From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <463D7047.6030200@conducive.org> Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 14:05:59 +0800 From: W B Hacker User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070221 SeaMonkey/1.1.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5b50e3d6-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 lucio@proxima.alt.za wrote: *snip* > > PS: I keep thinking that this is not 9fans, but rather > alt.folklore.computers. Does anyone out there have a copy of > Hollingdale and Toothill (Digital Computers, was it?) that they would > be willing to part with for a moderate amount of money? > > Well... 'C' *has* had an inordinately long run, and that has not always pleased even its creators. No tool remains 'good enough' forever, let alone 'best and only'. Similarly, Plan9 itself seems to have gone from bleeding edge to minor sideshow without much time on stage in between. Speaking of respect, admiration, use as a source of inspiration, partial emulation - not of 'popularity', per se. A Loonix 'distro' it is not. UTF-8 - for which I am very grateful, seems to be the most visible and enduring contribution, and few who depedn on it are even aware that it was Plan9 related. Maybe it is again time to do something new and shed another round of baggage - even if it is not HP Maxim's '.. whole nine yards'. Available CPU power is astonishing nowadays. More than we can actually put to work on personal task if not 'servicing' (as in animal husbandry) MS Orifice and their parasites. How about a voice-driven, speaker-independent human-machine interface? Demonstrated, and quite well, even with Mandarin, by IBM on a mainframe no more powerful THEN than commodity CPU and aoofrdable RAM are NOW. A natural for remote 'plumbing' over a 'net. Speech bandwidth need is really small compared to VNC or large file transfer for local manipulation when all ou want is the *answer* the human PA we can no longer afford to emply coudl have gotten for you. Hands free, and surely beats hell out of those itty-bitty keypads... could even make acme/rio paging model finally make sense... Computer voice: . user's voice: ['more' | 'repeat' | 'end' | 'next' | 'new'| 'snarf'] ;-) .. hmm .. or was Plan9 involved in AT&T automated attendant / directory service interfaces in the first place? ... seems a natural fit to the networking model. Bill