[TUHS] The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

Luther Johnson luther at makerlisp.com
Fri Jan 20 08:23:00 AEST 2023


Computers that are not smart phone-like are definitely on the endangered 
species list. You know, the kind on  a desk, with  a keyboard ...

On 01/19/2023 01:01 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2023, at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The era of general-purpose computers won't end.
> What I meant is it will likely become much more
> niche just like mainframe programming.
>
> What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
> do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
> desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
> few apps.
>
>> The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity, general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to do only one thing.
>>
>> But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things.  Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations controlling the society where the developers come from.  Some of them will be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings.  Some will be done by enthusiasts.  But I don't think we are too far from the world where you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick with a knife that's been in your family for generations.
>>
>> But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was, what, 1984?
> What I was reflecting on is there may not be a real
> need for virtual memory if you are running just a few
> apps and memory is plentiful!
>
> We have relied on virtual memory for creating protection
> boundaries but that has not been enough. In Unix a child
> process has all the privileges a parent has. If instead the
> permission model for a new process is to permit only what
> it needs[1], including memory, you can get rid of containers
> (such as docker) and jails (as on FreeBSD). What is more,
> this can be done without virtual memory. Further, the same
> model can be extended to distributed computing. If this
> becomes reality, why wouldn't vendors go for that?
>
> So yes, the hardware will be capable of general purpose
> computing (Turing complete?) but will vendors allow access
> to it?
>
> [1] As Capability folks say, this is the Principle Of
> Least Authority or POLA.
>
>
>



More information about the TUHS mailing list