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Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

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Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#21

Post by lallysingh »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6

I would argue that systems research has been incredibly relevant. First consider programming languages. Even though languages such as Java, C++, C# are all widely used, they are much different languages than they were in the early 2000’s. You can see the influences of academic research especially from the functional languages (monads) on these languages. Also, Rust is an exciting new language that is enabled by the s…

While he mentions languages & networking up top, he's not really complaining about it. Those have and continue to advance nicely. OSs have definitely gone into small-increment-improvement mode

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#22

Post by eeZah7Ux »

polskibus wrote: post #4
tlb wrote: post #2

The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.

There's a lot of churn in tech - people jump to new stacks for job prospects, instead of solving hard problems in existing frameworks. This is part of the reason why tech keeps on reinventing the wheel instead of providing improved productivity perceived from the business (customers' business needs) perspective.

Also, work environments strongly encourage buzzword-driven [development|careers].

It's almost like human society is trying really hard to keep developers busy.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#23

Post by harryh »

rayiner wrote: post #8
wyldfire wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.

I’d love to go back to Windows 2000 (and Google circa 2000). The software industry (at least in the desktop side) peaked two decades ago, then spent most of the last decade or so badly reinventing everything on the web.

Gmail didn't come out until 2004. You'd be stuck with Hotmail in 2000. Google Maps didn't come out until 2005.

Google Docs (and the subsequent migration of MS Office to web accessible forms) didn't come until even later.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#26

Post by weberc2 »

wyldfire wrote: post #3
tlb wrote: post #2

The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.

> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.

The topic is security research, not security practice. Security practice has improved, but security research has not (or that's the thesis, anyway).

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#27

Post by kbenson »

rayiner wrote: post #8
wyldfire wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.

I’d love to go back to Windows 2000 (and Google circa 2000). The software industry (at least in the desktop side) peaked two decades ago, then spent most of the last decade or so badly reinventing everything on the web.

> I’d love to go back to Windows 2000

While better than Windows 9X, Windows 2000 was also horrendous with regard to security. That was the era where Windows saw so many exploits and worms, and their security practices so lax that because they started the firewall a few seconds after starting the network interfaces when booting, if you were connected to the internet without a separate firewall on boot (fairly common at that time) it was likely you would be infected by a worm in that few seconds of unprotected networking.

Anyone around at that time will remember the rampant worms infecting large swaths of the internet connected Windows machines. Code Red. Sasser. Blaster. Slammer/Sapphire.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#28

Post by wyldfire »

jascii wrote: post #12
wyldfire wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.

I wonder what makes you say that? There is more social focus on security, however that seems more a consequence of the pervasiveness of computing in our society then in fundamental progress in our systems-thinking. As far as I can tell, the basic security models have not changed much since the late 60's.

"the basic security models have not changed much since the late 60's" != "number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security"

Those two are very different claims IMO. Who cares what the basic security models are if you are significantly more difficult to attack?

We can debate whether these were "innovative" or not but the fact is that in 2000 none of these things existed in anything beyond research if at all there: ASLR, stack canaries, RETGUARD, pledge, jails, seccomp, fuzzing, San/kSan/HWAsan (tagged mem), NX, signed bootloaders/secure enclaves. IMO, iOS took huge steps to isolate the different user applications from one another.

EDIT: I deleted a reference to SELinux. It was introduced only a handful of days before Jan 1, 2001 ;)

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#29

Post by JdeBP »

Would research into side-channel attacks count under M. Pike's criteria?

Granted, whilst it is system-level it is not system software. And it has not yielded demos that people have regarded as cool, rather ones that have been received by some as horrifyingly worrying.

But it has definitely influenced industry.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#30

Post by naniwaduni »

weberc2 wrote: post #26
wyldfire wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. This is an astonishing claim: what makes you think it hasn't gotten better? It's gotten a LOT better since 2000.

The topic is security research, not security practice. Security practice has improved, but security research has not (or that's the thesis, anyway).

What we see is security practice. The security practices coming into play today that come out of research already done by 2000 were not widespread in 2000. Is there no security research being done in 2017 that we won't have paid much attention to for another decade?
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