Re: [9fans] Laura's theme (Long) (Was: [9fans] I've got 4 student intern (undergraduates) here.)

["Boyd Roberts" <boyd@fr.inter.net>]

> If the students have encountered the pseudo-network-transparency of X11
> or NFS, they'll immediately appreciate the advantages of the Plan 9
> approach.

as i recall, the returning NFS guru's from Sun (have they served an
TM injunction on the owner of that star yet?), when i was working for
_the instruction set_, set about to teach us about it, in an internal
course.

i must have been 23 at the time and as soon as i heard UDP mentioned
i asked questions along the lines of 'are they mad'?  i was told not
to worry -- hah, hah.  real worry set in when they asked me to port
the kernel in 7 weeks (16 weeks being the current VAX -> 68020 port
speed of the 2.0 release and the '20 was far from stable -- all
sorts of glue to get it to take its faults/lumps correctly).

well it didn't take too long, once i realised that it was just a
in-line diff-ing of similar sources driven by someone who knew both
kernels, the odd machine dependent glop and byte order problem,
followed by a good thrashing to death against a Sun to see if it
worked -- it didn't.  all the world's a vax so some of XDR was just
hosed.  fix that, thrash it, play chess -- we're _ahead_ of schedule.

i think this is the 'storm trooper' school of coding.

maybe 'starship trooper' school if you're a yes fan:

    shining, flying, purple wolfhound show me where you are

much like those XDR bugs.

but the line is from 'yours is no disgrace'.