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UsesThis: Rob Pike

rob.pike.usesthis.com

121–130 of 192 posts

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#121
post #54
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... :-/

The problem with asking Unix users about their tools is that you'll get a long list, and the interesting part is more about how they connect them. While I personally would be interested in a long treatise on how he combines shell-scripts and plubming actions in acme to get his coding/documenting/project management work done, this is probably a bit too long (and maybe technical) for a usesthis post. It's certainly eas…

One of the success of plan9 was to reduce the number of tools (and the number of command line options for the tools). For example ftp and the option -r of cp have been killed.

Plan9 is marvellous. The only reason I do not install it for my everyday use is that it is not a mainstream OS (with up to date chrome, openoffice, XBMC and virtualbox)

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#122
post #42

At the risk of causing a flamewar, it sounds like he wants Microsoft surface. It has all of those attributes when backed by SkyDrive apart from the fact you can't roll it up.

Can you go to any other Microsoft Surface and see exactly what you saw on your own, including (but not limited to) your programs, data, and configuration/profile? Also, will the state of that other Microsoft Surface be exactly what yours was when you left it? That is, will your browser window located at (314, 159) with 6 tabs open and an HN post written in tab #2 appear on this other Microsoft Surface exactly as you…

Not entirely but 90% of it. Your programs, data and profile will move around and be cached if you sign in with a Live account. Some application state may be persisted differently but when you sign in to another PC, it'll all move across slowly.

plan9 doesn't do what he wants either. You can't detach a window station from the 9p network and take it and all your data with you. Communication networks aren't reliable enough to maintain a 9p connection either.

At least surface handles this...

Hell RDP'ing into the office is the same as what he wants...

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#123
post #44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is really a shame, bordering on suspicious, that Google Takeout doesn't include any approximately realtime sync APIs for maintaining an off-cloud copy of your life. Even at Microsoft's worst proprietary height, they could never delete your data.

Only in the Shuttleworthian sense of you already trust MSFT with your data.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#125
post #19

"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." It exists! It's called a sun…

Does Sun Ray make a phone? Of course I'm not serious, but the Sunray is one stack of technology that offers stateful session management, not a system for using the same computing environment on whatever hardware you happen to have at hand.

Touche, but they make a desktop client (oracle virtual desktop) and even an ipad app.

Pretty good, but I agree it isn't yet enough.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#126
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…

This basically describes my use of Dropbox. Anything important to me that's not code is stored in Dropbox. Every computer I have dropbox on and which has 100GB free, has a copy of those files so if Dropbox vanished, I still have a replicated copy of my files on one of my machines. I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed. One of those machines has my…

Dropbox is software, and like any software, it has bugs. One of those bugs could easily result in "delete this file and then propagate the deletion to every client". Granted, Dropbox has some rudimentary versioning, so it's pretty likely that you'd be able to recover, but still, I wouldn't advise anyone to use Dropbox sync exclusively as a backup solution.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#127

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…

AT&T did a very good job making the phone system widely available and phone equipment very, very reliable. I'm sure they would have done the same for the Internet, given the chance.

Obviously things didn't work out that way, and now it's actually more reliable to carry around expensive and rather-easily-breakable computers with you. It's kind of surprising if you think about just how fragile a laptop is.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#128
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…

This basically describes my use of Dropbox. Anything important to me that's not code is stored in Dropbox. Every computer I have dropbox on and which has 100GB free, has a copy of those files so if Dropbox vanished, I still have a replicated copy of my files on one of my machines. I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed. One of those machines has my…

[deleted]

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#129
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This basically describes my use of Dropbox. Anything important to me that's not code is stored in Dropbox. Every computer I have dropbox on and which has 100GB free, has a copy of those files so if Dropbox vanished, I still have a replicated copy of my files on one of my machines. I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed. One of those machines has my…

Dropbox is software, and like any software, it has bugs. One of those bugs could easily result in "delete this file and then propagate the deletion to every client". Granted, Dropbox has some rudimentary versioning, so it's pretty likely that you'd be able to recover, but still, I wouldn't advise anyone to use Dropbox sync exclusively as a backup solution.

Well said. Happens to me every couple of months, that I know of. Heck Dropbox might have just deleted a file from all my computers right now, how would I know? Last time it happened the deleted files didn't even show up in the Dropbox event log, but they did show up as deleted files. The only way I know it happens is when a build fails -- shame I don't build my documents. I wish I'd never started using Dropbox, but now I'm too busy to switch my workflow off of it.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#130
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with asking Unix users about their tools is that you'll get a long list, and the interesting part is more about how they connect them. While I personally would be interested in a long treatise on how he combines shell-scripts and plubming actions in acme to get his coding/documenting/project management work done, this is probably a bit too long (and maybe technical) for a usesthis post. It's certainly eas…

One of the success of plan9 was to reduce the number of tools (and the number of command line options for the tools). For example ftp and the option -r of cp have been killed. Plan9 is marvellous. The only reason I do not install it for my everyday use is that it is not a mainstream OS (with up to date chrome, openoffice, XBMC and virtualbox)

If it had all of those things, it wouldn't really be Plan 9 any more.

Grab a decent Linux box, shove it under your desk, and use VNC or X forwarding to display those programs on your Plan 9 terminal. You can keep your storage on a Plan 9 file server, then have your Linux box mount that (9p support is in Linux).

Or, if you're willing to put up with some slightly outdated software, Linuxemu can be a decent choice.

It's doable. I did an awful lot of my graduate work sitting at a Plan 9 terminal, from writing code to just browsing the web with Opera.

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