Why I Gave Up on OpenBSD

Having been an OpenBSD user since OpenBSD 2.7 was released in 2006, I—until recently—administrated several OpenBSD deployments and wrote utilities for the operating system.

Excited about the imminent release of OpenBSD 5.1, I thought to ask OpenBSD owner Theo de Raadt some questions about upgrading from OpenBSD 4.9. I knew Theo was infamous for his short temper, so I made sure to pose my questions intelligently. I sent the email and went to bed.

Let me tell you, I was not prepared for Theo's response.

FreeBSD X: Berkeley Unix, Apple Quality

The various Berkeley Software Distribution operating systems, having been nearly destroyed in an ugly lawsuit with AT&T, have had a challenging past. FreeBSD has been the only non-commercial Berkeley unix to have had any measure of real success and, to this day, the hangover of its early legal woes still stymies its popular use outside of industry despite improvements to its codebase.

The infamous AT&T/BSD lawsuits caused FreeBSD to jettison two-thirds of its codebase and start over from scratch, knocking its feature-set back several years, causing it to be bought out and divested by hopeful investors and only reaching robustness with code infusions from two commercial unix systems, BSD/OS and Mac OS X.

So as FreeBSD heads toward its milestone tenth release, it is Apple's platform that has been the center of gravity for the demonic operating system, largely in part by Apple's open-source efforts that have been more and more contributing code back into the main FreeBSD development branch. It obviously won't be long until the two are completely merged—so when thinking of 2014 and FreeBSD 10, starting thinking “FreeBSD X.”

But first, how did we get here? What did BSD/OS contribute or, more importantly, how did it take away from FreeBSD? And what exactly does FreeBSD 10 look like? What is Apple's role in the operating system? Important questions to be answered, picking up from after the lawsuits…

QNX CRASHED MY CAR

THE Q-N-X OPERATING SYSTEM IS A BAG OF HURT COMMA AND I KNOW BECAUSE I'M SITTING AT HOME WITH MY ARMS WRAPPED IN CASTS FROM MY SHOULDERS TO MY FINGERTIPS AFTER MY CAR CRASHED INTO A RAVINE PERIOD TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS IF YOU DRIVE COMMA OR ARE THINKING OF BUYING COMMA A CAR RUNNING THIS QUOTE REALTIME UNQUOTE OPERATING SYSTEM PERIOD

I BOUGHT A NEW CAR LAST YEAR BECAUSE I WANTED THE MOST EFFICIENT DRIVE OUT THERE COMMA MEANING A V8 ENGINE RUNNING Q-N-X PERIOD IF Q-N-X CAN RUN HOSPITAL EQUIPMENT THAT KEEPS PEOPLES HEARTS BEATING AND LUNGS BREATHING THEN IT MUST BE OKAY TO RUN A CAR ENGINE COMMA RIGHT QUESTION MARK THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT AT LEAST PERIOD

Game Review: Legend of the Ancients (1988)

I picked up a pretty cool video game last weekend called Legend of the Ancients, an old roleplaying game for C64 from 1988. To win you have to battle the evil Duke Durthane, who kills the king and rapes the prince every night. After opening the three power scrolls you become a dungeon-master and fight him to the death.

QNX 6.5 Plagued by Performance Problems

Tonight, I installed QNX 6.5 on my new PC that I bought just a few weeks ago. It isn't top of the line, but it's more than adequate for daily Internet and office stuff, and even a little gaming and compiling. And while I know that QNX isn't the fastest operating system in the world due to its realtime nature, I was more than a little underwhelmed by its performance—especially for development.

A Brief History of the ASCII Penis

Man has always sought to create, and has indeed done so since time immemorial: mathematics, civilization, language. Some of his modest efforts have reached the realm of art, especially as influenced by the primacy of his ability to create. And it is that very intersection that we discuss today: the ASCII penis.