Thursday  2003-09-11   Software

Joyless Sun -- the last of the Mohicans

The other day it was announced that Bill Joy was leaving Sun Microsystems he co-founded two decades ago. Joyless Sun is now the last of its kind -- proprietry Unix vendors or sales channels for SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC CPUs. All those fragmented Unixes (Solaris, Irix, Ultrix, Digital Unix, AIX to name only a few) had been little more than wrapping paper for the CPUs. Neither Sun, SGI, Digital nor anybody foresaw relentless march of Intel's positive feedback cycle between increasing market share and performance. Fragmentation of hardware and software worsened as overall Unix market deteriorated against Wintel monopoly. These vendors formed and disbanded numerous consortiums against each other, tried their hands on premium-priced PC, abandoned their Unix and became irrelavent.

Unlike the others IBM did not have fixation on OS as product differentiator or customer lock-in tool and provided Websphere running everywhere from PC to Unix to its venerable mainframe as higher level, portable application platform. Contrast IBM to Sun: Sun provided binary compatibility across many versions of Solaris on SPARC and made Solaris scale to hundreds of SPARC CPUs on its StarFire mainframe. Yet this engineering prowess made Sun a niche player for its customers and developers who did not want to be wedded to single OS no matter how great. As Sun continued to provide lackluster middleware products and slow SPARCs the customers and developers gradually moved to cheaper alternatives, leaving Sun the last Unix vendor standing and slowly sinking.

What Joy plans to do next is of great interest. Joy was a key figure in developing BSD Unix and SPARC that made up Sun's software and hardware as well Java (then Jini, followed by Jxta). He is one of the few people who made many sea changes in the industry.

Update on 2003-09-14 San Francisco Chonicle has a long interview with Scott McNealy of Sun, the last remaining co-founder and the CEO.

Sunday  2003-08-03   Web of Services

QoS

Internet2 folks like QoS. Dan Bricklin argues that the Internet does not need QoS.

Wednesday  2003-07-30   Web of Services

UBF and streaming XML

Nobody can recall just how many times various people called for binary XML over the years. If waiting for w3.org's deliberation on this matter is not an option, consider the following alternatives:

• UBF(A) - Universal Binary Format for data transport.
• XML stream for effcient transport and processing of XML.

Or as many people have pointed out just use gzip.

Monday  2003-06-23   Software

Crawling back to the future

Alan Kay and David Smith's recent talk at Stanford is supposedly about Croquet. But in fact it is more of a series of biting yet insightful comments on computer science, its education, its history, its output and everything in between. Do watch it. [link from Lambda the Ultimate]

Monday  2003-05-26   Development

Trust but verify

Most published papers on software verification deal with software used in research or some narrow vertical industry settings few outsiders have access to. On the contrary L Peter Deutsch's talk "The design, development, and maintenance of Ghostscript: (how) could verification have helped?" covers a widely used piece of software, that has evolved over close to two decades in the public eyes. More short notes on Deutsch's other contributions like PDP-1 Lisp, Smalltalk and "8 Fallacies of Networking" will come in the future.

Wednesday  2003-04-23   Software

RIP Codd

E F Codd, the inventor of the relational model of database management, passed away several days ago. True believers of relationalism visit www.dbdebunk.com to maintain their third normal form at all times. As one wit put it:

1. The key
2. The whole key
3. And nothing but the key

So help me Codd.

[Some links from langreiter.com via motz ]

Monday  2003-04-07   Development

CSP book is available

Tony Hoare's classic work "Communicating Sequential Processes" is available as PDF. [From Lambda the Ultimate]