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I have read about some of those. Unfortunately I must have missed or misunderstood something since I can't think of anything they offer that makes them worth a

I have read about some of those. Unfortunately I must have missed or misunderstood something since I can't think of anything they offer that makes them worth adopting over Unix. It wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened. The idea of the World Wide Web wasn't all that impressive to me when I first saw it, partially because I'd already been using networks for almost a decade before it and was completely adapted to using arcane file transfer commands. It could be that there are some ideas in those systems that are just as revolutionary and I've missed them. Could you perhaps choose one or two of the ideas you think make those systems fundamentally better than Unix and elaborate on them?

asciilifeform 17y ago
Orthogonal persistence, for one. All of the gymnastics we currently perform to make data outlive unplugging are a waste of precious lifetime: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794
- bayareaguy 17y ago
  Ok lets consider this. I'm willing to believe that we could eliminate some of these "gymnastics" by adopting new persistence models but not without paying a cost somewhere else. Perhaps that cost is only some additional education but I'm not convinced things are that simple. A decade or two ago many organizations tried proprietary object-oriented databases for various applications in part because they purported to simplify persistence issues. For some specific applications they did but more often than not the problems they caused their users were worse than the ones they solved and most ultimately decided to settle for app servers and ORM solutions. I've always thought a key barrier to the adoption of systems that support Orthogonal persistence is that it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently as ones designed to use lower level things like files or databases, partly because many techniques (e.g. efficient working set management, concurrency control, schema change, replication, data archival) are pretty well understood for applications that use the latter on systems like Unix. Maybe there are new opportunities for orthogonal persistence now that distributed cloud storage and computing is becoming popular. Such an OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage could change things. However none of the systems you mentioned look like good candidates to me for such change.
  - asciilifeform 17y ago
    Forget databases. The machine gets an address space of 0..N bytes. They stay there, whether or not there is AC power. Internally this could consist of an array of mechanical or flash disks, cached by abundant cheap RAM. How difficult is that? No proprietary anything, no "object oriented" anything necessary. Nothing to think about. No changes in software at all, in fact, except for all of the various things you no longer have to do. You build a data structure in memory - doesn't matter what kind - and it stays there, until you erase it. That's what orthogonal persistence is. Forget the snake oils which try to coopt the phrase. One example of a current machine with actual orthogonal persistence is the Palm Pilot. > it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently Crank the R/W speed up to eleven and hope the issues go away. We're nearly there with striped solid-state disks. > OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage Screw that, I just want a desktop which behaves sanely - from both the user and programmer's point of view. This means a single, nonvolatile address space.
    - bayareaguy 17y ago
      If you really believe that a Palm Pilot is a current machine or that the OS its own manufacturer no longer supports is superior to present day Unix then I don't think there's much for us to discuss.

asciilifeform 17y ago

Orthogonal persistence, for one. All of the gymnastics we currently perform to make data outlive unplugging are a waste of precious lifetime: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794

bayareaguy 17y ago
Ok lets consider this. I'm willing to believe that we could eliminate some of these "gymnastics" by adopting new persistence models but not without paying a cost somewhere else. Perhaps that cost is only some additional education but I'm not convinced things are that simple. A decade or two ago many organizations tried proprietary object-oriented databases for various applications in part because they purported to simplify persistence issues. For some specific applications they did but more often than not the problems they caused their users were worse than the ones they solved and most ultimately decided to settle for app servers and ORM solutions. I've always thought a key barrier to the adoption of systems that support Orthogonal persistence is that it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently as ones designed to use lower level things like files or databases, partly because many techniques (e.g. efficient working set management, concurrency control, schema change, replication, data archival) are pretty well understood for applications that use the latter on systems like Unix. Maybe there are new opportunities for orthogonal persistence now that distributed cloud storage and computing is becoming popular. Such an OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage could change things. However none of the systems you mentioned look like good candidates to me for such change.
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  Forget databases. The machine gets an address space of 0..N bytes. They stay there, whether or not there is AC power. Internally this could consist of an array of mechanical or flash disks, cached by abundant cheap RAM. How difficult is that? No proprietary anything, no "object oriented" anything necessary. Nothing to think about. No changes in software at all, in fact, except for all of the various things you no longer have to do. You build a data structure in memory - doesn't matter what kind - and it stays there, until you erase it. That's what orthogonal persistence is. Forget the snake oils which try to coopt the phrase. One example of a current machine with actual orthogonal persistence is the Palm Pilot. > it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently Crank the R/W speed up to eleven and hope the issues go away. We're nearly there with striped solid-state disks. > OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage Screw that, I just want a desktop which behaves sanely - from both the user and programmer's point of view. This means a single, nonvolatile address space.
  - bayareaguy 17y ago
    If you really believe that a Palm Pilot is a current machine or that the OS its own manufacturer no longer supports is superior to present day Unix then I don't think there's much for us to discuss.