UsesThis: Rob Pike
rob.pike.usesthis.com
UsesThis: Rob Pike
1–10 of 192 posts
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#2That's a weird dude. That's all.
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#3I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine.
I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google and Apple to move into this space more aggressively, but at best they've all only just scraped the surface of what's possible.
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#4i will +1 his love for the 11" MacBook Air ... people are always skeptical that i can do pretty much all of my work on it (yes, even some coding), but after almost two years, i still haven't found its small size to be too limiting.
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#5I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google…
But Google has moved into that space! The general populace just didn't care too much.[1]
Chromebooks do exactly what he's describing right off the bat.
Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical.
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[1] I think part of the reason for this is that just as nobody wants to think about things like death, NOBODY wants to think about data loss and prevention. It's like death, but harder to understand and to the common folk most people aren't even aware that there are options in this sphere.
Even though a lot of people just use Facebook, email, IM and word processing, its going to be hard to convince them that something like a chromebook is a really good idea because the reasons its technically sweet are lost on them.
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#6He plants a couple of nice flags:
"This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary."
and
"In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work."
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#7I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.
Interesting that someone so steeped in the "old ways" of Unix dumb terminals is also, seemingly, such a good matchup for the "far future" vision of Chrome OS. What's old is new again?
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#8I always wonder, how do people like this justify their level of trust for cloud providers and the government?
It's as if a majority of the hardcore hackers have gone "Fuck it, I'm being watched anyway, they might as well be backing up my stuff as well."
Are we past the point of it being a topic of debate except by people like me who have the illusion of choice?
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#9His dream setup:
"... carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage."
How last century. I thought he would have at least suggested a hologram projection screen combined with some bio implants. ;-)
Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike
#10i will +1 his love for the 11" MacBook Air ... people are always skeptical that i can do pretty much all of my work on it (yes, even some coding), but after almost two years, i still haven't found its small size to be too limiting.
Has the small size affected your vision?
I've briefly tried working on a small screen with high DPI and it really hurt my eyes. Maybe I'm getting old-man's eyes. ;)