[lomnakkus]

> you're being deliberately obtuse.

To me it sounds like codemac is being entirely sensible and pragmatic about what the limitations are. Pervasive "piping of bytes" is all well and good, but if you don't understand what the bytes mean, it doesn't really matter.

> you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine

Office network? Sure. Not try it over a WAN and suddenly it doesn't look so hot.

The thing is that once you're going over the network you really need to start thinking about the effects of latency and how to compensate for it or hide it. Network transparency is a foe in this (very common) scenario.