Slashdot Mirror
North Korea's Home-Grown Operating System Mimics OS X
CambodiaSam sends the latest on "Red Star OS," North Korea's attempt at a home-grown operating system. Previously, it had closely resembled Microsoft Windows, but a new update now strongly mimics Apple's OS X.
"Despite living in a country very much shut off from the outside world, many people in North Korea do have access to technology - including mobile phones. However, devices are heavily restricted. Internet access, for instance, is locked down, with most users able to visit only a handful of sites mostly serving up state-sponsored news. The Red Star OS is peppered with North Korean propaganda, and its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103 — the number of years since the birth of former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. An earlier version of Red Star OS was made available worldwide in 2010 after a Russian student posted it online. The latest version is believed to have been released some time in 2013."
Are we really any different? All hail the Unix gods.
Day 1: It wouldn't stop, the redirecting. At first I thought it was malware. Had my first drink in a long time.
Day 2: Barely had the strength to carry on as the BETA REDIRECTIONS continue.. trying not to talk to hallucinations at the bar and in the bathroom which laugh at me about these redirections.
Day 3: Discovered the BETA redirections were random, and while at first they looked somewhat usable, when I looked at me and my monitor screen in the mirror, a horrible woman with flesh hanging off of her body looked back, trying to lead me into a dance as the word BETA appeared across her rancid breasts.
Day 4: These BETA corridors go on FOREVER! On the plus side, I've taken up disassembling vehicles to corner this BETA beast and sacrifice myself rather than lead others to discovering it. I ate some red snow.
Day 5: Finding it harder to concentrate. I've ate some more of the red snow. The taste is starting to grow on me.
Day 6: This typewriter is the only entertainment I have, apart from throwing things at the walls, trying to get some response from the BETA which is now taking over my mind.
Day 7: Hahahahahha! Would you believe it? I'M STILL BEING REDIRECTED TO SLASHDOT BETA PAGES! AHAHhahahaah! Type, type, ding, ding! Wooo!
Day 8: The hallucinations are actually real! Would you believe it? They have offered to help me if I agree to work for them. I'm thinking about patenting this delicious red snow, the taste is unreal!
Day 9: Having black out sessions where I cannot remember large passings of time. Found some makeup, thought I'd paint a joker smile on my face to amuse the people only I can see!
Day 10: Productive today, part of what I wrote for my new screenplay:
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slashdot BETA!
I cannot opt out of Slas
(drops of blood on paper)
...
http://saveie6.com/
FUCK beta a second time
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
So what is it, really? A pirated copy? Based on Windows? OSX? Linux? Something unique?
Why does the roman alphabet kerning always look off in East Asian implementations. It's always bothered me on Japanese pages, but Korean too?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
It's worth noting that an important part of the culture that the kims enforced on north korea is "self reliance". Everyone is taught from a very young age that you can't depend on foreigners, and that everything should be produced in country. It makes sense, even without the massive censorship, that they'd do this whereas, say, China wouldn't.
*NB this is an understanding I've mostly gained from reading the axis of evil tour, not from expertise or in-depth sociological research
Funny - this was the first thing I thought, while reading the heading, as well.
Gosh, an OS that mimics another GUI? Would never happen in the 'west'?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
If not, Dear Leader is going to get some serious f-bombs dropped on him by Linus and Richard.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Looks like someone confused an OS with a WindowManager again.
\kids these days
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So what? Is this supposed to be some menacing thing that one group of people use a different date system than I do? Should I be concerned that in Japan the state writes Heisei 26 as the year on official documents? There are serious problems in North Korea, but we don't need to stoop to xenophobic fear mongering to illustrate it.
Just look at the footer and click on the label which reads "Slashdot Classic" and you'll have the good old slashdot.
Home grown Linux distro maybe. It looks more like they slightly altered elementary OS or Pear OS, applied an OS X theme and replaced the standard dock with cairo-dock. I would be surprised if they had the resources to write an entire OS from scratch.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Are you suggesting that Tim Cook is about to lose an uncle?...
imo soon /. with their beta design, will create a mass exodus of users and the end game is a ghost town like Kuro5hin, if any of you remember it.
North Korea is hardly unique in using alternative calendars. Japan uses dates based on the emperor's reign. You can set windows to use it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Where are the best surfing spots in North Korea?
I propose that we boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta.
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
He should have known better than to say anything against Mr. Cook or the latest iPhone.
I'm pretty sure the OS was made public back in 99, not 2010 as has been misreported by this article.
Fuck you, slashdot, for taking away classic.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
For me, it looks like an old KDE skin.
A distro that uses gnome + cairo dock or similar as primary desktop is now mimicking OS X as something new and world-shaking? In the login you probably could choose to boot a desktop that mimic Windows 7, Solaris CDE, OLPCs Sugar, or KDE (whatever it mimics). And that happens in most other linux distributions too, the horror!
1) Not sure why you're that worried about it, it seems to be to be just a comment, like one odd thing that they saw.
2) Mild irony, for Taiwan it is also year 103. Go to any Post office, official office, or even read an expiration date on an item you just bought. Why 103? Sun-Yat-Sen and Chinese Democracy. Yes, Chinese democracy wasn't just a bad Guns and Roses album, but a real thing, at least until outside forces messed with it. And like you had year 10 of the Qing Dynasty here, now you have year 103 of the era of democracy. So, they at least are honoring the democratic era of mainland China.
"Despite living in a country very much shut off from the outside world, many people in North Korea do have access to technology - including mobile phones."
I keep seeing this claim, that "many" people have cell phones. This is a country where 10% of the population have a landline. North Korea claims they have 1 million cell phone subscribers, but really, do you believe that?
Even if it were true, that's about four percent of the population, which does not fit any dictionary definition of "many" I have ever seen.
Please help metamoderate.
Surely this is based on some Linux simulation of OS/X, can anybody identify it?
I find it hard to believe NK took KDE and modified it themselves to look like OS/X, rather than basing it on work already done.
"Previously, it had closely resembled Microsoft Windows, but a new update now strongly mimics Apple's OS X."
Sounds like it was written by the Gnome developers.
Why change for the sake of change? Why are site visitors to be forced into something awful and unwanted? The new beta is awful. There is no other way to put it. If I am forced into the beta I will simply leave - forever.
from ubuntu to every other feces of the month linux distro
>Apple and North Korea share similar goals...
Some at both places were into Disney???
Will some group or agency hack the NK OS so it throws up "Make solar panels and greenhouses not weapons" cartoons?
It's interesting to note how time historic context of events can be forgotten. For instance on mentioning Sputnik, most people think of the cold Cold War. But regardless of startling many and marking a period of complex relations, it was actually part of the international 1957/1958 Geophysical Year. Much of the focus related to the solar maximum. There were some significant advances made. Maybe we can find more areas of advancing science together today to help reduce international tensions. Food, energy, health and climate all offer many possibilities. Food, warmth, and Disney movies with adventuresome kids and cute animals. What more could people want? Soma??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I visited it today for the first time in ages. Still sucks. Masses of wasted screen space. Surely it's possible to create a portal that converts the beta to the classic style?
soylentnews.org
The new beta looks like a bad case of ReCode (recode.net) envy to me.
. . . in both eye-sockets.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This is the first time in ages I've actually logged on to comment. I just want it on the record in my own name how much the Beta site hurts. I mean, after all these years, I've just finally gotten used to all the faults and boom! Here comes a whole new set of awful. I'll take a well-tuned slant six Dodge over an oil leaking, off-idle stumbling, lemon of a [insert disfavored auto brand here].
I rather enjoy the fact that almost none of the higher moderated comments have anything to do with the story itself and rather about Slashdot Beta. Goes to show how much people hate what this will do to Slashdot.
Account abandoned. I can't fucking spell for shit and Slashdot doesn't even allow time-limited edits of posts. Plus you'
Where can we get a copy?
I have been a regular visitor to Slashdot for around 15 years. For that, I get the checkbox to disable ads, though I browse with Javascript disabled so my browser does not slow down.
I come here for the discussions, and often read comments at +5, changing that only if I find a discussion interesting and warrants reading at a lower level.
The new beta uses JQuery for the comment threshold selector, and changes that on the fly. This means all the comments are loaded, but not visible, and processing any page with considerable number of comments will slow down MY computer! If I have a few tabs open to read later, my computer will be unusable.
If they insist that I enable Javascript to browse the site at the threshold I want, then they will lose me as a long time. I imagine that others long timers will hate the site too.
Dice have to remember that this site has two unmatched features, interlocked: a moderation system that is good at cutting down the trolling, spamming, and noise, and a comment section that is frequented by many people who are passionate about technology and other nerdy stuff.
If they manage to aggravate a lot of their users, the comment section will no longer be attractive to the audience. Perhaps we should revive kuro5hin?
I wrote the above in a feedback form that I filled a while ago, and I am emailing this comment to their feedback@slashdot.org.
Please send them feedback too.
And mod this up so Dice can see what they are getting themselves into.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
You obviously haven't seen many dictionaries. Merriam Webster has
: consisting of or amounting to a large but indefinite number
OED has
: a large number of:
I don't know about you. But 1000 people is a large number of people for me.
Many only sometimes means "a large percentage of"
First thing I noticed was mobile reverting to classic on some phone browsers (but not all..). Now this abomination. Is my text going to be sans-serif? It isn't in the preview text area but most people seem able to post in Helvetica. Hmm.. can I still use html tags? [inserts multiple BRs]
Well.. I guess not.
sorry, had to say it.
And we have our own brainwashing to content with. I mean, really, blue pill or red pill? Most want to taste that juicy steak, even if it does not really exist. I applaud them for at least trying to develop their own OS. I could say, 'life is shit in North Korea', if not for the fact that the so-called dear leaders in my corner of the globe seem to be taking diligent notes on how things are run in North Korea and then applying it here. Sure not all at once, but bit by bit, we're getting there. So ronerrryyyyyyyyyyy
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Can we just fucking nuke the goofy bastards and get it over with?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Steve Jobs was Tim Cooks mentor by any chance? And now he is gone.
as opposed to eating dog food elsewhere?
MANY: The word does not mean what you think it means.
The word "many" has nothing to do with percentages. If you were beaten with a stick by each of those million, you would not say "I wasn't beaten by many people."
Even though there are nitpickers who focus on scenario's where Windows features are used badly, because Mac does not have thoses features at all. And on faults Mac has just as much, but are less often encountered because most people don't use Mac.
The Mac App store is only another method of reaching apps. You can still download and install anything you want off the Internet. Gatekeeper is easily overridden too. Plus, you can muck about with the software on various levels using Terminal and other tools. It's more of a case of shutting off low-level access to people who don't have the patience to read a few guides and/or don't know what they're doing. Also, since Darwin is open source, there are a lot of third-party kernel extensions installable. The hardware for both Macs and iOS devices is repairable, if iFixit is anything to go by, although modifiability is an issue with the smaller laptops, and near-impossible with the phones and tablets, but not a lot of people are going to mod phones, and you can order the laptops at higher tech-specs. What you said about software is mostly true for iOS, but then again, who's going to mod a mobile OS? The iOS App Store's selection of apps covers most things anyway.
I'm sure its GPL since its tax payer sponsored...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
what's with the FUCKING WHITE SPACE? There's so much fucking white space, there's barely any content and writing a message forces a wrap after barely 30 characters! What a fucking crock! ... and a golden opportunity lost for good.
28 VDC
m, d = 1 s
And unicode is STILL for shit.
What a bunch of prime wankers... a waste of oxygen
You know now that they'll NEVER fix any of it with all this (justified) hate.
Useless bastards in charge.
I love it that they made the 3 top left window buttons look like Kim Jong Ill's glasses. Aww
You know what was great about Slashdot classic? I could browse it at work and raise no suspicions. You know what sucks about Slashdot Beta? It looks just like all the other sites I CANNOT BROWSE AT WORK WITHOUT RAISING SUSPICIONS. Fuck!
As it appears, this is based off of/is a Linux distro.
Nothing home grown about it.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Looks like a Duck but cracks like windoz.
score
He passed long ago. He's gone now only because the fanboi proletariat wasn't accepting the animatronic Steve Jobs as the real deal anymore.