[9fans] offtopic

[9fans] offtopic

[andrey mirtchovski]

hello,

i recently got caught into following alt.sysadmin.recovery (the
scary.devil.monastery) newsgroup after a heated debate with regards to
virtues of system administration vs virtues of system programming.

i'm not going to say what the debate was, i'm just going to mention that
both parties involved are quite pimply-faced when it comes to system
administration and OS programming :)

what prompts me to mention this at all, is a very pleasurable mention of p9
in the FAQ of said group... i don't know how many of you have seen this
already and how many of you follow the froup, but i'll cite it here since it
made me very delighted...


<paste from alt.sysadmin.recovery's faq>

3) OUR LITTLE FRIEND, THE COMPUTER

3.1)  Are there any OSs that don't suck?

No.

3.2)  How about any hardware?

The PDP-10 was pretty nice.  Pity they aren't made any more.

3.3)  Just HOW MUCH does this system suck?

The ASR standard unit of suckiness is the Lovelace (Ll).
This is defined as:  One Lovelace is the amount of force (measured in
dynes) it takes to draw a round ball weighing e Troy Ounces down a tube it
fits exactly (in air) at a speed of pi attoparsecs/microfortnight.

Like Farads, this is a rather large measurement.  Thus, Plan 9 sucks a few
mLl, for instance, while your average Microsoft product achieves many Ll.

</paste>

regards and sorry to bother with unrelated material: andrey

ps: if you know any details on how it happened to be included in the
FAQ, please share (privately, if you think it's offtopic).