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UsesThis: Rob Pike

rob.pike.usesthis.com

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Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#141

Post by dfc »

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…

I love git-annex. It is worth pointing out that the XMPP notification is still under heavy development. I don't want to turn people away from git-annex but I also do not want people to get their hopes up for a feature that is not complete yet: Joey described the xmpp work in his most recent blog entry and said it is "really the last big road-bump to making it be able to sync computers across the big, bad internet."

http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_11...

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#142

Post by Joeri »

Evbn wrote: post #44
pilif wrote: 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.

Why should you have to do that? Why can't google maintain proper backups? They could charge for it.

Of course, that means they would need to guarantee they will never, ever, cut you off from your data, not even if you defraud them. Under EU law they basically have a legal obligation to do that, but sadly they don't feel compelled to comply with their legal obligations without a court ordering them to.

By the way, if you've never had microsoft lose your data for you, you haven't been using their software for very long or been very very lucky. Admittedly, when microsoft did it they didn't mean to. Google and amazon mean to.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#143

Post by sp332 »

Evbn wrote: post #44
pilif wrote: 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.

Setting up and email or IM client to save your emails and IMs is pretty easy. Google Drive has a desktop client that syncs some documents in real-time (although it excludes documents made in Google Docs itself). You can use Picasa to sync photos from Instant Upload (which is inexplicably not integrated with Google Drive yet). I think that just leaves music... did I miss anything?

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#144

Post by petercooper »

stock_toaster wrote: post #20
activepeanut wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the small size affected your vision? I've briefly tried working on a small screen with high DPI and it really hurt my eyes. Maybe I'm getting old-man's eyes. ;)

Same here. I currently have an older (mid 2009) 15" mbp. Wondering if I can get by on a 13" though...

If you get a new 13" Retina MBP, you'll have the best of all worlds. If you need a lower res, you got it. If you need a higher res, you got it.

I hadn't anticipated this but since every resolution looks excellent on a retina display, I'm switching quite often for different tasks.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#145

Post by EdiX »

prunebeads wrote: post #100
ricardobeat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"break the way phones worked"? oi? You could only call, not get called unless you left precise descriptions of your whereabouts. Sometimes wait a lot until a phone was free. Having a phone on you all the time completely changed personal communication for the better. The idea that the way phones worked before mobile was better is so inane that I can't believe it's coming from a scientist.

What is better now with cellphones than before? Why is personal communication so much better now that we can be reached anywhere? I think it's a legitimate question. In most cases, people indeed want to be reachable, but is it really a good thing? In the long run, does it make the society a better place, and people better people? How can we measure the impact of the cellphone on society?

I remember waiting in line up to half an hour every day to call back home my parents while on vacation because otherwise I wouldn't know if something important had happened and they would assume I was dead. And, hey, did you remember buying a new card for payphones? Those things used to demagnetise at the speed of light. I also remember that one time I locked myself out of my home and had to walk for 2km to get a the spare set from a friend (lets just hope he is there). Yes I think overall it's really a good thing.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#146

Post by mhurron »

jff wrote: post #130
webreac wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A separate, contained server to run programs that can't talk to anything else is sort of against the whole Plan 9 idea, it's basically what Pike is complaining about here. All you did was turn a Plan 9 into a dumb terminal and NAS. Why would I do that when I could ditch the Plan 9 box and save money just by having the Linux machine, which apparently was needed for running everything in the first place.

The idea of Plan 9 was not to have no user applications running on it.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#147

Post by stcredzero »

> What would be your dream setup? 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.

This is exactly my idea of changing from our current memory hierarchy to take advantage of the new SSD and cloud capabilities we have now: "Fat Cache."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#148

Post by qdog »

jff wrote: post #133
negativity wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Oh man, I almost forgot we were SHEEPLE. wipes tear from eye Thanks for that.

In all seriousness, heavily encrypted, anonymous datablocks that people just 'back-up' on the net (I'm not advancing to the word cloud, sorry) is a pretty good idea. Trusting Google or anyone else to protect your raw data forever is probably not a good bet.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#149

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

jff wrote: post #132
statictype wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget about those crazy people that use emacs instead of vim...

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#150

Post by peterwwillis »

Payphones are annoying. It might be broken, or have gum jammed in it, or someone might be using it, or you have to track one down, and you have to be sitting at it to receive a call.

Cellphones are in your pocket, come with your personal phone directory, are cheaper per minute, and you don't have to stand still to use them.

I'm really surprised that Rob thinks people would want to deal with a computer-as-payphone model. And wireless data networks suck ass in North America. His ideal world is probably at least 20 years away.

On the other hand, I love thin terminals. Screw local stateless networked computation. Give me a snappy remote interface to a beefy terminal server and i'm happy. That's an interface you literally can pick back up at any time with no performance cost due to being far away from the data.

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