Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno

["ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On 3/6/07, Vester Thacker <vester.thacker@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, I apologize for offending you. But what ideas are you suggesting
> that we migrate toward?

no, sorry, I was kind of short. No problem :-)

I actually agree with your points in many ways. I just don't know how
to get around the problem of showing this system to people. It's such
a powerful system, and it drives me crazy when the first reaction is
"I don't like that GUI". I'm talking BEFORE I've typed anything in the
little window. These are not dumb people. But they have work to do,
and they don't see that climbing the learning curve is worth it.

Then I come to this list and people say "fuck 'em". I don't know,,
seems like an unconstructive attitude to me.

There's lots of stuff missing, as I pointed out at other times, in
other notes. A lot of things that are missing are needed to get
continued $$$ to keep things going. As jmk pointed out some time ago,
plan9.bell-labs is supported in part by DOE, but at some point, if we
can't show certain things, then the money goes away. The recompete
happens this summer.

The isses of Python and gcc are not simply academic. They're part of
the DOE meal ticket.

Users matter ... I've just gone through an interesting few years of
fielding the highest performing cluster software anywhere, and having
people get upset because they can't run emacs or xterm or gdb on each
and every one of 1024 cluster nodes. The system we have starts up
2048-cpu MPI jobs in 3 seconds, and the competitors literally take
minutes (one recent system). It boots 1024 or 2048 nodes in 2-4
minutes ,and the system replacing it can take hours -- yep, hours --
to boot. This is all without a local disk, mind you. But people want
that ssh login ... and /etc/passwd ... and xterm ... and so on. it's a
conservative world in computing, nowadays. Everybody wants everything
to look like a linux desktop, even a cluster node. It's kind of sad.
Clusters are stuck in a 1997 mentality.

So, yeah, users can be frustrating, but they are your meal ticket.
Saying "fuck em" only works just so long -- as you may have noticed,
most of the Plan 9 guys are at google, running large Linux clusters
... and I believe many of them carry macos systems around now.

ron