Re:Hey, would FreeBSD make a good DSL web server?
on
Bringing xMach To Life
·
· Score: 1
I think you want OpenBSD. If you want security, OpenBSD has security on the order of a booby-trapped bank vault guarded by snipers. FreeBSD is a good server system in general (just ask Yahoo) but if you want bulletproof use OpenBSD; everything has been source-audited to death.
Wow. Can you moderate someone down -3/4 for being 3/4 of a troll?
Last time I checked, the OS of choice for Mach is pretty much any Unix you care to port to it; the most important of these would be OSF/1 (aka Compaq Tru64) and MacOS X/NextStep (there may be others). The Hurd fits loosely into that category as it's meant to be more or less a Unix act-alike, though its architecture is drastically different from any Unix or Linux system available.
(IMHO the Hurd is obsolete except as a teaching tool anyway -- the world marched on without it while it was still vapor. But that's my personal bit of flamebait and I invite others to disagree.)
WinNT/2K is a joke as far as microkernel design is concerned -- you're right about Microsoft blowing massive holes in the design to do things. They've fixed a lot of that in W2K, but it's still Windows.
BeOS was a great idea that got bogged down by Jean-Louis Gassee's ego. The fact is that BeOS was "forced" onto Intel hardware because they weren't willing to suck it in and use the information that was already out there in the form of MkLinux (granted that would require some creative interpretations of the GPL, but I'm sure Apple could get away with GPLing Darwin without doing the same to X).
OS X is very much like what xMach is doing, though it's already been there for maybe ten or twelve years now (or is it longer?). It doesn't have the holes NT has, and it has one of the best object frameworks in the business (even if you do need to know ObjC or Java to use it).
The Hurd, finally, is not actually vaporware. What it is is a monument to Stallman's hubris in thinking that he could create a cutting-edge OS (and it's bleeding-edge, at the very least, if you know anything about its internals). The problem with the Hurd is that it's an extraordinarily complex piece of software with a limited appeal; where Linux pays little attention to the state of the art and follows the classic Unix philosophy of "just make it work right, dammit", the Hurd from what I've read tries to be the most advanced system out there; almost everything is customizable, and the kernel architecture itself is a Mach-based multiserver. (Read up on it -- you'll grok instantly why it took ten years to get it to daylight in any form at all...)
There are a few others, I believe. Minix is said to be a microkernel architecture, though I don't know much about it. PalmOS is microkernel-based, but the Palm userland doesn't really pay much attention to it. MacOS uses something called a nanokernel, which I think is nothing more than a very low-level HAL (exactly what use it is I don't know).
There are basically two reasons I can see for xMach to even exist:
-Lites is Not Ready for Prime Time (which I have no knowledge of), or
-someone wants to see a GPL'ed BSD.
I don't know if either situation applies; xMach as it stands is BSD licensed, so the second possibility is currently out. Apart from that, why do we need a fifth BSD to begin with except to satisfy someone's hacker itch?
The thing is, Yet Another Microkernel BSD is not what we need. We already have Lites. We already have Darwin. If you're going to create a Mach-based OS, why not do something non-Unixy? Why not do a freeware clone of Solaris or some other Unix with a lot of specialized features?
That said, I may offer to help out anyway, I don't know...
What, you didn't know they couldn't use "chicken" because they use headless beakless featherless footless soulless genetically modified frankenpullets? 'Strue, friend of a friend told me...
Well, this sort of cuts another leg out from under the IP argument, doesn't it?
But only sort of. I nevertheless think this whole thing is hilariously ironic. The RIAA has apparently just painted itself into a no-win situation -- if they go forward, they risk getting shot down with their own arguments on the one hand or alienating their own constituency and thereby rendering themselves obsolete.
I'd come up with a half-baked solution, but I can't think of one at the moment.../Brian
Palm from the very beginning was a Keep It Simple, Stupid sort of thing. Expecting all-singing, all-dancing out of something you can slip in a pocket and not worry about too much is unreasonable; that's why WinCE boxen have such horrid battery life compared to the month or so you can get out of a pair of AAAs in a Palm. (Granted, the rechargeable ones don't have to worry, but...)
My take is that if you want more than a Visor can provide, you really don't want a PDA. That's how I see it.
Now what's that thingy made of, aluminum? Doesn't matter too much. The specs are one thing -- they're as good as a Palm device needs to be (which is still nothing special, but the beauty of the platform has always been its ability to milk hardware that the more upmarket of its competitors would consider marginal). The alarm light is pretty cool as well, though I have issues with the outboard Springboard board.
What bothers me about it is that it seems to be such a plain and obvious ripoff of the new wave of titanium portables (i.e. Apple and IBM). At least as it looks online, it doesn't even seem to be a particularly slick ripoff; it doesn't even begin to compete with the Palm V for elegance, for example (just IMHO).
I've always thought Handspring's big virtue was cheap, expandable hardware. The Edge certainly manages to carry on the expandable tradition, but I've never thought too highly of Handspring's industrial design. This tradition carries on as well (sadly).
/Brian
I seem to remember somewhere having heard that the way to handle long filenames in Windows (recommended by MS) is to create an 8-character prefix to the filename and then put your real filename after that. Great idea, especially when Microsoft's idea of long filenames in VFAT is to allow a total pathname length of 255 characters.
It's called bug-compatibility. On the one hand, it means you can still run a 1981 version of Visicalc (free for download from www.bricklin.com) on Win2K. On the other hand, it means you're stuck with bad design that should have been excised long ago.
n.3 naming is rather useful from time to time. My site is at GeoCities and I use.tgz on a lot of my files because GeoCities' filesystem is kind of screwy. But even then, it seems to be a mere artifact of the web-based site admin tools and.html suffixes work just fine.
I'm assuming the point of authenticating a Q3 copy has more to do with making sure nobody's cheating (remember, the source is GPL) and less to do with actual copy protection? If not, how in the hell do they get away with it?
Your beliefs are not well understood because they're incomprehensible to anyone who decides to risk pneumonia and "freewheel through the implant" without the proper preparation.
This is the Xenu Leaflet answer. It's actually a bit more complicated than that. You can start by picking up a copy of an old Martin Gardner book called Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science -- it covers Hubbard's pre-Co$ work with a surprisingly gentle (but still scathing) review of the principles behind Dianetics.
The Xenu story seems to have come out of a drug-induced hallucination that Hubbard had while vacationing in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands (coincidentally enough a critical location in the weird, rambling OT III papers that the story was written up in).
What Dianetics is about is a slight plagiarism from Freud: the mind is divided into Analytical and Reactive sections. The Analytical mind is like a computer, perfectly logical; the Reactive mind is more like a trunk-trawler, scraping up and recording unconscious (often in-the-womb) memories ("engrams") and storing them as literal words, later to come back and haunt you (a couple of examples: Dad beats Mom and says "You've got to take it", fetus hears this and grows up to be a thief; Mom asks for an aspirin; when child grows up has a problem with rectal itching caused by the memory of the words "ass burn"). The point of Dianetics was to erase these "engrams" and "refile" them as ordinary memories; once this was done the patient was "Clear".
The thing is that most of Hubbard's "case studies" were clearly made up. Hubbard responded by turning around and creating a Dianetic religion -- Scientology. In Scientological terms, we are infested with the spirits of disgruntled dead people called Thetans; if we could get rid of all these (by clearing them, one at a time) we could become all powerful, with no reactive mind to speak of and no unclear thetans latching on to us and making their problems ours.
The church itself considers the concept of Scientology as a religion to be a front; it's really no more than a form of occult Freudianism with a reign of terror thrown in for good measure. (And believe me: if half of what is said is true, Nicole Kidman's life in the next couple of years is going to be a living hell.)
There's a lot more to it; I was never a church member myself, so most of what I know is from what I've read at places like www.xenu.net. The information is easy enough to get (even legally in a lot of places, especially.nl), so the "trade secret" thing has long gone out the window. It's pretty scary stuff.
/Brian
ps To those of you scientologists reading this, while I do think your belief system is a crock, you have every right to believe it. There is such a thing as the Free Zone (www.fza.org) that specializes in keeping the flame burning (i.e. squirreling tech for reasons of conscience) without the hell that the Church puts its members through.
Read the evidence. If Ron believed what he created when he died, he sure didn't going into it. And there's evidence (not proof, mind you, it's somewhat circumstantial) that Xenu (or Xemu, or whatever you prefer to call him) was a drug-induced hallucination anyway.
This is sort of a sticky issue, if you ask me. The big problem Mr. Panoussis probably had was the fact that it's something of a battle of dueling principles, and if the principle in question is not black-letter law, that makes it all the harder for the court to take the plaintiff's side.
I'd like to start a rumor here and now: Samus Aran is none other than Lara Croft's older sister:-)
ObKarmaWhoring:
Thing about Linux on PS2 -- it's probably the best target yet for a project like this. Think about it: with USB instead of a proprietary controller bus, the PS2 suddenly gets an easy way to add a hard drive. Admittedly it's not Firewire speed (and forget booting off of it), but it seems to me that when you get right down to it by putting USB in their hardware Sony has pretty much blown the hack possibilities wide open...
You don't much get the concept of one-line programs, do you:-)
The truth is that it goes to the heart of the old debate about unenforceable laws: are they just if they can't be enforced? This is a powerful argument for the negative position. Not proof, you're right about that, but it doesn't help much in the philosophical debate.
/Brian
Scaling up is irrelevant. The issues pointed out elsewhere in this thread seem to be more important -- stability for example. That might invalidate the Minix idea, but scaling wouldn't.
First off, I was talking about the LATE 90's. Second, occasionally responding to something because it affects their bottom line does not change the pervasive institutional arrogance that is the Microsoft Way (and which you are decrying -- credit where credit is due).
The fact is, you didn't endear yourself to the community you were trying to support because of your approach to the matter, and judging from the reactions you're getting from other/.ers you're not doing much better now. Attitude counts as much as accuracy sometimes (that's why I'm flaming).
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I think you want OpenBSD. If you want security, OpenBSD has security on the order of a booby-trapped bank vault guarded by snipers. FreeBSD is a good server system in general (just ask Yahoo) but if you want bulletproof use OpenBSD; everything has been source-audited to death.
/Brian
Wow. Can you moderate someone down -3/4 for being 3/4 of a troll?
Last time I checked, the OS of choice for Mach is pretty much any Unix you care to port to it; the most important of these would be OSF/1 (aka Compaq Tru64) and MacOS X/NextStep (there may be others). The Hurd fits loosely into that category as it's meant to be more or less a Unix act-alike, though its architecture is drastically different from any Unix or Linux system available.
(IMHO the Hurd is obsolete except as a teaching tool anyway -- the world marched on without it while it was still vapor. But that's my personal bit of flamebait and I invite others to disagree.)
/Brian
WinNT/2K is a joke as far as microkernel design is concerned -- you're right about Microsoft blowing massive holes in the design to do things. They've fixed a lot of that in W2K, but it's still Windows.
BeOS was a great idea that got bogged down by Jean-Louis Gassee's ego. The fact is that BeOS was "forced" onto Intel hardware because they weren't willing to suck it in and use the information that was already out there in the form of MkLinux (granted that would require some creative interpretations of the GPL, but I'm sure Apple could get away with GPLing Darwin without doing the same to X).
OS X is very much like what xMach is doing, though it's already been there for maybe ten or twelve years now (or is it longer?). It doesn't have the holes NT has, and it has one of the best object frameworks in the business (even if you do need to know ObjC or Java to use it).
The Hurd, finally, is not actually vaporware. What it is is a monument to Stallman's hubris in thinking that he could create a cutting-edge OS (and it's bleeding-edge, at the very least, if you know anything about its internals). The problem with the Hurd is that it's an extraordinarily complex piece of software with a limited appeal; where Linux pays little attention to the state of the art and follows the classic Unix philosophy of "just make it work right, dammit", the Hurd from what I've read tries to be the most advanced system out there; almost everything is customizable, and the kernel architecture itself is a Mach-based multiserver. (Read up on it -- you'll grok instantly why it took ten years to get it to daylight in any form at all...)
There are a few others, I believe. Minix is said to be a microkernel architecture, though I don't know much about it. PalmOS is microkernel-based, but the Palm userland doesn't really pay much attention to it. MacOS uses something called a nanokernel, which I think is nothing more than a very low-level HAL (exactly what use it is I don't know).
/Brian
There are basically two reasons I can see for xMach to even exist:
-Lites is Not Ready for Prime Time (which I have no knowledge of), or
-someone wants to see a GPL'ed BSD.
I don't know if either situation applies; xMach as it stands is BSD licensed, so the second possibility is currently out. Apart from that, why do we need a fifth BSD to begin with except to satisfy someone's hacker itch?
The thing is, Yet Another Microkernel BSD is not what we need. We already have Lites. We already have Darwin. If you're going to create a Mach-based OS, why not do something non-Unixy? Why not do a freeware clone of Solaris or some other Unix with a lot of specialized features?
That said, I may offer to help out anyway, I don't know...
/Brian
What, you didn't know they couldn't use "chicken" because they use headless beakless featherless footless soulless genetically modified frankenpullets? 'Strue, friend of a friend told me...
(Yes. This is a troll.)
/Brian
After copyright as we know it disappears, promotion is all they have left.
/Brian
Well, this sort of cuts another leg out from under the IP argument, doesn't it? But only sort of. I nevertheless think this whole thing is hilariously ironic. The RIAA has apparently just painted itself into a no-win situation -- if they go forward, they risk getting shot down with their own arguments on the one hand or alienating their own constituency and thereby rendering themselves obsolete. I'd come up with a half-baked solution, but I can't think of one at the moment... /Brian
Then buy an iPaq.
Palm from the very beginning was a Keep It Simple, Stupid sort of thing. Expecting all-singing, all-dancing out of something you can slip in a pocket and not worry about too much is unreasonable; that's why WinCE boxen have such horrid battery life compared to the month or so you can get out of a pair of AAAs in a Palm. (Granted, the rechargeable ones don't have to worry, but...)
My take is that if you want more than a Visor can provide, you really don't want a PDA. That's how I see it.
/Brian
It does. Three of them.
/Brian
Now what's that thingy made of, aluminum? Doesn't matter too much. The specs are one thing -- they're as good as a Palm device needs to be (which is still nothing special, but the beauty of the platform has always been its ability to milk hardware that the more upmarket of its competitors would consider marginal). The alarm light is pretty cool as well, though I have issues with the outboard Springboard board.
What bothers me about it is that it seems to be such a plain and obvious ripoff of the new wave of titanium portables (i.e. Apple and IBM). At least as it looks online, it doesn't even seem to be a particularly slick ripoff; it doesn't even begin to compete with the Palm V for elegance, for example (just IMHO).
I've always thought Handspring's big virtue was cheap, expandable hardware. The Edge certainly manages to carry on the expandable tradition, but I've never thought too highly of Handspring's industrial design. This tradition carries on as well (sadly).
/Brian
I seem to remember somewhere having heard that the way to handle long filenames in Windows (recommended by MS) is to create an 8-character prefix to the filename and then put your real filename after that. Great idea, especially when Microsoft's idea of long filenames in VFAT is to allow a total pathname length of 255 characters.
It's called bug-compatibility. On the one hand, it means you can still run a 1981 version of Visicalc (free for download from www.bricklin.com) on Win2K. On the other hand, it means you're stuck with bad design that should have been excised long ago.
/Brian
n.3 naming is rather useful from time to time. My site is at GeoCities and I use .tgz on a lot of my files because GeoCities' filesystem is kind of screwy. But even then, it seems to be a mere artifact of the web-based site admin tools and .html suffixes work just fine.
My $.01 (it's not worth that much),
/Brian
Uh... just for my personal edification...
I'm assuming the point of authenticating a Q3 copy has more to do with making sure nobody's cheating (remember, the source is GPL) and less to do with actual copy protection? If not, how in the hell do they get away with it?
/Brian
Your beliefs are not well understood because they're incomprehensible to anyone who decides to risk pneumonia and "freewheel through the implant" without the proper preparation.
/Brian
This is the Xenu Leaflet answer. It's actually a bit more complicated than that. You can start by picking up a copy of an old Martin Gardner book called Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science -- it covers Hubbard's pre-Co$ work with a surprisingly gentle (but still scathing) review of the principles behind Dianetics.
.nl), so the "trade secret" thing has long gone out the window. It's pretty scary stuff.
The Xenu story seems to have come out of a drug-induced hallucination that Hubbard had while vacationing in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands (coincidentally enough a critical location in the weird, rambling OT III papers that the story was written up in).
What Dianetics is about is a slight plagiarism from Freud: the mind is divided into Analytical and Reactive sections. The Analytical mind is like a computer, perfectly logical; the Reactive mind is more like a trunk-trawler, scraping up and recording unconscious (often in-the-womb) memories ("engrams") and storing them as literal words, later to come back and haunt you (a couple of examples: Dad beats Mom and says "You've got to take it", fetus hears this and grows up to be a thief; Mom asks for an aspirin; when child grows up has a problem with rectal itching caused by the memory of the words "ass burn"). The point of Dianetics was to erase these "engrams" and "refile" them as ordinary memories; once this was done the patient was "Clear".
The thing is that most of Hubbard's "case studies" were clearly made up. Hubbard responded by turning around and creating a Dianetic religion -- Scientology. In Scientological terms, we are infested with the spirits of disgruntled dead people called Thetans; if we could get rid of all these (by clearing them, one at a time) we could become all powerful, with no reactive mind to speak of and no unclear thetans latching on to us and making their problems ours.
The church itself considers the concept of Scientology as a religion to be a front; it's really no more than a form of occult Freudianism with a reign of terror thrown in for good measure. (And believe me: if half of what is said is true, Nicole Kidman's life in the next couple of years is going to be a living hell.)
There's a lot more to it; I was never a church member myself, so most of what I know is from what I've read at places like www.xenu.net. The information is easy enough to get (even legally in a lot of places, especially
/Brian
ps To those of you scientologists reading this, while I do think your belief system is a crock, you have every right to believe it. There is such a thing as the Free Zone (www.fza.org) that specializes in keeping the flame burning (i.e. squirreling tech for reasons of conscience) without the hell that the Church puts its members through.
Read the evidence. If Ron believed what he created when he died, he sure didn't going into it. And there's evidence (not proof, mind you, it's somewhat circumstantial) that Xenu (or Xemu, or whatever you prefer to call him) was a drug-induced hallucination anyway.
This is sort of a sticky issue, if you ask me. The big problem Mr. Panoussis probably had was the fact that it's something of a battle of dueling principles, and if the principle in question is not black-letter law, that makes it all the harder for the court to take the plaintiff's side.
/Brian
Samus?
:-)
I'd like to start a rumor here and now: Samus Aran is none other than Lara Croft's older sister
ObKarmaWhoring:
Thing about Linux on PS2 -- it's probably the best target yet for a project like this. Think about it: with USB instead of a proprietary controller bus, the PS2 suddenly gets an easy way to add a hard drive. Admittedly it's not Firewire speed (and forget booting off of it), but it seems to me that when you get right down to it by putting USB in their hardware Sony has pretty much blown the hack possibilities wide open...
/Brian
OS of last resort. It's not good for marketing, maybe, but it's netBSD's single biggest selling point.
/Brian
You don't much get the concept of one-line programs, do you :-)
The truth is that it goes to the heart of the old debate about unenforceable laws: are they just if they can't be enforced? This is a powerful argument for the negative position. Not proof, you're right about that, but it doesn't help much in the philosophical debate.
/Brian
This is what I'd do in an ideal world, but it might have to be cleared with the customer first... IANAL...
/Brian
Scaling up is irrelevant. The issues pointed out elsewhere in this thread seem to be more important -- stability for example. That might invalidate the Minix idea, but scaling wouldn't.
/Brian
But the scalability thing is just my point -- ucLinux and Elks aren't Linux per se, they're siblings.
/Brian
My understanding is that Minix is essentially a microkernel architecture. They could work down from there. /Brian
It's still ugly, just not as bad as it used to be. It still lacks the seamlessness of the Palm, and it's still obviously Windows.
/Brian
First off, I was talking about the LATE 90's. Second, occasionally responding to something because it affects their bottom line does not change the pervasive institutional arrogance that is the Microsoft Way (and which you are decrying -- credit where credit is due).
/.ers you're not doing much better now. Attitude counts as much as accuracy sometimes (that's why I'm flaming).
The fact is, you didn't endear yourself to the community you were trying to support because of your approach to the matter, and judging from the reactions you're getting from other
/Brian