On 26 July 2011 05:21, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > Again good points. > > Java itself could have been fixed if it were not for the Sun marketing > people who rushed "the electronic toaster language" out where it was not fit > to go. Sun was filled with computerists who knew what they were doing, but > it was quickly too late. > > And you are right about Mark Miller. > > My complaint is not about JS per se, but about whether it is possible to get > all the cycles the computer has for certain purposes. One of the main > unnecessary violations of the spirit of computing in the web is that it > wasn't set up to allow safe access to the whole machine -- despite this > being the goal of good OS design since the mid-60s. >
Indeed. And the only lucky players in the field who can access raw machine power is plugins like Flash. And only because they gained enough trust as being "well safe". As for the rest of developers (if they are not using existing mechanisms in browser) the computer's resources still closed behind solid fence. Another interesting fact that while we having a hardware which can do virtualization (not saying about software), the only application of it which adopted widely is to run one operating system inside another, host one. But hey, things could be much more lightweight! For instance , look at SqueakNOS project. Its boot time is like 10-15 seconds (and most of it not belongs to SqueakNOS itself but to bios and boot loader). So, it remains a mystery to me, why we cannot use web+virtualization. It seems like a good balance between accessing raw machine power and being safe at the same time. I hope that NaCl partly using it , but then i wonder why they spending an effort to validate native code, because if something vent wrong, you can just kill it or freeze it (or do anything which virtualization allow you to do), without any chance of putting host system in danger. > Cheers, > > Alan -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
