[TUHS] The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>]

On Jan 19, 2023, at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The era of general-purpose computers won't end.

What I meant is it will likely become much more
niche just like mainframe programming.

What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
few apps.

> The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity, general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to do only one thing.
> 
> But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things.  Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations controlling the society where the developers come from.  Some of them will be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings.  Some will be done by enthusiasts.  But I don't think we are too far from the world where you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick with a knife that's been in your family for generations.
> 
> But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was, what, 1984?

What I was reflecting on is there may not be a real
need for virtual memory if you are running just a few
apps and memory is plentiful!

We have relied on virtual memory for creating protection
boundaries but that has not been enough. In Unix a child
process has all the privileges a parent has. If instead the
permission model for a new process is to permit only what
it needs[1], including memory, you can get rid of containers
(such as docker) and jails (as on FreeBSD). What is more,
this can be done without virtual memory. Further, the same
model can be extended to distributed computing. If this
becomes reality, why wouldn't vendors go for that?

So yes, the hardware will be capable of general purpose
computing (Turing complete?) but will vendors allow access
to it?

[1] As Capability folks say, this is the Principle Of
Least Authority or POLA.