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| 30 Aug 2007 09:53:21 am |
 Hurd Opearting System Kernel |
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GNU Hurd is a free software computer operating system kernel, released under the GNU General Public License. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. It consists of a set of servers (or daemons, in Unix terminology) that work on top of a microkernel; together they form the kernel of GNU. The Hurd aims to surpass Unix kernels in functionality, security, and stability, while remaining largely compatible with them.
HURD is a co-recursive acronym, standing for HIRD of Unix-Replacing Daemons, where HIRD stands for HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth.
Thomas Bushnell, Roland McGrath and Marcus Brinkmann are the lead developers of the HURD kernel.
Unlike the majority of Unix-like kernels, the Hurd builds on top of a microkernel which is responsible for providing the most basic kernel services — coordinating access to the hardware: the CPU (through multiprocessing), RAM (via memory management), and other various devices for sound, graphics, mass storage, etc. In theory the microkernel design would allow for all device drivers to be built as servers working in user space, but today most drivers of this kind are still contained inside GNU Mach, the currently used microkernel. That is because initially user-space drivers would have suffered from performance loss, due to the overhead of the Mach interprocess communication. With the performance of today's machines, it is possible that this overhead would no longer cause a significant performance problem.
Hurd's Official Site: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd |
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Category : Operating System
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| 27 Aug 2007 08:38:17 pm |
| Richard Stallman and GNU |
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Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated rms (lower case), is a software freedom activist, hacker and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU project he started the free software movement, and in October 1985 set up the Free Software Foundation. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger.
Stallman was born in 1953 in New York City, New York. Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360.
During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer Laboratory Assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.
Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPAnet mailing lists and USENET.
In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman is the unsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Massachusetts.
In 1985, Stallman invented and popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor, compiler, debugger, and a build automator. The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for widespread usage.
GNU is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. Its name is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix, which was chosen because its design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and by not containing any Unix code. GNU was founded by Richard Stallman and was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
The project to develop GNU is known as the GNU Project, and programs released under the auspices of the GNU Project are called GNU packages or GNU programs. The system's basic components include the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU Binary Utilities (binutils), the bash shell, the GNU C library (glibc), and GNU Core Utilities (coreutils).
Richard Stallman's personal homepage: http://www.stallman.org
GNU's official site: http://www.gnu.org |
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Category : Personality
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| 31 Jul 2007 01:37:31 am |
| Microsoft Surface (Codename: Milan) |
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Microsoft Surface (Codename: Milan), is a forthcoming product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects, similar to the futuristic computer screens portrayed in Minority Report. It was announced on May 29, 2007 at D5, and is expected to be released by commercial partners in November 2007. Initial customers will be in the hospitality businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, retail, and public entertainment venues.
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special barcode labels on top of it.
Surface has been optimized to respond to 52 touches at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group's marketing director, "dipped" his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.
Prices will reportedly be $5,000 to $10,000 per unit. However Microsoft said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in 3 to 5 years.
The machines, which Microsoft debuted May 30, 2007 at a technology conference in Carlsbad, California, are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc.
Official site: http://www.surface.com |
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Category : Technology
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| 07 Jun 2007 11:13:54 am |
| Linus Benedict Torvalds |
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Linus was born in Helsinki, Finland, the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (roughly 5%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although he claims he was named after Linus in the Peanuts comic strip. In the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the peanut-cartoon character," noting that this makes him "a mix of 50 percent Nobel-prize-winning chemist and blanket-carrying cartoon character." Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s.
Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System. From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open helping choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix.
His interest in computers began with a Commodore VIC-20. After the VIC-20 he purchased a Sinclair QL which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an assembler and a text editor for the QL, as well as a few games. He is known to have written a Pac-Man clone named Cool Man. In 1990 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC and spent a few weeks playing the game Prince of Persia before receiving his Minix copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux.
About 2% of the current Linux kernel is written by Torvalds himself[citation needed]. Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage is very respectable. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority (aka Benevolent Dictator for Life) on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel.
Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark, and monitors use of it chiefly through the non-profit organization Linux International. Linux's wide and passionate userbase makes trademark abuse difficult as misuse is rapidly detected. |
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Category : Personality
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| 18 May 2007 02:08:34 pm |
| React Operating System (ReactOS) |
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ReactOS is a project to develop an operating system that is binary-compatible with application software and device drivers for Microsoft Windows NT version 5.x and up (Windows 2000 and its successors), while being composed entirely of free software, by means of a complete clean room reverse engineering process.
Although the project currently is in the alpha development stage, many Windows programs already work well. While the ReactOS kernel has been written from scratch, the userland is mostly based on the Wine compatibility layer for Unix operating systems.
ReactOS is primarily written in the C programming language, with some elements such as ReactOS Explorer written in C++. Various components of ReactOS are licensed under the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License, and the BSD License.
Around 1996, a group of free/open source software developers started a project called FreeWin95, with the aim of implementing an operating system that would be a clone of Windows 95. The project stalled in discussions of the design of the system.
At the end of 1997, the project had yet to release any software. The project members, led by coordinator Jason Filby, called to revive the project. The project's target was changed to Windows NT and the project's name was changed to ReactOS. The ReactOS project began in February 1998, with developing the kernel and basic drivers.
The official site for the reactOS is http://www.reactos.org |
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Category : Operating System
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