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FreeBSD hackers Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy surprised an audience of Bay Area FreeBSD Users in August 2015 by laying out their version for a new architecture, based vaguely on BSD but with a microkernel and an event-driven framework consisting of something like libdispatch and launchd. Those are big changes if you are familiar with what FreeBSD has looked like for all of its life.
The good news is, this doesn't mean the destruction of the FreeBSD we all know and love. In fact, Hubbard, who is also the CTO of ixSystems (developers of FreeNAS and PCBSD, both products derived from FreeBSD) aren't aiming to impact FreeBSD but rather change the fundamental architecture of ixSystems' own products.
The slide deck walks you through the proposed, new architecture. Better still, watch the talk yourself.
As a FreeBSD fan, I'm glad they're treating this as a separate product and not hacking up the FreeBSD source tree; that gives us time to see how this shakes out.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Friday August 28 2015, @07:51AM
They don't, the gender is for the word and not the item. Most of the time, the ending tells you what the gender will be. For example anything that ends in -chen or lein is neuter. For nouns formed by compounding other nouns, the last word is the one that gives the gender. Probably between 80 and 90% of the nouns in German follow one of the rules.
Sometimes it's because the word is a name for something that they had a gender for. Sometimes they do get clever, like Die Sonne and Der Mond. Because the mother is warm and the father is kind of cold and distant.
That's more or less the way it works in most languages that have gender. There's a set of rules that dictate most of them, then there's the exceptions. But, usually the exceptions are for words that are used less frequently.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday August 28 2015, @04:22PM
For example anything that ends in -chen or lein is neuter.
Guess that explains the facepalm-inducing das Mädchen (girl) being neuter.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday August 28 2015, @04:37PM
Yes exactly. The big mistake people make is trying to associate the gender of the word with the actual object and in many cases there's just no meaningful connection to be had. Most of the time it would be it in English as there's no sex of the object to be had.
(Score: 1) by gawdonblue on Saturday August 29 2015, @03:54AM
No sex please, we're English!