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A Week with Plan 9

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Re: A Week with Plan 9

#41

Post by khm »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #22

> 9Front And Surprise Auschwitz What the actual fuck. At first I thought this was some joke in poor taste by the blog post, but in fact he is referring to the use of Nazi death camp imagery in the documentation. That's not cool.

Hi. I made that image. I was searching for 'rails documentation' and accidentally hit the 'Images' link. That photo was in the first page of results. Its presence was so absurd and out of place that I felt like I had to do something with it. It was made in an era before actual Nazis had re-entered the public dialogue, so it felt like Google Image Search was denigrating Ruby on Rails by including this sort of imagery in the results.

Generally speaking, 4chan types read it as an endorsement, which sucks. More recently, people who are not assholes have also begun to read it as an endorsement, which is even more unfortunate.

I had a conversation on Mastodon with the author, where I explained some of this, but the author's followers filled my client with Nazi (and more) accusations, and then the author started demanding names of responsible parties and I didn't really feel like he was engaging in good faith. Probably could have gone better, but here we are.

This whole sort of thing has led to much confusion, which is why over the years the project home page has sprouted explicit anti-Nazi and Black Lives Matter links. As far as I am aware, there are no anti-semites (or other brands of racist) involved in the project.

and an edit: A couple of replies here ask the reasonable question: "why not just remove the image?" Bluntly, if we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job. It's more likely that we'll include some version of the above in order to further clarify our rejection of Nazi values and provide the context that was missing.

Besides, if we just delete the damn thing then the next message will be "9front devs are secret Nazis, look at archive.org" -- we've been down this road before with other contentious content.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#42

Post by butterisgood »

octetta wrote: post #37
butterisgood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plan9Port works on Mac OS, Linux, several BSDs etc, and I'm nearly 100% certain existed before Russ moved to google. It pre-dates Go by a bit for sure, and Go was already underway at Google with Rob Pike before Russ came over (per my recollection). That said, I too use plan9port, on my mac, for Acme mainly. Russ just fixed up the thread library so it works more uniformly (and correctly) on all platforms - including A…

I saw the thread fix-up recently. Based on the comments, it seems setcontext/getcontext versus pthreads is becoming less of an issue these days.

Well one is supposed to implement cooperatively scheduled coroutines, and the other is pthreads.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#43

Post by butterisgood »

young_unixer wrote: post #40
MisterTea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFIK Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java and intended to be an actual competing product. Plan 9 development was halted for nearly a whole year as the team focused on building Inferno.

'Inferno' sounds pretty aggressive for something in the corporate market.

Inferno as in Dante’s Inferno.

The VM is called dis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dis_(Divine_Comedy))

The language is Limbo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo

The protocol is Styx - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx

The Divine Comedy all over the place.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#44

Post by flenserboy »

the_only_law wrote: post #32

The more I read about some of the operating systems eventually died out (mostly), the more disappointed I am that the only realistic options for workstation/server OS’s are Windows and a handful of Unix-like systems.

I would be very curious to see a list of features which were available in defunct OSes that are not available or only available via kludge these days. There are some great ideas still out there in the wild.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#45

Post by ori_b »

MisterTea wrote: post #18
jsolson wrote: post #2

It's not entirely abandoned. A few years ago Brad Fitzpatrick dropped by my desk because the latest Google Compute Engine virtualization stack rollout had broken Plan 9 on GCE. This was interfering with cutting a new Go release (the official releases ran on VMs running Plan 9). I don't remember the specific breakage, but that was the day we added Plan 9 to the stable of operating systems we run in our CI regression s…

> I don't know if the Go releases are still done on Plan 9, but it seems likely that's still an active use of the OS. Go still builds. It's just difficult to build it out of the box on 9 because of bootstrap issues. Though not sure if the latest 9 build bug was squashed.

Yes, it is working on the latest releases. Note that for 9front tip, there's one small patch that you need: https://github.com/golang/go/pull/43533

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#46

Post by gcblkjaidfj »

MisterTea wrote: post #15
pjmlp wrote: post #5

> Plan 9 is as filled with unpolished brilliance as Mozart’s Requiem. It’s the Sagrada Familia of Operating Systems. It’s creators left long ago but people keep building on the scaffolds. If nothing else, it’s a collection of fantastic ideas never intended for mass consumption. This is The Holy Mountain of Operating Systems. Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo. http://www.vitanuova.com/i…

AFIK Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java and intended to be an actual competing product. Plan 9 development was halted for nearly a whole year as the team focused on building Inferno.

> Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java

they even had a inferno-applet demo, which was a full VM in an activeX(?) container running on the browser.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#47

Post by _b8r0 »

ori_b wrote: post #36
_b8r0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahem http://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front/log?rev=mein+kampf

Yes, the person who committed it was a high school teenager at the time. Maturity and good taste isn't generally associated with high schoolers. It was tasteless. And it was reverted. My family is full of holocaust survivors. My grandmother passed through Auschwitz. 10 of her 12 siblings did not. I am fairly heavily involved in 9front. I have never had any issues with anyone in that project -- certainly none to do wi…

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Re: A Week with Plan 9

#48

Post by ori_b »

_b8r0 wrote: post #47
ori_b wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the person who committed it was a high school teenager at the time. Maturity and good taste isn't generally associated with high schoolers. It was tasteless. And it was reverted. My family is full of holocaust survivors. My grandmother passed through Auschwitz. 10 of her 12 siblings did not. I am fairly heavily involved in 9front. I have never had any issues with anyone in that project -- certainly none to do wi…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#49

Post by seabird »

4bpp wrote: post #31
michaelhoffman wrote: post #22

> 9Front And Surprise Auschwitz What the actual fuck. At first I thought this was some joke in poor taste by the blog post, but in fact he is referring to the use of Nazi death camp imagery in the documentation. That's not cool.

Considering the ubiquitous Touhou references ( https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Cirno#Personality ), I would assume that the project is at least 4chan-adjacent (or at least adjacent to the culture of 4chan's early days; the demographic transition from people pretending to be [bad thing] to actual [bad thing] people who are not in on the joke is a matter of internet lore). This makes it quite likely that this is exactly…

I would go so far as to say that 9front's marketing works to try and attract only the second group in that trichotomy. The first page is footed with BLM and antifascist logos. Plan 9 is everything an old-school 4chan technology poster is interested in, and they're hard-wired to offend through whatever means possible.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#50

Post by _b8r0 »

khm wrote: post #41
michaelhoffman wrote: post #22

> 9Front And Surprise Auschwitz What the actual fuck. At first I thought this was some joke in poor taste by the blog post, but in fact he is referring to the use of Nazi death camp imagery in the documentation. That's not cool.

Hi. I made that image. I was searching for 'rails documentation' and accidentally hit the 'Images' link. That photo was in the first page of results. Its presence was so absurd and out of place that I felt like I had to do something with it. It was made in an era before actual Nazis had re-entered the public dialogue, so it felt like Google Image Search was denigrating Ruby on Rails by including this sort of imagery…

> then the author started demanding names of responsible parties

Kurt, so good to see you again! As I said in: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510076754785649

> Was it Uriel that committed that section? I could kind of understand not wanting to remove it if it was. If that's the case then context in the FQA might be helpful for people who stumble across it.

That's hardly demanding names, unless you're referring to somewhere else in the convo. In that case please feel free to point it out.

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