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UsesThis: Rob Pike

rob.pike.usesthis.com

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Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#81

Post by p9idf »

cokernel_hacker wrote: post #78
p9idf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is not clear to me.

The good ideas taken from plan9 aren't isolated to it and could have been fostered outside of it, perhaps speeding up adoption of those ideas.

I'm more interested in ideas themselves than details about how they're marketed. Plan 9 and its novelties are well known and published in detail. The authors of Linux, BSD, OSX, and NT are aware of Plan 9 and decided it wasn't worth imitating. What could be gained by wasting time lobbying to change their minds? They care only for what they and their customers want, and the average Joes that Microsoft and Apple sell operating systems to aren't exactly clamouring for them to be more like Plan 9. If you like an idea, then adopt it yourself. If not everyone shares your taste in operating system architecture, that's alright too.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#82

Post by nnq »

icebraining wrote: post #62
nnq wrote: post #48

The whole "everything in the cloud", "let someone else worry about storage" view, at least the way he promotes them, are more like VCS than let's say Git (or pick another DVCS)... you have a conceptual "central" point of failure, even if this "point" is a network of servers distributed around the world. I want STORAGE ON EVERY DEVICE (not volatile!), and and automatic system to sync it with all my other devices, WITH…

Frankly, I can't understand how can you criticize Pike for that. That's exactly what he wants: When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. By the way, try Joey Hess' git-annex, now with the assistant. It's just that: a sync and merge system for all your files, which can automatically sync up just about anything (c…

...but then he goes on with "no disks, no state[…] entirely in the network" ...what I meant was that you need "thicker" clients to make it work, because a real "thin" client implies being tied to a cloud and not part of it and this is what I argues, the he conflates two "cloud views" bi not considering the implications of really thin clients like he want them to be.

...but git annex is AF*GMAZING indeed :)

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#83

Post by aes256 »

fafner wrote: post #67

I'm a bit surprised that he is happy with a Mac Book. His editor acme requires three mouse buttons and Apple is designed for one mouse button use. Does he use an external mouse all the time? And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.

Surely he can use gestures instead of physical buttons?

Certainly gestures make the difference between one and two button trackpads a non-issue — if anything, I find it easier and more natural than reaching for a separate button — and it can't be too difficult to scale this to three buttons.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#84

Post by lazyjones »

Some of us do not like the cloud as much as Rob Pike because we are worried about censorship and corporate misconduct (what do you do if your stuff is suddenly gone one day?).

The "always accessible" and "continue where you left" paradigmata we can still relate to though: I've been using screen in ssh / putty windows for almost 20 years now, I used VNC for some time (even wrote a 16 bit client for DOS that ran off a floppy disk and with 2MB RAM...) for the same purpose.

Something like VNC but with a "responsive" UI that adapts to the device currently used (tablet, laptop, desktop) while still retaining all the state needed for the user to continue where he left, that'd be something novel and useful after all these years.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#85

Post by lazyjones »

AngryParsley wrote: post #35
andrewflnr wrote: post #21

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 c…

I agree. In addition to the concerns you brought up, I see other issues with Pike's proposal. If computers are infrastructure, I'm forced to deal with whatever computers others have. This is a problem, because most people don't use computers as much as me and aren't willing to spend as much on them. I'd rather carry a maxed-out 11" Air everywhere than put up with my friends' and relatives' computers. (In fact, I do t…

As you noticed yourself, the "dumber" the devices are, the more secure they will be. I'd happily log on to my e-mail account from a device that (I knew) booted an OS image from ROM just before I used it (comparable to those live CD-ROMs for secure applications like e-banking).

Let's go back to burning ROMs for OS upgrades instead of flashing/storing them on disk! People can replace batteries, so they shouldn't have trouble replacing an OS ROM ..

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#86

Post by jrabone »

lazyjones wrote: post #85
AngryParsley wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. In addition to the concerns you brought up, I see other issues with Pike's proposal. If computers are infrastructure, I'm forced to deal with whatever computers others have. This is a problem, because most people don't use computers as much as me and aren't willing to spend as much on them. I'd rather carry a maxed-out 11" Air everywhere than put up with my friends' and relatives' computers. (In fact, I do t…

As you noticed yourself, the "dumber" the devices are, the more secure they will be. I'd happily log on to my e-mail account from a device that (I knew) booted an OS image from ROM just before I used it (comparable to those live CD-ROMs for secure applications like e-banking). Let's go back to burning ROMs for OS upgrades instead of flashing/storing them on disk! People can replace batteries, so they shouldn't have t…

Batteries aren't static sensitive, and ROMs aren't available in gigabytes, but apart from that there is a certain appeal in a more secure OS environment.

It's a shame that (for example) Windows doesn't make it easier to make the entire system partition read-only, but applications are traditionally so abysmally poor at handling "no you can't write THERE" errors (yes, Photoshop, I'm looking at you) that most people gave up. UNIXes are better, but still at the mercy of morons (Acrobat has managed to drop files called "C:\nppdf32Log\debuglog.txt" all over my home directory, so it's probably just as well it's too fucking stupid to realise it's running on RHEL otherwise it'd be asking for root all the time instead)

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#87

Post by Millennium »

Count me in as another "synchronized local storage" person, for the typical two reasons: I don't want to rely on a connection to the cloud, and I don't want to have to trust the cloud storage providers.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#88

Post by aperture »

I think it was a good post overall, but what got to me was his lack of doing anything about his issues. When Mr. Pike wanted a revolutionary OS, plan9 was created. When Mr. Pike wanted a language fixing problems dealt with in C, Go was created. When it comes to a machine that's roll-able without persistent local storage, he merely wishes for it to be a reality? I can understand if, through working with Google, the only research in that area is tied to the Chromebook, but still. He certainly has the capability to cause influence (First link on hn), but he's not getting into the core of the problem. I love this guy just as much as the rest of the community, but I find it puzzling steps aren't already being taken to make this next dream of his a reality. I also agree that cloud is not the answer for everything, so it would be enlightening for a new tablet-esque roll able device to be made that swims against the general Mac-inspired cloud tablet trend. But if Rob Pike isn't going to make it a reality, I doubt someone else will release it in his vision or to his liking. Perhaps he has a few ideas or tricks to make things "just work". And that's what I'd look forward to.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#89

Post by tree_of_item »

aperture wrote: post #88

I think it was a good post overall, but what got to me was his lack of doing anything about his issues. When Mr. Pike wanted a revolutionary OS, plan9 was created. When Mr. Pike wanted a language fixing problems dealt with in C, Go was created. When it comes to a machine that's roll-able without persistent local storage, he merely wishes for it to be a reality? I can understand if, through working with Google, the on…

The 9p protocol addresses a lot of the network activity described in the article, but I'm not sure what Rob Pike could do to make the hardware he describes a reality. All the examples you gave were software.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#90

Post by jlouis »

fafner wrote: post #67

I'm a bit surprised that he is happy with a Mac Book. His editor acme requires three mouse buttons and Apple is designed for one mouse button use. Does he use an external mouse all the time? And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.

You can use acme with a MacBook. First of all Cmd-x, Cmd-c and Cmd-v works. Second, Cmd and Option with the mousepad gives you clicks on buttons 2 and 3.

Still I prefer to have a mouse when I am working on larger texts because it is so much easier to do text rearrangement with a mouse.

A correctly set up acme on a mac is surprisingly effective.

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