Re: Windows NT Server is #1 Web Server, Study Reveals

Ron Resnick (rresnick@dialogosweb.com)
Sat, 10 Jan 1998 13:28:19 -0500


Joe Barrera wrote:
> Or, as Rick Rashid pointed out to me once, during my first year of grad
> school, when I described something in a paper as a "truly distributed
> operating system"... "what is a falsely distributed operating system?"

Having not the slightest interest in getting into the "truth
in advertising" discussion, I will note that there are degrees
of distribution in OSes, as well as in other things. For example,
an OS that offers file services across multiple nodes, but otherwise
has no distributed memory or process execution facilities is
"less" distributed than an OS that has such facilities.

Hence, a designer claiming that his/her system was "truly" distributed
could be, fairly, contrasting its highly decentralized architecture
(lookup services, persistence, memory, process migration, etc.)
against systems that had only some, but not all, of these features.

I.e., the opposite of "truly distributed", in this context, doesn't
necessarily have to be "falsely distributed".

(This FoRKpost, of course, is merely a pretext for including the
advert-sig below :-)

Ron

---

Ron Resnick Senior Consulting Engineer DiaLogos Incorporated http://www.dialogosweb.com

FLASH! NEW Distributed Java Survey course being offered starting in Nov 1998 provides in-depth hands-on training with RMI, CORBA, ObjectSpace Voyager (TM) and SoftWired iBus (TM). Check http://www.dialogosweb.com/javasurvey.html for details.