Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy

["Dennis D. Jensen" <dendecjen@yahoo.dk>]

Spreading a little FUD are we?

OK. I couldn't help it...

--- Anastasopoulos S <anastas@ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, andrey mirtchovski wrote:
>
> > this one comes from a heated slashdot discussion
> someone had with somebody
> > else:
> >
> > 	"Plan9 is just another Hurd -- a theoretically
> great OS that
> > 	only gets used by a few people. The most it can
> hope for is that
> > 	its best principles are adopted by a real OS."
> >
> > just letting you know where you are: andrey
> >
> > ps: i'll gladly accept suggestions as to what this
> OS may be (inferno is
> > honorably excluded) and promise to summarize it in
> the Wiki :)
> >
> >
>
> Obviously it is not yet ready for prime time. It
> lacks a web brownser, a
> better web server, quicktime, C++( I really like it
> ), GUI, a DBMS etc...
> The core OS is however designed very well and all
> these can be integrated
> very smoothly.

What was the quote? "Fashion is such a abomination
that it must change every 6 months." -- cannot
remember the name of the author.

> Nowadays the tendency is to provide web based
> distributed services and use
> the brownser as the terminal. I can't say if that is
> good or bad but this
> is how business are done today. In a plan9 world we
> would have a data base
> server that would serve something like SQL/, we
> would import it in our
> name space and then use our toolchain to manipulate
> it(cat, echo, awk or
> custom ones). In the other world this is done with
> mozilla, PHP, MySQL.

I wouldn't be to sure. Consider Apple's IPod.

James Robertson of Cincom (smalltalk) has an
interesting blog on the subject:

"Years ago, the Smalltalk development team used a tool
called Scopus (long since chewed up by Siebel) for bug
tracking. Engineering was never happy with that, and
built a homebrew system called MARS (Minimal Action
Request System). It was first deployed back around
1995, right after VisualWave was developed - as a web
application. This was nifty - it was easily accessible
to any of the development staff that needed to get to
the bug system, and ran in any browser. The only
problem was speed - things like Query By Example were
none too speedy when the steps included:

Send the query
Server processes the query
Client browser has to render the query results

For a long time, we just put up with this. Then a few
months ago, I hacked together a simple UI client that
hit the back end (query by AR number only) via a
servlet. Interestingly, getting results displayed
outside a browser was much, much simpler. I integrated
the simple client tool as an internal plugin for
BottomFeeder. A couple of our engineers ran with this
idea, and started working on a more capable client
using Opentalk - our Smalltalk-Smalltalk distribution
framework. Now, using an ssh tunnel or VPN connection,
any of the internal users can query and update the
system much more easily.

This is interesting because it represents a move away
from a browser based interface and over to a smart
client - back to the future, as it were. Using this
approach, using the bug tool is far less painful,
because the roundtrip communication with the server is
so much faster. MS is moving this way in LongHorn; I
wonder how many other people are doing similar
things?"

Web clients only you say? Not necessarily.

> An a final note, i completely disagree that is can
> survive if the other
> OSes adopt its best features. Because we have one
> architecture(x86) that
> means we must have one OS(linux i suppose). Plan9 is
> another design(better
> or not you decide) and i would like to see more new
> OSes or ideas rather
> than see linux take the world.

Have you looked at the number of small
gnu/linux-distributions lately? You can find a mini
gnu/linux dist just for the purpose of multimedia :)
And what about OpenBeOS and it's cousins? Hurd is
progressing although it's only a plan9-clone on the
surface, if there's any similarity at all. Recently
Squeak SmallTalk was put on compact flash card on top
of a modified linux-kernel, and some lispers (SBCL --
Steel Bank Common Lisp) are trying something similar.
A smaller or more specialized environment, while
general enough for common use, seems to be the goal.

One architecture == one OS? It sounds like nonsens to
me. On my stationary mascine there is four OS'es and I
know people who regularly use five different OS'es.

These days more ordinary people come to me for LiveCDs
filled with a small or "polished" gnu/linux and even
some of my technical friends have shifted to Mac OS/X
in hope of a more consistent environment.

I think plan9 still has a place.

Put another way: It doesn't look anymore dead to me
than five years ago. Claims of death usually comes
from people using different systems. It depends on the
community, and plan9 will attract it's share, side by
side with the many gnu/linux distros.

--
Dennis Decker Jensen


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