From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: David Presotto To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy In-Reply-To: <05765b085429865f54c42d315b473a94@borf.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="upas-nxrsgasbyblvzaxxwqnegckqye" Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 10:24:02 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a7731992-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --upas-nxrsgasbyblvzaxxwqnegckqye Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > > (Hard to believe that the birthplace of Unix will be forced by management > to use Windows!) Research won't be forced to live on it. However we already are forced to use it to communicate with those who don't really care what the solution is, which is most of the company. Also, if we want to solve peoples' problems within the company, we have to do it in their context even if our initial experiments are on Plan 9. To boldly go, we can use Plan 9. If we want anyone in our corporate world to follow, we have (or someone else has) to figure out how to use our solutions in the other contexts. For most people, a keyboard and a manual are both fearful things to be avoided at all cost. Windows does a pretty good job of making an interface that can be more or less guessed at by trial pointing and clicking and lots of prompting. --upas-nxrsgasbyblvzaxxwqnegckqye Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Disposition: inline Received: from plan9.cs.bell-labs.com ([135.104.9.2]) by plan9; Wed Dec 17 10:00:48 EST 2003 Received: from mail.cse.psu.edu ([130.203.4.6]) by plan9; Wed Dec 17 10:00:45 EST 2003 Received: by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server, from userid 60001) id D278119AE5; Wed, 17 Dec 2003 10:00:39 -0500 (EST) Received: from psuvax1.cse.psu.edu (psuvax1.cse.psu.edu [130.203.20.6]) by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server) with ESMTP id 747D319B41; Wed, 17 Dec 2003 10:00:22 -0500 (EST) X-Original-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Delivered-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Received: by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server, from userid 60001) id 2282919AE9; Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:59:32 -0500 (EST) Received: from edsac.borf.com (borf.com [209.179.94.84]) by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server) with ESMTP id C3B1C19B40 for <9fans@cse.psu.edu>; Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:59:20 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <05765b085429865f54c42d315b473a94@borf.com> From: Brantley Coile To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: 9fans-admin@cse.psu.edu Errors-To: 9fans-admin@cse.psu.edu X-BeenThere: 9fans@cse.psu.edu X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk Reply-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu List-Id: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans.cse.psu.edu> List-Archive: Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:52:50 -0500 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.5 required=5.0 tests=IN_REP_TO version=2.55 X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.55 (1.174.2.19-2003-05-19-exp) There's also the constant friction caused by not using the solution of the day for embedded systems. It used to be only Vxworks. Now its slowly opening up to Linux because its the flavor of the week at IBM and Lucent looks at IBM as the model of a reincarnated big company. The GPL scares management somewhat which acts as a damping force. A problem with using Linux in embedded systems, and this would be true of any large source-only system, is that while it give the developers ready made tools, it also limits their solution to those tools. I watched one company use Linux pretty closely and it worked, but the solution is couched very high up. My first Embedded Unix product was shipped in 1988. It was based on V7 and was only 70K or so of kernel and a couple of small programs. The kernel was adapted to the applicaion. Worked really well. I recently looked into using Linux for an embedded system, but that didn't work out. It's not documented. I found it frustrating. Dropped it and went back to my own small kernels and just wrote more code, which I did faster than I could figure out how to get Linux to do what I wanted. Observation: A sufficently large amount of source == no source at all. (Hard to believe that the birthplace of Unix will be forced by management to use Windows!) Brantley --upas-nxrsgasbyblvzaxxwqnegckqye--