scherrer@mtxinu.UUCP (02/27/87)
Concerning those who didn't seem to feel day #1 of the Washington
Conference ("What it is to be UNIX") had much value, this reminds
me of a story I once heard, attributed to Columbus (you know, the
1492 one):
Seems that after Columbus returned from his first trip,
he was treated to a big celebration dinner by the Queen.
Several of those attending, perhaps jealous of Columbus's
success, were trying to downplay his achievements by noting that
it wasn't all that big of a deal, since everyone already
knew that the world was round anyway and so all one had
to do was get on a boat and do it. Well, says old Columbus,
as he reached for an egg on the table, "See this egg.
Can any of you make it stand up on end?" Of course they
all tried and all failed. Columbus smashed the (hard-boiled)
egg down on its nose and it stood up perfectly. Still
unenlightened, the downplayers claimed yet again "yeah, well,
that's obvious too, so what's the big deal"?
So, my friends, beware of underrating the value of insight. ;-)dyer@bacchus.UUCP (03/02/87)
At the risk of belaboring this discussion far beyond what's proper, I
wonder which one of the panel members claims to be Columbus. :-)
Actually, I'm afraid Debbie might have misunderstood my comments, which
cast no aspersions on the presumptive egg of her metaphor, UNIX itself,
and certainly not on the genius of its creators, which has been granted often
enough in the last 15 years. As long as we're using dinner parties as the
metaphor, I would say that it lasted too long, I ended up sitting beside
some particularly uninteresting dinner guests who wouldn't stop talking,
although there were some interesting people there, and that some of the
guests thought they were attending a wake, which made for a peculiar
atmosphere. :-)
I don't want to demean the efforts of the organizers, who obviously put a lot
of work into the production. At the same time, they can't be 100% responsible
for the results, any more than a host could claim 100% resposibility for the
success or failure of a dinner party. But you might decide who to invite
back, eh? :-)
---
Steve Dyer
dyer@harvard.HARVARD.EDU
dyer@spdcc.COM aka {linus,wanginst,bbnccv,harvard,ima,ihnp4}!spdcc!dyertrb@ima.UUCP (03/05/87)
In article <306@mtxinu.UUCP> scherrer@mtxinu.UUCP (Deborah Scherrer) writes: > Concerning those who didn't seem to feel day #1 of the Washington > Conference ("What it is to be UNIX") had much value, this reminds > me of a story I once heard, attributed to Columbus (you know, the > 1492 one): ... > So, my friends, beware of underrating the value of insight. ;-) I think that the Washington USENIX general technical sessions were fairly anemic, though this did not seem to be due to lack of planning effort on the part of the program committee. There was only one program stream, and there were whole sessions where I didn't have any interest in the talks. The first day's talks were retrospective, and in their effort to be cohesive, they tended to be repetitive and therefore bland. I thought some more emphasis on UNIX issues which are relevant in today's (and tomorrow's) market would have spiced up the first day, or at least rounded it out better. I have submitted an abstract for such a talk to the Phoenix USENIX committee, so I'll put up my dukes if it gets accepted. Andrew Tannenbaum Interactive Boston, MA +1 617 247 1155
bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (03/09/87)
Was I at a different conference? It seemed to me that the meta-theme of day #1 was to point out that we're all coming to some agreement that UNIX needs to get past its current paradigm and onto the future (present?) I think that's what all that talk about things like the MacIntosh file system (re: Mike O'Dell) window systems, networking etc. and the progress other systems have made in these areas. The current "problem" (well, let's say dilemma) is standards vs innovation. This is no small matter. How do we let a system heralded for its standardization and predictability from hardware system to hardware system grow into the diverse environments we are currently confronted with? It's great that UNIX runs on everything from a PC to a Cray-II, super-workstation to IBM mainframe and every other dimension. It's another thing to say that the concepts inherent in "standard UNIX" are modelling these environments. To paraphrase a comment once said about Fortran: I don't know what operating system people will be running in 10 years But I am sure they will call it UNIX. I think that's what the talks were about. Go look at the conference papers again. -Barry Shein, Boston University