Fuchsia is a new operating system
<https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/718267/206c8a5fbf0ee2ea/> being built
more or less from scratch at Google. The news of the development of
Fuchsia made a splash on technology news sites in August 2016, although
many details about it are still a mystery. It is an open-source project;
development and documentation work is still very much ongoing. Despite
the open-source nature of the project, its actual purpose has not yet
been revealed by Google. From piecing together information from the
online documentation and source code, we can surmise that Fuchsia is a
complete operating system for PCs, tablets, and high-end phones.
The source to Fuchsia and all of its components is available to download
at its source repository <https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/>. If you
enjoy poking around experimental operating systems, exploring the
innards of this one will be fun. Fuchsia consists of a kernel plus
user-space components on top that provide libraries and utilities. There
are a number of subprojects under the Fuchsia umbrella in the source
repository, mainly libraries and toolkits to help create applications.
Fuchsia is mostly licensed under a 3-clause BSD license, but the kernel
is based on another project called LK (Little Kernel)
<https://github.com/littlekernel/lk> that is MIT-licensed, so the
licensing for the kernel is a mix. Third-party software included in
Fuchsia is licensed according to its respective open-source license.
https://www.osnews.com/story/29747/Fuchsia_Google_s_new_operating_system
Over the April Fool’s weekend, Reddit, the (in)famous social-media and
troll-hangout site, tried something very unusual: they created a blank
1000-by-1000-pixel canvas, and turned their users loose on it to draw
whatever they liked. The only restriction was a limit on how quickly
any one user could update the image: just 1 pixel every 5 minutes.
The resulting time-lapse animation is quite breathtaking to watch
<https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/in-memoriam-reddits-72-hour-live-gra…>.
Look at the number of logos and national flags: a battle between the
French and German flags gets resolved with the French one running its
bars vertically, the German one horizontally, and an EU flag placed at
the intersection; another brief skirmish between the Greek and Turkish
flags gets resolved with them being placed side by side, joined by a
heart.
Yes, there are the occasional rude words. But it’s surprising how
little of that kind of thing appears--or perhaps it was removed too
quickly by competing groups with other fish to fry.
Watch the animations a few times; you’ll see something new each time.
