Story said:
Thank you for the reminders - it is really important to remember not everyone is working with optimal hardware or connections. That's something I want to strive to be mindful of. I definitely want to be someone who is on the side of providing a good user experience, rather than the fanciness-at-any-cost philosophy
The only member of this forum who has optimal hardware and connections is myself. I have in my house Cisco 6500 chasis switches, pervasive WDS clouds, multiple vlans, internal OSPF routing, and every switch is managed. And my largest computer has 256 GB of RAM. That’s
gigabytes. Running on a SPARC M4000 machine which can be partitioned into dual electricallly isolated domains for fault tolerance if desired. And even the CPUs are hot swappable. So objectively, my pity for every other member of the forum, as a condescending UNIX user, is almost
infinite. OCNet itself has really splendid hardware; we are running in a state of the art data center which provides centralized liquid cooling on cloud-architecture hardware. But a further planned hardware upgrade will happen. We can never have too much compute power.
I should also say how much I loathe resource intensive websites like Instagram and YouTube. Sure, we can load them like lightning at my house or at Anastasios’s house, although the lightning is faster at my house,
, but it is such a stupid waste of bandwidth. If it were up to me the maximum size of any web page would be 640 KB, that’s kilobytes, with the visual elegance provided using HTML5 and javascript and vector graphics which use your computer hardware to render them, rather than just pumping everything out over the net. But alas it is not up to me.
Nonetheless, I can assure you that the impact of the New Software Platform on your bandwidth should be the same as the old, give or take a few MB/mo.
So for those of you who will never know the joy of lighting a 10 gig E circuit or installing fibre, or even being able to load a ginormous PostScript file into memory 20 times over instantly for the pure heck of it; for those of you who will never debate vim vs. emacs, who think LISP is a speech impediment and a pipeline is for natural gas rather than metaprogramming, rest assured, your technical director weeps with you, and will not suffer any further misery or permit your computing life to bear witness to any further degradation. To paraphrase Walt Disney some more, the new OCNet is your forum, where age will relive fond memories of the pre-Facebook era and youth will enjoy the promise of a brighter future. Preferrably one in which we all run Plan9 or Haiku on customizable commodity devices with an open architecture, interchangeable parts, voxel graphics, and pervasive 5G, so if you break your screen it will cost $5 to fix and you can do it yourself as easily as changing the keyboard on your computer.
