Re: Fw: subscribe fork-l

Rohit Khare (khare@www10.w3.org)
Tue, 21 Jan 1997 18:07:58 -0500


Joe:

> Gee, a spy. Wow. Sounds pretty exciting.

Cool. You can tell FoRK has a few distinctly different and virulent schools
of thought running around. Personally, I'm somewhat biased against
Microsoft, partially from petty jealousy, but I've also got Good Friends
(TM) who work there and I am impressed by the degree of professionalism in
sectors of MS I've worked with. I don't know that I'd work there myself,
though. MS Research might be a different matter, so I never say never.

That said, many of us come from a pro-NeXT background and in general
support anything that subverts mass amounts of cheap hardware :-)

> I actually discovered this list after browsing for information on
> Windows-On-Unix, to help substantiate or refute the (facetious) claim
that
> in the future, folks will only run Unix so that they can run their
favorite
> Windows-On-Unix emulator on top.

Well, it *is* possible, though comic, to load up a Sparc 20 and run,
side-by-side, command line, X, OpenStep, Mac, and Windows apps. Don't try
this at home unless your family business is RAM chips, though...

> Hmm. What gets me up in the morning? My children, usually by jumping up
and
> down on me in bed. ("Daddy! Daddy!"). I usually keep fairly normal hours.

I'm shocked, shocked! Actually, I keep pretty normal West Coast hours, too.
It just seems to bother people here on the East Coast.

> A more serious answer to what motivates me... making great software and
> making it available to a really huge market.

I can respect that. In another sense, that's what some of us are
talking/daydreaming about, too: the vastly larger market of 'ubiquitous
computers': like nanotech, or really cheap wireless 'munchkins' that talk
to each other, not central switches, new smart consumer devices. Stuff that
will drive new software that doesn't necessarily look like desktop OSes at
all.

> I think the Microsoft bashers
> sometimes forget how much cheaper software is as the result of
> concentrating developer resources on a single system platform running on
> commodity hardware.

Well, "cheaper" has several shades of meaning :-)

> I'm (peripherally) involved in the Microsoft's
> clustering work, and I think it's going to be really exciting to see how
> Microsoft's entry into this market will change the economics. Clusters
are
> going to get MUCH cheaper and thus much more widely used as a result of
> Microsoft. In turn, systems used by middle-level businesses are going to
> get much more reliable.

I have been following Wolfpack & MS's related moves, and I have to say I
see the same juggernaut in action. Leak, brief, pre-announce, deliver a
tantalizing bit, push back to '98, refine, refine, refine, and hey, I can
believe that in '99 we'll have an excellent product that *will* change how
'average' enterprises work. But there's a lot more than raw software
prowess in the equation.

> I'm not going to spend my time on this list as a Microsoft chauvinist.
But

Awww... :-)

> I've tried to answer seriously what motivates me, and the answer is,
cheap
> software on cheap hardware, running everywhere, solving problems that
would
> never get solved if the costs of the software could not be amortized as
> broadly as Microsoft can.

Now, there, you might just catch the eye of Rob "Dances With Factors"
Harley. Because even if a pile o'NT boxes does nothing else, it can
factor...

> Oh, left out my background... graduate student on the Mach project under
> Rick Rashid, worked on network shared memory, then on OSF/1 support for
the
> Intel Multicomputers of the time (Touchstone Delta/XPS/etc.). Followed
Rick
> out to Redmond. About a year ago, moved South to the Bay Area to work
with
> Jim Gray.

I'm duly impressed, FWIW. I'm proud to count so many ex-OSFers among my
friends...

We'll have to hear about life in Pittsburgh sometime. Rajit Manohar ran
back to Caltech screaming after only a term. I have to admit, my own
constitution is so weak after four years of Southern California, I couldn't
bring myself to apply to CMU or any other East Coast CS PhD program this
spring (except MIT, which is a long shot anyway).

If you want to find out more, see
http://xent.w3.org/FoRK-archive/summer96/0411.html . In the meantime, we
may ruin this fine anonymous friendship yet -- I'm coming out the the Bay
Area Jan 31 - Feb 4...

Welcome,
Rohit "Dances with Ellipses..." Khare