Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

What I was thinking was that all my data are somewhere in The Cloud and whatever machine I use to access them (workstation, my hobby home laptop, tablet, or phone) I get access to the same data. Perhaps I don’t have all applications for all data (thinking that tablet or phone), then I cannot access those, but for those data which I have application for I can access the exact same data. And of course all that over the Internet, so fully secure, with authorizations and all that crap. And all that cached on the local disc, because otherwise latency will kill any user experience. It should be the normal state of everyday affairs not something like pulling your teeth slowly.

If you try something like that today you have NFS or Samba or stuff like that, which is unuseable for everyday work over even slightly non-local network (not mentioning a potential security disaster, so one switches to something even more obscure like sshfs and that’s even slower; NFSv4 may be more secure). Or you have some ultra-high-level stuff like Coda/OpenAFS etc. which requires really high-end hardware (no chance of running it on my tablet, phone could not be even mentioned) and even there I am not sure how well it works. Or you have series of mutually incompatible ad-hoc synchronization hacks (offline-IMAP, similar for CardDAV/CalDAV/etc., some weird in-browser proprietary caching for Google Docs, scripts using rsync, etc.).

http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/ seems to claim that Plan9 was supposed to be able of something like that, but I have my deepest doubts and I will believe it when I see it.

If you have some system which fulfils my requirements than you are either God or a liar, and I be on the latter.

You can do full machine migration easily either via VM checkpoint/restore or via CRIU, and this is useful in virtualization scenarios. You can also do high-availability via Xen where the same code runs on two computers at once, in case one of them goes down.