mycroftiv

lsub has done so many interesting Plan 9 projects which are so little known (and used). I have tried to read most of nemo's papers, but I admit I haven't actually used much of his software. Nowadays it seems that his projects are all self-contained rather than being userspace software for traditional Plan 9. There is still a lot of exploration to be done in the best semantics for implementing 9p servers for various purposes.

Wow, great work! And thanks for the plug!

If anyone is looking for an easy way to dive in and explore the wonderful world of namespaces and 9P, this is a perfect opportunity.

Thank you for sharing this story, and congratulations!

I always figured that it wasn't my place to bug anybody about anything. My comment was more or less meant as, "I think this might interest him, if you happen to have a personal connection, you might point it out to him" - it seems like that is a different kind of thing. See I can't really put what I've done and what is going on into any kind of meaningful context in my head, so I feel like I'd just be some crazy person knocking on the door if I tried to email and explain myself.

I just have a general sense of the world working through personal connections. I have never considered trying to contact a "public figure" as something which made sense to do as a random individual. Maybe I'm mistaken in that feeling though. I honestly haven't figured out how to interface with the world very successfully and maybe my instinct that I'm not allowed to try to contact human beings I don't know personally is wrong.

I've had a lot of ideas like that also, but be warned - the Plan 9 landscape is absolutely littered with speculative, half-baked amateur ideas that go absolutely nowhere. I know this because I was part of one when I first got involved in Plan 9. As a result of that, I have tried to make the Advanced Namespace Tools something that usefully expands the capabilities of Plan 9, but the gap between the current reality of "nobody uses plan 9" and the blue-sky possibilities is huge. For right now, it's probably best to think smaller and keep that bigger picture in the back of the mind. That's my conclusion from practical experience. I do like the ideas, but reality is a hard place for ideas.

It depends a lot on definitions. Protecting and backing up your data against hardware failure is a big part of what I want this software to do, but it is not a drop in replacement for mathematical/scientific cluster computing solutions at all. It is more about backing up static data, providing multiple working environments at once, and allowing data to flow between machines in arbitrarily complex ways.

I think this software is very interesting and does have real world uses, but it would need work to turn it into a math/science tool, and in general Plan 9 has a much smaller ecosystem built around these things. There are Plan 9 supercomputing projects like XCPU and if that is compatible with your wife's work it might be relevant to use XCPU top layer on top of ANTS architecture, - but I've never used XCPU personally.

I would say my software at the moment is better suited to hobby and exploration at the moment, but if you were interested in the possibilities, it could have an application in this field.

Yes you exactly have it. And the structure of the ANTS software is intended to bring the "non-disruptible mesh" concept of the revolutionary organization of the novel into the organization of plan 9 grids, which usually have a much less fail-proof chain of linear single-point of failure dependencies.

Manuel said it was poorly engineered and used #3 arm to improve the boot namespace.

I have heard that we are everywhere. I'm having kind of a personal crisis after having brought this project to this stage, and I feel like my personal VW has overheated and is broken down by the side of the road on the way to the show, and I could use a little bit of that famous Deadhead community helping hand to keep myself from losing it.

Thanks my friend.

Well "clustering" is a little loosely used here, ANTS isnt really mathematical cluster computation software at all, but it goes beyond the 'distributed os' of the basic Plan 9 design. It boils down to making multiple machines work together to create a good environment for the user that uses all of the resources of all the connected machines in a way where the user doesn't need to worry about which machine is which.

Anarchistic rather than hierarchical Plan 9 grid architecture.

While this is here and visible to the public, I would like to see if I can get someone connected to the EFF to tell John Perry Barlow that an old outsider hardcore Deadhead may have done something interesting in the world of computers. Also, I trolled IBM about a patent (see http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/173) and there might be some matters of professional interest in terms of patent law. A very personal document that makes the connection between the psychedelic anarchism of the 60s and the software design of ANTS is found at http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/206

Professional colleagues of the late University of Wisconsin Law Professor John Kidwell might also have a vague personal interest in knowing what his son has been up to in the world.

I don't like facebook or any of those things, so I'm not well "networked" in the world. Kind of isolated actually. Me and a basement of Plan 9 machines. Figured I should reach out a bit.

Have you seen the tutorials at the ANTS farm subsite? They show a series of things you can do to explore the 9worker and 9queen in combination with live CDs, which show what I believe are new exciting features for Plan 9 that I have tried to add. There is also a full length paper explaining how I have tried to improve the design of Plan 9 and how I use ANTS on my systems.

It's free form clustering software. Standard Plan 9 tends to have a pretty rigid structure for how all the services on the grid are organized. This is an attempt to make things much more free-form, so the system can be set up more easily by home users, and everything is more reliable.

I'm trying to make Plan 9 easier and more fun for home hobby users to explore. Plan 9 is amazing and I think the possibilities created by the clean and consistent design are exciting. Advanced Namespace Tools try to make Plan 9 easy to jump into, and also have a more reliable architecture when used as a grid.

One way to describe my software is as a Grateful Dead inspired approach to home clustering. Maybe it's even "outsider software art" or some ridiculous term like that.

Anyway, it has no web/facebook/ecommerce anything aspect to it, so it may not match the prevailing concerns here, but I tried to make it easy to use by providing preinstalled virtual machines to play with. Use them on a private network because they have default passwords and listen for cpu service. The "ANTS farm" subsite (http://antfarm.9gridchan.org/tutorial) has the VM/tutorial style documentation and walkthroughs.

I'd be interested in any feedback.

I think I have stated clearly that I personally do not take credit for these ideas. I believe that Doug McIlroy expressed everything important related to pipes, hubs, and everything else. I believe that IBM's patent in this case is indefensible completely regardless of any work that I have personally done - but that my personal interests in this area called my attention to this patent.

As I hope I made clear, I think the idea of "we can mux the readers and the writers" is not anything that should be patented, and neither is the details of implementing this idea.

Just to clear some things up. The idea was invented by Doug McIlroy who said that we should screw computers together like garden hoses. This was in the 60s. They made unix pipes as a simple compromise. I wanted to make "screen" for plan 9 and because plan 9 has no TTY, you can do it just with buffered muxed pipes. It was a lucky insight into something cool. I invented nothing, I just tried to keep working in the great tradition of unix and share the implementation of ideas. By the way, ants.9gridchan.org is actually more interesting than all this patent bullshit. I'd rather have people take an interest in my current work than make a huge soap opera out of this. Advanced Namespace Tools for Plan 9 are pretty cool I think.

I believe your answer, while correct as to matters of law, is actually missing the essential point. The fundamental issue is the morality of the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, not whether the legal team conducting the prosecution was following the rules of law. It is undoubtedly true that they were.

The reason people care so much about this issue is that many of us feel it shows that the current method of applying the rule of law produces bad and immoral consequences. Yes, it is true that Mr. Swartz's previous writings may establish intent in a way that is relevant to criminal prosecution. It is also true - and I believe an ultimately more significant matter - that this case demonstrates that "writing about what you believe" may indeed place you in greater criminal jeopardy, and that consequence of the "rule of law" as it was enforced in this case may cause more harm to society than the "evils" the laws were intended to prevent.

In other words, the significance of this case is that it shows our current methods of applying the laws may have negative consequences. Saying "the prosecution was applying the law correctly" is not relevant to the question: does this case show that we should change the laws, and how they are applied?

I'm a huge believer in the transformative power of technology, and AI in particular. I don't see, though, why AI is so fundamentally different from nanomachines, "fully programmable" genetic engineering, and "free energy" technologies in either feasibility or in potential impact on humanity.

You might say my problem with the singularity talk is that I think we have ALREADY gone through "technological singularity" using the current, rather flaky definition. We already have experienced technology-driven change which has made the future completely unpredictable from the past. The integrated circuit has already revolutionized the nature of human life. The claim that the future changes will be orders-of-magnitude more important in some way seems difficult to measure in an objective way, which is part of why the topic has a bit of a "code smell" of pseudoscience.

Once I really start thinking about how technology has changed the human condition, it seems to me that the invention of both spoken and written language is actually the TRUE "singularity" because human civilization is radically different from how other animals live, and it is the ability to transmit and preserve information that is the most important enabling technology.

Even if I can upload my brain into a computer, isn't that just an upgrade to the capability I already have, which is to preserve my brain contents by writing and transmitting that information into the future?

tl; dr - Humanity has already experienced fundamentally transformative technological change. We will certainly experience more in the future. Is there any objective way to measure the impact of technologies, and are any potential future changes actually "more important" than those we have already experienced?

When I was a young person in the 1970s reading about technology, space travel was the focus of futurism and predictions. I read a lot about the "accelerating rate of progress" in space technologies, and many experts confidently predicted permanent lunar colonies around 1990 and luxurious martian and orbital space colony living post-2000. The reasoning was more or less the same as the "AI singularists". If you look at the "curve of progress" in space tech from WWII to 1970 and extrapolate from it, we ought to have the full "Star Trek" technologies now.

However, as we know, the pace of progress in space travel and settlement technology slowed down and almost stagnated, despite a lot of very smart people who thought fast space colonization was a sure, inevitable prediction.

I think the same goes for extrapolations from our current computing technology - as exciting as the blue-sky scenarios are, and as fervently as I hope that brain uploading and similar goals will be achieved, I think the barriers to computational transcendence of the current limits of our bodies will probably be at least as challenging as the barriers to permanent off-earth colonization.

There are a lot of problems with Metro and Unity, but starting your essay by ridiculing the fashion choices of non-conformist teen girls is absolutely the wrong way to frame the discussion. The essay would be much stronger without the off-target metaphor of the title and first paragraph.

The accumulated evidence of Zuckerberg's poor character was already overwhelming. For me, all it took was the infamous "dumb fucks" quote to make me decide to never use Facebook. That alone disqualifies someone to be a responsible custodian of my privacy. This article's evidence isn't as significant as other established facts like Zuckerberg's invasion of other people's email accounts, but it is consistent with everything else we know: in one of the modern world's great ironies, a person with no respect for his fellow human beings is the de facto gatekeeper of "friendship" on the net.

This comment should probably be translated into 40 languages, cast in pure gold, and illuminated with spotlights in every major city of the world. Humans need 'stories about the world' to understand it, but we often forget that the stories - and our categorical abstractions in general - are a highly filtered and edited subset of reality.

Did you read the blog post? The author specifically was comparing the cost of delivery via the Kindle service to using Amazon S3/EC2 to deliver the content. His specific comparison was that the price that he would pay to host and deliver the content using Amazon's own services, would be orders of magnitude smaller! In other words, the comparison you are making is the exact basis for his entirely justified claim that Amazon's delivery fee is complete ripoff.

He is making an entirely justified complaint that Amazon charges unreasonable fees. The idea that any and all corporate behavior is fine simply because "it says so in the contract" is ridiculous.

You aren't actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon's Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post doesn't display any ignorance of the points you are making - instead, he acknowledges them but makes the entirely valid point that charging several dollars for a "delivery fee" of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!

There is a huge disconnect between the attitude of "any price that people will pay is a fair price" and the fact that economic systems require that parties engage in transactions in good faith. To me, it seems blatantly obvious that Amazon is engaging in the bad-faith practice of trying to conceal the true costs of their service by loading a lot of the price into a "delivery charge" that is absurd.

This kind of thing is a very old game in business, but that doesn't make it ok. Just because something is common and legal doesn't make it appropriate. A large amount of standard business practices are deliberate, but legal, rip-offs - and calling a rip-off a rip-off is a good thing.

I was enjoying this essay and "with" the author all the way until he suddenly swerved into imploring everyone to not give their work away for free, in order to preserve the market value of the work of full-time professionals. This kind of argument has been used a lot against free open source software, and I doubt many readers of HN are very sympathetic to it.

I think there are two different issues here which you eliding by labeling this as "settled back in 1996." What I would say was "settled in 1996" was the fact that cookies are a useful technical measure to enable websites to save state, and users wanted features like login persistence across browser sessions, etc.

I don't think that "unlimited user tracking by advertising networks, regardless of good-faith user efforts to limit data tracking" was at all part of any tacit agreements reached by the internet community. The principle that communication networks should be transparent in how they operate, and allow users of the network to meaningfully control their interactions with them is a meta-principle that is pretty clearly implicit in the design of the internet, and I don't think the current widespread use of tracking technologies and data analysis without informed user consent is consistent with those principles.

I think this piece acts as a reductio ad absurdum of some of its premises. When your chain of reasoning leads you to the conclusion that "women are likely to bring diversity to a male founding team, and that’s not what founding teams need" it should be obvious that something has gone wrong, just as you would conclude after a mathematical chain of reasoning yields the conclusion "X is both even and odd."

In other words, this is an example of the pernicious spread of a purely financial-utility-maximizing perspective on decision making within the startup culture which deliberately ignores the necessity of making sure that all of our actions stay within desirable moral parameters. The observation that a smaller percentage of women than men in the current cultural context feel motivated to create and work in startups should not be a justification for ignoring the issue; it is a justification for interrogating our sociocultural organization, and a motivation for directing energy and resources towards making startups a positive force for changing prevailing cultural patterns. Entrepreneurship is about creating value and the reductionist idea that only financial value matters must always be fought vigorously.

This is great. I've been wanting my phone to be a node on my grid for a long time. I'm glad some people got motivated and actually hacked it all together. The dream of ubiquitous 9p/styx lives!

>What strikes me about Thurrott’s tweet is that the two companies have attracted the writers they deserve. Me? I’d be appalled if Apple were to unveil something in the half- (if that) finished state of Windows 8 for tablets. I enjoy writing about what’s real.

I can't believe that Gruber can write such self-satisfied tripe without more self-awareness. His quote is more true than he realizes - the incredible smugness of both Gruber and Apple is very striking. Rabid fanboyishness combined with pretension to some kind of superior aesthetic taste in how product announcements are handled shows that DF is reaching the point of self-parody.

I understand that air travel for meetings is still commonplace and I wasn't intending to apply the label of extreme privilege to all business travelers - only to those who are given Free Steak Delivery. I do think the vast majority of business air travel for meetings is completely wasteful, but it is often suffering - not privilege - for the people who are tasked with it! Airports and airplanes are not generally very pleasant environments.