I may be a bit biased -- the Bell Labs guys are major influences of mine -- but I think the criticism of Pike, et. al is unfair. I understood Pike's "systems re

I may be a bit biased -- the Bell Labs guys are major influences of mine -- but I think the criticism of Pike, et. al is unfair. I understood Pike's "systems research is irrelevant" presentation to be a tongue-in-cheek observation about the decline of systems research, not a statement that "OS research is dead" and we shouldn't work on it, but maybe I'm mistaken. I don't consider Plan9 to be a failure, at least in the engineering sense. Many ideas pioneered in Plan9 influenced developments in the Linux kernel. It actually seems contradictory to me that Keith spends so much time flaming the community for not trying something new, then berates researchers like Pike for doing exactly that.