It's worse than that. The waiver of patent enforcement offered by MS was only for compliant implementations. So by ensuring that there are no compliat implementations, MS ensures that it doesn't have to waive any patent enforcement. And I don't think anyone knows exactly what patents are involved. (We've seen this pattern before, but this time we actually know that some real patents are involved. We just don't know what the complete list is. So nobody can be certain that they've worked around them.)
Add to the fact that it's probably impossible for ANYONE, MS included, to make a totally compliant implementation...and MS has no incentive to actually try...so it wouldn't do any good to implement a compliant version...it wouldn't read the documents created by MS.
What's really needed is a test for compliance, so that anyone claiming to have a standards compliant version can be tested for compliance. But that would just ensure that nobody would be able to claim compliance. And lacking such a test, anyone can claim compliance.
And this conclusion is based on what reasoning, precisely?
I'll agree that a good lawyer could probably argue that a contract allowing Google to claim that everything you do with Chrome would be unconscionable. That's different from arguing that the contract doesn't claim that. It's also quite expensive, and has a high failure rate.
I'll also agree that it's possible that the contract isn't making that claim. But IANAL, so I can't be sure, and that's what it looks like to me.
If you want to claim that this reading is incorrect, it would be desirable to specify WHY you believe this reading is incorrect. Otherwise I feel my caution will shape my actions more than does your confidence. And I feel that this is the correct action on my part.
P.S.: I also look on Google with considerably less favor than I did before I encountered this EULA, and I can't even use the browser, as it's MSWind only.
P.P.S.: I'm aware that there's a branch of this software that is BSD licensed. This partially mitigates my attitude towards Google for this escapade, but only partially. I'm starting to think of Google as a Fool-Killer.
I don't think it would be more of a "sure loss in court" than, possibly, a court ordering them "don't do that anymore in this jurisdiction". Any stricter punishment would surprise me.
Mind you, ANY court case would be bad PR, but probably no worse than this/. page (and it's analogues on other sites).
You don't know the company lawyers that I've known. Many of them seem to be anxious to win a case...which means having a case to win.
They also don't seem very knowledgeable about the technical possibilities. They can't conceive that a contract could be enforced by technical measures rather than by legal measures...so they argue that no court would force them to do such a thing, ignoring that a technical measure might already have executed the terms of the contract, and *you* would be in the position of trying to be made whole against the terms of a contract to which you have agreed. The court might, indeed, refuse to enforce such a contract, but it wouldn't act to damage another company acting on the terms of an agreed upon contract. Big difference.
But Google could just automatically take the stuff, and afterwards claim that it was acting in good faith on your authority. Which it would have been...unless you can prove that they were scheming for this scenario.
Google might well be off the hook, but *you* wouldn't be. And once information has been released, it's quite hard to recall it. So you might end up liable for considerable damages.
Typing or causing to be displayed? If this is a browser, then it makes a significant difference.
OTOH, I do acknowledge that this is an attempt to blend browsers with other software applications, so it's not THAT significant...but it's still not trivial.
What about any passwords that you may type? What about the results of sites to you visit after typing in the password...like your bank?
I find the terms totally unacceptable. Possibly just because I don't know how a court would interpret them, but then I don't know how a court would interpret them.
One of the good things about Free Software is that you only need to deal with a very few licenses...I used to say OSI approved before they accepted MS' offering. This means you only need to learn the catches on a few licenses.
Google has intentionally chosen not to use one of those licenses, so it's on Google's shoulders to make clear what they mean. I'm no lawyer, so I don't know what they mean by "promote their services". I've got idea, but no certainty. This applies at several places during the reading of the small part of the EULA that I read.
To me the summary appeared to be "What's our is ours, and what's yours is ours." As such I consider it an absolute benefit that it's only available for MSWind.
Again, IANAL, and I'm reading this with a pessimistic set of mind conditioned by other contracts I've encountered, and, admittedly, by the SCO lawsuits. As such I'll freely admit that my reading is precautionary, but I dispute any assertion that it's unwarranted. I didn't bother to read the whole thing, because once I got to the point of "I'll never agree to this" reading more seemed (and seems) pointless.
It's really too bad that there isn't a *UN*-insightful moderation.
I don't think this is a troll, or flamebait. Just stupid and un-foresightful...or possibly totally lacking in a knowledge of history, and how government actions creep, and leadership changes.
Were it possible to have an ideally honest and upright government, AND to rely on it staying that way, then this proposal would be reasonable. To believe in that at this point appears willful blindness.
FWIW, I've had no trouble with getting and installing Python libraries. Most of the ones that I need come included with Python.
OTOH, if I *really* need speed, then I agree with you, a native compiled language is the way to go. Because of library availability that usually means C or C++, though I'd rather use a language with decent syntax and garbage collection, like D. No libraries for that, though.
Python is my choice for the intermediate position. It's got much of the desirable language feature of an interpreted language, and it's only around 5-10 times as slow as C. (Just how much depends on how much your code is using native libraries.)
Ruby's nice, but it's slow compared to Python. If you're doing something where that doesn't matter, then Ruby's a nice choice.
Also, Ruby's libraries seem to be more specialized towards web development than Python's. This may well make Ruby a better choice for that area. But they are (or were) much weaker in more general areas. So again, it depends on what you're doing.
Not sure about the others, but Python 3000 *IS* vaporware, and intentionally so. Python 3.0 is on track to be released this October. (A beta is available for current download. It's still missing a lot of external libraries, however, as it's got some reasonably sized incompatibilities with the 2.x series.)
OK. I'm not recommending any particular solution, I'm establishing conditions required for a free market to work. The main topic here are the telcos.
I'm saying that IF you want the free market to work in the domain of the telcos, THEN you need to establish that, at minimum, these three conditions are met. If they aren't, then forget about the possibility of a free market working. I'm not talking about how you would enable the conditions to be met, that would be taking a position that a free market was the correct answer. This may or may not be true, a matter on which I have opinions, but not a well-founded argument.
E.g., it would be possible to develop an argument that a free market police force was the correct answer. These three conditions would still apply, but so would many others. Whether a free market is the best answer in any particular situation depends partially on what one is endeavoring to achieve...and details can be important. (E.g., suppressing communicable diseases requires AMONG OTHER THINGS mass immunizations. No other method has been sufficiently effective to eliminate a disease. But that requires that people who can't pay are also immunized. And that people who won't pay are immunized. And that people who don't want immunization are also immunized. [The failure to meet this last condition is why polio hasn't been eradicated.] It's not clear that a free market could accomplish this.)
Why not gravitational field strength? That could be checked (though not easily) on the moon...or an asteroid.
The standard model should be able to predict what effect changes in neutrino flux would produce. Changes in gravitational strength would be more difficult, as gravity hasn't been integrated into the standard model. Additionally, one would expect gravitational field strength to vary with the distance from the sun, so that matches. (Yes, earth's gravitational field is predominant by a large amount on the surface of the earth, but solar gravitation is not insignificant. It raises tides nearly as great as the lunar tides, and tides are based on change in field strength, not absolute strength.)
I think you're overly optimistic. The current plants can only produce so much. If at a particular price they can sell their entire inventory, then there's no reason to cut prices below that, even if they could do so and still earn a decent profit.
Sorry, part of my answer is missing from the post. I was pointing out that all three conditions for the free market working were violated, and part of my post was deleted. (Possibly an unclosed html tag...at this point I can't say.)
There are many situations in which that it known to be true. But there *are* conditions.
1) Competition must be allowed. 2) It must be reasonably easy for the customers to become reliably informed sufficiently to judge good providers from ill. (Using the values important to the customer.) 3) There must be a reasonably low barrier to the entry of new vendors.
Where these conditions are not met, then the free market does not work.
Note that an assertion that everything should be governed by free market prices is a religious assertion rather than a logical one. E.g., "Should health care be governed by the free market?" If you look at the listed conditions, you can predict that a free market will lead to vile conditions in health care. There is a high barrier to entry, and it's difficult for the customers to reliably judge the quality of the care. So we institute health plans, and government regulations and other measures that allow a facade of the free market to continue without producing a result so vile that the populace revolts. They are working for the designated purpose, but they are a facade that is expensive to maintain, clumsy to use, and barely acceptable in terms of service...and they tend to cut people off just when they need service most.
Now let's look at the telcos.
1) Competition must be allowed. Not allowed.Nope. it's a company secret...except to the extent that the company willingly (and honestly?) shares. The honesty is generally either difficult or impossible to check. 3) There must be a reasonably low barrier to the entry of new vendors. Nope. New entries are usually forbidden. When they appear they are frequently ruled illegal. (Meaning any money invested is lost.)
As such we cannot expect the free market to operate. The only point in it's favor is that unlike health care people don't usually have their life depending on the reliability of the telco. *usually*. There are exceptions, and the telcos are no more reliable when someone's life is hanging on it than they are at other times.
Well, the US internet is pretty slow as advanced countries go. I think it's one of the slowest. The often trotted out excuse of "dispersed population" doesn't hunt. The rural population only gets satellite and dial-up unless someone sets up a microwave retransmitter (usually for TV...which means no retrotransmission). (Most of them don't care, but a few do.)
The abusive thing about this is that we've been paying for a fast internet connection via direct tax payoff to the telcos. They just haven't felt like spending the money for the purpose that it was allocated for. So we've PAID to have a fast internet connection to everyone in the country. (Well, perhaps not quite that much.) The money has just disappeared. When will an accountant look into their books to find out what happened to it? (It is to laugh.)
It's got to be shake tested, fire safety tested in high Oxy environments, and it's got to run in zero-G without fans. (No convection currents.)
I think it's probably quite a bit special. That doesn't mean that it's especially useful down here. (Lots of things are "shake test" safe these days. Computers are rarely fire dangers unless their power supply explodes. Etc.)
I agree. My first thought was "Look for another job now, BEFORE it becomes urgent."
There isn't really sufficient information here to judge by, but from appearances this is a company in great danger of being sued, and when it is, who will be blamed? Best to leave first.
OTOH, I'm not at all sure that I trust any government report to be honest. NIST used to be honest, or at least reliable, but this administration has been repeatedly shown to muzzle those who disagree with it, and to be willing to use paid liars with degrees.
To me the verdict is: Not Proven.
It probably CAN'T be proven. Proof requires that you trust those supplying you with evidence, and any trust in the government, or any arm of it, has been systematically undermined during this entire administration. This doesn't automatically mean that they are lying, but it does mean that *I* can't trust them when they say something that doesn't contradict the known government line. (Note the large area of uncertainty!)
If I were to guess, I would guess that if the report hadn't followed the official line, then they wouldn't have been allowed to publish it. This doesn't mean that it's full of lies, but it certainly leaves the possibility open. They may have been ordered to produce a publishable report, with criteria as to what constitutes publishable.
I would expect that the report contains few direct lies. (Note, I haven't read it. This is a prediction.) I would also not be surprised if it contained massive equivocation. Did anyone actually read the report of the Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy? That's the kind of report I expect. One that will allow those who interpret it to the public to draw the official conclusion, but which if read closely doesn't say that at all, but rather leaves multiple possibilities open. (Experts hate to directly lie.)
What do I believe about this? It still changes from moment to moment. The evidence appears equivocal about who actually did what (except for a few people who are dead, and unable to testify further). It doesn't appear to have surprised the government, however, though perhaps the exact date did.
HURD is still alpha. If they see something they want to change, they just change it, and don't worry much about compatibility.
A few years ago HURD was almost working...so they did a total redesign and swapped the kernel(?).
Anyway, the point is that because HURD doesn't have a user base, it can make breaking changes. That is does so for reasons that appear to me insignificant is irrelevant. Project leaders change, and the community mentality of the HURD is such that if they saw a clear design improvement, they'd go for it, even if it broke existing code
Also, "Unix based" is a term that's either ill-defined, or so broad as to not be very confining. It includes Xenix, the HURD, Linux, AIX, and several other extreme variants. I see no reason to believe that the term wouldn't be used for ANY large OS designed to allow multiple users to work on it in safety. On what basis, e.g., could you claim that VMS isn't "Unix based"? You could eliminate the IBM DOS/TOS 360 operating system on historical precedence, but is there any other basis? (Well, that's unfair. DOS/TOS didn't allow multiple simultaneous users. Make it JES2 360/370. It has a historical chain linking back to DOS/TOS.) Or how about CMS? (I'm not sure which was first historically, UNIX or CMS.)
The point is, when you say "Unix based" I'm not sure what you mean unless you are talking about historical derivation of ideas, and ideas tend to merge from multiple sources. So if that's what you mean, then I don't see "Unix based" as imposing any significant constraint.
My guesstimate is that within 30 years parallel processing will be so dominant that single thread processors won't run anything mainstream. Elevators, maybe.
As such there needs to be a radical redesign. The system will probably *LIVE* on 5+ processors, which it will totally own. Two or more processors will be devoted to nothing be screen management. (Screens may be massively altered, but people will still need a video-style interface, even if there's direct neural connection.) A thread for the keyboard (maybe a separate processor...processors will be cheap), a thread or two for some kind of pointer input (possibly sharing the same processor that the keyboard uses). (Or analogues to those if we've gone to neural interfaces.) A few processors to manage access to long-term memory. These will prevent locking by standing between long-term memory and any access attempt (by an application without root privileges). Etc.
It could still be called Linux, but it wouldn't be Linux as we know it, and it would probably be a 3.x kernel, where the switch to version 3 occurred when the kernel was split between processors.
N.B.: Application threads may share processors, but the kernel would own the processors that it uses. Nothing foreign allowed except via standard messages.
Inter processor communication is the big bottle-neck in software to developing this system. It's currently being worked on, but not seriously. Think OpenMP, etc. Now think how many CPUs Intel is promising to put on one chip in 6 (8?) years.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than that. The waiver of patent enforcement offered by MS was only for compliant implementations. So by ensuring that there are no compliat implementations, MS ensures that it doesn't have to waive any patent enforcement. And I don't think anyone knows exactly what patents are involved. (We've seen this pattern before, but this time we actually know that some real patents are involved. We just don't know what the complete list is. So nobody can be certain that they've worked around them.)
Add to the fact that it's probably impossible for ANYONE, MS included, to make a totally compliant implementation...and MS has no incentive to actually try...so it wouldn't do any good to implement a compliant version...it wouldn't read the documents created by MS.
What's really needed is a test for compliance, so that anyone claiming to have a standards compliant version can be tested for compliance. But that would just ensure that nobody would be able to claim compliance. And lacking such a test, anyone can claim compliance.
And this conclusion is based on what reasoning, precisely?
I'll agree that a good lawyer could probably argue that a contract allowing Google to claim that everything you do with Chrome would be unconscionable. That's different from arguing that the contract doesn't claim that. It's also quite expensive, and has a high failure rate.
I'll also agree that it's possible that the contract isn't making that claim. But IANAL, so I can't be sure, and that's what it looks like to me.
If you want to claim that this reading is incorrect, it would be desirable to specify WHY you believe this reading is incorrect. Otherwise I feel my caution will shape my actions more than does your confidence. And I feel that this is the correct action on my part.
P.S.: I also look on Google with considerably less favor than I did before I encountered this EULA, and I can't even use the browser, as it's MSWind only.
P.P.S.: I'm aware that there's a branch of this software that is BSD licensed. This partially mitigates my attitude towards Google for this escapade, but only partially. I'm starting to think of Google as a Fool-Killer.
I don't think it would be more of a "sure loss in court" than, possibly, a court ordering them "don't do that anymore in this jurisdiction". Any stricter punishment would surprise me.
Mind you, ANY court case would be bad PR, but probably no worse than this /. page (and it's analogues on other sites).
But they aren't claiming ownership, merely the world-wide rights to perform.
You don't know the company lawyers that I've known. Many of them seem to be anxious to win a case...which means having a case to win.
They also don't seem very knowledgeable about the technical possibilities. They can't conceive that a contract could be enforced by technical measures rather than by legal measures...so they argue that no court would force them to do such a thing, ignoring that a technical measure might already have executed the terms of the contract, and *you* would be in the position of trying to be made whole against the terms of a contract to which you have agreed. The court might, indeed, refuse to enforce such a contract, but it wouldn't act to damage another company acting on the terms of an agreed upon contract. Big difference.
But Google could just automatically take the stuff, and afterwards claim that it was acting in good faith on your authority. Which it would have been...unless you can prove that they were scheming for this scenario.
Google might well be off the hook, but *you* wouldn't be. And once information has been released, it's quite hard to recall it. So you might end up liable for considerable damages.
Safest to just avoid this monster.
Typing or causing to be displayed? If this is a browser, then it makes a significant difference.
OTOH, I do acknowledge that this is an attempt to blend browsers with other software applications, so it's not THAT significant...but it's still not trivial.
What about any passwords that you may type? What about the results of sites to you visit after typing in the password...like your bank?
I find the terms totally unacceptable. Possibly just because I don't know how a court would interpret them, but then I don't know how a court would interpret them.
You may be right, but IANAL, so I can't tell.
One of the good things about Free Software is that you only need to deal with a very few licenses...I used to say OSI approved before they accepted MS' offering. This means you only need to learn the catches on a few licenses.
Google has intentionally chosen not to use one of those licenses, so it's on Google's shoulders to make clear what they mean. I'm no lawyer, so I don't know what they mean by "promote their services". I've got idea, but no certainty. This applies at several places during the reading of the small part of the EULA that I read.
To me the summary appeared to be "What's our is ours, and what's yours is ours." As such I consider it an absolute benefit that it's only available for MSWind.
Again, IANAL, and I'm reading this with a pessimistic set of mind conditioned by other contracts I've encountered, and, admittedly, by the SCO lawsuits. As such I'll freely admit that my reading is precautionary, but I dispute any assertion that it's unwarranted. I didn't bother to read the whole thing, because once I got to the point of "I'll never agree to this" reading more seemed (and seems) pointless.
It's really too bad that there isn't a *UN*-insightful moderation.
I don't think this is a troll, or flamebait. Just stupid and un-foresightful...or possibly totally lacking in a knowledge of history, and how government actions creep, and leadership changes.
Were it possible to have an ideally honest and upright government, AND to rely on it staying that way, then this proposal would be reasonable. To believe in that at this point appears willful blindness.
FWIW, I've had no trouble with getting and installing Python libraries. Most of the ones that I need come included with Python.
OTOH, if I *really* need speed, then I agree with you, a native compiled language is the way to go. Because of library availability that usually means C or C++, though I'd rather use a language with decent syntax and garbage collection, like D. No libraries for that, though.
Python is my choice for the intermediate position. It's got much of the desirable language feature of an interpreted language, and it's only around 5-10 times as slow as C. (Just how much depends on how much your code is using native libraries.)
Ruby's nice, but it's slow compared to Python. If you're doing something where that doesn't matter, then Ruby's a nice choice.
Also, Ruby's libraries seem to be more specialized towards web development than Python's. This may well make Ruby a better choice for that area. But they are (or were) much weaker in more general areas. So again, it depends on what you're doing.
Not sure about the others, but Python 3000 *IS* vaporware, and intentionally so. Python 3.0 is on track to be released this October. (A beta is available for current download. It's still missing a lot of external libraries, however, as it's got some reasonably sized incompatibilities with the 2.x series.)
OK. I'm not recommending any particular solution, I'm establishing conditions required for a free market to work. The main topic here are the telcos.
I'm saying that IF you want the free market to work in the domain of the telcos, THEN you need to establish that, at minimum, these three conditions are met. If they aren't, then forget about the possibility of a free market working. I'm not talking about how you would enable the conditions to be met, that would be taking a position that a free market was the correct answer. This may or may not be true, a matter on which I have opinions, but not a well-founded argument.
E.g., it would be possible to develop an argument that a free market police force was the correct answer. These three conditions would still apply, but so would many others. Whether a free market is the best answer in any particular situation depends partially on what one is endeavoring to achieve...and details can be important. (E.g., suppressing communicable diseases requires AMONG OTHER THINGS mass immunizations. No other method has been sufficiently effective to eliminate a disease. But that requires that people who can't pay are also immunized. And that people who won't pay are immunized. And that people who don't want immunization are also immunized. [The failure to meet this last condition is why polio hasn't been eradicated.] It's not clear that a free market could accomplish this.)
Over time you are no doubt correct. But it takes time and money to build new plants. Two to three years is probably optimistic.
Why not gravitational field strength? That could be checked (though not easily) on the moon...or an asteroid.
The standard model should be able to predict what effect changes in neutrino flux would produce. Changes in gravitational strength would be more difficult, as gravity hasn't been integrated into the standard model. Additionally, one would expect gravitational field strength to vary with the distance from the sun, so that matches. (Yes, earth's gravitational field is predominant by a large amount on the surface of the earth, but solar gravitation is not insignificant. It raises tides nearly as great as the lunar tides, and tides are based on change in field strength, not absolute strength.)
I think you're overly optimistic. The current plants can only produce so much. If at a particular price they can sell their entire inventory, then there's no reason to cut prices below that, even if they could do so and still earn a decent profit.
Sorry, part of my answer is missing from the post. I was pointing out that all three conditions for the free market working were violated, and part of my post was deleted. (Possibly an unclosed html tag...at this point I can't say.)
There are many situations in which that it known to be true. But there *are* conditions.
1) Competition must be allowed.
2) It must be reasonably easy for the customers to become reliably informed sufficiently to judge good providers from ill. (Using the values important to the customer.)
3) There must be a reasonably low barrier to the entry of new vendors.
Where these conditions are not met, then the free market does not work.
Note that an assertion that everything should be governed by free market prices is a religious assertion rather than a logical one. E.g., "Should health care be governed by the free market?"
If you look at the listed conditions, you can predict that a free market will lead to vile conditions in health care. There is a high barrier to entry, and it's difficult for the customers to reliably judge the quality of the care.
So we institute health plans, and government regulations and other measures that allow a facade of the free market to continue without producing a result so vile that the populace revolts. They are working for the designated purpose, but they are a facade that is expensive to maintain, clumsy to use, and barely acceptable in terms of service...and they tend to cut people off just when they need service most.
Now let's look at the telcos.
1) Competition must be allowed.
Not allowed.Nope. it's a company secret...except to the extent that the company willingly (and honestly?) shares. The honesty is generally either difficult or impossible to check.
3) There must be a reasonably low barrier to the entry of new vendors.
Nope. New entries are usually forbidden. When they appear they are frequently ruled illegal. (Meaning any money invested is lost.)
As such we cannot expect the free market to operate. The only point in it's favor is that unlike health care people don't usually have their life depending on the reliability of the telco. *usually*. There are exceptions, and the telcos are no more reliable when someone's life is hanging on it than they are at other times.
Well, the US internet is pretty slow as advanced countries go. I think it's one of the slowest. The often trotted out excuse of "dispersed population" doesn't hunt. The rural population only gets satellite and dial-up unless someone sets up a microwave retransmitter (usually for TV...which means no retrotransmission). (Most of them don't care, but a few do.)
The abusive thing about this is that we've been paying for a fast internet connection via direct tax payoff to the telcos. They just haven't felt like spending the money for the purpose that it was allocated for. So we've PAID to have a fast internet connection to everyone in the country. (Well, perhaps not quite that much.) The money has just disappeared. When will an accountant look into their books to find out what happened to it? (It is to laugh.)
If it's actually designed for space..., well...
It's got to be shake tested, fire safety tested in high Oxy environments, and it's got to run in zero-G without fans. (No convection currents.)
I think it's probably quite a bit special. That doesn't mean that it's especially useful down here. (Lots of things are "shake test" safe these days. Computers are rarely fire dangers unless their power supply explodes. Etc.)
I agree. My first thought was "Look for another job now, BEFORE it becomes urgent."
There isn't really sufficient information here to judge by, but from appearances this is a company in great danger of being sued, and when it is, who will be blamed? Best to leave first.
Major investors should be punished, yes. Minor stock-holders...no more than losing their investment. Directors, yes. Corporate executives, yes.
It should be handled analogously to fiscal malfeasance. ... Or rather as fiscal malfeasance should be handled.
I don't think your evidence is strong.
OTOH, I'm not at all sure that I trust any government report to be honest. NIST used to be honest, or at least reliable, but this administration has been repeatedly shown to muzzle those who disagree with it, and to be willing to use paid liars with degrees.
To me the verdict is: Not Proven.
It probably CAN'T be proven. Proof requires that you trust those supplying you with evidence, and any trust in the government, or any arm of it, has been systematically undermined during this entire administration. This doesn't automatically mean that they are lying, but it does mean that *I* can't trust them when they say something that doesn't contradict the known government line. (Note the large area of uncertainty!)
If I were to guess, I would guess that if the report hadn't followed the official line, then they wouldn't have been allowed to publish it. This doesn't mean that it's full of lies, but it certainly leaves the possibility open. They may have been ordered to produce a publishable report, with criteria as to what constitutes publishable.
I would expect that the report contains few direct lies. (Note, I haven't read it. This is a prediction.) I would also not be surprised if it contained massive equivocation. Did anyone actually read the report of the Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy? That's the kind of report I expect. One that will allow those who interpret it to the public to draw the official conclusion, but which if read closely doesn't say that at all, but rather leaves multiple possibilities open. (Experts hate to directly lie.)
What do I believe about this? It still changes from moment to moment. The evidence appears equivocal about who actually did what (except for a few people who are dead, and unable to testify further). It doesn't appear to have surprised the government, however, though perhaps the exact date did.
HURD is still alpha. If they see something they want to change, they just change it, and don't worry much about compatibility.
A few years ago HURD was almost working...so they did a total redesign and swapped the kernel(?).
Anyway, the point is that because HURD doesn't have a user base, it can make breaking changes. That is does so for reasons that appear to me insignificant is irrelevant. Project leaders change, and the community mentality of the HURD is such that if they saw a clear design improvement, they'd go for it, even if it broke existing code
Also, "Unix based" is a term that's either ill-defined, or so broad as to not be very confining. It includes Xenix, the HURD, Linux, AIX, and several other extreme variants. I see no reason to believe that the term wouldn't be used for ANY large OS designed to allow multiple users to work on it in safety. On what basis, e.g., could you claim that VMS isn't "Unix based"? You could eliminate the IBM DOS/TOS 360 operating system on historical precedence, but is there any other basis? (Well, that's unfair. DOS/TOS didn't allow multiple simultaneous users. Make it JES2 360/370. It has a historical chain linking back to DOS/TOS.) Or how about CMS? (I'm not sure which was first historically, UNIX or CMS.)
The point is, when you say "Unix based" I'm not sure what you mean unless you are talking about historical derivation of ideas, and ideas tend to merge from multiple sources. So if that's what you mean, then I don't see "Unix based" as imposing any significant constraint.
Yes, it needs to be reinvented.
My guesstimate is that within 30 years parallel processing will be so dominant that single thread processors won't run anything mainstream. Elevators, maybe.
As such there needs to be a radical redesign. The system will probably *LIVE* on 5+ processors, which it will totally own. Two or more processors will be devoted to nothing be screen management. (Screens may be massively altered, but people will still need a video-style interface, even if there's direct neural connection.) A thread for the keyboard (maybe a separate processor...processors will be cheap), a thread or two for some kind of pointer input (possibly sharing the same processor that the keyboard uses). (Or analogues to those if we've gone to neural interfaces.) A few processors to manage access to long-term memory. These will prevent locking by standing between long-term memory and any access attempt (by an application without root privileges). Etc.
It could still be called Linux, but it wouldn't be Linux as we know it, and it would probably be a 3.x kernel, where the switch to version 3 occurred when the kernel was split between processors.
N.B.: Application threads may share processors, but the kernel would own the processors that it uses. Nothing foreign allowed except via standard messages.
Inter processor communication is the big bottle-neck in software to developing this system. It's currently being worked on, but not seriously. Think OpenMP, etc. Now think how many CPUs Intel is promising to put on one chip in 6 (8?) years.