What if the two major U.S. political parties were computer operating systems? These are the kinds of features they would each have:
ElephantOS 2005:
“Patriot Partition Management” (PPM) – PPM makes disparate and otherwise incompatible file systems behave as one monolithic partition, even when the separate file systems don’t want to. Even better, should a user or application try to unmount a constituent partition, PPM will save time by formatting and reconstructing the partition using the native file system, which will allow tighter control of file contents by the operating system.
Network Capability – ElephantOS provides full support for TCP/IP networking. In addition, the Server Import Monitoring & Protection Protocol (SIMPP) examines incoming network data from foreign servers. If it detects that these “offshore” servers are operating at a higher efficiency than servers on the local host, it adds garbage data to incoming data packets in order to encourage increased use of domestic servers.
“Data Manufacturing Server” (DMS) – In the event that the Central I-Node Authority (CIA) cannot find a requested file on the physical disk, our proprietary algorithms use fuzzy logic to create file data on the fly, allowing your application to resume doing whatever it wants to do.
“No File Left Behind” – ElephantOS relieves users and applications from the burden of deciding what kind of data to put into their little files.
DonkeyOS 2000:
“File Equality Manager” (FEM): On DonkeyOS, all files are the same size. If the operating system detects that some files are growing too large (perhaps because they have an unfair advantage), data will be taken from large files and redistributed to smaller files.
File Transperancy: In order to allow DonkeyOS to do it’s job, all user files will be public. In addition, DonkeyOS will maintain a list of all files transferred off of the system via network, and will insist that the foreign host let DonkeyOS retain control of those files. This capability is shared with ElephantOS.
User Directories: All system users on DonkeyOS must share the same common directory (/home). Users are discouraged (but allowed, for now) from creating their own subdirectories, but are prohibited from making those directories private or protecting their contents. Before a user creates a subdirectory, a System Hierarchy Impact Tradeoff Table (too easy) must be constructed by the operating system, taking into account the affect of this new subdirectory on other users (“stakeholders”).
“Application Security System” (ASS): All installed applications will be issued an ASS number by the operating system. Each application will forfeit a few clock cycles of processor time from each of their timeslices. Forfeited cycles will be recorded by the OS in an ASS database and put into a common pool of processor cycles (the “trust fund”). The operating system will definitely not use these clock cycles for its own operations.
June 8, 2005
