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A Week with Plan 9

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Re: A Week with Plan 9

#51
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…

Some people in the go team were indeed part of the plan9 team, Rob Pike and Russ Cox to mention a few. Iirc Russ Cox ported Plan9 userspace to Linux when he moved to google, somehow out of frustration. Thanks for that, using acme on Unix is like a hot summer late afternoon fresh beer. Or whatever fresh beverage of your fancy.

Google+ wasn't good for much, but following Rob Pike was always interesting as he was doing Plan 9 stuff and talking about Go often on there. Linus Torvalds also frequently posted on G+ and was interesting. Twitter just doesn't fill that same space.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#52
post #41

> 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…

I don't really understand why you wouldn't just remove the image then. I get that you added it for its absurdity, but if many people take it as an endorsement, isn't it just a joke that didn't land? Personally I think it's a joke in poor taste, but even if you don't, it seems like such a weird hill to die on.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#53
post #28

I enjoyed this article and was impressed with how far the author got in each day's exploration. I always thought Plan9 should have had a comeback as part of the "Internet of Things" given its deep support for networking and its modest hardware requirements (it was designed in the 90s.)

let's make that happen! install a plan9 vm and start doing your regular work in there.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#54
post #41

> 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…

Can you please just remove the image? The context is obscure and long gone, and I doubt there is any way for an outsider to see it as anything other than a hateful meme targeted at ruby, given the context of the rest of the memes on that page.

Edit to respond to your edit: please can you commit to removing or changing anything else in your documentation that confuses or angers people? I think you have an understanding that having good quality, accessible documentation is important. So why not commit to having that? It's entirely what documentation writers are supposed to do. It doesn't have to be a full time job unless someone wants it to be, you can do the process of improving things slowly, one step at a time with everyone chipping in. Do you really want things to stop here where some of your documentation pages look like a twitter feed?

And I say this because I think it's somewhat of an inevitability -- over time, someone has to remove the memes and in-jokes. There is no way a newcomer is ever going to understand what they all mean. Yes people can look in archive.org but that's less important than what's actively on the website.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#55
post #47
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]

[deleted]

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#56
post #50
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.

The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#57
post #56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal. The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.

'vibe' seems like an odd concern what with the imagery of an extermination camp

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

And I guess that the name of the company, Vita Nuova, comes from Dante's "La Vita Nuova"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vita_Nuova

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#59
post #56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal. The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.

> There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.

Sure, I can see that and thanks for raising that. It wasn't intended that way but I can see how it came across. Some mediums are just poor for discussion and text is always poor for expressing context.

> The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.

I got that sense from you at the time. I get that you've all been attacked heavily at different points. I don't think there's any way you couldn't have felt that vibe. I've seen people call you guys out to me since on a scale that I've not seen elsewhere.

The bit I didn't know is the how you operate in general. As an outsider that's just not info I have.

I genuinely had links and samples for Appendix L's C section - if you look at the post you'll see the drawing screenshot and references to building blocks. Not knowing how you guys worked, I perhaps wrongly assumed that this might've been welcome, but wasn't comfortable putting it in with that image there. I genuinely wasn't trying to gotcha you.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#60

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.

Have a look at Multics and what Unix missed out implementing. VMS also really interesting. And for sure Plan9.
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