Aucbvax.2167
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Wed Jul 8 02:41:34 1981
Re: A Quibble or two
>From Joe.Newcomer@CMU-10A Wed Jul 8 02:34:48 1981
I see nothing unreasonable about entering something in the computer "for
someone in the same office"; I don't see that spatial proximity should
require using an alternate method of notification, assuming that the
mechanism is already satisfactory. If using little pieces of paper is
more effective than using the computer, this indicates that something
is very wrong in the design of the software. Either the software is
good enough to replace paper, which is presumably the intent, or somebody
blew the design. Thus, we have a very good way of determining if the
designers built a system tailored to human needs, or one which is simply
intended as an ego trip for the designer.
I still don't understand why people seem to think "rings" or "stacks" or
other complex connected graphs are remotely reasonable for representing
past context. The top of my desk has no little strings connecting all the
things I'm doing, and I don't miss them; if I have to deal with such a
mechanism on my computer, then somebody who wrote the software doesn't
understand how people do work. See above predicate test.
A more serious problem is, given massive amounts of state, how do you
preserve them over a system crash? In the case of distributed systems,
it is even harder, since the state may be embodied in many (potentially
unreliable) separate machines. In the best of all possible worlds, when
my personal workstation rolls in the door, I turn it on. If I turn it
off, the result of turning it back on should be to put me back in the state
I was in when I turned it off. Likewise for system crashes. If some server
somewhere crashes, this should be of no interest to me, even if I'm using
it; when it comes back, my work continues just where it left off. None of
this is easy, and some of it is probably impossible, but I think it is
important enough that we should be concerned about reliability at a level
above parity and disk scavengers.
joe
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