5 ms·

The whole "everything in the cloud", "let someone else worry about storage" view, at least the way he promotes them, are more like VCS than let's say Git (or pi

by nnq 14y ago

The whole "everything in the cloud", "let someone else worry about storage" view, at least the way he promotes them, are more like VCS than let's say Git (or pick another DVCS)... you have a conceptual "central" point of failure, even if this "point" is a network of servers distributed around the world. I want STORAGE ON EVERY DEVICE (not volatile!), and and automatic system to sync it with all my other devices, WITHOUT NEEDING THE CLOUD, just set up and ad-hoc mesh network and sync everyth (yeah, there's gonna be smth like "merges" for OS settings and music collection changes but I can do with that). The "cloud" should be just infrastructure, nothing else added, and I shouldn't be distrupted when my connection to it fails... "Always connected"? No, no, no, I'll always want to be able to work offline and be able to sync/merge/push/pull even my OS, its settings and software (and be able to "branch" my and keep multiple versions of software and all that). DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency. Rob Pike's ideal of "homogeneity" in computing really misses the distinction between distributed and central syncing, the security and reliability implications etc. ...and large local storage capacity and "enough" computing power on all devices is needed for this. I'd rather be "part of the mesh" than "connected to the cloud mesh", because I think the distinctions are important and they require different things from "client devices" (all devices should be "clients"! no servers "in the cloud" for me please!)

justincormack 14y ago
That is the CouchDB model. It is very appealing...
- nnq 14y ago
  in a narrow sense... yet I've always wondered why people don't choose the master-master model of doing things more often...
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    Because it's hard to do, and even harder to do right. You at least need immutable data and versioning, and you still have to do something about conflicts.
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Well, I don't know about you, but many of my files are on my website, and my website is tracked by Git (on my PC, on my server, and on GitHub).
- nnq 14y ago
  ...I know, we geeks have this already as we use dvcs for all sorts of stuff other than code too (like my text editor's settings etc.) ...but most other non IT professionals using computers (doctors, physicists, most non-software engineers etc.) don't do this and are pretty far from using things this way ...they are more likely to be "fished into" cloud solutions that will have them "hanging from the cloud (someone else's cloud)" than actually be "part of a/the mesh/cloud" ...it's easy for us to forget how things work for "the rest of world" (and I don't mean computer illiterate or dumb people, just smart persons that don't happen to be neck deep in coding or other IT specific activity...)
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    Well, someone just needs to make a file storage-oriented Git client.
    - bergie 14y ago
      There is git-annex, and of course also http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/
icebraining 14y ago
Frankly, I can't understand how can you criticize Pike for that. That's exactly what he wants: 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. By the way, try Joey Hess' git-annex, now with the assistant. It's just that: a sync and merge system for all your files, which can automatically sync up just about anything (computers, USB drives, cloud services, etc) and doesn't rely on central services (the Assistant will use XMPP to broadcast messages between clients, and then they connect directly to each other). http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...
- jf 14y ago
  git-annex looks _amazing_, thanks for mentioning it!
- nnq 14y ago
  ...but then he goes on with "no disks, no state[…] entirely in the network" ...what I meant was that you need "thicker" clients to make it work, because a real "thin" client implies being tied to a cloud and not part of it and this is what I argues, the he conflates two "cloud views" bi not considering the implications of really thin clients like he want them to be. ...but git annex is AF*GMAZING indeed :)
- dfc 14y ago
  I love git-annex. It is worth pointing out that the XMPP notification is still under heavy development. I don't want to turn people away from git-annex but I also do not want people to get their hopes up for a feature that is not complete yet: Joey described the xmpp work in his most recent blog entry and said it is "really the last big road-bump to making it be able to sync computers across the big, bad internet." http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_112__and_now_for_something_completely_different/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_11...
  - icebraining 14y ago
    He already has a new post out: Built out the XMPP push notifier; around 200 lines of code. Haven't tested it yet, but it just might work. It's in the xmpp branch for now. (...) http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_113__notifier_work/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_11... That said, the future tense in my post wasn't an accident ;) but you're right, the Assistant is still under heavy development and lacks some parts. Of course, git-annex itself is robust and stable, and awesome!
pkorzeniewski 14y ago
I agree, for me cloud is just another backup storage, as it surely isn't - and never will be - fully reliable. Sure, it's convenient that you can access your data from any device, anywhere, but the price of not having direct control over your data and relying on internet connection to access it disqualifies cloud as "one and only" storage for me.
ericmoritz 14y ago
This basically describes my use of Dropbox. Anything important to me that's not code is stored in Dropbox. Every computer I have dropbox on and which has 100GB free, has a copy of those files so if Dropbox vanished, I still have a replicated copy of my files on one of my machines. I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed. One of those machines has my dropbox share on a Drobo, so I'd need a catastrophic failure of my Drobo disks, Dropbox and my laptop in order to lose those files.
- deong 14y ago
  Dropbox is software, and like any software, it has bugs. One of those bugs could easily result in "delete this file and then propagate the deletion to every client". Granted, Dropbox has some rudimentary versioning, so it's pretty likely that you'd be able to recover, but still, I wouldn't advise anyone to use Dropbox sync exclusively as a backup solution.
  - euroclydon 14y ago
    Well said. Happens to me every couple of months, that I know of. Heck Dropbox might have just deleted a file from all my computers right now, how would I know? Last time it happened the deleted files didn't even show up in the Dropbox event log, but they did show up as deleted files. The only way I know it happens is when a build fails -- shame I don't build my documents. I wish I'd never started using Dropbox, but now I'm too busy to switch my workflow off of it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jervisfm 14y ago
  > I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed. But you really should have a separate actual backup of your data though. What would happen in the scenario that somehow your drop-box data is deleted ? Won't this deletion also be replicated to all your synced devices ?
Shorel 14y ago
The hard thing about his vision, is safety. Carrying the cellphone means two things: The state data is available with you (it's not in the cloud) and the actual hardware is your authentication token for the things that are in the cloud. In his vision he talks about having state and everything in the cloud, login in from any terminal and doing his job. He would go to a coffee/Internet shop and do all his personal banking there. It should be obvious at this point the problems that could arise from such setup. The terminal could be compromised (key loggers, etc), and no authentication tokens have been defined. Even retina scanners are more troublesome than having a cellphone as the auth token. So his vision is nice, in an ideal society where no one cheats, ever. In the real world it is dangerously unsafe. > DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency. I still dream about a Git GUI that works as a distributed Dropbox (for some specially enabled repos, not for all of them).
- codemac 14y ago
  > I still dream about a Git GUI that works as a distributed Dropbox (for some specially enabled repos, not for all of them). Please look above in this thread about git-annex if you haven't heard of it. That's.. pretty much exactly what it is.
  - Shorel 14y ago
    Yes, I found about it later in the thread. The perks about replying before reading everything. I'm actually pretty excited about git-annex. The Windows GUI will probably be neglected, but as long as the pipes are good, the chrome can be fixed easily.
- codemac 14y ago
  > I still dream about a Git GUI that works as a distributed Dropbox (for some specially enabled repos, not for all of them). Please look above in this thread about git-annex if you haven't heard of it. That's.. pretty much exactly what it is.
- sciurus 14y ago
  Maybe you're dreaming of http://sparkleshare.org/ http://sparkleshare.org/

by nnq 14y ago

justincormack 14y ago

That is the CouchDB model. It is very appealing...

nnq 14y ago
in a narrow sense... yet I've always wondered why people don't choose the master-master model of doing things more often...
- lucian1900 14y ago
  Because it's hard to do, and even harder to do right. You at least need immutable data and versioning, and you still have to do something about conflicts.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago

Well, I don't know about you, but many of my files are on my website, and my website is tracked by Git (on my PC, on my server, and on GitHub).

nnq 14y ago
...I know, we geeks have this already as we use dvcs for all sorts of stuff other than code too (like my text editor's settings etc.) ...but most other non IT professionals using computers (doctors, physicists, most non-software engineers etc.) don't do this and are pretty far from using things this way ...they are more likely to be "fished into" cloud solutions that will have them "hanging from the cloud (someone else's cloud)" than actually be "part of a/the mesh/cloud" ...it's easy for us to forget how things work for "the rest of world" (and I don't mean computer illiterate or dumb people, just smart persons that don't happen to be neck deep in coding or other IT specific activity...)
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Well, someone just needs to make a file storage-oriented Git client.
  - bergie 14y ago
    There is git-annex, and of course also http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/

icebraining 14y ago

Frankly, I can't understand how can you criticize Pike for that. That's exactly what he wants: 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. By the way, try Joey Hess' git-annex, now with the assistant. It's just that: a sync and merge system for all your files, which can automatically sync up just about anything (computers, USB drives, cloud services, etc) and doesn't rely on central services (the Assistant will use XMPP to broadcast messages between clients, and then they connect directly to each other). http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...

jf 14y ago
git-annex looks _amazing_, thanks for mentioning it!
nnq 14y ago
...but then he goes on with "no disks, no state[…] entirely in the network" ...what I meant was that you need "thicker" clients to make it work, because a real "thin" client implies being tied to a cloud and not part of it and this is what I argues, the he conflates two "cloud views" bi not considering the implications of really thin clients like he want them to be. ...but git annex is AF*GMAZING indeed :)
dfc 14y ago
I love git-annex. It is worth pointing out that the XMPP notification is still under heavy development. I don't want to turn people away from git-annex but I also do not want people to get their hopes up for a feature that is not complete yet: Joey described the xmpp work in his most recent blog entry and said it is "really the last big road-bump to making it be able to sync computers across the big, bad internet." http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_112__and_now_for_something_completely_different/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_11...
- icebraining 14y ago
  He already has a new post out: Built out the XMPP push notifier; around 200 lines of code. Haven't tested it yet, but it just might work. It's in the xmpp branch for now. (...) http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_113__notifier_work/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_11... That said, the future tense in my post wasn't an accident ;) but you're right, the Assistant is still under heavy development and lacks some parts. Of course, git-annex itself is robust and stable, and awesome!

pkorzeniewski 14y ago

I agree, for me cloud is just another backup storage, as it surely isn't - and never will be - fully reliable. Sure, it's convenient that you can access your data from any device, anywhere, but the price of not having direct control over your data and relying on internet connection to access it disqualifies cloud as "one and only" storage for me.

ericmoritz 14y ago

This basically describes my use of Dropbox. Anything important to me that's not code is stored in Dropbox. Every computer I have dropbox on and which has 100GB free, has a copy of those files so if Dropbox vanished, I still have a replicated copy of my files on one of my machines. I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed. One of those machines has my dropbox share on a Drobo, so I'd need a catastrophic failure of my Drobo disks, Dropbox and my laptop in order to lose those files.

deong 14y ago
Dropbox is software, and like any software, it has bugs. One of those bugs could easily result in "delete this file and then propagate the deletion to every client". Granted, Dropbox has some rudimentary versioning, so it's pretty likely that you'd be able to recover, but still, I wouldn't advise anyone to use Dropbox sync exclusively as a backup solution.
- euroclydon 14y ago
  Well said. Happens to me every couple of months, that I know of. Heck Dropbox might have just deleted a file from all my computers right now, how would I know? Last time it happened the deleted files didn't even show up in the Dropbox event log, but they did show up as deleted files. The only way I know it happens is when a build fails -- shame I don't build my documents. I wish I'd never started using Dropbox, but now I'm too busy to switch my workflow off of it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jervisfm 14y ago
> I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed. But you really should have a separate actual backup of your data though. What would happen in the scenario that somehow your drop-box data is deleted ? Won't this deletion also be replicated to all your synced devices ?

Shorel 14y ago

The hard thing about his vision, is safety. Carrying the cellphone means two things: The state data is available with you (it's not in the cloud) and the actual hardware is your authentication token for the things that are in the cloud. In his vision he talks about having state and everything in the cloud, login in from any terminal and doing his job. He would go to a coffee/Internet shop and do all his personal banking there. It should be obvious at this point the problems that could arise from such setup. The terminal could be compromised (key loggers, etc), and no authentication tokens have been defined. Even retina scanners are more troublesome than having a cellphone as the auth token. So his vision is nice, in an ideal society where no one cheats, ever. In the real world it is dangerously unsafe. > DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency. I still dream about a Git GUI that works as a distributed Dropbox (for some specially enabled repos, not for all of them).

codemac 14y ago
> I still dream about a Git GUI that works as a distributed Dropbox (for some specially enabled repos, not for all of them). Please look above in this thread about git-annex if you haven't heard of it. That's.. pretty much exactly what it is.
- Shorel 14y ago
  Yes, I found about it later in the thread. The perks about replying before reading everything. I'm actually pretty excited about git-annex. The Windows GUI will probably be neglected, but as long as the pipes are good, the chrome can be fixed easily.
codemac 14y ago
> I still dream about a Git GUI that works as a distributed Dropbox (for some specially enabled repos, not for all of them). Please look above in this thread about git-annex if you haven't heard of it. That's.. pretty much exactly what it is.
sciurus 14y ago
Maybe you're dreaming of http://sparkleshare.org/ http://sparkleshare.org/