Hadoop? Spark? Are those not systems software?
Hadoop was not an academic project although Spark was.
Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. In 2000, people mostly still used Windows 9x. A single-user system with no sandboxing and no built-in firewall.
He's talking about research, so you have to look at the state of the art, not what the masses were still using. In 2000 I used FreeBSD, which was pretty good. It had jails [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail ] by then, which a reasonable person might still prefer to modern Linux containers.
FreeBSD jails have certainly not be a static concept since 2000, so the term "FreeBSD jail" does not denote a single, unchanged thing.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#43I genuinely don't know what the author is refering to.
I'm amazed at how many comments resolve around "But wait, of course systems research has evolved, see XX and YYY", followed by responses along the lines of "Nah, he was not talking about XX and YYY, rather ZZZ, etc..."
I hate being the "please define xxx" guy, but is there a consensual definition of what "Systems software" is ?
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#44I genuinely don't know what the author is refering to. I'm amazed at how many comments resolve around "But wait, of course systems research has evolved, see XX and YYY", followed by responses along the lines of "Nah, he was not talking about XX and YYY, rather ZZZ, etc..." I hate being the "please define xxx" guy, but is there a consensual definition of what "Systems software" is ?
Rob defined systems software in the first part of his post as "Operating systems, networking, languages; the things that connect programs together.".
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtualization: See VMS (1977) Kernel-bypass networking: See microkernels (1967) Need I go on?
I think it is a wild misunderstanding of how academic research works to say that the first demonstration of a concept is equal to all further work on a concept. It is like saying that the Human Genome Project isn't recent work because the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953.
"arithmetic has existed for quite a while...what's the novelty Of Mr. Newton's integral? Mathematics research is irrelevant."
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#46The 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.
If you consider the [admittedly naive] risk equation:
(amount of data to protect * number of systems that store or handle data * level of risk) - mitigation
...you'll probably agree that the mitigation mechanisms improved 100x but the risk improved even more.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#47"What happened" was two-fold: 1. Starting especially a few years before 2000 but continuing today, the software industry is quite profitable, pays well, and has lots of openings, while the a academic job market in systems research continues to pay poorly and has much more limited openings. So if you want to do systems software research while also having an enjoyable quality of life, you might as well go to a company…
Commercial research is decently different from academic research, which is what I think Rob may be referring to.
Commercial research needs to keep in mind the existing legacy systems used by the sponsor. Innovations are more evolutionary instead of revolutionary as the field matures. They may be more tailored to observable pain points of the research sponsor. They may not be widely shared if they yield results providing a competitive advantage. While it may not demand immediate returns, commercial research does have an axe to grind. All of this hampers advancement in the field of computer science in general.
I also don't know if there's any kind of commercial research on the scale of XEROX PARC or Bell Labs. I can't think of any off the top of my head. Microsoft and Google do some pretty neat research, but I don't think they've shipped anything quite on a similar scale.
There's really no organization hiring the best talent to work on the kind of black swan events commercial research may miss. For example, I think it'd be cool to have a microcode-based OS; I've heard it would help with keeping operating systems secure. But who would fund it, and who would work on it? Right now it doesn't look like anybody would, and that might be what Rob is concerned about.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#48Earlier 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.
What a false dichotomy.
I'd love to go back to the irreverent hacker spirit of the 90ies.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#49Hadoop? Spark? Are those not systems software?
Beowulf? MPI? Were these not already things 30 years ago?
https://github.com/intel/spark-mpi-adapter
Oh look, a paper; "For example, a recent case study found C with MPI is 4.6–10.2×faster than Spark on large matrix fac-torizations on an HPC cluster with 100 compute nodes"
Does it sound like large data analytics would have horribly stagnated?
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
#50This is how you end up with a language like golang.
Well, to be fair, there is almost no actual scientific programming language research to begin with, so anything goes.