Joe Landman wrote:
Hi Jon
Jon Forrest wrote:
First of all, I like Microsoft, and I voluntarily use
Vista as my desktop of choice. I've built and run the
Windows environments for the top CS and Civil Engineering
departments in the US, and I was the first to port
Postgres to Windows NT.
Postgres is nice. Did you do a native (ms C compiler) port or a cygwin
port?
It's an interesting story, which is OT to Beowulf.
I was working for Mike Stonebraker in his research group.
Jolly Chen and Andrew Yu and just added SQL support
to Postgres. Mike and I had been to Microsoft several
times to see about them supporting us, and other research.
I was very interested in Windows NT and very impressed
by Microsoft. This was back in about 1994 or 1995.
Anyway, I had NT 3.51 running on a 16MB 486 and I decided
to try to port what was to become PostgreSQL. I used the MS
Visual C compiler, not cygwin, which I'm not sure existed
back then. The Postgres code was surprisingly easy to
port, although the porting went much faster when Mike
was able to get a 64MB MIPS machine donated. The big
accomplishment was that I was able to
run the infamous Wisconsin Benchmark.
Oddly enough, for a long time I have believed (and we have proposed
privately to Microsoft) ways in which I think it could make a
difference. In short, there are codes that are now and will always be
windows based, and that is fine. They may need to run on a cluster, and
they should be able to.
What kind of reaction have you received from them?
What code are you thinking of that is now and will always
be Windows based?
It needs to adapt. But not necessarily "compete" the way it has in the
past.
How can they adapt to an Open/Free Software world?
The big question that needs to be
answered (by Microsoft) is whether or not they need to displace or take
over for Linux to be successful in this space. I believe the answer to
this is "no".
But how will they be able to make any money?
It might be worth engaging John West (InsideHPC.com), and a number of
others in this conversation, as there are some good and informed views
about this out there.
I hope they read this thread.
Cordially,
--
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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