Tag: Software

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.

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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]

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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:

The key
The whole key
And nothing but the key
So help me Codd.

After all these years of relational database, some still find it suspect.

[Some links from langreiter.com via motz ]

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Tuesday 2003-01-07 Software

X11 grows up

After all these years X11 whose excuse has been "it's not, repeat, not a windowing system but a toolkit/protocol for such" becomes a useful GUI. X11 for Mac OS X even lets users to replace the native Aqua window manager with their own choice.

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Sunday 2002-11-24 Software

Intertwingle

"Everything is deeply intertwingled."
-- Ted Nelson
"Everything is related to everything else."
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

More than four years after Jamie Zawinski wrote about dealing with large volume of messages by aggressively exploiting their relationship to one another (expressed in their "metadata" and data), several new promising programs in the category of PIM or personal information manager are appearing. ZOË is hailed as Google for email for surfacing out all kinds of relevant information about a given email. Spaces tries to connect email, calendar, tasks and notes by providing multiple views on them. Mitch Kapor, famous for Lotus 1-2-3, is also designing Chandler as an inter-personal information manager - sharing information with other users is its primary design goal. Kapor is also known for Agenda, a pioneering PIM from 1980s.

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Tuesday 2002-10-29 Software

Agents everywhere

Well, not quite. Despite years of research by both academia and commercial interests, agents are still rare creatures. But there are more and more would-be agent-runners and they may like to read "Key Issues in Agent Technology" by James Odell and compare it with a more general overview of AI, "Architectures for intelligent systems" by John Sowa.

For a contemporary example of agent technology, see ABLE or Agent Building and Learning Environment (described in this paper).

Addenda: see also Odell's columns at Journal of Object Technology:

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Wednesday 2002-09-18 Software

More on cross platform WYSIWYG HTML|XML editors

See a follow up note of the original note.

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