[TriLUG] OT - But hilarious anyway, and its SORT of on topic

[Matthew Opoka]

What If the Parties Were Operating Systems?

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 Transparency: 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 Trade off Table (tooeasy) 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 time
slices.  Forfeited cycles will be recorded by the OS
in an ASS database and put into a common pool of
processor cycles (the "trustfund"). The operating
system will definitely not use these clock cycles for
its own operations.