5 ms·

German news article about TempleOS

11 points by atesti 11y ago

kaybe 11y ago
Is it a good idea to start linking content in other languages? It's a way of fracturing the community, somewhat. Do we want this? edit: Could the downvoters please provide an opinion and not just a downvote?
- jacquesm 11y ago
 Rough translation of the first two pages: Godly Hardcore Internet trolls talk a lot, but seldomly deliver. An exception is Terry Davis: He actually wrote his own operating system. We have tried TempleOS and balanced on the narrow line between genius and crazy. Terry Davis is in a many English language computer fora a long time persona-non-grata. He is not the classical troll that wants to provoke, he's more likely to mix the technical background with the goal of being a Christian Missionary to the IT world. That would normally be an internet footnote. But Davis has actually done that which others only talk about: In the last twelve years he has written his own operating system. Not just the kernel, not for some (fictuous) microprocessor in the old style but a 64 bit operating system for modern day Intel and AMD processors, including a C-Dialect, a compiler, a command shell, editor and applications as well as games. In March 2015 he released version 3.04, we took a look at 'Gods operating system'. That's Davis' own name for his operating system - he is very religious and takes his TempleOS as handed down from God. This also goes for a series of technical rewards and 'godly' improvements on the hardware, the software and their development. Quite a few things are strnage - such as the pronounciation that a grapic resolution of 640x480 pixels with 16 colors is eough and that hardware upgrades should occur on a 49 year schedule. Other improvements such as the removal of Microsofts secure boot and a dedicated reset button on a computer will find a lot of supporters. Davis has learned how to write computer programs close to the metal and has done so professionally. His change in the religious direction started when his schizophrenia went untreated. At the same time this gave him the required motivation to write TempleOS for so long on his own. A detailed and readworthy biography about his professional career, his schizophrenia and his religion was published in Vice magazine in the fall of the previous year. The first steps with TempleOS are no different than those with other operating systems. The rituals are the same. That is: an ISO file is downloaded and burned to a CD - or connected to a virtual machine. The user can choose between a minimal and a complete distribution. Since the latter is only 17MB large being a scrooge is not going to pay off in this case. The CD image is also a Live-CD. It takes only a very short time to start the OS from the CD. We were expecting the terminal screen and the ASSCII-look, but not the blinking and scrolling window titles. To head this off at the pass: the blining is very disturbing in the first few minutes but with some time the brain edits them out, and after a while the information contained in there actually is useful. More by coincidence we noticed the thin mouse pointer in the middle of the screen, which tracks the movements of our USB mouse. We move the mousepointer over the windowborder of the smallest of the three windows, it is the autocomplete, as we learn later. Intuitively we click on the windowframe and keep the mousebutton pressed. That allows us to move the frame around. We try to click the large 'X' in the corner and as expected the window closes. That's how the user of TempleOS is greeted. All the terminal windows are freely re-arrangeable. The rest of the windows are classical terminal windows with a command line. In the left window we have an offer to install the system on the harddisk and to do a tutorial. We decide against that and want to first work a bit more on the command line. We type 'dir' and press enter, nothing happens. We type 'ls' and press enter. This gives us a compiler warning about an unknown identifier. You read that right: no complaint about an unknown program, but actually a compiler error. The command line of TempleOS has been equipped with a C-Compiler. It is to make it precise not the original 'C', but Davis' own C-dialect called 'HolyC'. More about that later. Installation requires more knowledge. Before we go further explore the system, we'd like to install it from the Live-CD. We don't need a license key, TempleOS is public domain and open source. Davis advises explicitly to do the installation either as dual boot or in a VM. Even though TempleOS is a complete and stand-alone operating system, for the most part it is understood to be a platform for education and experimenting. We took an older computer and let TempleOS take over the machine, removing the previous installation of windows completely. Because we broke off the installation and because we do not yet know how to restart the installation process we chose to hard-reset the computer. The boot time is so short that this is an entirely painless way to get back. This time we don't end the installation script, but we confirm our desire to install. The script runs through a series of programs that could have been started manually as well. The installation is definitely not a trivial affair. We have to partition the hard drive and put the Red-Sea-filesystem of TempleOS on it. The order and the numbers entered for the partition data reminds of Linux in the early days. That we're not talking about Linux is clear when the system talks about drive names such as 'C'. After arranging the harddrive the contents of the Live-CD are copied to the harddrive and after that a custom bootloader. TempleOS can be used with Grub as well. When using the TempleOS bootloader the system will save the original master boot record (MBR). Finally we take out the CD, and using a hard-reset force another restart. We land in the bootmenu. Which gives us the choice to start TempleOS or to restore the old MBR. Of course we start TempleOS. -- Lots more, but this gives you a good indication.
- gus_massa 11y ago
 [Spanish speaker here, to be more precise es-ar.] I can read technical articles in probably in 5 languages, but I prefer that the posts are in English. (Sometimes the technical terms get mangled in the translations to Spanish, and the only way to read the article is to mentally untranslate it to English.) I think that post in other languages are ok if they have some information that is not available in English, in particular if they are the original source and they don't have an official translation. (And they are interesting, of course.) [1] I submitted one or two articles in Spanish without too much success, but I always add the Google autotranslation link as a comment. I remember a few articles in other languages that got popular. An old article about drawing Homer Simpson in CSS (in Spanish), a recent article about a strange keyboard (in Japanese) and a few about government surveillance in German and ¿Norwegian?. [1] For example, an article about the difference between the tag and the tag in another language is not a good candidate, because there is a lot of information about this in English. (Unless it discusses the low level details of the implementation in different browsers and how the vertical space interacts with the vertical space of other tags.)

11 points by atesti 11y ago

kaybe 11y ago

Is it a good idea to start linking content in other languages? It's a way of fracturing the community, somewhat. Do we want this? edit: Could the downvoters please provide an opinion and not just a downvote?

jacquesm 11y ago
Rough translation of the first two pages: Godly Hardcore Internet trolls talk a lot, but seldomly deliver. An exception is Terry Davis: He actually wrote his own operating system. We have tried TempleOS and balanced on the narrow line between genius and crazy. Terry Davis is in a many English language computer fora a long time persona-non-grata. He is not the classical troll that wants to provoke, he's more likely to mix the technical background with the goal of being a Christian Missionary to the IT world. That would normally be an internet footnote. But Davis has actually done that which others only talk about: In the last twelve years he has written his own operating system. Not just the kernel, not for some (fictuous) microprocessor in the old style but a 64 bit operating system for modern day Intel and AMD processors, including a C-Dialect, a compiler, a command shell, editor and applications as well as games. In March 2015 he released version 3.04, we took a look at 'Gods operating system'. That's Davis' own name for his operating system - he is very religious and takes his TempleOS as handed down from God. This also goes for a series of technical rewards and 'godly' improvements on the hardware, the software and their development. Quite a few things are strnage - such as the pronounciation that a grapic resolution of 640x480 pixels with 16 colors is eough and that hardware upgrades should occur on a 49 year schedule. Other improvements such as the removal of Microsofts secure boot and a dedicated reset button on a computer will find a lot of supporters. Davis has learned how to write computer programs close to the metal and has done so professionally. His change in the religious direction started when his schizophrenia went untreated. At the same time this gave him the required motivation to write TempleOS for so long on his own. A detailed and readworthy biography about his professional career, his schizophrenia and his religion was published in Vice magazine in the fall of the previous year. The first steps with TempleOS are no different than those with other operating systems. The rituals are the same. That is: an ISO file is downloaded and burned to a CD - or connected to a virtual machine. The user can choose between a minimal and a complete distribution. Since the latter is only 17MB large being a scrooge is not going to pay off in this case. The CD image is also a Live-CD. It takes only a very short time to start the OS from the CD. We were expecting the terminal screen and the ASSCII-look, but not the blinking and scrolling window titles. To head this off at the pass: the blining is very disturbing in the first few minutes but with some time the brain edits them out, and after a while the information contained in there actually is useful. More by coincidence we noticed the thin mouse pointer in the middle of the screen, which tracks the movements of our USB mouse. We move the mousepointer over the windowborder of the smallest of the three windows, it is the autocomplete, as we learn later. Intuitively we click on the windowframe and keep the mousebutton pressed. That allows us to move the frame around. We try to click the large 'X' in the corner and as expected the window closes. That's how the user of TempleOS is greeted. All the terminal windows are freely re-arrangeable. The rest of the windows are classical terminal windows with a command line. In the left window we have an offer to install the system on the harddisk and to do a tutorial. We decide against that and want to first work a bit more on the command line. We type 'dir' and press enter, nothing happens. We type 'ls' and press enter. This gives us a compiler warning about an unknown identifier. You read that right: no complaint about an unknown program, but actually a compiler error. The command line of TempleOS has been equipped with a C-Compiler. It is to make it precise not the original 'C', but Davis' own C-dialect called 'HolyC'. More about that later. Installation requires more knowledge. Before we go further explore the system, we'd like to install it from the Live-CD. We don't need a license key, TempleOS is public domain and open source. Davis advises explicitly to do the installation either as dual boot or in a VM. Even though TempleOS is a complete and stand-alone operating system, for the most part it is understood to be a platform for education and experimenting. We took an older computer and let TempleOS take over the machine, removing the previous installation of windows completely. Because we broke off the installation and because we do not yet know how to restart the installation process we chose to hard-reset the computer. The boot time is so short that this is an entirely painless way to get back. This time we don't end the installation script, but we confirm our desire to install. The script runs through a series of programs that could have been started manually as well. The installation is definitely not a trivial affair. We have to partition the hard drive and put the Red-Sea-filesystem of TempleOS on it. The order and the numbers entered for the partition data reminds of Linux in the early days. That we're not talking about Linux is clear when the system talks about drive names such as 'C'. After arranging the harddrive the contents of the Live-CD are copied to the harddrive and after that a custom bootloader. TempleOS can be used with Grub as well. When using the TempleOS bootloader the system will save the original master boot record (MBR). Finally we take out the CD, and using a hard-reset force another restart. We land in the bootmenu. Which gives us the choice to start TempleOS or to restore the old MBR. Of course we start TempleOS. -- Lots more, but this gives you a good indication.
gus_massa 11y ago
[Spanish speaker here, to be more precise es-ar.] I can read technical articles in probably in 5 languages, but I prefer that the posts are in English. (Sometimes the technical terms get mangled in the translations to Spanish, and the only way to read the article is to mentally untranslate it to English.) I think that post in other languages are ok if they have some information that is not available in English, in particular if they are the original source and they don't have an official translation. (And they are interesting, of course.) [1] I submitted one or two articles in Spanish without too much success, but I always add the Google autotranslation link as a comment. I remember a few articles in other languages that got popular. An old article about drawing Homer Simpson in CSS (in Spanish), a recent article about a strange keyboard (in Japanese) and a few about government surveillance in German and ¿Norwegian?. [1] For example, an article about the difference between the tag and the tag in another language is not a good candidate, because there is a lot of information about this in English. (Unless it discusses the low level details of the implementation in different browsers and how the vertical space interacts with the vertical space of other tags.)