Re: [ossig] Nothing exciting in Comp.Sci. anymore?

[Mukhsein Johari <pythonium@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Dinesh Nair <dinesh@alphaque.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Imran William Smith wrote:
> 
> > Good point.  Unix has done well out of the
> 'everything is a file' method
> > - makes for a nice small number of system calls to
> achieve everything.
> > But there could be other ways.
> 
> that's because the most primitive method of storage
> is still serially on
> disks. 

Precisely. This concept is 'hampered' by current
technology. Just as current programming goes back to
the days of punch cards. Bear in mind that 3D physical
storage is not too far off (10 years?). In such a
case, will serial storage make more sense? Something
to think about.

In the same vain, there are other ways to do
computation. While I don't understand quantum
computing enough to comment, there are other ways to
compute. Biological brains don't compute by clock
cycle. Massive network effects enable unbelievable
feats of pattern recognition and related motor
movement. Anyone watching martial arts experts in
real-life will understand where I'm coming from. 

> unix provides the primitive calls to access
> this data. you can
[snip]
> model (including
> addressing) on top of the serial access model.
> 
> which is why i still say the OP spouted a bunch of
> rubbish.
> 

I have to disagree - imho, it's just that his thinking
is a bit ahead of his time, is all. 

One thing I have to agree, though, is that with
_current_ technology, the unix everything-is-a-file
concept makes a helluva lot of sense. Makes a lot of
things simpler and intuitive. (eg. /proc 'files' can
be read to get interesting info, /dev files can be
written to and read from to get devices to do stuff -
excellent!)

I think that when you have 3D holographic displays,
real (star trek-like) speech recognition, 3D storage,
a more efficient way of computing (without proc
'cycles' perhaps?) would have to be thought up - then
you might not have 'files' anymore, at least not as we
know them. :-)

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