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skwiddoron Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'

Does plan9 support 15 different archs with all of their quirks and subarchitectures? no. only 11

WiFi stack? yes, and bluetooth

Support for different power modes? yes, I think so, can't say I've ever used it. does "echo blank > /dev/vgactl" count?

Framebuffers? no, it is a 21st century os

Kernel probes, high resolution timers, extended inbuilt security APIs? yes

all in 13 syscalls

skwiddoron Is anybody else loading their database by tailing log files?

cat data | tee log | data_processor

it's called "the Unix philosophy". invented by Doug McIlroy, probably before you were born

skwiddoron Ask HN: Building a web circumventor or proxy server

I thought goople app engine didnt allow outgoing connections

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/devserver...

Using URL Fetch

When your application uses the URL fetch API to make an HTTP request, the development web server makes the request directly from your computer. The behavior may differ from when your application runs on App Engine if you use a proxy server for accessing websites.

skwiddoron Coroutines in C

http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/

http://swtch.com/libtask/

skwiddoron Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'

Linux, fuse

there's your problem. it's not designed for it

skwiddoron Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'

> If anything, a microkernel is always more bloated because of the extra code needed to do all the process sync.

there are more than two types.

We have fretted recently because the plan9 kernel is struggling to fit on a floppy disk when loaded up as an installer with most things turned on.

The whole of plan9, kernel, userspace, 386 binaries & sources for 6 architectures fit into 200Mb uncompressed (and the whole shooting match compiles in 15 minutes).

Linux is a re-implementation of an OS that was already considered dead by it's maintainers.

"Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." Rob Pike circa 1991.

see also "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks."

skwiddoron Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'

I wouldn't use Fuse as your benchmark. All of plan9's filesystems are userspace (except the one that uses a dedicated machine). They can saturate 10gbe so your objections really concern Fuse and it's hosts.

skwiddoron Obama mandates FCC to support Network Neutrality

That's "President Obama".

skwiddoron Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'

thats right, bloat

filesystems dont belong in the kernel.

skwiddoron Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'

My operating system is open source but I bought it. What kind of software is it?

skwiddoron "The greatest human being who ever lived" has died

instead he's killed us all

700 years ago there were two million people in my country, now 60,000,000+

skwiddoron UK Postcode coordinates on WikiLeaks

still close enough to search for things.

% postcode

NG15

% ff http://www.google.com/webhp?q=ng15+curry

bah google changed their uri scheme

skwiddoron Using Markov Chains to Generate Test Input

no, just providing more info, the author linked to Bentley's text for further reference so I was filling in the back story.

skwiddoron UK Postcode coordinates on WikiLeaks

how about "what postcode am I in"? when out and about.

also "click on the map, what's the postcode?"

quite handy for getting the area code i.e N1

skwiddoron The Width of Men’s Ties and Waste in IT

Only if you buy into it.

We were on Windows 2000 until this year finally moving to XP for multi-media compatibilty (specifically Flash) reasons.

I've been around since dos3.3, looking forward to upgrades went out of the window a long time ago :)

The only interesting hardware innovation in recent times has been an interest in reduced power consumption / back to passive cooling.

Then again, I'm a guy with a 486 upgraded to P54C with 32Mb RAM as my email server.

skwiddoron Using Markov Chains to Generate Test Input

Bentley built his Markov chain using his Bell labs colleagues Pike & Kernighan's Markov algorithm from The Practice of Programming

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=to6M9_dbjosC&pg=PA62&...

Pike had used this technique earlier when coding up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney with Bruce Ellis

I'm sure they were not the first

skwiddoron Using Markov Chains to Generate Test Input

Did you read to the bottom? They wanted to generate not only valid output from valid makefiles but wanted to catch the same errors in the same way as their reference.

I like their approach and I would consider it an excellent bug hunting tool. Focussed fuzzing.

Would you consider their markov chained output a derivative work though ?

skwiddoron Apple betrays the iPhone's business hopes

    echo 'here''s your problem'' | {
        apple
        exchange
    }

hmm

skwiddoron Energy saving light bulbs offer dim future

> In our test, we used a simple lamp with a light metre placed half a metre away,

A light metre is 1 / 299 792 458 or 3.33 x 10e-11 seconds

skwiddoron Should we create pain-free animals for eating?

how do you measure mental pain?

skwiddoron Bach canon played forwards and backwards as a moebius strip

Markov chaining bach is also interesting

http://www.caerwyn.com/ipn/2007/04/lab-77-unexpected-markov....

skwiddoron Don't MAWK AWK - the fastest and most elegant big data munging language

use it in unicode mode, that kills performance

skwiddoron A digital raw file is not an original image

my friend works digitising film stock.

He told me that a Portuguese tv station is deteriorating and the fumes it gives off spreads the process to the other film stock and even if they had all the 35mm film digitisers in the world running 24/7 they would still lose a significant portion so they are having to make some tough decisions about what to save.

oh and it was Bell-Labs that invented pixels.

skwiddoron Ask HN: Best Unix Tricks?

    import kremvax /net /net

Plan9 doesn't need nat

skwiddoron Why not discuss the inclusion of python on the browser?

Python used to be available as a client side scripting language for EMCA but I can't find that project these days.

skwiddoron Co-routines as an alternative to state machines

The Limbo programming on the Inferno OS makes great use of co-routines. http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

skwiddoron Co-routines as an alternative to state machines

C.A.R. Hoare wrote a whole book on CSP

http://www.usingcsp.com/

skwiddoron Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

I copy the data arenas to another machine and when they are full (500mb per arena) I burn them to cd.

I us this script to copy the arenas

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/maht/rc/vbackup

It's slightly sloppy in that I could just append the unwritten bytes but for < 500mb who cares, its a 1gbe after all.

Venti dumps give me a full history of file changes. On the plan9 central server one can browse the daily snapshots for 10+ years of plan9 development. It also coalesces duplicate blocks so storing 20 copies takes as much room as one.

Venti is available for plan9 and Lunix.

i accidentally wiped $home this week, then :

    cp `{yesterday $home}/* $home

got it all back

skwiddoron PostScript interpreter in JavaScript

ff3.5 - Drawing took 34.206 seconds. 1.8Ghz P4