TUNES random comments

[Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr.]

Just a few, quick ideas:

- Organization

  This is certainly the very first thing to do. After it is done,
however, I wonder if everyone will still receive every message
from all of the subgroups or if there will be sublists of some
kind?

- Survey

  Very important. Though this will start next week at the very
earliest, I can't resist pointing people who have been thinking
about objects, agents and security to Sun's SpringOS project.
You can get lots of papers about it at http://www.sun.com by
looking up research.

  For those of you who don't know about organizing object oriented
systems using reflection, I would recomend studying Sony's Apertos
OS ( ftp://scslwide.sony.co.jp/CSL/papers or look in OOPSLA'92 ).

- Documentation

  I have used AmiPro, PageMaker, Interleaf Publisher and Latex so
far to document my project, but have recently converted to HTML.
This would be great even if the formatting is a little limited -
you can insert charts and other figures as GIF files. Even those
who don't have WWW access ( I normally don't ) could receive the
latest version of the docs in a ARJed or TAR-GZIPed file uuencoded
by mail and read them locally with Mosaic or Netscape.

I have found it easy to create drawings with any tool I want in
Linux and convert them to GIF via xv. I don't know if there is a
easy way in Windows, though I know how to convert PCX to GIF.

- Security

  Just a note to Francois-Rene and Chris who were wondering about
386 LDT segments: in the 286 OO OS I designed in 87 we used this
idea. Each task will need about two GDT entries ( one for its TSS
and another if it has a LDT ), so you are limited to about 2K tasks.
Each task can have its own LDT with up to 8K entries, so 500 tasks
with 3 objects each is a very tiny fraction of the 286's architectural
limits. But I would not use this feature today, as this would make
it impossible to port to other CPUs.

Regards,
Jecel Assumpcao Jr
Merlin Computers
+Laboratorio de Sistemas Integraveis - University of Sao Paulo - Brazil
+Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo