Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.

— Rob Pike

local_irq_save() and local_irq_restore() were mistakes :( It's silly to write what appears to be a C function and then have it operate like Pascal (warning: I last wrote some Pascal in 66 B.C.).

— Andrew Morton

So this is it. The big step why we did all the work over the past kernel releases. Now everything is prepared, so nothing protects us from doing that big step.

           |  |            \  \ nnnn/^l      |  |
           |  |             \  /     /       |  |
           |  '-,.__   =>    \/   ,-`    =>  |  '-,.__
           | O __.´´)        (  .`           | O __.´´)
            ~~~   ~~          ``              ~~~   ~~

— Jiri Slaby

So really Rasberry Pi and Broadcom - get a big FAIL for even bothering to make a press release for this, if they'd just stuck the code out there and gone on with things it would have been fine, nobody would have been any happier, but some idiot thought this crappy shim layer deserved a press release, pointless.

— Dave Airlie

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Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 25, 2012 10:07 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

I think I have to file Rob Pike's piece under "interesting but wrong". The only way I can get his phone analogy to make sense is if it's delivered from the standpoint of someone who never receives calls and never calls individuals.

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 25, 2012 20:08 UTC (Thu) by hamjudo (subscriber, #363) [Link]

Rob Pike worked at Bell Labs, which was part of the phone company. He had access to the nice call forwarding interface. It was relatively painless for employees to forward their office number to any phone with direct inward dialing. Likewise, all outgoing calls went through an 800 number, to the switch in the office in New Jersey, and out from there. Thus, as far as caller id was concerned, it always appeared as if the employee was dialing from the phone in their office.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 7, 2012 20:01 UTC (Wed) by quanstro (guest, #77996) [Link]

i think you misunderstand. rob pike wasn't talking about anything
as specific as a pots interface.

the design of plan 9 allows one to put together a (up-to) per-process
uniform namespace that looks largely like a traditional unix name space.
but it is in fact radically different under the covers. parts of that namespace
can be on other machines. you might have a ftp file server serving /n/ftp/...
locally and a remote plan 9 machine serving a big archive mounted on
/n/archive. you might have a the kernel cons file server serving /dev/cons
and other files. you might have /net.alt (and ip stack running on exotic
networking) imported from another machine. as you can see the naming
is uniform (i'm glossing over a bit), and we can mix protocols at any level
and replace any level with mount or bind. this is all because of uniform
naming. unfortunately as rob himself pointed out in "the hideous name"
naming schemes like uris really mess this up. and of course the reality
of other systems does too. so one ends up stitching together a frankenstein.

please check out the papers. my ramblings can't do the system justice.

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 26, 2012 16:31 UTC (Fri) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]

> Jiri is really brave, to walk around the tty code with bare feet. I hope his tetanus shots are up to date.

This is "quote of the week" material as well. We must go deeper.