Congregation,
Please open your Lions’ Book to Chapter Seven, page 7-1, verse 7, and
we shall begin.
At the Lower Level, "processes" are inactive entities which are
acted on by active entities such as the processor.
On Sheet 15, line 1550 (Chapter 1, “Initialisation, Process Initialisation”), we
find the main() function of the kernel. It takes no arguments, and
returns nothing. It starts by zeroing and freeing all of core, and
printing a copyright :-)
The System 6 code uses an initial indent of 3 spaces, and then 8
spaces for every level of indent after that.
–
Tonight, a “cartel” of ex- and current UNSW students pooled together
to win the auction of a copy of the Lions’ Commentary on the System 6
Unix Source, famously distributed by John Lions from UNSW via
photocopier before it was officially published in 1996.
The book in question was signed by the original Unix hackers Ken
Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, as well as Eric Allman of Sendmail fame,
as well as Linus Torvalds, to name a few. (The speakers of the LCA
2006 conference also have signed the book). The auction was to raise
funds to support the creation of the John Lions Chair – a position
for a professor of great talent to teach in perpetuity at UNSW.
Tonight, we raised and bid $10,000 to this cause. The book will
appear on display at the University of NSW, in honour of Lions, who
has inspired generations of students and academics in the elegance of
simple design, open communication and sharing of knowledge; key
elements of the community of open source.
We’d like to thank those members of the open source community who
offered bonuses to the auction to boost the bid, and as such claim the
following:
- Jeff Waugh’s hair.
- The text ‘The KDE Project uses and recommends the GNOME DESKTOP’ in
the KDE 4 about dialog.
- Rusty Russell’s mustache.
- Dave Miller’s facial hair in its entirety.
- Greg ‘groggy’ Lehey’s facial hair.
- The text ‘We may be fast, but for real data security, use
PostgreSQL’ in the MySQL 5.1 release notes.
- A thankyou to John Lions in the Planet 1.0 release announcement.
- oh there were probably more, but who can remember? :-)
(the LCA 2006 photoset has been updated)