&gt; you&#x27;re being deliberately obtuse.<p>To me it sounds like codemac is being entirely sensible and pragmatic about what the limitations are. Pervasive &quot;piping of bytes&quot; is all well and good, but if you don&#x27;t understand what the bytes <i>mean</i>, it doesn&#x27;t really matter.<p>&gt; you wouldn&#x27;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<p>Office network? Sure. Not try it over a WAN and suddenly it doesn&#x27;t look so hot.<p>The thing is that once you&#x27;re going over the network you <i>really</i> need to start thinking about the effects of latency and how to compensate for it or hide it. Network transparency is a <i>foe</i> in this (very common) scenario.