A distributed filesystem like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe-LAFS or http://ipfs.io/ would become incredibly useful if they got sufficient adoption.
Re:The Web of Alexandria
by DarkLinkXXXX on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @11:38AM
(#9612114)
I gotta say, IPFS looks nice. Thanks.
Re:The Web of Alexandria
by walterbell on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @05:36AM
(#9610244)
>We need operating systems that treat programs as adversarial rather than trusted
A few client platforms are moving in the direction of isolating workloads: Qubes, Genode, unikernels.
OS X and Windows 10 include hypervisors that could be used to isolate risky workloads, but they are not yet positioned for mainstream use. Recent Intel GPUs include support for 3D graphics virtualization.
With strong isolation, we can localize competing vendors, filesystems, SDNs, DRM, monetization and data retention approaches into isolated VMs on the same device. No need to force all workloads into one walled garden, or put stable workflows at risk from experimental software.
Re:The Web of Alexandria
by FeepingCreature on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @05:22AM
(#9610196)
100GB is cheap to store, but it's not cheap to download, for you or for the distributor. (At least, if everyone does it.) With free software, load-on-demand makes way more sense - if you need a purely local install, buy a DVD set.
Well, BitTorrent pretty much solved this problem a decade ago. I imagine that you can download a base image, and then have a torrent sync in the background.
Most people have 100 GB free on their hard disk indefinitely these days, so why not?
Why doesn't every person with a computer have all the world's open source software on their machine? The entire Debian repository can fit 10 times over on a 1TB hard drive [1].
Why not leverage that tremendous body of free knowledge and work?
The answer I've come up with is that the state of software security is holding us back. Even though we have all this free knowledge, it's not worth it for us to just try new stuff. I remember as a kid I would download new stuff from BBSes and just try it. But no more.
I just stick with a small set of well worn programs that address my needs. Perhaps this is a habit from the Windows days, where installing a new piece of software could break ANY existing piece of installed software. But the risk is still non-zero on Linux distros.
We need operating systems that treat programs as adversarial rather than trusted, and then every computer could have every piece of software installed locally. If you wanted to try out 100 different audio editing programs, you'd be free to do so.
Or perhaps there would be no monetization model for that. Just a thought.
[1] https://www.debian.org/mirror/size