Still jacking into the net with a browser and your old, 4Gb OS?  Tryna choke yer LOC to optimize your mainline?  Waiting for Plan 9 or the Hurd?  Maybe filling your call stack tryna find the last digit of pi.  But, why haven't you discovered the Uhix-Nature and the Great Way?  What is it, man?  Why haven't you already signed on?  Seek no further.  This is exactly the glam you are looking for.

This is an operating system for the Internet (not your clunky computer or some server), where all nodes are equal and all data/messages are part of a cooperative society of nodes.  It's like two operating systems in one.  One for manageing objects in a data ecosystem and another for communicating to each other.  It's two complete systems, each with their own audio-visual language -- just like the universe.  BOOM.  You need it.  You don't even know how bad you need it (that's how bad you need it).  Your present news services are a joke.  Your apps, monolithic BLOATWARE.  Right Now.

This project is going to make the first-ever, distributed, peer-2-peer, social operating system (SOS).  That means, that networking is built-in, but instead of everyone's PC being seen as a dumb client asking for server data, it's an equal peer to ALL other nodes to the system.  It is a publisher of news content, apps/objects, and a part of the system's data security and runtime environment, storing data for others as popularity requires it (like FreeNET) and processing some of the global view of the CYBERSPACE.  It builds a COMMUNITY.  It's designed to replicate how the human soul maintains balance, keeps its own knowledge within cells (copying for redundancy), and runs new code but prevents malicious code from running, and builds wisdom though constructive inheritence (objects become more complex and powerful as self-contained organisms).

This social operating system will be very small, yet very functional and very fast.  It achieves this through radical computer and data science that hasn't been integrated much into commercial or even free OSs (nor hardware).  Some of it won't be, because it's unpublished.  This new science comes from biomimicry and mimics how the soul itself stores and uses data in cells.  Also, new software architecture that makes data-flows more natural, much like good bulding architecture makes the flow of people more efficient.   A typical kernel might only be 10k in size (a 100th of the Linux kernel), nearly invisible. 

This data ecosystem forms a new way to relate to the Internet and a new way to relate to the power of the personal computer.  Every app is a re-useable object (see the wiki:GOOP), much like Unix created shell utilities from a small set of commmands.  Since one of the major powers of the network is communicating with people, a peer-2-peer messaging system is built-in, allowing ad hoc group formation and messages to be passed to others without alot of overhead.  These messages become part of a meritocracy and peer nodes with expertise get tracked and rewarded.

Speaking of rewards, object creators can get paid every time their objects are instantiated and run.  Every object contains meta-data that allows a small fee to be sent to the object creator`s paypal (or some such) account.  So the operating system has app-creation incentives built-in.

These re-inventions of social and applicaiton dynamics re-invent the operating system.  No more traditional, monolithic apps whose files live in their own mini universe.  Everything is interconnected, man.  The security model hasn't been completely imagined yet, but mostly these concerns are already handled by the FreeNET-style redundancy and paypal-like, SSL transactions.  

Oh, and the operating system will have a 3d visualization that will be out-of-this-world.  More than eye-candy, it represents the state-of-the-art in data science and representation.  CYBERSPACE:  the last frontier.  A full ontology of data and color scheme that matches it will be developed, so that all data can be tagged, uniformly and uniquely across the net.  No more privatized data or domain-specific languages that encode the personality of its origin.  Everything has it's right place.  Think XML, but now the schema is based on real philosophy and epistemology, not ad-hoc layers that never fit quite right.  In fact, if done right, there will be no need for books.  Books, tied so much as they are to the personality of the author, are simply disconnected data stores.  This project creates something like Hesse envisioned in the book Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game):  a storehouse for all human knowledge, kept intact by noble, data stewards, on behalf of all Mankind.

Enjoy looking through the wiki.  It has a mix of both computer science, philosophy, and dream-building and join the project to help it evolve and become part of your own.

Cheers,

Mark
Palo Alto, CA

--- OLD README:

This is a project for the OS and lanugage CONVERGENCE, where they figure out they're all trying to accomplish the same thing.  See also the googlegroup: programming-topics.  Turns out there's not that many significantly different ways to do that on a single-processor system.  So, we're going to optimize it and do it perfectly with a language we'll call Prime (even though it may start as Python or some such available language).

It combines the best of programming languages (Python/Forth/C/C++/ASM and others), using new computer science to measure programming language efficiency to make the BEST computer language (given a few caveats).  It emerged out of the conflict between proprietary and free software over which is best and the Mage Wars of the 21st Century over political correctness.  We'll combine the best practices of each and add totally NEW computer science.  For example, there's no compiler.  Parametized object macros are built from a perfected computer language that turns into machine code when objects are first run.  OOP was the best architectural aid that CS had up to this point, but this project takes a systems-level approach and rearchitects the whole software environment, optimizing all OS-APP-HARDWARE questions so that every object is an app and every app is an object and all components are re-used and familiar to everyone.  

Imagine a networked, p2p, software-development environment where every object which gets run deposits a small amount of money in the object creator`s account.  Now Free software programmers can be paid for being smart!  Software-encoded contracts and/or doctests keep everyone satisfied.

Or, imagine that every bit of color and shape was meaningful on your screen.  The transition from ASCII to GUI is a bit change of greater than 2000-fold more data to your visual cortex, but most GUIs are using this resource as mere decoration -- like putting a sweater on your dog.  Cute, but not worth the extra resources and power consumption.

This is a project for the OS CONVERGENCE, where OSs figure out they're all trying to accomplish the same thing.  It emerged out of the conflict between proprietary and free software over which is best and the Mage Wars of the 21st Century over political correctness.  We'll combine the best practices of each and add totally NEW computer science.  For example, there's no compiler.  Parametized object macros are built from a perfected computer language that turns into machine code when objects are run.  OOP was the best architectural aid that CS had up to this point, but this project takes a systems-level approach and rearchitects the whole software environment, optimizing all OS-APP-HARDWARE questions so that every object is an app and every app is an object so components can be re-used.  
XXXThis. doc has gotten. corrupted.
Position creates a new OS starting from basic principles of OS theory, modular and object-oriented, and at the bare metal (the CPU architecture).  It comes out of frustration of the bloatware that all modern OSs have become and new wisdom about system architecture via epistemology (see Zen Code on the Pangaia wiki).  With no thanks to artificially cheap manufacturing prices and other voodoo, this project is made also to fix the instabilities that have cropped up from poor or inadequate design choices from legacy systems, including Intel, X, Microsoft, and Unix.  But we're not just going to scratch an itch, we're going to ADVANCE Computer Science and even Philosophy.  Woot!

The name Position is a spin on POSIX.  The idea of PositionOS is Portability to the MAX, an end-point to those design goals.  See Samurai Jack (Pangaia wiki) for his contributions to these project ideas.  It is also architected like the human mind:  built from simple primitives towards higher levels of abstraction.

Core philosophies:
1. There are *two core relationships* to the machine as far as software and the OS are concerned:  application user and data administrator, much like CODE vs. DATA.  Hiding this from the user makes either users or developers dumb. (-ChromeOS/Surface/Windows10)
2. One can get better performance by using *better hardware and software archictecture* rather than requiring MORE hardware. (-Linux/Microsoft/Apple)
3. All data relate to other data (wikiwikiweb), so *make everything an object* and make application "mashups" from simpler primitives that relate to that data in all the ways users want, much like unix commands did w/pipes. (-Python, +GPL/POSIX)
4. The *network is the computer* (Sun Microsystems), so integrate P2P architecture directly in the OS and make a data/app ecosystem.  (-Javascript, -file hierarchies)
5.  All objects exist in a UnifiedDataModel, so all apps draw on these objects re-useing them in many ways.  Each app primitive is inspectable.  There are no proprietary apps.  (+GPL)
6. *3D cyberspace visualization* to navigate the 4D hierarchy.  'Nuff said.  (+Pangaia/GlassBeadGame Project)

Good architeture can reduce your code base 100-fold.  The actual formula is some asymptote to 100*log2(LOC).  That's a huge savings that pays many dividends, like easier maintainance (as the code is architected to embody the problem domain more naturally, rather than artificial CS optimizations), better performance, more participants (because your code is actually understandable without a programming team's mini domain languages).

User I/O, Storage, Networking, and Processing form the high-level components of the system and the wiki has pages for each.  Go there for DesignGoals as well.

This OS will implement the material in "Gospel of Object-Oriented Programming" apt wiki.hackerspaces.org.  That is, objects are both data AND applications in a Unified Object Model (you can pronounce it "yum").  Files are objects, apps are objects, data are objects.  Finally realizing the design goals of OOP:  modularity (maintainability), encapsulation (data security), scalability (compositing), and object reuse (p2p networked re-use).  The internet produces exabytes of data, if the "network is the computer", we should have a data ecossytem for it rather than monolithic silos isolated from other data, kind of like multiprocessing, but for DATA.  Recognizing that data is growing faster than code, this project will experiment with many new ideas such as "LanguageAsAnOS", and "EverythignIsAnObject", trying new language ideas that facilitate such concepts.

As the OS will implement a unified epistemic model of data to knowledge, this project may merge with the GlassBeadGame at sourceforge.net.  It is called SINGULARITY, after all.  

UPDATE:  With some small tweaks, the design goals of Singularity can be implemented in UNIX using shell operators as a universal API.  See the Gospel of Data Ecologies on the wiki.

All files are STUBS.  Contact me and actually get some files with code in them.  Discuss at [email protected]

Keywords: Blue Abyss, Reconfigurable OS, Peer-to-peer...