is a version of emacs available. I referenced an out-of-date posting on the 9fans list (I think). Thanks for the correction. Emacs is a great asset. You will see that I too provided plenty of references to the Plan 9 documentation for people to investigate.
That EULA no longer applies, it's legitimately open source now. That was back when Lucent still controlled it very carefully.
In some sense, sure, but on the other hand, that is grossly unfair to Ed Wood's beneficial relationship to Lugosi. Consider the following (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi, but which agrees with similar details from some films on the subject, including one with Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, from some years back):
( [*] Plan 9 was a posthumous performance, and note that the death of Lugosi early in filming was precisely the reason that Plan 9 became "the worst film ever made" rather than merely the usual Ed Wood grade B movie.)
Yes, Wood was a hack (albeit a fun one with a cult following to this day), but he did his best to rescue Lugosi when the rest of the world had given up and no longer cared. Give credit where credit is due, rather than simply sneering at the charitable, no matter the flaws you see in the good samaritan. By all accounts, Wood seems to have done the best he could by Lugosi.
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