Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 25, 2012 10:07 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
Parent article: Quotes of the week

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.

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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.