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[107.215.223.229]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id q13-20020a0566022f0d00b0070780586a51sm429458iow.51.2023.01.19.12.01.53 (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Thu, 19 Jan 2023 12:01:53 -0800 (PST) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 16.0 \(3731.300.101.1.3\)) From: Bakul Shah In-Reply-To: Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2023 12:01:43 -0800 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: References: <202301180943.30I9hrOw030485@freefriends.org> <202301181513.30IFDDUJ015224@freefriends.org> <20230118151446.GD2964@mcvoy.com> <202301190802.30J82KwQ025718@freefriends.org> <20230119150434.GA626@mcvoy.com> To: Adam Thornton X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.3731.300.101.1.3) Message-ID-Hash: TKY62JXCI75O2EX75BMCZW2Y6Y5YLSNC X-Message-ID-Hash: TKY62JXCI75O2EX75BMCZW2Y6Y5YLSNC X-MailFrom: bakul@iitbombay.org X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: On Jan 19, 2023, at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton wrote: >=20 > 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. >=20 > 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. >=20 > 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.