The whole "everything in the cloud", "let someone else worry about storage" view, at least the way he promotes them, are more like VCS than let's say Git (or pick another DVCS)... you have a conceptual "central" point of failure, even if this "point" is a network of servers distributed around the world.<p>I want STORAGE ON EVERY DEVICE (not volatile!), and and automatic system to sync it with all my other devices, WITHOUT NEEDING THE CLOUD, just set up and ad-hoc mesh network and sync everyth (yeah, there's gonna be smth like "merges" for OS settings and music collection changes but I can do with that). The "cloud" should be just infrastructure, nothing else added, and I shouldn't be distrupted when my connection to it fails... "Always connected"? No, no, no, I'll always want to be able to work offline and be able to sync/merge/push/pull even my OS, its settings and software (and be able to "branch" my and keep multiple versions of software and all that).<p>DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency.<p>Rob Pike's ideal of "homogeneity" in computing really misses the distinction between distributed and central syncing, the security and reliability implications etc. ...and large local storage capacity and "enough" computing power on all devices is needed for this. I'd rather be "part of the mesh" than "connected to the cloud mesh", because I think the distinctions are important and they require different things from "client devices" (all devices should be "clients"! no servers "in the cloud" for me please!)
Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done.
He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/
I can't get behind the idea of every computer I interact with being a dumb terminal. I don't want to assume I'll always have a connection to the mother machine. Even in some ideal world where I always have a high speed connection that never fails, can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down? Not really.<p>I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the cloud" and thence to other devices (and other people). But if I'm in the hills or the server goes down, hey, I still have a perfectly good computer in my pocket.
> When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.<p>For me, Dropbox has brought me that.<p>I still use Github and the like, but my computers now share such a similar setup (all Linux, install Go, install Dropbox, install Sublime Text 2, done) that I can walk out of the office without doing anything special to my machine, go home and pick up literally where I left off.<p>My git repositories are cloned into my Dropbox folders so that when I move from one place to another but am not ready to check in (local branch in state of flux) I still have that in multiple locations.<p>As Sublime Text 2 stores the project and file info in a plain text file, that state comes with me too.<p>My $GOROOT is also in my Dropbox folder, so if I've grabbed something via "go get" that also follows me around.<p>I view Dropbox as an ever present working cache, not as storage. Things like documents are in Google Drive and accessed via the browser.<p>On Friday I went to a meeting at 3pm that I thought would just be 20 minutes. It turned out that it took 3 hours, and I hadn't closed ST2 or anything I was working on... no problem, I went home instead of back to the office and my work was exactly where I left off with the same files open in ST2.<p>I think the only thing that doesn't follow with me are the undo buffers in ST2.
I always wonder, how do people like this justify their level of trust for cloud providers and the government?<p>It's as if a majority of the hardcore hackers have gone "Fuck it, I'm being watched anyway, they might as well be backing up my stuff as well."<p>Are we past the point of it being a topic of debate except by people like me who have the illusion of choice?
Rob Pike doesn't want a dumb terminal. He wants a powerful new infrastructure.<p><pre><code> My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world.
</code></pre>
I can relate to what he wants: he cares about his data, not about what his data is on. Every time I upgrade machines or move to a different machine, I have to either reconstruct my environment or I have to tolerate an absence of some data that would be nice to have. How amazing would it be if I can could use any 'terminal' anywhere and have complete access to all of my personal data without having to tote around a physical piece of hardware that's 'mine'.<p>Any geek's 'bat-cave' is testament to this need: a Mac Plus sitting underneath a table next to Commodore 64. On top of the table lays a 486 DX/2 PC with Super VGA and a Soundblaster compatible card decaying inside. Everywhere strings of SCSI, RS-232, Ethernet spaghetti encircle cases of floppies (both 5.25 and 3.5). Where's the data? Anything precious has made it's way through different formats to whatever you're on now. Everything else is slowly rotting away.<p>Outsourcing the batcave to this ubiquitous seems much more appetizing to me. Plus it leaves me room for my 1st and 2nd gen Transformer collection.
<i>I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine.</i><p>I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google and Apple to move into this space more aggressively, but at best they've all only just scraped the surface of what's possible.
He plants a couple of nice flags:<p>"This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary."<p>and<p>"In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work."
<i>I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.</i><p>Interesting that someone so steeped in the "old ways" of Unix dumb terminals is also, seemingly, such a good matchup for the "far future" vision of Chrome OS. What's old is new again?
If you haven't seen acme in action, it is pretty crazy and interesting. Basically it makes heavy use of the mouse, and any typed word can be invoked like a command.<p>Here is a tutorial.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M</a>
His dream setup:
"... carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage."<p>How last century. I thought he would have at least suggested a hologram projection screen combined with some bio implants. ;-)
I clicked the link seeing the high point count and thinking I might find some gems of productivity I could pull into my own daily routine, but instead I found some discussion of clouds and terminals and other things that are philosophically interesting but tangibly well argued and discussed ad nauseam.<p>Of course, the article is tiny and talks abstractly about something that <i>everyone</i> has an opinion on, so of course it has up lots of votes.<p>I am disappoint.
I like how his photo matches the colors of the blog design (pink & grey), obviously on purpose. This tells me that he pays attention to detail. Not every Unix hacker would change his clothes for some random interview on the web.
I don't think his phone system analogy is correct. Yes, you can pick up any phone and make a call, but you can't receive a call to 'your' number from any phone. i.e. there is still state associated with the phone network, and landlines are not portable in the same sense that mobiles and laptops are.
Some of us do not like the cloud as much as Rob Pike because we are worried about censorship and corporate misconduct (what do you do if your stuff is suddenly gone one day?).<p>The "always accessible" and "continue where you left" paradigmata we can still relate to though: I've been using screen in ssh / putty windows for almost 20 years now, I used VNC for some time (even wrote a 16 bit client for DOS that ran off a floppy disk and with 2MB RAM...) for the same purpose.<p>Something like VNC but with a "responsive" UI that adapts to the device currently used (tablet, laptop, desktop) while still retaining all the state needed for the user to continue where he left, that'd be something novel and useful after all these years.
Personally, I switched to a tiled WM because I didn't want to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse all the time. I want an editor which I can handle using keyboard alone, and only use the mouse when I really have to (web, drawing, games - perhaps I should use a trackball).
Acme relies too much on the mouse for me, but I like the idea a lot.<p>There's another couple of issues: syntax highlighting, large scale refactoring (which is not easy either with vi or emacs atm).<p>However, once you get accustomed to a certain workflow, it becomes difficult to accept something new. Maybe I should give it a shot.
Many of the things he says I agree with, others I don't. I think that's the thing with computing. Everyone's tastes are at least slightly different. We don't all want exactly the same things.<p>I think the big failure is programmers' inability to bring these desired advances, like what Plan 9 achieved, to a wider audience. I mean, he says he had this wondwerful environment at Bell Labs, but almost no one outside of Bell Labs gets to experience that pleasure. Why not? They open sourced it too late? I'm not sure I buy that. It's still better than UNIX, so what's changed? It's like there's some assumption that people just don't deserve anything better, and there's no point in working towards it. Except if you're at Bell Labs.<p>We're stuck with old UNIX, with all of its historical cruft. Like him, I've just learned to cope with it. (It's funny he's complaining about argv limits (see 2004 Slashdot interview). That seems to suggest he likes to compose super long argv's. No? Maybe he does not like xargs? I never did. But then I've seen similarly unexplainable limits in the Plan 9 port to UNIX. Why can't I have a Plan 9 sed command file with a very large number of commands?)<p>We could certainly have better. Perhaps it's simply a matter of getting behind the right projects, instead of just following the money and being lazy... working at Google and buying MacBook Pros. That's sort of like giving up. Complacency.<p>Honestly, "grep'ing the web" just doesn't sound all that "amazing" to me. I don't care how many servers they have running, Google is not Bell Labs.
"The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that."<p>It exists! It's called a sunray<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray</a>
I think it was a good post overall, but what got to me was his lack of doing anything about his issues.
When Mr. Pike wanted a revolutionary OS, plan9 was created.
When Mr. Pike wanted a language fixing problems dealt with in C, Go was created.
When it comes to a machine that's roll-able without persistent local storage, he merely wishes for it to be a reality? I can understand if, through working with Google, the only research in that area is tied to the Chromebook, but still. He certainly has the capability to cause influence (First link on hn), but he's not getting into the core of the problem. I love this guy just as much as the rest of the community, but I find it puzzling steps aren't already being taken to make this next dream of his a reality. I also agree that cloud is not the answer for everything, so it would be enlightening for a new tablet-esque roll able device to be made that swims against the general Mac-inspired cloud tablet trend. But if Rob Pike isn't going to make it a reality, I doubt someone else will release it in his vision or to his liking. Perhaps he has a few ideas or tricks to make things "just work". And that's what I'd look forward to.
i will +1 his love for the 11" MacBook Air ... people are always skeptical that i can do pretty much all of my work on it (yes, even some coding), but after almost two years, i still haven't found its small size to be too limiting.
A surprisingly ideological interview. Combined with my run-ins with the go-nuts, I have to imagine there's some sort of general cultural coding cohort I've not fully understood yet.<p>This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.
Payphones are annoying. It might be broken, or have gum jammed in it, or someone might be using it, or you have to track one down, and you have to be sitting at it to receive a call.<p>Cellphones are in your pocket, come with your personal phone directory, are cheaper per minute, and you don't have to stand still to use them.<p>I'm really surprised that Rob thinks people would want to deal with a computer-as-payphone model. And wireless data networks <i>suck ass</i> in North America. His ideal world is probably at least 20 years away.<p>On the other hand, I <i>love</i> thin terminals. Screw local stateless networked computation. Give me a snappy remote interface to a beefy terminal server and i'm happy. That's an interface you literally can pick back up at any time with no performance cost due to being far away from the data.
I like his ideal, all the work being accessible no matter what device you've got in front of you but the whole idea only works with ubiquitous network connectivity. I commute a couple of hours most days through areas where the 3G quality is non-existant to poor, occasionally reaching 'Usable', so I'd be doomed to being unproductive. Caching gets you so far, but there's still plenty of rough spots to the idea.<p>It's definitely a nice idea though, maybe some day it'll happen. Nice to see Rob Pike getting a usesthis.com post, slightly (but not much) surprised to see him using Macs as his primary choice.
<i>> What would be your dream setup?
I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve.</i><p>This is exactly my idea of changing from our current memory hierarchy to take advantage of the new SSD and cloud capabilities we have now: "Fat Cache."<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522</a>
Rob also uses tinted glasses and that shirt.<p>I doubt the awesome bits of plan9 that he compared to a telephone (pay phone) can be replicated by a higher level service like amazon/google cloud something, git or some other dvcs. 9p is a protocol after all.<p>He also mentioned doing computing somewhere else, and not just storing data in the cloud.<p>So please tell me I just need to configure git differently or sign up for amazons newest whatever.<p>This seems relevant as well <a href="http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/" rel="nofollow">http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/</a>
<p><pre><code> My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have
to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not
even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around
with me in order to function in the modern world. The world
should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for
me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right,
my life would become much simpler and so could yours.
</code></pre>
Wow that sounds like a dream!
<p><pre><code> "The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere."
</code></pre>
Reminds me of the mini glass that Tony Stark is carrying with him all around the 2nd Iron Man movie, see here: <a href="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9694286/iron-man-computer.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9694286/iron-man-computer.jpeg</a><p>In the movie Tony (Iron Man) can control the infrastructure around him with this device, just like Rob Pike described.
At the risk of causing a flamewar, it sounds like he wants Microsoft surface. It has all of those attributes when backed by SkyDrive apart from the fact you can't roll it up.
Using ssh, screen, and a prgmr instance, I can access my stuff and have the same state for almost all of my dev work anywhere I can use a chrome browser with the ssh plugin or any ssh terminal app. That is pretty close to what he's talking about I suppose. As of now my iphone, ipad, and laptop can all jump on my little instance and I'm good to go.<p>That being said, I don't think going 100% cloud is for everybody yet, but we're getting closer.
I dream of Rob's dream setup as well. I suspect many people do. But I hope it shouldn't be too hard to make it a reality.<p>A smart phone which is always connected to remote storage (the cost could be a problem here?), and how about an electronic paper keyboard which rolls up to the size of a pen, that's somehow attached to or part of the phone.<p>Sit down somewhere, connect, unroll the keyboard, and there is your computing environment.
I like the no-local-storage dream. But what about when you're at the airport or the hotel network is broken or on holiday in indochina, and want to do some hacking? There's probably no network, or if there is it'll be expensive, slow and unreliable. Though I struggle with git, I love it that you can easily keep a tree pulled (even if you don't actively use it), and use that when you need it.
I'm a bit surprised that he is happy with a Mac Book. His editor acme requires three mouse buttons and Apple is designed for one mouse button use. Does he use an external mouse all the time?<p>And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.
Some very interesting stuff here. Everyone should look at this screencast about the acme text editor: <a href="http://research.swtch.com/acme" rel="nofollow">http://research.swtch.com/acme</a>. This thing is wild and crazy in a way that's totally unexpected. I have no idea if the ideas are actually good, but they sure are different.
I'm hesitant to move to the cloud until privacy issues are fundamentally addressed. All these vendors pouring over user data is not in our interest. I think it will take laws and government action to stop this sort of privacy invasion. Until that happens, I'll keep my local storage.
I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in a network, and might make tasks like massively distributed map/reduce more accessible.
Maybe we can ask him what its like to be coding at 50?<p>For a serious question, does acme lend itself to a chording keyboard? It seems like this is taking another step towards Engelbert's vision in the mother of all demos.
Count me in as another "synchronized local storage" person, for the typical two reasons: I don't want to rely on a connection to the cloud, and I don't want to have to trust the cloud storage providers.