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UsesThis: Rob Pike

rob.pike.usesthis.com

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Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#21

Post by andrewflnr »

I can't get behind the idea of every computer I interact with being a dumb terminal. I don't want to assume I'll always have a connection to the mother machine. Even in some ideal world where I always have a high speed connection that never fails, can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down? Not really.

I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the cloud" and thence to other devices (and other people). But if I'm in the hills or the server goes down, hey, I still have a perfectly good computer in my pocket.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#22

Post by drivebyacct2 »

wooster wrote: post #14
pgbovine wrote: post #4

i 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.

I lasted almost two months on my 11" MacBook Air before hooking it up to a 27" Thunderbolt Display in a fit of desperation. As my traveling machine it's fantastic, but I prefer my iMac as a full time dev machine. (I mostly do Cocoa dev in Xcode these days.)

I guess I assume that's a given. I'm getting one of those cheap 27" super high res displays off ebay to compliment my MBA. It handles everything I do, but I also have a server that I run my heavy code on because it's where my data is. At the same time, I pretty much constantly have a VM running on here and I get good enough battery life.

I also have a monitor though of course. I would go crazy alt+tabbing. Even now the width of my display can't handle my open tabs in Sublime.

edit: though... now that I sit here and realize what I'm saying, 80% of the time I code, I do it on the MBA. The DPI is such that I prefer the font when coding. This will change when I get my new display though. The laptop will sit on a dock and be my doc-dock or my stream a movie while I work-dock.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#23

Post by epaga »

Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done. He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#24

Post by dchuk »

tesseractive wrote: post #11
pgbovine wrote: post #4

i 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.

I had a netbook that size. I liked everything about the form factor, it was just cripplingly slow.

a macbook air is in no way similar to a netbook other than in physical dimensions.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#25

Post by codewright »

A surprisingly ideological interview. Combined with my run-ins with the go-nuts, I have to imagine there's some sort of general cultural coding cohort I've not fully understood yet.

This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#26

Post by waferbaby »

epaga wrote: post #23

Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done. He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/

Aw, sorry about that. I guess it's a nice break from the normality, maybe? :)

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#27

Post by pilif »

simonsarris wrote: post #5
n8agrin wrote: post #3

I 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. -------------------- [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…

> Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical.

unless of course some algorithm at Google decided that you are a bot and/or spammer. At that point, all your Chromebooks are useless and all your data is gone without any way for you to get it back.

See the Amazon Kindle post from a cole of days ago.

Don't get me wrong. In general I love the idea of having my data somewhere in the cloud where somebody else is working on keeping it save. But in case of emergencies, I would love to have somebody to talk to who is willing (and able) to help me.

Unfortunately all services coming close to this vision are too big to be able to afford any customer support it seems.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#28

Post by kaptain »

Rob Pike doesn't want a dumb terminal. He wants a powerful new infrastructure.

  My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world.
I can relate to what he wants: he cares about his data, not about what his data is on. Every time I upgrade machines or move to a different machine, I have to either reconstruct my environment or I have to tolerate an absence of some data that would be nice to have. How amazing would it be if I can could use any 'terminal' anywhere and have complete access to all of my personal data without having to tote around a physical piece of hardware that's 'mine'.

Any geek's 'bat-cave' is testament to this need: a Mac Plus sitting underneath a table next to Commodore 64. On top of the table lays a 486 DX/2 PC with Super VGA and a Soundblaster compatible card decaying inside. Everywhere strings of SCSI, RS-232, Ethernet spaghetti encircle cases of floppies (both 5.25 and 3.5). Where's the data? Anything precious has made it's way through different formats to whatever you're on now. Everything else is slowly rotting away.

Outsourcing the batcave to this ubiquitous seems much more appetizing to me. Plus it leaves me room for my 1st and 2nd gen Transformer collection.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#29

Post by zvrba »

n8agrin wrote: post #3

I 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…

I haven't yet seen a product that emulates a disk over the network with acceptable latency over anything other than LAN. Until this happens, networked storage (except backup) is a no-go for me.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#30

Post by statictype »

waferbaby wrote: post #26
epaga wrote: post #23

Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done. He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/

Aw, sorry about that. I guess it's a nice break from the normality, maybe? :)

I liked it. It's nice to see a guy's thoughts on how he thinks computing should be. Especially if its someone like Rob Pike. (Better than the usual stream of Macbook-Pro-with-24"-Cinema-Display which is what everyone seems to be using)
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