Re: [9fans] So What is P9 good for.....

["Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

- in the long run, an OS which uses integer IDs is totally useless
  for distributed computing. I learned that one the hard way
  11 years ago with a large enough Condor flock. Globus should have
  learned it the hard way by now but for some reason they have not.
- "you can't secure a system with a privileged user" - Spaf
  How many other OSes avoid having root/administrator/you-name-it
  accounts. Bad deal. Plan 9 avoids this mess.
- device numbers are a Bad Thing, but the various Unix derivatives
  still are having trouble doing a devfs that works well. No such
  issues in Plan 9.
- It's nice to be able to (as a user) mount and unmount things, esp.
  CDROMs etc. Doing it without setuid-root kludgery is even nicer
- Graphics that you can program without a 2000-page stack of packs.
  Now there's a concept.

That's just a few things.

It all boils down to Unix being past the point of smelling bad, now it's a
set of decaying bones with no smell. We need to figure out what comes
next. Arguably, that should have been Plan 9 ca. 1991, but that's another
story. It's hard to believe that in 10 years we'll all still be running
Linux or BSD, so it makes sense to try to see what we SHOULD be running.

ron