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)
FUCK beta a second time
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Gosh, an OS that mimics another GUI? Would never happen in the 'west'?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
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.
http://classic.slashdot.org/ ftw
So what is it, really? A pirated copy? Based on Windows? OSX? Linux? Something unique?
It's about a dictatorial regime imposing a new version of its software on what it sees as a captive population of users, with a generic new user interface obviously copied from somewhere else.
Oh sorry, you meant Red Star, not Slashdot Beta! No idea. Looks like Linux.
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
for a limited time only, per the announcement.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 also works, if it bugs out like it did for me and there isn't a sidebar or footer.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I'm pretty sure the OS was made public back in 99, not 2010 as has been misreported by this article.
1. judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Looks like someone confused an OS with a WindowManager again.
Looks like someone confused a desktop environment with a window manager again.
Instead, its going to look like somenobody's blog
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I think it's funny how they mock the N. Korean government for presenting Kim Il Sung as a god and yet they are all too happy with their year 2014 that pushes some ordinary human being, who may not have even existed
...and who, if he did exist, was born a few more than 2,014 years ago in any case. :-)
Fuck you, slashdot, for taking away classic.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
I scanned through both FAs, but I fail to see "xenophobic fear" or mocking regarding the DPRK's year 103. What are you guys talking about?
Dark Reflection
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
You must be confused and offtopic. Today's comments are dedicated to saying fuck BETA.
developer on a payroll
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
Tried it. It hasn't "improved" quite to the the extent of nbcnews.com, but it's definitely an "improvement" in that sense. (More shiny, less useful; too many big pictures. I'm waiting for headlines like "15 ways to improve your .Net skills" or "5 weird ways LISP can simplify your code" or....)
THANK YOU.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
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
Asian languages use spaces since, well, not sure ... certainly at least since they saw europeans use them, but I assume much longer.
Hint: there are plenty of old japanese paintings, drawings etc. available whre you see "space" characters since roughly 1400.
So yes, they have spaces between words.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Let's not overstate the quality of the "classic" interface. The fact that it still barfs over unicode and HTML is unforgivable. And after you submit a message, you are left in limbo, without a button to get back to where you were. And the browser back button method results in a "are you sure you want to resubmit this form" dialog!
Lets not get misty eyed over an old interface just because it's familiar.
The new beta looks like a bad case of ReCode (recode.net) envy to me.
Oh sure. But improvements dont need to come at the cost of readability.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
If not, Dear Leader is going to get some serious f-bombs dropped on him by Linus and Richard.
It is almost worth sending a request to the govenment of North Korea for the a copy of the source code as per the gpl's license just to see what happens...
Firstly to see if you get a response, and secondly to see how many US govenment watch lists you get put on.
and if I don't get response i could always sick Stallmen on them...
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
. . . in both eye-sockets.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That is one feature of CJK fonts. Most characters are square (same width as height), originally aligned along a grid. When you want to typeset western languages like English, you need to figure out how those foreign letters match into this East Asian typographic grid. The result is the division of characters into full-width and half-width. As a result, the Roman characters in East Asian fonts are often half-width, which looks jarring to us (full-width would look even worse to us). Unfortunately, CJK punctuation is also divided into full-width and half-width. If half-width characters for western languages and punctuation are used a fair amount, that destroys the original grid alignment. This means that the whole thing becomes pointless unless there is some formatting policy or typographic engine to handle the matter. Since ancient times, the ideal has always been to have a grid of characters where characters are aligned horizontally and vertically:
xxxx
xxxx
xxxx
xxxx
I would show some real examples, but apparently Slashdot only allows a very small range of Unicode characters, meaning that I can't even post some basic Chinese here. :-(
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
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'
Good on ya, mate. Keep this thread on topic. BETA is teh sux0r!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
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