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UsesThis: Rob Pike

rob.pike.usesthis.com

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Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#131

Post by deong »

prunebeads wrote: post #107
mmariani wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

The closest thing I can imagine to what he wants is something like a "t+15 years" version of the Motorola WebTop (and many other similar ideas). You carry a powerful processor with you and either use it "bare" or connect it to a standardized interface setup. You'll never get enough of those kiosks to completely get to what you described, but when your phone can be a perfectly capable standalone device as well, that becomes less important. You have the "docks" at home, work, and a few popular public places like airports, coffee shops, etc.

The idea of something like these dockable phones is almost certainly going to be a big part of where the industry is headed. It's just too obvious not to be. But it requires advances in both ubiquitous broadband availability and power and battery life available to mobile devices, so it's just not feasible right now.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#132

Post by jff »

statictype wrote: post #30
waferbaby wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Macbook Pro, vim, and git. Honestly, when there's a discussion of people's work setup on HN, that's kind of what I assume it's going to be.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#133

Post by jff »

negativity wrote: post #40
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…

First Order of Business: The thought police have to weed out the service providers that won't play ball. We can't have any rogue independent thought enablers like Kim Dotcom floating around. So for now, while there are enough bit players and small-time shops floating around, people are still wary about losing their data to fly-by-night operations. Unreliable SSD's and Stuxnet infected flash drives have shaken user co…

yeah WAKE UP SHEEPLE

(christ, dude)

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#134

Post by deong »

aerique wrote: post #53
dchuk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are the differences?

Processor, memory, keyboard, touchpad, display, storage, and build quality. Well, and price.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#135

Post by jff »

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…

"...can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down?" No, but neither can I guarantee that the hard drive in that Macbook you've been abusing for the last 3 years won't suddenly fail and wipe out your work.

One nice compromise that I'm sure Pike has used is to have your "dumb terminal" be a laptop with Plan 9 installed. When you boot a Plan 9 terminal, you can tell it to get the root from the network or from the local disk. If you select one, though, it's quite easy to also make the other available, and sync your data back and forth.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#136

Post by codewright »

p9idf wrote: post #81
cokernel_hacker wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

A lack of interest in marketing is partly why you don't have a plan9-esque userspace available to you by default.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#137

Post by jff »

programminggeek wrote: post #111

Using ssh, screen, and a prgmr instance, I can access my stuff and have the same state for almost all of my dev work anywhere I can use a chrome browser with the ssh plugin or any ssh terminal app. That is pretty close to what he's talking about I suppose. As of now my iphone, ipad, and laptop can all jump on my little instance and I'm good to go. That being said, I don't think going 100% cloud is for everybody yet,…

Using ssh and screen gives you a 1975 interface to the computer. You've just made your own dumb terminal, doing EVERYTHING on the remote system except printing out a stream of characters to the local screen. It's not even as smart as the Blit that Rob Pike designed in 1982; at least that had the capability to fetch configuration from the server to set itself up.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#138

Post by jff »

wyclif wrote: post #66
mdonahoe wrote: post #15

If you haven't seen acme in action, it is pretty crazy and interesting. Basically it makes heavy use of the mouse, and any typed word can be invoked like a command. Here is a tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M

The mousing is what lost me. I love vim because you don't have to deal with the mouse at all.

The mousing is what adds a crazy amount of power. You end up with dozens of files on screen, some showing text, some just displayed as the "tag" line. You use the mouse to rapidly jump around them, select text from one, paste into another, etc.

The mouse is a pointing device, why not use it to point at things? If I have 3 columns in my acme window (which I usually do) and I'm working in the 3rd file down in the left-most column, it's faster to get to the top file in the right-most column by just grabbing the mouse and clicking than by futzing with key combos.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#139

Post by frou_dh »

wowoc wrote: post #33

All these esteemed people must be such individualists. They all use Macs.

Are you saying that individualism in this game is more about what is incidentally used than what is created with it?

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#140

Post by neverm0re »

pi18n wrote: post #104
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.

He already has gone into great detail about acme: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/
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