on GUIs and such things

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

> Palm-sized computers benefit from transparent persistence;
> unfortunately, transparent persistence might not interact well with
> ten-thousand-cycle flash RAM.  I'm not sure whether palm-sized
> computers can really benefit from EROS's security architecture, given
> that they are very single-user

Actually, they interact very well. If you're going to eat a 10,000 cycle
flash ram, you definitely want to do it asynchronously in the background. I
believer (though I don't have data) that EROS is more efficient at this than
anything else I've seen to date.

Also, these devices are NOT single user. You download some useful tool off
the net, like a calculator, and suddenly your palm is crashing. Your bank
wants to put security stuff on your palm pilot for account access. So does
your grocery. So does Microsoft (for some value of Microsoft). Each of these
sources of software is best thought of as another user.

The alternative is for each provider to hand you a distinct device. I need a
better buzz-phrase, but I am fond of saying that "the bat belt [i.e. a belt
full of equipment] is not the future of pervasive computing"

Perhaps a better way to say this is that pervasive computing should require
a hand, not a wheelbarrow.

shap