First, Andrew, thanks for getting us on OS News. Yeah, your article was
not perfect, but, as a number of us have pointed out, we didn't exactly
get off our collective duffs and write anything ourselves, now, did we?
I view your efforts as a net plus ...
Andrew Hudson wrote:
Secondly, you shouldn't address mis-information with a flame, but in a
positive, professional, and helpful manner.
Just a comment on this. Every once in a while, there is a slashdot
article about linuxbios. I created linuxbios, so I know a thing or two
about it. Any time I try to correct some of the more ridiculuous
statements ("Why not just use Open Firmware? It's open source!" is
typical) my post gets rated a 5 (boring). It could be partly due to my
official status as a Boring Person, but still, ...
Slashdot reviewing filters for cute, pithy, relatively
information-free, sound-bite quality replies. It's great for 6 o'clock
news-style writing. It's about as accurate. You might argue that it's
better than nothing -- it's not, it's worse than nothing -- it
frequently does damage by propagating misinformation. There's a certain
irony in the fact that the Children of the Information Age, Creators of
the Information Superhighway, Denizens of Cyberspace, have built a
popular web side that creates so much misinformation, and in general
does no better a job with the news than Mr. and Ms. Cutie-Pie on the TV
News.
A well-though posting
spreads good karma and encourages others to do the same.
well, maybe :-) I like the theory :-)
A few other things:
Yep, the web pages are not great. There are lots of dead links. We need
a web dude, but they are really hard to find. It's a pain in those same
duffs we sit on while we're not writing osnews articles ... it also
suggests that the Web, as an information storage medium, has some real
problems.
as to the environment. I will make people mad here -- I already upset
people by adding a few emacs keybindings to Acme (I also got some real
thank you's). I sat down with a very good CS person who pointed out
some of the ways in which the desktop could, and should, be more
internally consistent. And, there are many enough of them to be
annoying. People get stymied in unnecessary ways and give up.
It's this kind of thing that puts off Plan 9 (potential) users. I've
seen it happen, again and again, over really trivial issues. They don't
stay intrigued enough to explore the real beauty of the system. I think
it's a shame.
Plan 9 needs to be more subversive. Were any one thing a little bit
familiar, people would have an easier time. But Plan 9 requires a
"mental world swap", and people are not ready for it in most cases.
No vi. No emacs. No gcc. No firefox ... I've heard all these complaints,
over and over again, in 5 years.
Plus, people see no compelling reason to put in the effort to cut over,
and that's also a shame. I talked to an OS buzzard at Cray a few weeks
ago -- he was as old as me! He used Plan 9 at sequent. He was put off by
the mouse-oriented editors and the fact that getpid required an
open/read/close of a file. Chickenshit stuff, right? Well, it meant the
end of looking at Plan 9 at more than one company, sadly.
Unix was interesting in the sense of being subversive. Taken from almost
any point of view, Unix was a far better OS than ANY of the PDP-11 OSes
at the time -- I know, I used them all -- and so the case for cutting
over to it was pretty strong. Plus, it was very familiar to people --
same GUI -- the Teletype. The paper tape. An editor you typed at. It
wasn't until you really got into it that you found out how much more
capable it was. It was subversive. You didn't know what you had gotten
into until AFTER you moved from RSX-11 to Unix.
Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have two
spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or macos
system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not, sufficiently
capable to be the only system one uses. It's a shame, because the
foundations of Plan 9 -- OS, windowing system, etc. -- are far more
capable than anything else out there. But -- the third party apps don't
exist. We can't do javascript.
So, is it the case that any new OS, that is not Windows or MAC or X11
compatible, is doomed, due to third party apps? I hope not, but my uses
of Plan 9 are now tending to areas in which third party apps don't
matter so much -- supercomputing and distributed sensor networks. And,
it's working. I demo'd the DSN system 10 days ago and people really
liked it. There are compelling reasons to use Plan 9 in a distributed
sensor network as opposed to Linux or other such systems.
As to the "LLNL connection". Yep, it's LANL. And Yep, our web pages Suck
-- my fault. It's just a lot of work to maintain that kind of thing, and
we are overloaded. And, on Plan 9, there is no decent web page editor
(third party apps, remember?). But we are funded for at least 18 more
months for a number of interesting things:
1) plan 9 as a foundation for supercomputers with 100,000 CPUs
2) plan 9 for distributed sensor networks
and we did help a few things happen, although some we have not done as
well as we would have liked
1) 9grid.net (we get a C on that -- maybe an F)
2) port to 64-bit kernel, compiler, etc. (jmk and forsyth did the real
work -- I just got them the $$$) (we get an A here for getting money :-)
3) we had a little bit to do with the license getting fixed in 2003.
(A for effort ... it worked out)
we're trying. It's a bitch -- like refloating an almost sunken ship.
But, it beats living in a world in which the only two OSes are Unix and
Windows. I just wish more people could write code.
thanks
ron
