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1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2019–2024
1:17:07 · 42K views · Oct 31, 2019
Ori Bernstein gives an overview of Plan 9 at a NYC*BUG meeting. He explains what the system is, how it is built, what has happened since Bell Labs, and what its design teaches, with a live demo.
HN mostly cites it as background on Plan 9 and its ideas, with one commenter thanking the speaker for an enjoyable talk.
4 comments from Hacker News
Hey Ori :) I particularly enjoyed your video talk "not dead just resting" - thanks for everything you do this video
If you feel you have to tell me that your family is full of holocaust survivors before you tell me you're involved in a software distro, something is very wrong. This is software not biker gangs. I'm not judging you. I hope you understand that. One or two other people maybe, but not you. I've not called anyone a Nazi. I didn't commit Mein Kampf twice. I didn't put an Auschwitz joke in the manual. Neither did you. It was this[1] that convinced me to spend time with Plan 9. I've spoken to some really nice 9Front users and contributors. I've read and watched cool things by people like mycroft, Sigrid and yourself. Then at the other end of the scale there's this: ahem [LINK] And for shits and giggles, this: ahem [LINK] For every person you explain to, there are many more who just call you all a bunch of Nazis. People have slid into my DMs and just outright openly called everyone in 9Front nazis for over a week now. The idea is ridiculous yet it persists. That's obviously not the association you want for yourself, but it's one you're aware of or you wouldn't be here. It's happening right now here: [LINK] - that's just one place, there are plenty others. My Signal's full of it, Telegram too. Memes, some pretty personal, the lot. You can't whack-a-mole that association. All you can do is choose to change it or choose to own it. EDIT: Seems I can't reply to Ori directly so here it is: No I'm not insinuating you're a Nazi sympathizer. I wouldn't. The whole point of my reply is that yo
> we need to throw away everything and start from scratch This has already happened back in the 1990s with Plan 9 from Bell Labs[1] and Inferno[2], but it didn't take due to various factors. With Docker and Kubernetes we are slowly wrangling the current Linux ecosystem to be more akin to Plan 9 environment with private namespaces and networked environment, with "compute" and "storage" servers. But the issues these tools are trying to fix and improve are buried deep in the stack, at the kernel level - fixing them would mean throwing away years of work put into Linux and starting almost from scratch. Plan 9 was definitely ahead of its time. The original authors learned from their UNIX choices back in the 1970s and looked into the future with a fresh set of eyes. Private process namespaces, lack of a superuser account with full privileges, transparent networking, split of the monolithic system architecture into CPU (compute), fileserver (storage) and terminal with CPU and storage being in the data center on a fast network and terminals being out there used by the users... I would say that this is pretty spot on with 2020s world where cloud and data centers are used almost all the time and end users rely on lightweight (both in a "weight" and in a "computing power" sense) devices to engage with the system at large. Of course there were missteps as well, nobody's perfect. A byzantine graphical user interface with overfocus on the mouse (today's world overwhelmingly uses touch-base
”Is there support for playing video? No. (...) Watch this introductory video: this video I think I'll pass.