> On 05/18/2011 05:12 AM, Jacob Todd wrote: >> Writing/porting web stuff to plan 9 will be hard. Writing something that >> accesses plan 9 from the web will be less hard. > > "The KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) acronym has been popular in business > for decades, but its message has never been more important and, or > useful for many." -- Rob Tannen > > "When simplifying, is's critical to target the right features for > excision, based on the customers' actual needs" -- Rob Tannen
I'm confused. Why are we using business ideas to constrain what we are doing with a research system? It seems to me that what we work on (outside what puts food on the table) should be driven primarily by what we find intellectually stimulating. I personally get no stimulation over the idea of porting an existing web browser. However, the idea of an emulator in a highly portable environment was interesting enough that I looked around some and found a PDP-11 emulator running 6th Edition (also in js). I couldn't help but think about extending Bellard's work to include a drawable device and a network interface and then building a Plan 9 terminal for it, or running native Inferno on it, or using the same ideas to build a Dis VM in js, or... It's true that utility can be a meaningful motivator for what questions we look at, but if all you care about is utility, it's hard to beat an android tablet. Like most of us, I worry about what customers want in my day job. But what customers want is boring to the point of suicide. To borrow from the bard; "There is more in the computing universe than is dreamt of in the PC/Web philosophy." Plan 9 and Inferno are the best places I've found to glimpse that hidden beauty. BLS
