I would imagine the FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director might have reasons for wanting to run a modern DE on FreeBSD.

I remember a possibly apocryphal tale from many years back that Larry Ellison demanded Oracle's internal payroll was run on alpha quality software because he believed in "Eating our own dog food"

Which unfortunately I can no longer find.

If anyone can find the URL in the archive or a clone I'd love to re-read it.

Here's what Gemini says about it when I queried "In the early 2000s, slashdot user kiore wrote a satirical comment about the prospect of a microsoft linux. Do you know about this comment?

Yes, absolutely! The user kiore is a well-known, long-time Slashdotter (a senior software developer based in New Zealand) whose satirical take on "MS Linux" became a legendary piece of lore within the community.

Back in the early 2000s, when the tech world was obsessed with the bitter rivalry between Microsoft and the open-source community, the idea of a "Microsoft Linux" was the ultimate paradox. Kiore leaned into this brilliantly by writing a mock release note/review detailing exactly what a Linux distribution engineered by Microsoft would actually look like.

The satire perfectly captured the specific tech anxieties and Microsoft tropes of that era. Some of the most memorable gags from the comment included:

• The Installation Process: It required multiple reboots just to get the command line up, mimicking the clunky Windows installers of the time.
• The Kernel and Licensing: The Linux kernel was technically there, but you had to "product activate" it within 30 days or the system would lock up.
• File Hierarchy Hijacking: Instead of standard Linux directories like /bin, /usr, and /etc, everything was forced into a massive, tangled folder named /My Documents.
• Command Line Changes: The standard root user root was renamed to Administrator. If you tried to use standard tools like grep or awk, you'd be met with a friendly pop-up dialog box asking, "Are you sure you want to search this file?"
• The Infamous Registry: Instead of editing text-based config files in /etc (one of Linux's core advantages), kiore joked that Microsoft had somehow managed to graft a binary Windows Registry right into the Linux kernel.

It was a masterful piece of "News for Nerds" satire that perfectly predicted how Microsoft might try to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" open source. Ironically, decades later, with the release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Microsoft Azure heavily relying on its own internal Linux distributions, kiore's joke ended up feeling strangely prophetic! I don't remember the pop-up box but details of a simple joke I spent 10 minutes has faded after 20 years or maybe someone else suggested it. BTW: I am no longer a software developer. For a few years I was a comedy producer, now I'm on hiatus until at least the southern hemisphere summer)

According to TFA, this is so. As a result, I'm renaming my OnlyOffice fork from "Sucks" to "OnlyOffice Sucks"

Yes, the US Congress can give instructions to NASA, but half the ISS is run by the Russian Government.

NB: I am only discussing Russian modules here, NASA and its suppliers have already demonstrated the ability to build, launch and maintain the American modules.

The Russians wanted to quit the ISS in 2024, subsequently extended to 2028 at which point Unity and Zarya will be 30 years old. Zvezda, launched 2000, has had a persistent air leak in the transfer tunnel since 2019. While repairs have been made, the leak continues and has caused increased concern due to, at times, rising, significant air loss. Zarya was designed for a minimal operational lifespan of 15 years, while Zvezda, originally built for the Mir program had a designed minimal operational lifespan of 5 years, Mir itself was still OK after 15 years, but by 2030 Zvezda will have been operating for twice that long. When talking about the proposed extension from 2024, Space Policy Online site reports "Roscosmos initially declined to agree to the extension in part because it was waiting for a review by its engineers of the status of the hardware, which TASS said today was completed in February."

Other than operational life of the segments, the other risks are orbital corrections and deorbiting. Fortunately NASA and its suppliers already have orbital boost and plans for deorbiting.

Traditionally boost and other orbital corrections were performed by Progress Rockets docked to the aft port of Zvezda but SpaceX Dragon and Cygnus Cargo Vehicle craft also have that capability, and dock at the nadir port of Harmony so this can be maintained if Zvezda ceases to be operational.

Finally, deorbiting. Had the Russians committed to the 2032 date, the plan was to use multiple Progress cargo vehicles docked to the station, without the Russians the plan is to use a (single?) SpaceX Cargo Dragon.

The above was mostly assembled from multiple Wikipedia pages

This funding should enable them to finish HURD.

As soon as AMD releases AARCH128, AMD the AMD-256 & Intel the Itanium-512.

"115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 bytes should be enough for anyone." Bill Gates.

Ukraine is developing military drones that can reach the moon.

Yes, my (dormant) blogs were hand written long before LLMs were easily available to the public, but if I feel like adding something it will be something I've hand written (typed?).

The difficulty is having people find your content in a sea of LLM generated content when the most used search engine is also now given over to LLM rather than providing valuable content.

Caldera open sourced early versions (32-bit 32V UNIX; 16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) of Research UNIX in 2002. https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/C...

Let's be charitable and assume Musk has just moved on from not knowing his arse from his elbow and is just demonstrating he doesn't know up from down either.

If you must write in a language that often looks like line-noise, try one that was designed to look that way ... INTERCAL

ChatGPT prompt "please write me a short program in Intercal that calculates and outputs the first 20 prime numbers

ChatGPT Response: Below is a working INTERCAL program (tested for C-INTERCAL dialect) that calculates and outputs the first 20 prime numbers. It uses a very basic trial-division algorithm and outputs each prime on its own line.

PLEASE DO ,1 <- #20 ; how many primes we want
PLEASE DO ,2 <- #0 ; count of primes found
PLEASE DO ,3 <- #1 ; current candidate number
PLEASE DO ,4 <- #0 ; divisor for trial division
PLEASE DO ,5 <- #0 ; flag: prime/not prime

(100) PLEASE DO ,3 <- ,3 + #1 ; next candidate
PLEASE DO ,5 <- #1 ; assume prime
PLEASE DO ,4 <- #2 ; start trial division

(200) PLEASE IF ,4 × ,4 > ,3 THEN (300) ; stop when divisor^2 > candidate
PLEASE IF ,3 % ,4 = #0 THEN (250) ; divisible not prime
PLEASE DO ,4 <- ,4 + #1
PLEASE RESUME (200)

(250) PLEASE DO ,5 <- #0 ; mark not prime

(300) PLEASE IF ,5 = #1 THEN (400) ; if still prime, output
PLEASE RESUME (100)

(400) PLEASE DO ,2 <- ,2 + #1
PLEASE WRITE OUT ,3
PLEASE IF ,2 < ,1 THEN (100)
PLEASE GIVE UP

I haven't checked, but I believe there are too many "Please"s in this which will generate a "err: code insincere"

Zvezda was originally built in the mid 1980s by the USSR to be the core of Mir-2 then mothballed until it was repurposed and modified for the ISS. I can't find a good source for the design service life of Mir-2 was, but Space.com says Mir had an intended lifespan of 5 years and Astronautix says Mir-2 also had an intended service life of 5 years.

Mir was in orbit for 15 years, three times its design life and by the mid 1990s the cooling and Elektron oxygen generating systems were starting to break down . Next month Zvezda will have been in orbit for 25 years, probably five times its design life.

I find it amazing that it is still functioning as well as it is, but ???

There's always enough spacecraft docked to get the crew back to Earth if needed but given that the leak was first noticed in 2019 and has slowly become worse, this looks like "an abundance of caution".

OTOH, unless the USA is planning to stop sending crews to the ISS, it will need to send a new crew up sooner or later.

In 1988 CSRG, University of California, Berkeley released 4.3BSD Tahoe which IIRC was the first port they made of BSD to a non-DEC processor.

CM Mach and 4.3BSD Tahoe were the parents of NeXTSTEP (1989) which when merged with Classic Mac OS and refreshed with more recent Mach & BSD implementations through Darwin (2000) ultimately gave us the modern Mac operating systems.

In 2025 we learn that the Tahoe name has been dusted off for the last portable version of macOS.

I'm loving the irony.

I can't believe the Grauniad would want to hire someone to fix their only selling point.