Regarding Saul Hansell’s report on the launch of Accoona, with star power brought to bear by Bill Clinton courtesy of a large undisclosed contribution to his library by the Chinese government yesterday – I am puzzled. If Accoona is a variant on “hakuna”, and is derived from the phrase “hakuna matata” for “no worries”, and if, according to the Swahili English dictionary matata plural of tata means “tangle, mess, difficulty, perplexity”, and hakuna means “there is no, there are no”, does this mean the official 20 year licensed search engine of the Chinese government used to search out even better web pages than google really means “There is no”?
Hmmm. So if I search accoona.com for “Taiwan independence” will I get back “There is no Taiwan independence”? Subliminal Internet messages, indeed.
Ever notice what’s been going on with OS X? First it was Mac, then it was Mach (yes, that’s why Avi Tevanian moved there from NEXT), and now it’s BSD (of course, we’ve had Mach’s VM system in every 386BSD version and variant from our first public open source BSD release back in 1992 – a very fine VM system BTW and a favorite of mine). But to actually cut through the Linux hype and mention someone else – Wow! “Then of course there is Darwin, Apple’s version of BSD Unix at the heart of its Mac OS X operating system, which would nicely provide IBM with a non Linux semi-open source alternative…”
Nice to see you say something nice about Berkeley Unix, John. Never thought I’d see the day.