Something that undermines the operating system angle is that emacs does not implement hardware drivers. All interaction with the computer go via system calls.
Norton Commander contains a text editor. Emacs operates at that level, whilst being reprogrammable.
What you say seems true. But a comment - there are more effective ways to achieve it than a bill of rights. Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights but does have decent due process, as a result of deliberate legislation. The bill of rights leads to the US Supreme Court being highly politicised because it is a nasty undemocratic backdoor to synthetic legislation. Australia does not have a politicised high court.
I have built large systems on python that use classes, for more than ten years. I came to it from Java, ten years.
As a rule, I avoid implementation inheritance. Occasionally I need to facade a library that assumes implementation inheritance to avoid it spreading into my codebase.
When the codebase hits a certain size, I hand-roll some decorators to create functionality like java interfaces. With that done, and a suite of acceptance tests, I find it scales up well.
This is a rough history from an outsider: the original developers (“DevTeam”) went quiet, and would not take in new talent. There was some new talent in the community, and momentum for code tidy up and new features. One group forked and called theirs nethack 4. There were other forks with a similar spirit, such as unnethack. Eventually, DevTeam decided to reach an accommodation with talent in the fork groups. Release 5 is a DevTeam release with input from what was new blood fifteen years ago.
For all your words, you have dodged the only question of my last post.
By the late 80s, the wholesale sales tax was creaking at the seams. Toys were taxed at 24% but luxury goods at 0%. Also it was complex and expensive to administer. The wholesales sales tax was awful public policy.
Keating knew the GST was good policy, but lacked the conviction to stand up to “jellyback” Hawke (Walsh’s characterisation) and his caucus for it. Keating had taken it to the Tax Summit as his preferred policy “Option C”. Lacking meaningful policies of his own, Keating won the 93 election on a platform of opposing the GST and could not engage in reform as a result.
In the aftermath of the 93 election, Howard said never ever to a GST. Then, during government, cabinet and treasury looked at the indirect taxation mess and concluded that the GST was the optimal policy.
They could have done several things at this point. They could have done nothing, and focused on holding onto power, as Keating had done. They could have dressed it up as a VAT. Or they could have just introduced it with their majority. Instead, Howard gave a speech where he plainly recognised that he had said never, and said he had made a mistake, and his conviction was it was the right policy.
He then called an early election, in full knowledge that he was bad in the polls, and made the GST cause the centrepiece of that campaign.
This was the greatest act of political courage and decency of our lifetime. They risked everything on that conviction. Costello then ran a meticulous publicity campaign in which he made not a single mistake to open ground to the rerun of the ALP scare campaign. Against those odds, the Coalition won the election and made the reform, which now has bipartisan support.
But if you think there was a better reform to the indirect tax system available, let’s hear it.
> It's only certain strains of right-leaning governments that
> figure out you can grow the pie so rich and poor alike become
> wealthier.
Credit to a few. Roger Douglas in New Zealand. Contemporary Peter Walsh in Australia, the Hawke finance minister, also got it. Keating somewhat got it, and put his neck on the line for politically-difficult but structurally-easy growth-pie macro reforms as treasurer, but did not follow through for the politically-difficult and structurally-hard reforms, like wholesale sales tax, and then became a fixed-pie prime minister. Walsh was gone by then.
Howard/Costello era in Australia. Reagan 80s. Pinochet - fits your criteria.
Arden is indefensible. She increased the size of government, decreased social cohesion via critical theory, housing promises went nowhere. Worse balance sheet, worse outcomes, across the board.
"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.
Do you dislike type inheritance? Or only implementation inheritance? My view is that type inheritance is incredibly useful, both for single system programming, and rpc. Whereas implementation inheritance creates brittle systems.
"The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance."
That's not the only difference. I have had situations where I ran equivalent optics side-by-side, and then touched one and it was hot, and touched the other and it was not hot. They do contain different components. In the case of that test - the atgbics SFP was cool, and the other clone unit was hot. My dealer was able to get me in contact with someone technical at atgbics (the cool-running unit) who explained the difference, "The DSP might be say 13nm where more modern more expensive ones are 5nm."
But you definitely do not need to pay for "genuine" optics to get high-reliability optics. You just need to shop around the clones - atgbics is a clone.
Before I comment, a disclaimer about my small scale. I am running probably three hundred SFP+s running and less than five years of experience with optics. I don't have stock tracking for the individual manufacturers, and the failure rate comments here are based on gut-feel only. (there will be other people here used to far larger scales)
I bucket it into there being three options: genuine, clone, and good-clone.
We had a bad run with fs.com QSFP+s. Their SFP+s have been better to me, but reckon I have had a couple fail.
Atgbics SFP+s have been a reliable clone supplier for us. I don't think I have had any of those fail, and they have been my main vendor for a while now. You can order them programmed with personalities for Cisco, etc.
Part of the edge of fs.com is that it is so easy to place an order and get fast delivery. My main site is in another country to where I live, and I do a few trips a year. Several times they have made low-notice projects possible.
Yes, Valve controls supply. That strengthens my point.
Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods.
Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules.
User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.
Without convenience it will not be successful as a common currency. It does not need convenience to succeed in other ways. For example, as a store of value.
I tend to run my tmux session for months at a time on my office workstation. When I remote in to that computer, I can type ‘tmux attach’ and all my context is there. I might have four long arc dev projects running at once, and my planning system, all within those windows.
On our datacentre servers, I also have tmux running. It is fast to connect to these hosts, attach tmux and continue from where I left off.
Another use case: it is common for corporates to require devs to use windows desktops, but to then give them a headless linux host in a datacentre for development work. Here, you use putty to connect to the linux host, fullscreen it, run tmux. On your desktop you have outlook and office and putty and a browser and no dev tools. You can do all your planning and dev work on the linux host, using your favourite ten thousand hours text editor and building your own tools, and this becomes your hub. You lose awareness that you are connected to this from a locked down windows host. Corporate security reboots your windows host for patching several nights in a row, and it does not cause you any hassle because your work context is in the tmux session on another host.
Had not heard of Apollo, an interesting read. I am building a 9P library at the moment towards some projects in this spirit.
You make a good case for base features in your last paragraph. I think monolith drivers as well. Raw speed seems to be important for survival in computing platforms. I am far from a domain expert but as far as I know, monolith drivers have efficiency/speed advantages over microkernel.
Be is much more like NT than OS/2 or classic Mac OS. Like NT: kernel written in C, portable, emphasis on multi-threading, robust against subsystem failures, shipped with a TCP/IP stack in the base OS. Be booted straight into the desktop but you could download software to give it a logon screen like NT4 and different users - the structures were already in place.
The current crop of operating systems may themselves be a temporary niche. The design of NT and unix are awash with single-host assumptions yet most use-cases are now networked. Consider the way that linux filesystem handles are specific to the host they are running on, rather than the grid of computers they run in. Yet we run word-processors in browsers, ssh to other host to dispatch jobs.
There is a gap for a system which has an API that feels like an operating system API, but which sits on top of a grid of computers, rather than a single host. The kernel/keeper acts as a resource-manager for CPUs and memory in the grid. Such systems exist in sophisticated companies but not in the mainstream. Apache Yarn is an example of a system headed in that direction.
Once such a system becomes mainstream, you don't need the kind of complex operating systems we have now. A viable OS would do far less - coordinate drivers, scheduler, TCP/IP stack.
> If you take that away, I do not see how you automatically strengthen scarce property rights
I made this case in the grandparent post. To reiterate: the presence of scarce and non-scarce property rights creates a contest between two things that we pretend to be the same thing (property) but which follow different dynamics (scarce vs non-scarce). Government must rule that one dominates the other. In the developed world, the way this plays out is that government rules non-scarce rights to overrule scarce rights. Removing the non-scarce rights would therefore lead to a strengthening of scarce rights.
> Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad"
But that is not what I did. I made a first-principles argument, and then supplied examples as a form of illustration.
You have quoted "bad" here as though I said it, though I did not.
> Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
(heavy edit)
There was incentive to create in the pre-scarce world. Large bodies of great work were produced in theatre, chamber music, literature, sculpture, painting in a scarce-rights world with much lower GDP, lower living standards and no copyright. Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Chekov - these people all operated in scarce-rights regimes. People routinely copied their works. That we have these works is evidence of their incentive.
The licenses that sit behind Linux and similar systems go to great lengths to cancel protections given by copyright. Yet great work is done on these systems. The incentive must be there.
Non-scarce rights create incentive against creation. They discourage remixing of existing work, and they create legal barriers against entry into fields that are affected by patents.
Norton Commander contains a text editor. Emacs operates at that level, whilst being reprogrammable.