I just realized you might not be from the USA... Our political spectrum is shifted 'far to the right' of the European one, but I tend to get called left-leaning where I am, mostly on account of social issues.
On the fiscal stuff, I'm actually all over the map, but tend to lean right.
Where do you call home, if you don't mind my asking?
And tossing you to the far-right camp is undeserved why, exactly?
Because I believe in a living wage for workers, and that even people who elect not to work should be given enough to survive in relative comfort.
I support the expansion of government into areas where government belongs (we could really use municipal composting where I live, and also more social workers for foster kids).
I'm for decriminalizing most things, shutting down prisons and improving their conditions, ending the military-industrial stranglehold on our government, not being in 'optional' wars, universal healthcare (with a 10% deductible) for everyone, easing restrictions on immigration to allow current 'illegal' residents to stay and get legal faster... Amongst other things.
This really pisses me off, people are -very- quick to toss you in the 'far left' or 'far right' camp.
Look, I think wages from a full 40-hour week need to meet the bare-minimum basics for living in an area: Food, shelter, energy, transportation, and enough to save for retirement. I'm all for a well-defined and sane 'living wage' for workers. I've worked for abusive and exploitative employers before, taking home 10% what they made off of me.
I'm also of the mind that there's enough wealth to go around where we shouldn't have to deal with a starving, freezing, uneducated, and homeless pool of non-workers. Social programs -should- cover the bare necessities of human existence.
What pisses me off is that while I work a 50-hour week, wear a jacket inside in the winter, and drive a beat-up subcompact, there are 'welfare moms' I know who jack the heat up to the mid-seventies, use their food stamps to buy their kids soda and $5/box Corn Pops, and drive luxury sedans they pay for with their off-the-books jobs.
I think technology can solve part of the problem: I think that thermostats for people getting heating assistance should 'lock' at 62 degrees, which is comfortable, but not 'warm'. That could be done wirelessly. I think food stamps should cover a family's needs, but be limited to the 'lowest cost-per-unit equivalent item' in a store's inventory (so 'no' to 'Corn Pops', but 'yes' to generic big-bag-o-cereal). Employers should be credited 100% for purchasing free mass-transit passes for their employees, get the money from the gasoline tax.
And yeah, you know what? I really like the idea that if you're on long-term public food/heat assistance for no discernable reason, a condition of getting it is that you also don't have a $39/month account with the local cable monopoly. It's not responsible to pay for entertainment if you need society to help you pay for food and heat.
Good. You should. Nobody should go hungry in a nation with as much money as ours.
I've been there; the first year I was on my own, there were eleven days where we had no gas, no food, and no money. I was going to bed hungry and wondering how I was going to get to work the next day. It was horrible, and I can only imagine living that way for more than a year.
Mind if I inquire about the situation you're in? A post here or slash-message right to me would be really cool.
I'm well-aware of the fact that income is concentrating towards the top, and I agree that it's not a good thing.
But you make the point yourself: Income has been stagnant for the working and lower-middle classes for decades, but people feel entitled to a much higher standard of living.
Here's a little question for you: What's one thing has enabled the accumulation of wealth and commoditization of labor?
It's not some shadowy group of corporatists bending the government, it's modern communication. Email alone enables the CEO to have a megaphone right to each worker's ear. Cell phones enable both the management and the workers to functionally be in more than one place at a time. WAL-MART, Home Depot, and Stop and Shop are the behemoths that they are because they use technology to keep their inventory ratios far lower than any Mom and Pop ever could, and that keeps overhead down.
I actually have friends who do a very simple non-scam:
1. Guy gets 'good job' and buys house/condo. 2. Girl has baby, signs up for every benefit under the sun. 3. Girl pays rent to guy.
4. Profit!
(the trick is to not get married, so you can hide the first partner's income from 'the man')
You get the advantages of a stay-at-home Mom for the low cost of one employed person in the household. If you want a stay-at-home parent without government assistance, you're going to have to make some pretty major bank these days, it's much easier to just do it this way.
What I find strange is how the working and middle classes feel entitled to so much more than they did only a few years ago in the 1980s. I had two college-educated parents with jobs, and I still had to share a room with my sister until I was ten. We had a small 19" TV and an antenna, because, according to my dad, it was 'absurd' to spend $20/month for cable. We crammed our family of five into a tiny Mazda when the station wagon was in the shop. The heat never came on until mid-November, and it never went above 62F.
Now it seems that even welfare moms feel entitled to cell phones, cable TV, mid-range sedans, 70-degree apartments, and endless subsidized premium cereal for their already obese children. Seriously, try restricting any of the above for the people who are collecting government assistance, and watch as you are made out to be a corporate villain.
There was recently a news article about how the local groceries have to staff-up for the first of the month. The (stay-at-home) mom (of five) complained how the benefits weren't enough, since she had to ration the cereal or it would run out and the kids would have to eat oatmeal for the rest of the month. My eyes bugged-out. Of course you have to ration 'sugar pops', I got one bowl a week, oatmeal was the standard breakfast of the middle class.
We need a hardcore reality check and fiscal literacy like no other culture in history.
That's the point of 'asymmetric warfare'. We lose if we overreact, and overreacting is our nature. We got played. Hard.
But really, can you see this speech getting you elected to office:
"Sure, a lot of good folks died on 9/11, but we have to be strong. 9/11 is bait, we have to be sure not to walk into the trap, because we have so much more to lose than they can ever hope of gaining. Some are calling for war. War will cost trillions of dollars and thousands more American lives. I've authorized a small team of operatives to act on capturing the perpetrators dead or alive, and I've activated a special diplomatic corps to curry favor with host countries for allowing our teams to work on their soil. First we're going to ask politely, then we'll bribe them, and if that doesn't work, we'll threaten embargo and international action, and finally, we'll use our superior skill and technology to just go ahead and get the job done as cleanly as possible without permission. Hopefully it doesn't come to that."
In the city I live in, teachers start at lowish wages ($36K), but state law says that they get automatic raises every year for ten years. All you have to do is not get fired and you're making $76,000 a year by the time you're in your mid-thirties. More if you coach or counsel, or have a masters' degree, or more than 20 years of service, or if you're a union rep. You get 66% of your pay for the rest of your life after 27 years of service, health care for life, and while the rest of the state is 'at will' employment, your union contract demands 'just cause' for you to be let go. You're even safe from having your job evaporate: When we discuss closing schools due to lack of enrollment (yes, we're losing population here), they make sure to keep all the staff on the payroll. We have student/teacher ratios that are the envy of private schools.
Also, our scores suck and on the whole our kids can't balance a checkbook, do simple math, or write a coherent sentence.
Move to Rhode Island, it's a wonderland for teachers.
This is an interesting inadvertent side effect of the 'awareness' about carbon dioxide these days. Everyone is thinking 'carbon, carbon, carbon' when there are other major issues to tackle, too.
I even heard someone say we should 'scrub the carbon out of the atmosphere and blast it into space', which is crazy. There's basically the same amount of 'carbon' on the planet as there has been since the planet formed. We just have a nasty habit of burning the stuff and mixing it into the atmosphere, where it doesn't really belong.
It's like the skanky girl in college who was so worried about AIDS, but managed to get every other STD under the sun.
Well yeah, if you use a standard PWR nuclear reactor. I wonder if the story would be different if there were pre-fabbed reactors that had steady output, a self-contained fuel-supply, and never needed service. Basically big, hot, nuclear batteries loaded by crane into a steam-generating unit of the ship.
You could also sell the reactors to the military and remote population centers as power units for small electric, heat, and hydraulic applications (like irrigation).
That would actually be pretty cool, standard modular self-contained reactors in varying sizes, from 'power a tank' to 'power a container ship' or 'steam heat for my whole neighborhood'. When the unit is done, it's already sealed and ready for 'forever storage'.
Yes! And a lot of pie-int-the-sky stuff that MULTICS brought was later merged into the way we do things now (shared libraries and memory, the 'ring' security architecture).
Things could have kept going the MULTICS way if there weren't such limited resources, though. I think we're at a point where the resources aren't limited, and we can make major changes in that direction again.
I want some sort of system that intelligently says 'you know what, it's silly to run this VM on your PC, with puny spinning media. I have room on an SSD array and a rack of free CPUs over here in the data center, I'll just move the app over and keep the window on the client machine'. With an institution-wide 64-bit address space, the 'app' could be migrated over to that faster place and my machine could be informed to attach to the GUI output coming from a memory address over in the data center instead of my own PC.*
OK here's an example... A professor opens up MATLAB and loads in all the stuff he wants to show the class, he gets the whole simulation ready to run, then 'sleeps' it. Then he changes the app image to 'template' mode and gets its URL on the campus network.
In class, he hands the URL out. Students who try to run it have computers that reach into the campus network, copy the app from whatever storage it's on, load any dependencies into RAM (including OS runtimes like posix.so, X11.so, or win32.so from the campus repository), starts a VM sandbox for the app, and the app runs on the student machine. When the student is done, they can save a 'running copy' of the app back to the professor or their own home folder. Once you 'quit' the app, though, it's gone forever and the files that were pulled for dependencies are moved to 'empty space' on the local drive, which is used as cache for that sort of thing. The app ran on the student's machine, but the student never really 'installed' it, and the University MATLAB license allows free distribution of that kind of app.
The 64-bit address space can be used to simplify things by unifying an entire organization's storage into one flat field, it's like Microsoft's Distributed File System but for more than files sitting on different servers. It facilitates the commoditization of -all- storage, RAM, SSD, tape, spinning media.
I'm talking about 'Star Trek' stuff here. You don't think they were installing applications, opening them up, saving data files, and then emailing them to each other, do you? I want to go to there.
The limits were always right around the corner with 8-to-32 bit computing. Everyone knew that 4GB hard drives were coming when the 386 came out. With 64 bits of address space, there's 2048 petabytes to play with. That's not coming to a PC or a business near you anytime soon.
"there ought to be a reason why fast and slow storage is separated logically"
The entire computing paradigm that we're familiar with is based on the idea that address space is very limited, RAM is expensive, and disk is cheap. That's not true anymore; with 64-bits of address space, you could have access to a 'field' of over 2000 petabytes. That's more than the entire storage available at the research university I work at. You could literally have common address pointers and direct, unbrokered access to vast amounts of data, migrate running apps and sessions between machines, and break free from the limits we have built computer science around.
That's because your professor is locked-in to the model we've been using, one that evolved when resources were scarce. That's no longer the case.
-Losing data: Obviously, we're not talking about getting rid of files, just pre-packaging apps in a running state between sessions. Your word processor is going to save the data to a 'file' that by requirement, must live on 'cold' storage (disk-backed or network) or in the cloud. The session of the app would have a little check when it is restored to verify if the file has changed since the app was last awake, and if so, ask you if you want to reload it.
-Upgrades/Patches: If there's a need for one, it is applied to the 'root files' (that are backed on disk) that spawn the app sessions and the app sessions are marked 'dirty' so they can't restore, they must be restarted. There would have to be a system in the hypervisor to track dependencies and mark things as 'dirty' as their dependencies were patched.
-Config files: Would remain the same... See my reference to 'root files' previously. Most software would still be 'files on the disk', but their running state would be saved. In the case of a config change that required the app to be restarted, the app would obviously be able to mark itself 'dirty' and reload the next time you tried to restore it. Software that isn't 'yours', like Google Apps, or game demos, or restricted freeware, or University-owned expensive software, would be distributed over the network in time or session-limited 'stored sessions'.
Just because the distinction between RAM and disk would go away doesn't mean that all access-control goes with it, I don't see how that's implied. An application would just be running in a sandbox that's really just a 'file' sitting in the portion of the address space that's hosted by RAM. If the app doesn't get used, or the kernel needs to 'swap' it to free up resources closer to the 'hot' side of the stack, or gets put to sleep for any other reason, it migrates out of RAM and back to disk.
Same with user sessions... Imagine that you log in and your session was actually brought back for you. Not the way Gnome/KDE does it now by opening apps with the same name, I'm talking about -actually getting your session back-. When you log out, all memory that's owned by you (all apps and data you have open) gets compressed and moved to disk until you return.
low-latency bare-metal fileservers that consume only a few watts, but can natively handle huge filesystems and live encryption? It's a lot easier to handle a multi-TB storage array when you're 64-bit native, same for encryption. Look at Linux benchmarks for 32 vs 64-bit filesystem and OpenSSH performance.
Do you have any idea how many $4,000 Intel Xeon boxes basically sit and do nothing all day at the average enterprise? If you can put Linux on these beasties, you could have a cheap and inexpensive place for projects to start, if load ever kills the 2GHz ARM blade, you can migrate the app over to an Intel VM or bare metal. I'll bet 80% of projects never leave the ARM boxes, though.
My whole department (currently seven bare-metal Intel servers and five VMs) could run entirely off of a few ARM boxes running Linux. It would probably save an employees'-worth of power, cooling, upkeep, and upgrade costs every year.
I know folks think it's 'overkill' to have 64-bit CPUs in portable devices, but consider that the -entirety- of storage and RAM can be mmapped in the 64-bit address space... That opens up a lot of options for stuff like putting entire applications to sleep and instantly getting them back, distributing one-time-use applications that are already running, sharing a running app with another person and syncing the whole instance (not just a data file) over the Internet, and other cool futuristic stuff.
I'm wondering when the first server/desktop OS is going to come out that realizes this and starts to merge the 'RAM' and 'Storage' into one 64-bit long field of 'fast' and 'slow' storage. Say goodbye to Swap, and antiquated concepts like 'booting up' and 'partitions'.
Or that free people reserve the right to act like idiots if they so choose, and the rule of law should make them responsible for any damage to others that they incur while doing so.
Also, imagine if these laws didn't actually change the outcomes at all... Would you still support them?
Would adding 'air holes' to the CPU and I/O scheduler help? What if the CPU and I/O air holes were synchronized, so when I'm rsync'ing and Firefoxing at the same time, the system allows other apps to simultaneously get the CPU and the I/O?
I think the disk schedulers are great, and so is the CPU one, but don't they need to be synced-up to provide a good desktop experience? What's the point of giving Firefox some CPU if it can't use the disk during it?
Maybe there should be a sysctl for this, 'server' or 'interactive' I/O scheduling, 'server' for maximum I/O, 'interactive' for a scheduler that suits desktops best.
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I just realized you might not be from the USA... Our political spectrum is shifted 'far to the right' of the European one, but I tend to get called left-leaning where I am, mostly on account of social issues.
On the fiscal stuff, I'm actually all over the map, but tend to lean right.
Where do you call home, if you don't mind my asking?
And tossing you to the far-right camp is undeserved why, exactly?
Because I believe in a living wage for workers, and that even people who elect not to work should be given enough to survive in relative comfort.
I support the expansion of government into areas where government belongs (we could really use municipal composting where I live, and also more social workers for foster kids).
I'm for decriminalizing most things, shutting down prisons and improving their conditions, ending the military-industrial stranglehold on our government, not being in 'optional' wars, universal healthcare (with a 10% deductible) for everyone, easing restrictions on immigration to allow current 'illegal' residents to stay and get legal faster... Amongst other things.
I usually get yelled-out of the Republican blogs.
I didn't say -any- of those things.
This really pisses me off, people are -very- quick to toss you in the 'far left' or 'far right' camp.
Look, I think wages from a full 40-hour week need to meet the bare-minimum basics for living in an area: Food, shelter, energy, transportation, and enough to save for retirement. I'm all for a well-defined and sane 'living wage' for workers. I've worked for abusive and exploitative employers before, taking home 10% what they made off of me.
I'm also of the mind that there's enough wealth to go around where we shouldn't have to deal with a starving, freezing, uneducated, and homeless pool of non-workers. Social programs -should- cover the bare necessities of human existence.
What pisses me off is that while I work a 50-hour week, wear a jacket inside in the winter, and drive a beat-up subcompact, there are 'welfare moms' I know who jack the heat up to the mid-seventies, use their food stamps to buy their kids soda and $5/box Corn Pops, and drive luxury sedans they pay for with their off-the-books jobs.
I think technology can solve part of the problem: I think that thermostats for people getting heating assistance should 'lock' at 62 degrees, which is comfortable, but not 'warm'. That could be done wirelessly. I think food stamps should cover a family's needs, but be limited to the 'lowest cost-per-unit equivalent item' in a store's inventory (so 'no' to 'Corn Pops', but 'yes' to generic big-bag-o-cereal). Employers should be credited 100% for purchasing free mass-transit passes for their employees, get the money from the gasoline tax.
And yeah, you know what? I really like the idea that if you're on long-term public food/heat assistance for no discernable reason, a condition of getting it is that you also don't have a $39/month account with the local cable monopoly. It's not responsible to pay for entertainment if you need society to help you pay for food and heat.
Good. You should. Nobody should go hungry in a nation with as much money as ours.
I've been there; the first year I was on my own, there were eleven days where we had no gas, no food, and no money. I was going to bed hungry and wondering how I was going to get to work the next day. It was horrible, and I can only imagine living that way for more than a year.
Mind if I inquire about the situation you're in? A post here or slash-message right to me would be really cool.
I'm well-aware of the fact that income is concentrating towards the top, and I agree that it's not a good thing.
But you make the point yourself: Income has been stagnant for the working and lower-middle classes for decades, but people feel entitled to a much higher standard of living.
Here's a little question for you: What's one thing has enabled the accumulation of wealth and commoditization of labor?
It's not some shadowy group of corporatists bending the government, it's modern communication. Email alone enables the CEO to have a megaphone right to each worker's ear. Cell phones enable both the management and the workers to functionally be in more than one place at a time. WAL-MART, Home Depot, and Stop and Shop are the behemoths that they are because they use technology to keep their inventory ratios far lower than any Mom and Pop ever could, and that keeps overhead down.
I actually have friends who do a very simple non-scam:
1. Guy gets 'good job' and buys house/condo.
2. Girl has baby, signs up for every benefit under the sun.
3. Girl pays rent to guy.
4. Profit!
(the trick is to not get married, so you can hide the first partner's income from 'the man')
You get the advantages of a stay-at-home Mom for the low cost of one employed person in the household. If you want a stay-at-home parent without government assistance, you're going to have to make some pretty major bank these days, it's much easier to just do it this way.
How many Volkswagens is that?
What I find strange is how the working and middle classes feel entitled to so much more than they did only a few years ago in the 1980s. I had two college-educated parents with jobs, and I still had to share a room with my sister until I was ten. We had a small 19" TV and an antenna, because, according to my dad, it was 'absurd' to spend $20/month for cable. We crammed our family of five into a tiny Mazda when the station wagon was in the shop. The heat never came on until mid-November, and it never went above 62F.
Now it seems that even welfare moms feel entitled to cell phones, cable TV, mid-range sedans, 70-degree apartments, and endless subsidized premium cereal for their already obese children. Seriously, try restricting any of the above for the people who are collecting government assistance, and watch as you are made out to be a corporate villain.
There was recently a news article about how the local groceries have to staff-up for the first of the month. The (stay-at-home) mom (of five) complained how the benefits weren't enough, since she had to ration the cereal or it would run out and the kids would have to eat oatmeal for the rest of the month. My eyes bugged-out. Of course you have to ration 'sugar pops', I got one bowl a week, oatmeal was the standard breakfast of the middle class.
We need a hardcore reality check and fiscal literacy like no other culture in history.
That's the point of 'asymmetric warfare'. We lose if we overreact, and overreacting is our nature. We got played. Hard.
But really, can you see this speech getting you elected to office:
"Sure, a lot of good folks died on 9/11, but we have to be strong. 9/11 is bait, we have to be sure not to walk into the trap, because we have so much more to lose than they can ever hope of gaining. Some are calling for war. War will cost trillions of dollars and thousands more American lives. I've authorized a small team of operatives to act on capturing the perpetrators dead or alive, and I've activated a special diplomatic corps to curry favor with host countries for allowing our teams to work on their soil. First we're going to ask politely, then we'll bribe them, and if that doesn't work, we'll threaten embargo and international action, and finally, we'll use our superior skill and technology to just go ahead and get the job done as cleanly as possible without permission. Hopefully it doesn't come to that."
I think the latter revelation makes some recent news seem much more sane:
Remember how we sold Saudi Arabia a bunch of fighter jets and bombers recently? Here's what I imagine is going on:
SA: "Please bomb these guys! They scare us!"
US: "Um, here's some jets, go bomb them yourself."
or
SA: "Please bomb these guys! They scare us!"
US: "Sure thing. Here's some jets, so you can defend yourself when we get around to it."
Substandard wages?
In the city I live in, teachers start at lowish wages ($36K), but state law says that they get automatic raises every year for ten years. All you have to do is not get fired and you're making $76,000 a year by the time you're in your mid-thirties. More if you coach or counsel, or have a masters' degree, or more than 20 years of service, or if you're a union rep. You get 66% of your pay for the rest of your life after 27 years of service, health care for life, and while the rest of the state is 'at will' employment, your union contract demands 'just cause' for you to be let go. You're even safe from having your job evaporate: When we discuss closing schools due to lack of enrollment (yes, we're losing population here), they make sure to keep all the staff on the payroll. We have student/teacher ratios that are the envy of private schools.
Also, our scores suck and on the whole our kids can't balance a checkbook, do simple math, or write a coherent sentence.
Move to Rhode Island, it's a wonderland for teachers.
This is an interesting inadvertent side effect of the 'awareness' about carbon dioxide these days. Everyone is thinking 'carbon, carbon, carbon' when there are other major issues to tackle, too.
I even heard someone say we should 'scrub the carbon out of the atmosphere and blast it into space', which is crazy. There's basically the same amount of 'carbon' on the planet as there has been since the planet formed. We just have a nasty habit of burning the stuff and mixing it into the atmosphere, where it doesn't really belong.
It's like the skanky girl in college who was so worried about AIDS, but managed to get every other STD under the sun.
Well yeah, if you use a standard PWR nuclear reactor. I wonder if the story would be different if there were pre-fabbed reactors that had steady output, a self-contained fuel-supply, and never needed service. Basically big, hot, nuclear batteries loaded by crane into a steam-generating unit of the ship.
You could also sell the reactors to the military and remote population centers as power units for small electric, heat, and hydraulic applications (like irrigation).
That would actually be pretty cool, standard modular self-contained reactors in varying sizes, from 'power a tank' to 'power a container ship' or 'steam heat for my whole neighborhood'. When the unit is done, it's already sealed and ready for 'forever storage'.
During MacWorld '84, I believe, there were guys walking around outside selling 256K SIMMs for $380, and that was a steal.
My first computer had 1K of RAM, and my dad had to save up to buy me the 16K expansion pack, if that's any idea of how far we've come.
Yes! And a lot of pie-int-the-sky stuff that MULTICS brought was later merged into the way we do things now (shared libraries and memory, the 'ring' security architecture).
Things could have kept going the MULTICS way if there weren't such limited resources, though. I think we're at a point where the resources aren't limited, and we can make major changes in that direction again.
I want some sort of system that intelligently says 'you know what, it's silly to run this VM on your PC, with puny spinning media. I have room on an SSD array and a rack of free CPUs over here in the data center, I'll just move the app over and keep the window on the client machine'. With an institution-wide 64-bit address space, the 'app' could be migrated over to that faster place and my machine could be informed to attach to the GUI output coming from a memory address over in the data center instead of my own PC.*
(I am not a computer scientist)
OK here's an example... A professor opens up MATLAB and loads in all the stuff he wants to show the class, he gets the whole simulation ready to run, then 'sleeps' it. Then he changes the app image to 'template' mode and gets its URL on the campus network.
In class, he hands the URL out. Students who try to run it have computers that reach into the campus network, copy the app from whatever storage it's on, load any dependencies into RAM (including OS runtimes like posix.so, X11.so, or win32.so from the campus repository), starts a VM sandbox for the app, and the app runs on the student machine. When the student is done, they can save a 'running copy' of the app back to the professor or their own home folder. Once you 'quit' the app, though, it's gone forever and the files that were pulled for dependencies are moved to 'empty space' on the local drive, which is used as cache for that sort of thing. The app ran on the student's machine, but the student never really 'installed' it, and the University MATLAB license allows free distribution of that kind of app.
The 64-bit address space can be used to simplify things by unifying an entire organization's storage into one flat field, it's like Microsoft's Distributed File System but for more than files sitting on different servers. It facilitates the commoditization of -all- storage, RAM, SSD, tape, spinning media.
I'm talking about 'Star Trek' stuff here. You don't think they were installing applications, opening them up, saving data files, and then emailing them to each other, do you? I want to go to there.
The limits were always right around the corner with 8-to-32 bit computing. Everyone knew that 4GB hard drives were coming when the 386 came out. With 64 bits of address space, there's 2048 petabytes to play with. That's not coming to a PC or a business near you anytime soon.
"there ought to be a reason why fast and slow storage is separated logically"
The entire computing paradigm that we're familiar with is based on the idea that address space is very limited, RAM is expensive, and disk is cheap. That's not true anymore; with 64-bits of address space, you could have access to a 'field' of over 2000 petabytes. That's more than the entire storage available at the research university I work at. You could literally have common address pointers and direct, unbrokered access to vast amounts of data, migrate running apps and sessions between machines, and break free from the limits we have built computer science around.
That's because your professor is locked-in to the model we've been using, one that evolved when resources were scarce. That's no longer the case.
-Losing data: Obviously, we're not talking about getting rid of files, just pre-packaging apps in a running state between sessions. Your word processor is going to save the data to a 'file' that by requirement, must live on 'cold' storage (disk-backed or network) or in the cloud. The session of the app would have a little check when it is restored to verify if the file has changed since the app was last awake, and if so, ask you if you want to reload it.
-Upgrades/Patches: If there's a need for one, it is applied to the 'root files' (that are backed on disk) that spawn the app sessions and the app sessions are marked 'dirty' so they can't restore, they must be restarted. There would have to be a system in the hypervisor to track dependencies and mark things as 'dirty' as their dependencies were patched.
-Config files: Would remain the same... See my reference to 'root files' previously. Most software would still be 'files on the disk', but their running state would be saved. In the case of a config change that required the app to be restarted, the app would obviously be able to mark itself 'dirty' and reload the next time you tried to restore it. Software that isn't 'yours', like Google Apps, or game demos, or restricted freeware, or University-owned expensive software, would be distributed over the network in time or session-limited 'stored sessions'.
Just because the distinction between RAM and disk would go away doesn't mean that all access-control goes with it, I don't see how that's implied. An application would just be running in a sandbox that's really just a 'file' sitting in the portion of the address space that's hosted by RAM. If the app doesn't get used, or the kernel needs to 'swap' it to free up resources closer to the 'hot' side of the stack, or gets put to sleep for any other reason, it migrates out of RAM and back to disk.
Same with user sessions... Imagine that you log in and your session was actually brought back for you. Not the way Gnome/KDE does it now by opening apps with the same name, I'm talking about -actually getting your session back-. When you log out, all memory that's owned by you (all apps and data you have open) gets compressed and moved to disk until you return.
You don't see the use?
low-latency bare-metal fileservers that consume only a few watts, but can natively handle huge filesystems and live encryption? It's a lot easier to handle a multi-TB storage array when you're 64-bit native, same for encryption. Look at Linux benchmarks for 32 vs 64-bit filesystem and OpenSSH performance.
Do you have any idea how many $4,000 Intel Xeon boxes basically sit and do nothing all day at the average enterprise? If you can put Linux on these beasties, you could have a cheap and inexpensive place for projects to start, if load ever kills the 2GHz ARM blade, you can migrate the app over to an Intel VM or bare metal. I'll bet 80% of projects never leave the ARM boxes, though.
My whole department (currently seven bare-metal Intel servers and five VMs) could run entirely off of a few ARM boxes running Linux. It would probably save an employees'-worth of power, cooling, upkeep, and upgrade costs every year.
I know folks think it's 'overkill' to have 64-bit CPUs in portable devices, but consider that the -entirety- of storage and RAM can be mmapped in the 64-bit address space... That opens up a lot of options for stuff like putting entire applications to sleep and instantly getting them back, distributing one-time-use applications that are already running, sharing a running app with another person and syncing the whole instance (not just a data file) over the Internet, and other cool futuristic stuff.
I'm wondering when the first server/desktop OS is going to come out that realizes this and starts to merge the 'RAM' and 'Storage' into one 64-bit long field of 'fast' and 'slow' storage. Say goodbye to Swap, and antiquated concepts like 'booting up' and 'partitions'.
Or that free people reserve the right to act like idiots if they so choose, and the rule of law should make them responsible for any damage to others that they incur while doing so.
Also, imagine if these laws didn't actually change the outcomes at all... Would you still support them?
http://english.pravda.ru/news/science/earth/29-01-2010/111932-cell_phone_usage_ban_statistics-0/?mode=print
If banning cell phones and texting doesn't change accident or fatality rates, then you're just preaching morality and superstition.
I might want them to let me testify sometime, so I'm just going to say 'no comment' to this guy. :-)
Would adding 'air holes' to the CPU and I/O scheduler help? What if the CPU and I/O air holes were synchronized, so when I'm rsync'ing and Firefoxing at the same time, the system allows other apps to simultaneously get the CPU and the I/O?
I think the disk schedulers are great, and so is the CPU one, but don't they need to be synced-up to provide a good desktop experience? What's the point of giving Firefox some CPU if it can't use the disk during it?
Maybe there should be a sysctl for this, 'server' or 'interactive' I/O scheduling, 'server' for maximum I/O, 'interactive' for a scheduler that suits desktops best.