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UsesThis: Rob Pike

rob.pike.usesthis.com

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Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#101

Post by gurkendoktor »

buro9 wrote: post #51

> 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. For me, Dropbox has brought me that. I still use Github and the like, but my computers now share such a similar setup (all Linux, install Go, install Dropbox, install Sublime Text 2, done) that I can walk out of the office without doing anything special to my machine, g…

Dropbox with symlinks is indeed amazing. (It's a pity that symlinks are so hard to create on OS X - darn aliases...)

I love it even more with enc_fs on top of it. I don't even need to mount enc_fs (I don't automount it), and Dropbox will still sync my work like a charm.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#102

Post by enneff »

aes256 wrote: post #83
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.

Mouse clicks in acme usually accompany precise cursor positioning, so I don't think gestures would work well.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#103

Post by pi18n »

I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in a network, and might make tasks like massively distributed map/reduce more accessible.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#104

Post by pi18n »

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... :-/

My gut reaction was the same, I'm more interested in the technical solutions the experts have come up with. The cloud idea is interesting, but I've already got git and vim everywhere so it's not a radical idea for me. I wish he had gone into more detail regarding acme, I bet that would be fascinating.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#105

Post by pi18n »

tree_of_item wrote: post #89
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.

Surely Rob Pike could get funding to start a hardware company, especially if the aim is going to be low powered devices connecting to cloud services?

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#106

Post by papsosouid »

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.

Did something change recently? Every time I've tried to install plan9 in virtualbox or vmware it ran incredibly slow. Not like "wow this is slow" slow, but "there is something broken here" slow. Just the installation took several hours.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#107

Post by prunebeads »

mmariani wrote: post #13
mturmon wrote: post #6

He 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."

These are the points that most held my attention. I think too we're going in the wrong direction breaking up things and stitching them up again with technologies that weren't made for that. Although I think this strategy fits well the planned obsolescence policies we have widely deployed in the tech industry nowadays.

That's interesting, but what would be the alternative?

Rob Pike's dream setup "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. The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours."

In this situation, there would be public phones, public computers available in sufficient quantity everywhere. Think of the necessary amount of work to install, maintain, and upgrade such a setup. In a capitalist society, there would be different brands providing access to their own solutions, and thus a lot of Blackberry, Apple, or kiosks all over the place.

You could think that with such a scheme, costs would prohibit a rapid evolution of services, as we witness them in current business models. Would we get the iKiosks updated each year with new firmware, or the latest multitouch screens? In comparison, how much money is being poured by individuals in upgrades for their personal stuff? What is the overall cost (i.e. money that could be spent on something else).

There's the real estate issue also. How much space would be consumed by those kiosks, and how much would it cost?

It would be interesting to estimate all the pros and cons of that dream setup, and compare it with our current situation.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#108

Post by prunebeads »

Personally, I switched to a tiled WM because I didn't want to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse all the time. I want an editor which I can handle using keyboard alone, and only use the mouse when I really have to (web, drawing, games - perhaps I should use a trackball). Acme relies too much on the mouse for me, but I like the idea a lot.

There's another couple of issues: syntax highlighting, large scale refactoring (which is not easy either with vi or emacs atm).

However, once you get accustomed to a certain workflow, it becomes difficult to accept something new. Maybe I should give it a shot.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#109

Post by mhd »

pi18n wrote: post #103

I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in a network, and might make tasks like massively distributed map/reduce more accessible.

What part would you be interested in? Pretty much everything that Plan 9 has is available in some kind of fashion for other operating systems, often in a more specialized manner. And by the time you hack the performance and compatibility into Plan 9's kernel and drivers (if its minimalism would allow it), you could port/re-implement most of what you'd be missing.

The main part that made this distributed nature possible was 9P, a network protocol/file system. And distributed file systems are a dime a dozen now. Hadoop, S3, GFS, GlusterFS are all vital elements of "the cloud", never mind old staples like NFS, AFS etc.

For "cloud needs", they're better suited (fault tolerance, performance…). The big thing about Plan 9 (and Bell Laps software in general) wasn't its novelty, but its scope, narrowing down everything in a typical network environment down to a few protocols, APIs and GUIs. Not really all that applicable for serving bits to browsers.

Never mind the bandwidth. Plan 9 was mostly text in a LAN.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#110

Post by acuozzo »

Andrex wrote: post #7

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. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminal…

Rob Pike was one of the earliest advocates __against__ the use of traditional "dumb" terminals (including the "smart" ones, e.g., DEC's VT-100+ line). Early on, he developed Blit and brought the mouse to Unix. Later, he helped develop Plan 9, an operating system that's far more advanced (in some respects) than what we have today.

He is not and has never been "steeped in the 'old ways'".

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