30 Sep
2015
30 Sep
'15
10:40 a.m.
You can still have a useful machine without it being connected to the
public Internet. Network access is indeed very important, Internet
connectivity, less so.
I too rue the loss of simplicity ... and this has been voiced by many
people much more luminous than I ... Ken Thompson, for one, has commented
about the size and complexity in contemporary UNIX implementations ... This
is one reason why I love Plan 9 so much ... it takes you back a little bit
to when it was a pleasure to bang out a little code and you don't have to
deal with so much nonsense to get a little application that actually does
something, built.
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
From: Liam
Proven
I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that
modern
computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire
computer
turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.)
I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more
complex
than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality.
However, one thing I am going to quibble with:
This is a nice explanatory quote:
The main reasons TempleOS is simple and
beautiful are because it's
ring-0-only .. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. ...
It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. ... It was
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
simple and unsecure. If you don't have
malware and you don't have
bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code
complicated.
Note the part I highlighted. If you want to have a system that's
network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable
system
in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable
today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript,
etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs
in
the local machine.
To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active content is probably
the
worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud. It's
_potentially_ a giant, gaping security hole - one that in today's OS's is
responsible for a huge share of security issues. (There _is_ a way to have
systems which aren't as vulnerable, but it means having military-grade
security on everyone's machine - and no, I don't mean crypto; probably not
likely, alas.) I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active
content - just text, images, etc, etc. But no, they had to add all sorts of
flashy eye candy - and did so in a way that makes basically all modern
machines horribly insecure. But let me dispense with the soap box...
Anyway, the inevitable consequence is that if you want a networked machine,
it's _not_ going to be simple. Alas.
You're basically sharing the machine with _lots_ of other people -
effectively, every Tom, Dick and Jane out there in the Internet. In other
words, you need everything one normally saw/sees in a time-sharing machine.
(And I'm not talking about wimpy ones like Unix/Linux. I mean industrial
strength ones like Multics.)
Noel