From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] alright, this should be interesting From: Charles Forsyth Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 23:47:02 +0100 In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: f10a17c6-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 one aspect of `personality' can be hard to emulate, and that is ease of getting the whole system to be more nearly correct (and maintainable, given that the underlying system that's doing the emulating might constantly be changing, with independently changing variants). it's the old problem of trying to build a sturdy reliable thing on top of lots of wobbly bits (``they said i was daft to build castle on swamp, but i built it all the same, just to show them''). mind you, i suppose that's essentially what is done when an effective distributed system is built on top of lots of cheap components that often break down and fall into the swamp.