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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

I can't get behind the idea of every computer I interact with being a dumb terminal. I don't want to assume I'll always have a connection to the mother machine. Even in some ideal world where I always have a high speed connection that never fails, can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down? Not really.

I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the cloud" and thence to other devices (and other people). But if I'm in the hills or the server goes down, hey, I still have a perfectly good computer in my pocket.

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I agree. In addition to the concerns you brought up, I see other issues with Pike's proposal. If computers are infrastructure, I'm forced to deal with whatever computers others have. This is a problem, because most people don't use computers as much as me and aren't willing to spend as much on them. I'd rather carry a maxed-out 11" Air everywhere than put up with my friends' and relatives' computers. (In fact, I do this.)

Pike doesn't address security either. Would you log into Gmail on a public computer? Would you enter your credit card info or visit your bank's website? I sure wouldn't. Phones from 20 years ago didn't have any storage or computational abilities, so these security concerns didn't exist for them.

While I'm a huge fan of cloud-based storage and synchronization, there are just too many issues with using untrusted computers everywhere I go. Maybe it was due to the interview format, but I'm surprised such an intelligent, technical thinker managed to avoid discussing the downsides of his proposal.

Don't forget that this is Pike's ideal setup. Presumably in this "ideal" the security issues no longer exist and my "setup" is available at any interface I interact with - instantly.

As you noticed yourself, the "dumber" the devices are, the more secure they will be. I'd happily log on to my e-mail account from a device that (I knew) booted an OS image from ROM just before I used it (comparable to those live CD-ROMs for secure applications like e-banking).

Let's go back to burning ROMs for OS upgrades instead of flashing/storing them on disk! People can replace batteries, so they shouldn't have trouble replacing an OS ROM ..

Batteries aren't static sensitive, and ROMs aren't available in gigabytes, but apart from that there is a certain appeal in a more secure OS environment.

It's a shame that (for example) Windows doesn't make it easier to make the entire system partition read-only, but applications are traditionally so abysmally poor at handling "no you can't write THERE" errors (yes, Photoshop, I'm looking at you) that most people gave up. UNIXes are better, but still at the mercy of morons (Acrobat has managed to drop files called "C:\nppdf32Log\debuglog.txt" all over my home directory, so it's probably just as well it's too fucking stupid to realise it's running on RHEL otherwise it'd be asking for root all the time instead)

True ROM chips are by definition available in sizes slightly larger than similarly priced DRAM or SLC flash, it's probably cheapest memory to manufacture. And you would be surprised about how many megabytes of ROM are contained in Android/iOS devices (baseband code is often i mask ROM on chip, modern SoCs tend to have some kind of support core with code in mask ROM and also some ARM acessible mask ROM with things like "low-level" bootloader, if you count reading files from filesystem on MMC and relocating ELFs as "low-level"), even desktop PCs contain significant amount of mask ROM (CPU microcode, sometimes embedded controller code, microcode for various other chips, probably bootloaders for HDD controllers). Bottom line: flash is still more expensive than mask ROM, given enough volume (and by definition will always be).

So who makes, say, 4GB E(E)PROM chips? I'm thinking Windows here, not Android. Clearly the technology isn't the problem but the largest ROMs I've worked with are all in the Mbit range.

I don't think these are widely available ... Practical solutions for Windows would probably be DVD-ROMs or read-only NAS filesystems, or (for reasonable speed) SSDs, preferably PCIe or Mini-PCIe with hardware write-protect switch.

"...can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down?" No, but neither can I guarantee that the hard drive in that Macbook you've been abusing for the last 3 years won't suddenly fail and wipe out your work.

One nice compromise that I'm sure Pike has used is to have your "dumb terminal" be a laptop with Plan 9 installed. When you boot a Plan 9 terminal, you can tell it to get the root from the network or from the local disk. If you select one, though, it's quite easy to also make the other available, and sync your data back and forth.

  "...can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down?" No, but neither can I guarantee that the hard drive in that Macbook you've been abusing for the last 3 years won't suddenly fail and wipe out your work.

Of course not, that's why I want both. Having to choose which version of my files to use is annoying, manually syncing or having to write/install something to do it automatically is worse. You've definitely lost "the normals" at that point. No, just proactively sync my changes.

You missed the part where he qualifies almost every statement about getting rid of the local disk with, "except for caching". This implies that he's not talking about a dumb terminal.

If your device has frequent (not necessarily constant) internet access this is essentially the same thing as having many regular computers, since your cache can allow you to work offline just like normal. Like git, you would just work on the local "cache", and then sync with other devices when you need to switch or regain internet access.

I didn't understand his use of the word caching to mean the same thing as a local git repository, but rather a simple latency optimization; SVN has a "cache" too. He also states that most if not all real computation takes place off the device, in the server. If that's not the definition of a dumb terminal, what is?

If I misunderstood him, well, good, I'm glad we're not so far apart. But I don't think so.

Remember who Dr Pike works for: "real computation" means updating the Page rank of the World Wide Web, adding up America's phone bills, and other things from the don't-try-this-at-home category.

True. I guess from that perspective, anything that's not a major cluster looks like a dumb terminal.

AT&T did a very good job making the phone system widely available and phone equipment very, very reliable. I'm sure they would have done the same for the Internet, given the chance.

Obviously things didn't work out that way, and now it's actually more reliable to carry around expensive and rather-easily-breakable computers with you. It's kind of surprising if you think about just how fragile a laptop is.

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