The article was meant as a brief exposure of Plan 9 for people who may have had little to no exposure to "alternative" operating systems and as such its point was not to delve deeply into issues. The intent was more to open a door to concepts that people without a computer science degree might not have been exposed to.
This is a very noble intention - but, alas, that is not enough, IMHO. On the contrary... mis-information to those that do not know, is much worse than no info at all. Those that have not been exposed to Plan 9 previously might get a very wrong first impression, and what is worse, wrong expectations.
I myself am very new to Plan 9 - but constant reading helps a lot. And actually *trying out* stuff, playing with the system. Have you tried to run emacs? That simple test would have helped not to raise hopes of misinformed users. And it is very dangerous to start talking about stuff you do not completely understand: namespaces, in Plan 9, don't have anything to do with the network database. Yes, namespaces are confusing: it has been recently mentioned by several, on this list.
I myself am struggeling with understanding how Plan 9 works - and when you threw ndb in one pot with namespaces, I got even more confused. Your article mis-informs, and consfuses.
I pulled all of my materials from the available Plan 9 web sources. Which by the way are mostly dead links now.
Some private projects might well be dead - but as far as I can tell, the URLs on the web site and in the wiki work mostly fine. At least, that's where I collected my info from...
Considering that MS VPC is free, completely skirts most driver compatibility issues, and could greatly increase Plan 9 trials you would think someone might publish a FAQ for nubes. But there isn't one.
You could start one :) The wiki has a FAQ, and maybe more answers to more questions could be added there, if you miss some. The more people contribute to documentation, and divulgation, the better it is for Plan 9. But documentation and divulgation has to be correct. If you don't understand something, leave it to somebody else. Or investigate, until you *do* know something.
How do you convey the deep concepts of Plan 9 to someone who doesn't have 5+ years of large scale system admin experience, or a Master's degree in Computer Science?
IIANM Francisco Ballesteros is planning an introductory course to Plan 9 at his university and asked the list about which points people do find most confusing and hardest to understand. Will this material be available?
/c (a n00b's two cents...)
