Several people have asked me about the most distinguishing
feature of the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference for Unix developers
(compared to HP World the previous week). This was certainly
a highlight: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2087
I was among a fairly large group who stayed up until 2:00 AM
or so downloading (and installing) all kinds of cool software
that had been mentioned during the day's sessions. It felt
like those wonderful college days -- except that, instead of
paper and pencil, everybody had many gigabytes of disk and
hundreds of MHz of CPU power (all interconnected through a
state-of-the-art wireless cloud whose speed made my home T1
feel sluggish). There was "electricity" running through the
bodies of all participants. It was nice to see so much
passion, particularly among die-hard Unix folks such as
James Gosling. He could not speak highly enough of his
Titanium PowerBook.
Ten years ago, I wrote this paper:
http://www.adager.com/TechnicalPapersHTML/YearOfThePies.html
where I mentioned:
There are two camps in the standards battlefield.
Some people want to standardize components while
other people, more realistically, want to standardize
interfaces. Sometimes, "the best component" -- according
to a given set of someone else's criteria -- is not
necessarily the most appropriate under a given set
of circumstances for you. In any case, you want to
be able to communicate with any component by means
of a suitable collection of standard-interface messages.
MPE-Image has come a long way in the last ten years in terms
of TCP/IP, SQL, Java, and several other standards. I was
very interested in the comments by Tim O'Reilly in this regard.
You can see the following O'Reilly comments being delivered here:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/osx2002/tuesday_photos.html
During his keynote, "The Future is Built In," Tim O'Reilly
explained how history tends to repeat itself, and if you
want to be successful in the technology arena, working with
standards can help your endeavor.
BTW: The press was totally free to roam, unshackled :-)
I look forward to upcoming HP3000 User Group meetings like this,
where we can passionately discuss out-of-the-ordinary components
(such as the elite MPE/iX OS and its elite IMAGE/SQL DBMS)
as well as the standard interfaces that they use to communicate
with all kinds of other computing platforms. Some people will
use such standard interfaces to migrate their data to other
platforms, of course (migrating their programs will be a different
can of worms). Other people will use such standard interfaces for
revenue-generating purposes, such as increasing the productivity
of their organizations with their secret MPE-Image competitive
advantages (their secret weapons). To each his/her own :-)
There is a prerequisite for the rebirth of such passionate
MPE-Image meetings. Homework: What is the prerequisite?
For Linux enthusiasts, there are excellent news from Moshe Bar.
(Moshe Bar is a systems administrator and OS researcher who
started learning UNIX on a PDP-11 with AT&T UNIX Release 6,
back in 1981. Moshe has a M.Sc and a Ph.D. in computer
science and writes UNIX-related books.)
If you love Linux, you will enjoy Moshe's recent Byte column:
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=7620/byt1032475416823/0923_bar.html
Things are exciting. May the power of "electricity" be with you,
_______________
| |
| |
| r | Alfredo [log in to unmask]
| e | http://www.adager.com
| g | F. Alfredo Rego
| a | Manager, R & D Labs
| d | Adager Corporation
| A | Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000 U.S.A.
| |
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