The arrow of time

It's 2009 damn it, I want some convergence between my "smart" devices! Why can't my photo camera beam photos to my mobile phone? Why can't I edit simple documents on my phone without excessively jumping through hoops? Why can't my car use the GPS from my mobile phone? Why can't I shut down my desktop machine from my mobile phone? Why is even simple communication between my desktop and my mobile phone via Bluetooth so complicated and sucky?

I wrote this in 2003. and am republishing it here for fun :) Now I know slightly more and would probably rewrite the whole thing from a more microkernel-oriented angle and with better discussion of security properties but even now, t's a complete overkill. Beware of geeking out!

Since one of my fascinations is operating systems' design, implementation and maintenance, ever since I've first seen the Matrix movies I've thought some of the concepts in them can be related to familiar concepts in operating systems:

I've been listening to James Randi semi-regularly and have come across many jevels of information, anecdote, positive thinking and just plain old ranting on favorite subjects. This kind of material is of the type that should be shown at school, regularly, for at least a year.

YouTube in general has become a repository not only of college fart jokes but of incredibly useful information in general. It, along with Wikipedia, comprise this age's Library of Alexandria.

Yes, this is old news. I guess the reason I'm writing about it now is that only now the shock of the news is subsiding. Though it's nothing special in the business world, I don't think that casual users of technology have enough appreciation of how monumental event this is in the history of computing and technology-oriented businesses.

ZFS was MFC-ed into 7-STABLE by Kip Macy a short time ago!

One feature in 7.2 that I am guilty of introducing is the support for UFS ID labels in GEOM_LABEL. While it's currently known to annoy some people with messages like

GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0s1a is ufsid/49d629fac5da1db9.

it's actually a feature that will make life easier for many users.

It's not that Wolfram-the-person isn't a smart guy, but he could learn a lot from Steve Jobs when it comes to delivering products. Apparently his modus operandi is to create so much hype and incredible claims over whatever he's doing that the end product simply cannot sustain it and then appears to implode. Both A new kind of science and Alpha are good in their own way and have a use but the aura / hype / word of mouth that they have attracted does them more harm than good.

The world seems to be catching on - as opposed to building a large quantity of huge multi-core multi-gigahertz CPUs and using virtualization to manage them, which at best looks too similar to the mainframes from which we have escaped years ago and at worst introduces a point of failure that can bring down many critical services by a single hardware glitch, we now have "infraservers" - a potentially huge number of which can be used to power many services.