On 05/18/2011 05:56 PM, blstu...@bellsouth.net wrote:
On 05/18/2011 05:12 AM, Jacob Todd wrote:
Writing/porting web stuff to plan 9 will be hard. Writing something that
accesses plan 9 from the web will be less hard.
"The KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) acronym has been popular in business
for decades, but its message has never been more important and, or
useful for many." -- Rob Tannen
"When simplifying, is's critical to target the right features for
excision, based on the customers' actual needs" -- Rob Tannen
I'm confused. Why are we using business ideas to constrain what
we are doing with a research system? It seems to me that what
we work on (outside what puts food on the table) should be driven
primarily by what we find intellectually stimulating. I personally
get no stimulation over the idea of porting an existing web browser.
However, the idea of an emulator in a highly portable environment
was interesting enough that I looked around some and found a
PDP-11 emulator running 6th Edition (also in js). I couldn't help
but think about extending Bellard's work to include a drawable
device and a network interface and then building a Plan 9 terminal
for it, or running native Inferno on it, or using the same ideas to
build a Dis VM in js, or... It's true that utility can be a meaningful
motivator for what questions we look at, but if all you care about
is utility, it's hard to beat an android tablet. Like most of us, I
worry about what customers want in my day job. But what
customers want is boring to the point of suicide. To borrow from
the bard; "There is more in the computing universe than is dreamt
of in the PC/Web philosophy." Plan 9 and Inferno are the best
places I've found to glimpse that hidden beauty.
How useful a research could be which is not backed by a business idea?
Who will fund such projects, why and for how long?
OTOH, nobody is going to stop anyone going his/her own way; everyone has
a right to beat his/her drum and that too either at any rhythm or no
rhythm at all ;)
However, the *real* programmers are different and they should/must know
well what they are doing and why?
--
Balwinder S "bdheeman" Dheeman
(http://werc.homelinux.net/contact/)
