As much as I would have loved to get out in sooner than six years, I tend to agree. In hindsight, if I'd treated it like a job and just done the coding and writing necessary to get the projects I published out the door, I could have done it in three, maybe two. But that would have missed the whole point.
> It was so easy once we saw it that there was no reason to keep the placemat for notes, and we left it behind. Or maybe we did bring it back to the lab; I'm not sure. But it's gone now.
IPv6 is arguably a good example of what happens when you don't do the simplest thing possible. What we really needed was a bigger IP address space. What we got was a whole bunch of other crap. If we had literally expanded IPv4 by a couple of octets at the end (with compatible routing), would we be there now?
In a place with even less IPv6 adoption, probably. It's not like there wasn't similar proposals discussed, and there's no need to rehash the exact same discussion again.
The problem quickly becomes "how do you route it", and that's where we end up with something like today's IPv6. Route aggregation and PI addresses is impratical with IPv4 + extra bits.
The main changes from v4 to v6 besides the extra bits is mostly that some unnecessary complexity was dropped, which in the end is net positive for adoption.
We could really take a page from this style for teaching advanced computing. We try to imagine that architectures just kind of come out of nowhere. Starting with mechanical computing and unit record equipment makes so much make more sense.
They're in the process of doing this for alums @hmc.edu too. Google baited us into moving the whole infrastructure into the cloud and now are switching us to something the alumni association can't afford.
Meanwhile, the self-hosted mail server for the CS department @cs.hmc.edu still hosts accounts for all the alumni and will for the foreseeable eternity. I can still SSH into the current department cluster and read two decade old (or two second old) emails using mutt. If their cluster somehow ever runs out of disks, I'm happy to donate a terabytes worth, but like hell I'm giving money to big-G for cloud storage.
I'm always amazed by Crispix. It's not a heterogeneous material, it's not a poured mixture of two parts, it's not a coated material, it's an assembly. And you can eat it by the handful.
They were called "template-based" JIT and copy-and-patch approach is not new in this regard. The novel idea of copy-and-patch JIT was an automatic code generation via relocatable objects. (By the way, QEMU is indeed cited as an inspiration for copy-and-patch JIT.)
While I'm sure some people theorize that Fabrice Bellard is actually a pseudonym of a collective of 10x programmers, he is as far as I know just one person.
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