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Federation Starship
USS Augusta Ada NCC-55011Federation Starship
USS Augusta Ada NCC-55011she dreams of the future...
The U.S.S. Augusta Ada meets monthly!
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Near the end of year, Network Computing ran an ediitorial describing some of the most unusual letters to the editor they received in their past annum. One of them was somebody chastising their columnist for writing about Linux, noting that it certainly wasn't ready for the Enterprise. (
Our intelligence chief passed the news along to us, our Comp Ops at the time, Heather Stern, chose to disagree. Although I can't say I blame Network Computing for not publishing our reply. |
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Is Linux ready for the Enterprise? We think so. |  |
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// LCARS: open Ops log, ixdate 1010905539
.. Hi Fritz, my husband Jim Dennis pointed out the reference in LWN, and .. as Comp Ops for the U.S.S. Augusta Ada NCC-55011, exploring the universe .. of free software, it seemed apropos that I copy you on the news to our .. group. .. .. You have permission to publish, and to refer to our website, --> http://trek.starshine.org/ .. .. Although we are a meeting chapter of Starfleet International --> http://www.sfi.org/ .. in the San Francisco region, we do have a few members elsewhere on Earth, .. who are active supporters of Linux projects as well as Star Trek fans. .. Some of us are BSD'ers too. .. .. Ensign Heather Stern, Comp Ops, ops@trek.starshine.org // supplemental .. Fritz Nelson is the Publisher of Network Computing, overseeing Network .. Computing's editorial and sales directions, both in print and online. .. .. LWN referred to the entry in TechWeb where he printed tidbits from some .. of their strangest incoming letters. // LCARS: return to normal mode
"Linux is not ready for the Enterprise. There is not a single voice-controlled app for any of the mission-critical functions of the Enterprise.
I'm wouldn't bet on that -- between emacspeak and "BLINUX" (Blind + Linux = BLINUX, http://leb.net/blinux/index.html) the natives probably have a lot of voice control available if they feel like using it.
Conspicuously absent are warp core control,
The slashdotters claim this is proprietary hardware, maybe in 2.5. However, as the Wireless Access Router Project (WARP) moves on I think voice control wouldn't be that hard to sneak in. Whether it's *wise* to have it overhear your neighbors and do stuff is, well, a different problem, right? Sorry, but we have to keep this under Federation seal until it's approved for general use.
phaser bank activation,
According to Linuxprinting.Org, Textronix model phasers work great. Don't even need to kill a redshirt over it. The 780 works (don't hit me! I'm quoting, I swear!) "stunningly", and the 850, Phaser IISX, and Phaser PX work ok (resolution maybe needs work); Phaser 350 says "mostly" and needs a little bit of help but the directions are there.
interstellar navigation,
Goodness knows we have enough -non- voice enabled astronomy apps to make it chat with you all day about which one you'd want it to use.
transporter operation
And Mike Orr rather clearly states in Linux Gazette issue 60 (http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue60/lg_answer60.html#tag/7) that if your packets were routed by matter transporter, you wouldn't see it in traceroute because that only checks TCP/IP turnaround, not any protocol tunneling that may be going on.
uhh, there's someone whining in an old redhat digest that they cost too much CPU. So maybe we need to work harder on the softmodem problem. Most of our crew agree, however, that the Borg can worry about those, as it's quite easy to replicate real communications hardware.
and the all-important self-destruct sequence.
Huh, the 'dotters already got that one, it comes already set up in inittab on every distro. ctrlaltdel = shutdown -r -t 10 unless you prefer to tweak it, and seeing as that's a signal you can send init, ViaVoice really shouldn't have any problem giving it to you. Not self destructive enough? "shutdown -h now" or even "dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda" if you really hate life ! Though of course real starships would use FTL drives, which have to be flashed...
Until these and thousands of other important apps are written and deployed, Linux will just be a toy in the Enterprise."
Well of course it is! Everybody knows gamers make the best weapons officers, and torpedo and phaserbank controls are some of the oldest software known to be free.
You can still read the editorial:
// LCARS command redisplay
$ man trek
... some data ellided ...
AUTHOR
Eric Allman
... some data ellided ...
phasers manual amt1 course1 spread1 ...
torpedo course [yes] angle/no
ram course distance
rest time
shell
shields up/down
srscan [yes/ no]
status
terminate yes/no
undock
visual course
warp warp_factor
BSD Experimental December 30, 1993 1
// LCARS command complete.While I took my first shot across the Organian treaty line much earlier than that, I'm sure it wasn't in a Linux vessel.
But I can assure you that our access to library retrieval systems is quite
modern, as our own MI/BUS continues to keep ency up to date -- this vessel
accesses the Starfleet Encyclopedia via Federation standard isolinear media
(classification: 9660 Joliet) although uplink to a starship data bank is
highly recommended if you want warp speed out of the poor thing. He just
released a new revision, including tricorder support (for iPAQ/Linux):
http://users.bigpond.com/mibus/ency/index.html
* Heather * Comp Ops, USS Augusta Ada NCC-55011 * http://trek.starshine.org
she dreams of the future...
![---[combadge]-------------------------------](../../img/hr/1comm.gif)
Support for voice-based consoles has been added to the 2.5.x kernel series. A limited number of speaking-terminals are supported... and these things are not cheap... but it exists. How well it handles the standard "noisy bootup" of regular kernels, we have no idea.
The pundits have still not come up with a definitive description of "the enterprise" for the original context. At least not one that is agreed on beyond the scope of their own magazine publishing house.
One of our crew wrote a white paper on this subject on behalf of Linuxcare, a number of years ago. It's been updated; we'll see if we can make the newer edition accessible.
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