While I'm at it its time to dispell this entire top down power myth. I work for the second largest (private) employer in my state. I work on computers and at anytime a handfull of us could bring this company to its knees. The same is true of our engineers and accountants. Any business is made up of people and if enough of them think the environment needs changing then things change. The same has been true everywhere I have worked.
I tned to disagree with this sort of synopsis. Gone are the days where you owed loyalty to a company or product. Today's king-of-the-hill is tomorrow's street sweeper. IMHO people that beleieve this need to get a life. Go camping. Go for a bicycle ride down to the nearest park. Business is the same sharkpit it ever was and those who stand tall shall be lain low. In the real world there are only people. Everything else is made-up.
Imagine Seurat as being the apex in artistic expression. For anyone to go beyond his achievements he would fist have to learn all the technical skills of creating large pictures from hand painted, tiny dots. Schools would be created to teach people how to paint all these tiny little dots with precise detail. Then imagine tring to go beyond his achievments. Having spent years being taught the mundane details of painting tiny dots, how could a person learn to be creative?
This is modern computing. To even get to the point where you can create skilled works you often spend years learning mechanical programming skills in a structured environment. Worse yet, in every age prior to our own excess productivity resulted in a class of people who devoted their lives to nothing but the arts and philosophy. Today we watch TV, play videogames and browse porn on the web.
I think to move any further we must develop the tools to make the internet a natural extension of our creativity instead of becoming mechanics. At the same time we must be enticed to want to express ourselves in ways that create greater things.
I don't think its the medium that will distingiush the next great minds. Its the content. Porn aside, we have yet to create somthing online that captures the soul of the everyman. We play to the desires of the many. The next great thing has to entice the everyman with somthing innovative that could only have existed through this new meduim. Not simply rehashing old ideas. From what I have seen we have yet to concieve this.
Is there any way that we internet users or the Open Source Community could help with Heavenco? Are there any specific software/software security need that you have? Have you considered working with individulas/groups from other countries to help politically support your operations from their native soil?
In the case of yesterday's story where the article ws in postscript and there are a lot of people at work without access to a postscript viewr, then it is a service. Not to mention cases where the site/story in question gets/.ed and the only other choice is listneing to people comment on a story they didn't read.
Wouldn't this count as Trademark Infringement? Since domain names have precedent as being covered under Trademark law, shouldn't abuse of domain names also fall under Trademark/IP law? Unfortunatly this would put the onus on the abused company to do anything. Matbe IBM should get in on the action.
Rob Pike Bell Labs Lucent Technologies rob@plan9.bell labs.com Feb 21, 2000
1 A Polemic This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my feelings about systems research these days. I won't talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone's excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires action.
2 Thesis Systems software research has become a sideline to the excitement in the computing industry. When did you last see an exciting non commercial demo? Ironically, at a time when computing is almost the definition of innovation, research in both software and hardware at universities and much of industry is becoming insular, ossified, and irrelevant. There are many reasons, some avoidable, some endemic. There may be ways to improve the situation, but they will require a community wide effort.
3 Definitions Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant
4 A Field in Decline 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 New Operating Systems at SOSP "Who needs new operating systems, anyway?" you ask. Maybe no one, but then that supports my thesis. "But now there are lots of papers in file systems, performance, security, web caching, etc.," you say. Yes, but is anyone outside the research field paying attention?
5 Systems Research's Contribution to the Boom A high end workstation: _ ________________________________________________ 1990 2000 _ ________________________________________________ _ ________________________________________________ Hardware 33 MHz Mips R3000 600 MHz Alpha or Pentium III 32 megabytes of RAM 512 megabytes of RAM 10 Mbps Ethernet 100 Mbps Ethernet _ ________________________________________________ Software Unix Unix X Windows X Windows Emacs Emacs TCP/IP TCP/IP Netscape _ ________________________________________________ Language C C C++ C++ Java Perl \ a little\ _ ________________________________________________ Hardware has changed dramatically; software is stagnant.
6 Where is the Innovation? Microsoft, mostly. Exercise: Compare 1990 Microsoft software with 2000. If you claim that's not innovation, but copying, I reply that Java is to C++ as Windows is to the Macintosh: an industrial response to an interesting but technically flawed piece of systems software. If systems research was relevant, we'd see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the '70s and '80s. Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software.
7 Linux Innovation? New? No, it's just another copy of the same old stuff. OLD stuff. Compare program development on Linux with Microsoft Visual Studio or one of the IBM Java/web toolkits. Linux's success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill. Besides, Linux's cleverness is not in the software, but in the development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS \ especially software engineering\
8 What is Systems Research these days? Web caches, web servers, file systems, network packet delays, all that stuff. Performance, peripherals, and applications, but not kernels or even user level applications. Mostly, though, it's just a lot of measurement; a misinterpretation and misapplication of the scientific method. Too much phenomenology: invention has been replaced by observation. Today we see papers comparing interrupt latency on Linux vs. Windows. They may be interesting, they may even be relevant, but they aren't research. In a misguided attempt to seem scientific, there's too much measurement: performance minutiae and bad charts. By contrast, a new language or OS can make the machine feel different, give excitement, novelty . But today that's done by a cool web site or a higher CPU clock rate or some cute little device that should be a computer but isn't. The art is gone. But art is not science, and that's part of the point. Systems research cannot be just science; there must be engineering, design, and art.
9 What Happened? A lot of things: PC Microsoft Web Standards Orthodoxy Change of scale Unix Linux Startups Grandma
10 PC Hardware became cheap, and cheap hardware became good. Eventually, if it didn't run on a PC, it didn't matter because the average, mean, median, and mode computer was a PC. Even into the 1980s, much systems work revolved around new architectures \ RISC, iAPX/432, Lisp Machines\ No more. A major source of interesting problems and, perhaps, interesting solutions is gone. Much systems work also revolved around making stuff work across architectures: portability. But when hardware's all the same, it's a non issue. Plan 9 may be the most portable operating system in the world. We're about to do a new release, for the PC only. \ For old time's sake, we'll include source for other architectures, but expect almost no one will use it.\ And that's just the PC as hardware; as software, it's the same sort of story.
11 Microsoft Enough has been said about this topic. \ Although people will continue to say lots more.\ Microsoft is an easy target, but it's a scapegoat, not the real source of difficulty. Details to follow.
12 Web The web happened in the early 1990s and it surprised the computer science community as much as the commercial one. It then came to dominate much of the discussion, but not to much effect. Business controls it. \ The web came from physicists and prospered in industry.\ Bruce Lindsay of IBM: HDLC C HTTP/HTML; 3270s have been replaced by web browsers. \ Compare with Visicalc and PC.\ Research has contributed little, despite a huge flow of papers on caches, proxies, server architectures, etc.
13 Standards To be a viable computer system, one must honor a huge list of large, and often changing, standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, CORBA, Unicode, POSIX, NFS, SMB, MIME, POP, IMAP, X,... A huge amount of work, but if you don't honor the standards you're marginalized. Estimate that 90 95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards. At another level, instruction architectures, buses, etc. have the same influence. With so much externally imposed structure, there's little slop left for novelty. Plus, commercial companies that `own' standards, e.g. Microsoft, Cisco, deliberately make standards hard to comply with, to frustrate competition. Academia is a casualty.
14 Orthodoxy Today's graduating PhDs use Unix, X, Emacs, and Tex. That's their world. It's often the only computing world they've ever used for technical work. Twenty years ago, a student would have been exposed to a wide variety of operating systems, all with good and bad points. New employees in our lab now bring their world with them, or expect it to be there when they arrive. That's reasonable, but there was a time when joining a new lab was a chance to explore new ways of working. Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination. The situation with languages is a little better many curricula include exposure to functional languages, etc. but there is also a language orthodoxy: C++ and Java. In science, we reserve our highest honors for those who prove we were wrong. But in computer science...
15 Change of scale With so many external constraints, and so many things already done, much of the interesting work requires effort on a large scale. Many person years are required to write a modern, realistic system. That is beyond the scope of most university departments. Also, the time scale is long: from design to final version can be five years. Again, that's beyond the scope of most grad students. This means that industry tends to do the big, defining projects operating systems, infrastructure, etc. and small research groups must find smaller things to work on. Three trends result: 1. Don't build, measure. \ Phenomenology, not new things.\ 2. Don't go for breadth, go for depth. \ Microspecialization, not systems work.\ 3. Take an existing thing and tweak it. I believe this is the main explanation of the SOSP curve.
16 Unix New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture and some do the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer. How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable? There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn't believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true \ Microsoft notwithstanding\ A victim of its own success: portability led to ubiquity. That meant architecture didn't matter, so now there's only one. Linux is the hot new thing... but it's just another Unix.
17 Linux the Academic Microsoft Windows The holy trinity: Linux, gcc , and Netscape. Of course, it's just another orthodoxy. These have become icons not because of what they are, but because of what they are not : Microsoft. But technically, they're not that hot. And Microsoft has been working hard, and I claim that on many \ not all\ their corresponding products are superior technically. And they continue to improve. Linux may fall into the Macintosh trap: smug isolation leading to \ near\ Besides, systems research is doing little to advance the trinity.
18 Startups Startups are the dominant competition for academia for ideas, funds, personnel, and students. \ Others are Microsoft, big corporations, legions of free hackers, and the IETF.\ In response, government funded and especially corporate research is directed at very fast `return on investment'. This distorts the priorities: Research is bent towards what can make big money \ IPO\ in a year. Horizon is too short for long term work. \ There go infrastructure and the problems of scale.\ Funding sources \ government, industry\ pressures, so there is a vicious circle. The metric of merit is wrong. Stanford now encourages students to go to startups because successful CEOs give money to the campus. The new president of Stanford is a successful computer entrepreneur.
19 Grandma Grandma's on line. This means that the industry is designing systems and services for ordinary people. The focus is on applications and devices, not on infrastructure and architecture, the domain of systems research. The cause is largely marketing, the result a proliferation of incompatible devices. You can't make money on software, only hardware, so design a niche gimmick, not a Big New Idea. Programmability once the Big Idea in computing has fallen by the wayside. Again, systems research loses out.
20 Things to Do Startups are too focused on short time scale and practical results to try new things. Big corporations are too focused on existing priorities to try new things. Startups suck energy from research. But gold rushes leave ghost towns; be prepared to move in. Fiona's story: "Why do you use Plan 9?" Go back to thinking about and building systems. Narrowness is irrelevant; breadth is relevant: it's the essence of system . Work on how systems behave and work, not just how they compare. Concentrate on interfaces and architecture, not just engineering. Be courageous. Try different things; experiment. Try to give a cool demo. Funding bodies: fund more courageously, particularly long term projects. Universities, in turn, should explore ways to let students contribute to long term projects. Measure success by ideas, not just papers and money. Make the industry want your work.
21 Things to Build There are lots of valid, useful, interesting things to do. I offer a small sample as evidence. If the field is moribund, it's not from a lack of possibilities. Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. \ In some ways, it's been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.\ Surely there are other possibilities. \ Linux's interface isn't even as good as Windows!\ There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts. The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility. The Web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let's go back to having the data come to the user instead. System administration remains a deeply difficult problem. Unglamorous, sure, but there's plenty of room to make a huge, even commercial, contribution.
22 Conclusions The world has decided how it wants computers to be. The systems software research community influenced that decision somewhat, but very little, and now it is shut out of the discussion. It has reached the point where I doubt that a brilliant systems project would even be funded, and if funded, wouldn't find the bodies to do the work. The odds of success were always low; now they're essentially zero. The community universities, students, industry, funding bodies must change its priorities. The community must accept and explore unorthodox ideas. The community must separate research from market capitalization.
Thats what I just used. Read everything between the "()"s. Not a real intellectual discussion, just someone disgusted with be marginalized out on the bleeding edge. Lots of valid points though.
Academics for Profit:The day that academics got into bed with big industry, innovation died. If a concept isn't economically profitiable they aren't likely to funt the research. The other part of the problem is that mostly the same questions keep getting asked, over and over.
Take the Road Less Traveled:What we need is to ask new questions. Like: What if somone used a transfer protocol as a storage meduim? Instead of, Whats the best UI? One question has been beaten to death and the other may lead to new innovations. New questions like: What if data storage was perpetually dynamic? Would the information be siphoned off when accessed or copied as it passes by? Are there any advantages/disadvantages to this.
But like I said, if you were to pose that question in modern day academia as a research project they would scoff at you and you would likely be off on your own. Getting funding for a project that won't likely be profitiable for the college/university isn't too likely to float.
Teacher dillution:Not to mention the quality of CS professors. I actually had a course in sotware design taught by a guy who had written exactly one full blown program application (say >5000 lines of code as a criteria.) for a warehouse program while he was in school. He didn't have a clue.
Student dillution:Worse yet, since CS/CE has become a top ten major the quality of people going into these programs has gone from those who were truely interrested in computer science to those looking to make >40K upon graduation. Why would these guys hang around in a graduate program for four extra years when they could be making the big bucks?
Before you pick up the torch on my post, yes I understand there are the rare few who really try to do innovative work. Keep chuggin'. places like SlashDot and Sourceforge are our meeting places where we can meet and hopefully share ideas.
of 3.000,- US-$ to the KDE project, in case (and only in case) that the licence of the official release of KDE2 (all official packages incl. koffice) will be modified in the mentioned way...
Seems pretty straightforward to me. You have to get all the developers to add this change to their licenses. I don't know how many this means but on sych a large project it could be a monumental task.
weather (Web/Applications) A PHP tool to display the weather of about 3000 cities in the world. created: May 23rd 2000, 12:57 stable: 0.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
KWeather (KDE/Misc) A KDE dock applet that can display the current weather outside. created: Sep 01st 1999, 00:04 last update: March 26th 2000, 13:30 stable: none - devel: 0.96 - license: GPL
pyWeather (Console/eMail) pyWeather gets local weather info and mails it out to any given email address created: Jun 29th 1999, 22:57 last update: June 30th 1999, 12:53 stable: 0.1b - devel: none - license: GPL
tkWeather (X11/Utilities) Get up-to-date weather information for any city, world wide created: Dec 28th 1998, 16:08 last update: January 03rd 1999, 13:23 stable: none - devel: 1.0-pre4 - license: GPL
weather.PHP (Web/Applications) Get, store and subsequently display current US Cities Weather Information. created: Feb 08th 1999, 19:55 last update: February 09th 1999, 18:32 stable: 1.0 - devel: none - license: freely distributable
What do you need the an OS running on the hard disk for anyway? There are already good graphical utilities for setting up most hardware. What would be the difference if the user wen't through driver configuration the first time they boot to the cd (or if the boot cd OS read the config files off the HD or a mix of either method). The OS running via the cd could then write/save the settings to the HD with the other datafiles. At that point the game would use whatever API(s) the game was written for.
Well, I download the RPM, follow the instructions for installing cookbook right out of the docs. 80-90% don't work. Of couse I could read more about RPS/RPM troubleshooting but then wouln't that defeat the purpose. Actually, at least a few years ago I got erros about not having the correct libs installed. Now I get nothing. Doing make from the prompt is much easier, unless there are a bunch of flags to set.
Personally I think that if you shoot your mouth off in a hot venue you shouldn't be suprised by vehement attacks. It the case of the fire, she tossed a coat over a lamp. I'm sure the lamp manufacturer shares some responsibility for building such a hot lamp, but in the end she chose to buy the lamp and toss her coat onto it. You know, responsibliity for your actions. Sometimes you have to accept a little blame yourself.
Does anyone know of a similar open standard for installing software that is not distribusion specific. I'm not terribly fond of RPMs. Half the time it seems to work but the program won't execute. At least if I compile it myself I see the problems firsthand. How about a special game distro for just running a game off of the boot CD? That way only the data files need to be written to the HD.
When I worked maintenance for an paartment building we ejected a lady for inadvertantly starting a fire. At first I felt bad, but it was her actions that caused the fire. In this case it is reasonable for someone to act responsibly on the net and if through your actions the ISP is harmed they should have the option of tossing you. A better ISP would simply ash that you change to a new account, but I see the validity in this. This goes right along with abusing any other service. Better yet, mutual respect. Is it reasonable if you pit yourself against a bunch of idiots to expect retaliation? I say yes, even if you feel justified. Just don't expect your ISP to foot the bill for your actions. On a side-note, the ISP is giving you access to the web, but does the agreement also cover VPN's, chat rooms etc?
I think this is where it ties into the Columbine thing. Paranoia about teen violence. They probably had to put in a call to the state prosecutor to see if they had anyone to search his computer. "seven nights in a juvenile detention facility"..."5th District Juvenile Court Judge Joseph Jackson ordered Ian sent to Cedar City's juvenile detention center because of safety concerns for him and the community." . I'm not sure about the laws in Utah, but it could have been done by Social Services. They are given a lot of leeway. At any rate the reporting is missing any information on what evidence the police had. Pink haired kid with past altercations with classmates... If his Dad said stuff like this to the police,"Lake acknowledges his son has a temper, and has gotten counseling to deal with it. "Ian's a fighter," he says.". I don't think the Judge would have objected to an extended stay.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm at it its time to dispell this entire top down power myth. I work for the second largest (private) employer in my state. I work on computers and at anytime a handfull of us could bring this company to its knees. The same is true of our engineers and accountants. Any business is made up of people and if enough of them think the environment needs changing then things change. The same has been true everywhere I have worked.
I tned to disagree with this sort of synopsis. Gone are the days where you owed loyalty to a company or product. Today's king-of-the-hill is tomorrow's street sweeper. IMHO people that beleieve this need to get a life. Go camping. Go for a bicycle ride down to the nearest park. Business is the same sharkpit it ever was and those who stand tall shall be lain low. In the real world there are only people. Everything else is made-up.
This is modern computing. To even get to the point where you can create skilled works you often spend years learning mechanical programming skills in a structured environment. Worse yet, in every age prior to our own excess productivity resulted in a class of people who devoted their lives to nothing but the arts and philosophy. Today we watch TV, play videogames and browse porn on the web.
I think to move any further we must develop the tools to make the internet a natural extension of our creativity instead of becoming mechanics. At the same time we must be enticed to want to express ourselves in ways that create greater things.
The cssht's gonns really hit the fan now. Let the big boys duke it out for awhile.
We need a technological solutions to this problem, not a legislative. If there was no method to fake e-mail then this wouldn't be a problem.
I don't think its the medium that will distingiush the next great minds. Its the content. Porn aside, we have yet to create somthing online that captures the soul of the everyman. We play to the desires of the many. The next great thing has to entice the everyman with somthing innovative that could only have existed through this new meduim. Not simply rehashing old ideas. From what I have seen we have yet to concieve this.
Is there any way that we internet users or the Open Source Community could help with Heavenco? Are there any specific software/software security need that you have? Have you considered working with individulas/groups from other countries to help politically support your operations from their native soil?
In the case of yesterday's story where the article ws in postscript and there are a lot of people at work without access to a postscript viewr, then it is a service. Not to mention cases where the site/story in question gets /.ed and the only other choice is listneing to people comment on a story they didn't read.
Picasso could barely hawk his wares for food. Maybe in time Daikatana will be seen as an autistic masterpiece too.
Stop messing with the natural order. Stop experimenting with other dimensions. For the love of humanity, just STOP!
Wouldn't this count as Trademark Infringement? Since domain names have precedent as being covered under Trademark law, shouldn't abuse of domain names also fall under Trademark/IP law? Unfortunatly this would put the onus on the abused company to do anything. Matbe IBM should get in on the action.
Step 1: View source of file in tect editor
Step 2: Replace all "("s--open paren with an open script html tag.
Step 3: replace all ")"s -close paren with a break tag then a end scrpit tag.
Step 5: save the file as filename.html and view in a browser.
The output is reasonably legible.
Rob Pike
Bell Labs
Lucent Technologies
rob@plan9.bell labs.com
Feb 21, 2000
1 A Polemic This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my feelings about systems research these days. I won't talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone's excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires action.
2 Thesis Systems software research has become a sideline to the excitement in the computing industry. When did you last see an exciting non commercial demo? Ironically, at a time when computing is almost the definition of innovation, research in both software and hardware at universities and much of industry is becoming insular, ossified, and irrelevant. There are many reasons, some avoidable, some endemic. There may be ways to improve the situation, but they will require a community wide effort.
3 Definitions Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant
4 A Field in Decline 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 New Operating Systems at SOSP "Who needs new operating systems, anyway?" you ask. Maybe no one, but then that supports my thesis. "But now there are lots of papers in file systems, performance, security, web caching, etc.," you say. Yes, but is anyone outside the research field paying attention?
5 Systems Research's Contribution to the Boom A high end workstation: _ ________________________________________________ 1990 2000 _ ________________________________________________ _ ________________________________________________ Hardware 33 MHz Mips R3000 600 MHz Alpha or Pentium III 32 megabytes of RAM 512 megabytes of RAM 10 Mbps Ethernet 100 Mbps Ethernet _ ________________________________________________ Software Unix Unix X Windows X Windows Emacs Emacs TCP/IP TCP/IP Netscape _ ________________________________________________ Language C C C++ C++ Java Perl \ a little\ _ ________________________________________________ Hardware has changed dramatically; software is stagnant.
6 Where is the Innovation? Microsoft, mostly. Exercise: Compare 1990 Microsoft software with 2000. If you claim that's not innovation, but copying, I reply that Java is to C++ as Windows is to the Macintosh: an industrial response to an interesting but technically flawed piece of systems software. If systems research was relevant, we'd see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the '70s and '80s. Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software.
7 Linux Innovation? New? No, it's just another copy of the same old stuff. OLD stuff. Compare program development on Linux with Microsoft Visual Studio or one of the IBM Java/web toolkits. Linux's success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill. Besides, Linux's cleverness is not in the software, but in the development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS \ especially software engineering\
8 What is Systems Research these days? Web caches, web servers, file systems, network packet delays, all that stuff. Performance, peripherals, and applications, but not kernels or even user level applications. Mostly, though, it's just a lot of measurement; a misinterpretation and misapplication of the scientific method. Too much phenomenology: invention has been replaced by observation. Today we see papers comparing interrupt latency on Linux vs. Windows. They may be interesting, they may even be relevant, but they aren't research. In a misguided attempt to seem scientific, there's too much measurement: performance minutiae and bad charts. By contrast, a new language or OS can make the machine feel different, give excitement, novelty . But today that's done by a cool web site or a higher CPU clock rate or some cute little device that should be a computer but isn't. The art is gone. But art is not science, and that's part of the point. Systems research cannot be just science; there must be engineering, design, and art.
9 What Happened? A lot of things: PC Microsoft Web Standards Orthodoxy Change of scale Unix Linux Startups Grandma
10 PC Hardware became cheap, and cheap hardware became good. Eventually, if it didn't run on a PC, it didn't matter because the average, mean, median, and mode computer was a PC. Even into the 1980s, much systems work revolved around new architectures \ RISC, iAPX/432, Lisp Machines\ No more. A major source of interesting problems and, perhaps, interesting solutions is gone. Much systems work also revolved around making stuff work across architectures: portability. But when hardware's all the same, it's a non issue. Plan 9 may be the most portable operating system in the world. We're about to do a new release, for the PC only. \ For old time's sake, we'll include source for other architectures, but expect almost no one will use it.\ And that's just the PC as hardware; as software, it's the same sort of story.
11 Microsoft Enough has been said about this topic. \ Although people will continue to say lots more.\ Microsoft is an easy target, but it's a scapegoat, not the real source of difficulty. Details to follow.
12 Web The web happened in the early 1990s and it surprised the computer science community as much as the commercial one. It then came to dominate much of the discussion, but not to much effect. Business controls it. \ The web came from physicists and prospered in industry.\ Bruce Lindsay of IBM: HDLC C HTTP/HTML; 3270s have been replaced by web browsers. \ Compare with Visicalc and PC.\ Research has contributed little, despite a huge flow of papers on caches, proxies, server architectures, etc.
13 Standards To be a viable computer system, one must honor a huge list of large, and often changing, standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, CORBA, Unicode, POSIX, NFS, SMB, MIME, POP, IMAP, X, ... A huge amount of work, but if you don't honor the standards you're marginalized. Estimate that 90 95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards. At another level, instruction architectures, buses, etc. have the same influence. With so much externally imposed structure, there's little slop left for novelty. Plus, commercial companies that `own' standards, e.g. Microsoft, Cisco, deliberately make standards hard to comply with, to frustrate competition. Academia is a casualty.
14 Orthodoxy Today's graduating PhDs use Unix, X, Emacs, and Tex. That's their world. It's often the only computing world they've ever used for technical work. Twenty years ago, a student would have been exposed to a wide variety of operating systems, all with good and bad points. New employees in our lab now bring their world with them, or expect it to be there when they arrive. That's reasonable, but there was a time when joining a new lab was a chance to explore new ways of working. Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination. The situation with languages is a little better many curricula include exposure to functional languages, etc. but there is also a language orthodoxy: C++ and Java. In science, we reserve our highest honors for those who prove we were wrong. But in computer science...
15 Change of scale With so many external constraints, and so many things already done, much of the interesting work requires effort on a large scale. Many person years are required to write a modern, realistic system. That is beyond the scope of most university departments. Also, the time scale is long: from design to final version can be five years. Again, that's beyond the scope of most grad students. This means that industry tends to do the big, defining projects operating systems, infrastructure, etc. and small research groups must find smaller things to work on. Three trends result: 1. Don't build, measure. \ Phenomenology, not new things.\ 2. Don't go for breadth, go for depth. \ Microspecialization, not systems work.\ 3. Take an existing thing and tweak it. I believe this is the main explanation of the SOSP curve.
16 Unix New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture and some do the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer. How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable? There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn't believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true \ Microsoft notwithstanding\ A victim of its own success: portability led to ubiquity. That meant architecture didn't matter, so now there's only one. Linux is the hot new thing... but it's just another Unix.
17 Linux the Academic Microsoft Windows The holy trinity: Linux, gcc , and Netscape. Of course, it's just another orthodoxy. These have become icons not because of what they are, but because of what they are not : Microsoft. But technically, they're not that hot. And Microsoft has been working hard, and I claim that on many \ not all\ their corresponding products are superior technically. And they continue to improve. Linux may fall into the Macintosh trap: smug isolation leading to \ near\ Besides, systems research is doing little to advance the trinity.
18 Startups Startups are the dominant competition for academia for ideas, funds, personnel, and students. \ Others are Microsoft, big corporations, legions of free hackers, and the IETF.\ In response, government funded and especially corporate research is directed at very fast `return on investment'. This distorts the priorities: Research is bent towards what can make big money \ IPO\ in a year. Horizon is too short for long term work. \ There go infrastructure and the problems of scale.\ Funding sources \ government, industry\ pressures, so there is a vicious circle. The metric of merit is wrong. Stanford now encourages students to go to startups because successful CEOs give money to the campus. The new president of Stanford is a successful computer entrepreneur.
19 Grandma Grandma's on line. This means that the industry is designing systems and services for ordinary people. The focus is on applications and devices, not on infrastructure and architecture, the domain of systems research. The cause is largely marketing, the result a proliferation of incompatible devices. You can't make money on software, only hardware, so design a niche gimmick, not a Big New Idea. Programmability once the Big Idea in computing has fallen by the wayside. Again, systems research loses out.
20 Things to Do Startups are too focused on short time scale and practical results to try new things. Big corporations are too focused on existing priorities to try new things. Startups suck energy from research. But gold rushes leave ghost towns; be prepared to move in. Fiona's story: "Why do you use Plan 9?" Go back to thinking about and building systems. Narrowness is irrelevant; breadth is relevant: it's the essence of system . Work on how systems behave and work, not just how they compare. Concentrate on interfaces and architecture, not just engineering. Be courageous. Try different things; experiment. Try to give a cool demo. Funding bodies: fund more courageously, particularly long term projects. Universities, in turn, should explore ways to let students contribute to long term projects. Measure success by ideas, not just papers and money. Make the industry want your work.
21 Things to Build There are lots of valid, useful, interesting things to do. I offer a small sample as evidence. If the field is moribund, it's not from a lack of possibilities. Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. \ In some ways, it's been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.\ Surely there are other possibilities. \ Linux's interface isn't even as good as Windows!\ There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts. The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility. The Web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let's go back to having the data come to the user instead. System administration remains a deeply difficult problem. Unglamorous, sure, but there's plenty of room to make a huge, even commercial, contribution.
22 Conclusions The world has decided how it wants computers to be. The systems software research community influenced that decision somewhat, but very little, and now it is shut out of the discussion. It has reached the point where I doubt that a brilliant systems project would even be funded, and if funded, wouldn't find the bodies to do the work. The odds of success were always low; now they're essentially zero. The community universities, students, industry, funding bodies must change its priorities. The community must accept and explore unorthodox ideas. The community must separate research from market capitalization.
Thats what I just used. Read everything between the "()"s. Not a real intellectual discussion, just someone disgusted with be marginalized out on the bleeding edge. Lots of valid points though.
Academics for Profit:The day that academics got into bed with big industry, innovation died. If a concept isn't economically profitiable they aren't likely to funt the research. The other part of the problem is that mostly the same questions keep getting asked, over and over.
Take the Road Less Traveled:What we need is to ask new questions. Like: What if somone used a transfer protocol as a storage meduim? Instead of, Whats the best UI? One question has been beaten to death and the other may lead to new innovations. New questions like: What if data storage was perpetually dynamic? Would the information be siphoned off when accessed or copied as it passes by? Are there any advantages/disadvantages to this.
But like I said, if you were to pose that question in modern day academia as a research project they would scoff at you and you would likely be off on your own. Getting funding for a project that won't likely be profitiable for the college/university isn't too likely to float.
Teacher dillution:Not to mention the quality of CS professors. I actually had a course in sotware design taught by a guy who had written exactly one full blown program application (say >5000 lines of code as a criteria.) for a warehouse program while he was in school. He didn't have a clue.
Student dillution:Worse yet, since CS/CE has become a top ten major the quality of people going into these programs has gone from those who were truely interrested in computer science to those looking to make >40K upon graduation. Why would these guys hang around in a graduate program for four extra years when they could be making the big bucks?
Before you pick up the torch on my post, yes I understand there are the rare few who really try to do innovative work. Keep chuggin'. places like SlashDot and Sourceforge are our meeting places where we can meet and hopefully share ideas.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. You have to get all the developers to add this change to their licenses. I don't know how many this means but on sych a large project it could be a monumental task.
A PHP tool to display the weather of about 3000 cities in the world.
created: May 23rd 2000, 12:57
stable: 0.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
An Enlightenment weather epplet.
created: Dec 14th 1999, 18:26
last update: March 30th 2000, 21:34
stable: none - devel: 0.2 - license: GPL
Gnome weather monitor
created: Jul 07th 1999, 07:15
last update: July 15th 1999, 21:38
stable: none - devel: 0.05-4 - license: GPL
Access realtime, local weather information from Java code.
created: Feb 15th 1999, 13:09
last update: February 16th 1999, 10:55
stable: 1.0.0 - devel: 1.0 - license: OpenSource
A KDE dock applet that can display the current weather outside.
created: Sep 01st 1999, 00:04
last update: March 26th 2000, 13:30
stable: none - devel: 0.96 - license: GPL
pyWeather gets local weather info and mails it out to any given email address
created: Jun 29th 1999, 22:57
last update: June 30th 1999, 12:53
stable: 0.1b - devel: none - license: GPL
Get up-to-date weather information for any city, world wide
created: Dec 28th 1998, 16:08
last update: January 03rd 1999, 13:23
stable: none - devel: 1.0-pre4 - license: GPL
Get, store and subsequently display current US Cities Weather Information.
created: Feb 08th 1999, 19:55
last update: February 09th 1999, 18:32
stable: 1.0 - devel: none - license: freely distributable
Shows environmental conditions in space.
created: Aug 27th 1999, 10:55
last update: August 28th 1999, 21:46
stable: 1.04 - devel: none - license: GPL
Displays your current local weather conditions.
created: Aug 27th 1999, 10:39
last update: August 28th 1999, 21:44
stable: 1.31 - devel: none - license: GPL
Shell script that downloads radar images using an Accuweather account
created: Sep 30th 1999, 16:49
stable: 1.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
Application and library for talking to Dallas Semi 1-wire devices
created: Aug 09th 1999, 23:52
last update: November 12th 1999, 13:33
stable: 0.1.2 - devel: none - license: freely distributable
Weather forecast in an Epplet
created: May 14th 2000, 01:57
last update: May 14th 2000, 07:16
stable: 0.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
Perl module for processing aviation weather reports.
created: Feb 20th 1999, 18:20
last update: November 18th 1999, 23:04
stable: 1.13 - devel: none - license: GPL
GTK+ wx200d Weather Client
created: Feb 17th 2000, 01:26
last update: February 17th 2000, 03:21
stable: 1.0 - devel: none - license: GPL
Perl Module to grab images with dynamic URLs from the Internet
created: Feb 18th 1999, 00:59
last update: May 25th 2000, 04:07
stable: 1.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
Pseudo-AI IRC bot written in Perl
created: Jul 16th 1999, 10:46
last update: October 27th 1999, 13:10
stable: 0.44.3 - devel: 0.44.2 - license: freely distributable
A diary/journal program for KDE.
created: Dec 10th 1999, 18:26
last update: December 10th 1999, 21:13
stable: none - devel: 0.0.1 - license: GPL
Displa ys system statistics on an external LCD display
created: Apr 20th 1998, 15:38
last update: January 30th 2000, 18:27
stable: 0.3.4 - devel: 0.4-pre9 - license: GPL
An extendable Neural Network
created: Aug 08th 1999, 10:49
last update: August 09th 1999, 20:19
stable: none - devel: 0.8 - license: GPL
I think the last time I tried it was for a mysql JDBC driver. I'll try it again and see what happens.
What do you need the an OS running on the hard disk for anyway? There are already good graphical utilities for setting up most hardware. What would be the difference if the user wen't through driver configuration the first time they boot to the cd (or if the boot cd OS read the config files off the HD or a mix of either method). The OS running via the cd could then write/save the settings to the HD with the other datafiles. At that point the game would use whatever API(s) the game was written for.
Well, I download the RPM, follow the instructions for installing cookbook right out of the docs. 80-90% don't work. Of couse I could read more about RPS/RPM troubleshooting but then wouln't that defeat the purpose. Actually, at least a few years ago I got erros about not having the correct libs installed. Now I get nothing. Doing make from the prompt is much easier, unless there are a bunch of flags to set.
Personally I think that if you shoot your mouth off in a hot venue you shouldn't be suprised by vehement attacks. It the case of the fire, she tossed a coat over a lamp. I'm sure the lamp manufacturer shares some responsibility for building such a hot lamp, but in the end she chose to buy the lamp and toss her coat onto it. You know, responsibliity for your actions. Sometimes you have to accept a little blame yourself.
Does anyone know of a similar open standard for installing software that is not distribusion specific. I'm not terribly fond of RPMs. Half the time it seems to work but the program won't execute. At least if I compile it myself I see the problems firsthand. How about a special game distro for just running a game off of the boot CD? That way only the data files need to be written to the HD.
Yes, but how many times has somthing seemed to work only to flop when implemented across the board.
When I worked maintenance for an paartment building we ejected a lady for inadvertantly starting a fire. At first I felt bad, but it was her actions that caused the fire. In this case it is reasonable for someone to act responsibly on the net and if through your actions the ISP is harmed they should have the option of tossing you. A better ISP would simply ash that you change to a new account, but I see the validity in this. This goes right along with abusing any other service. Better yet, mutual respect. Is it reasonable if you pit yourself against a bunch of idiots to expect retaliation? I say yes, even if you feel justified. Just don't expect your ISP to foot the bill for your actions. On a side-note, the ISP is giving you access to the web, but does the agreement also cover VPN's, chat rooms etc?
I think this is where it ties into the Columbine thing. Paranoia about teen violence. They probably had to put in a call to the state prosecutor to see if they had anyone to search his computer. "seven nights in a juvenile detention facility"..."5th District Juvenile Court Judge Joseph Jackson ordered Ian sent to Cedar City's juvenile detention center because of safety concerns for him and the community." . I'm not sure about the laws in Utah, but it could have been done by Social Services. They are given a lot of leeway. At any rate the reporting is missing any information on what evidence the police had. Pink haired kid with past altercations with classmates... If his Dad said stuff like this to the police ,"Lake acknowledges his son has a temper, and has gotten counseling to deal with it. "Ian's a fighter," he says.". I don't think the Judge would have objected to an extended stay.