User Conversations
Sarah Jane Smith's OS and GUI?
posted by sbergman27 on Tue 1st Jul 2008 23:21
Conversations I figured I'd share a post I just made to doctorwhoforum.com here. Let's not bash each other's OSes, but have some fun. In "The Sarah Jane Adventures" series, she has both a desktop computer, which has no name, and "Mr. Smith" which is an... err... somewhat more elaborate rig:

Does anyone recognize the OS/GUI which Sarah Jane (and Rose in "The Stolen Earth") uses? It doesn't look like Windows. It doesn't look like MacOS X. It does not look like Linux or *BSD running KDE, Gnome, E, or any other DE or WM with which I am familiar. It does look a bit like RISC OS. But it's not that either. Yeah, it's probably something invented by the CGI team which is not encumbered by patents, copyrights, trade secrets, or trademarks. But it is fun to speculate. The gods only know what Mr. Smith runs. Probably some some future variant of Plan9. ;-)
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NFS, NFSv4, cache coherency, Cobol
posted by sbergman27 on Sat 9th Feb 2008 21:33
Conversations I believe I read that OSNews conversions were for tech discussion, and I have an issue which I've Googled and Googled but the answer is still not clear to me.

I know that NFS does some client-side caching, and have read that ensuring complete cache consistency between clients is expensive, so NFS implements a lesser guaranty which is good enough for "everyday file sharing".

I have a server that runs many sessions of a multiuser Cobol accounting application. I have a need to run one session of the app on another box, with the Cobol C/ISAM data files mounted via NFS. The application, obviously, will be reading and writing individual records within the files, and proper locking is employed such that clients running on the server do not step on each others' changes to the files. But can I trust that NFS is going to handle this properly and not cause corruption?
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