A Second Conversation with Werner Vogels:
The Amazon CTO sits with Tom Killalea to discuss designing for evolution at scale.
When I joined Amazon in 1998, the company had a single US-based website selling only books and running a monolithic C application on five servers, a handful of Berkeley DBs for key/value data, and a relational database. That database was called "ACB" which stood for "Amazon.Com Books," a name that failed to reflect the range of our ambition. In 2006 acmqueue published a conversation between Jim Gray and Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, in which Werner explained that Amazon should be viewed not just as an online bookstore but as a technology company. In the intervening 14 years, Amazon's distributed systems, and the patterns used to build and operate them, have grown in influence.
A Conversation with Ed Catmull:
The head of Pixar Animation Studios talks tech with Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan.
With the release of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar Animation Studios President Ed Catmull achieved a lifelong goal: to make the world’s first feature-length, fully computer-generated movie. It was the culmination of two decades of work, beginning at the legendary University of Utah computer graphics program in the early 1970s, with important stops along the way at the New York Institute of Technology, Lucasfilm, and finally Pixar, which he cofounded with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Since then, Pixar has become a household name, and Catmull’s original dream has extended into a string of successful computer-animated movies. Each stage in his storied career presented new challenges, and on the other side of them, new lessons.
A Conversation with Jeff Heer, Martin Wattenberg, and Fernanda Viégas:
Sharing visualization with the world
Visualization can be a pretty mundane activity: collect some data, fire up a tool, and then present it in a graph, ideally with some pretty colors. But all that is changing. The explosion of publicly available data sets on the Web, coupled with a new generation of collaborative visualization tools, is making it easier than ever to create compelling visualizations and share them with the world.
A Conversation with Steve Furber:
The designer of the ARM chip shares lessons on energy-efficient computing.
If you were looking for lessons on energy-efficient computing, one person you would want to speak with would be Steve Furber, principal designer of the highly successful ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) processor. Currently running in billions of cellphones around the world, the ARM is a prime example of a chip that is simple, low power, and low cost. Furber led development of the ARM in the 1980s while at Acorn, the British PC company also known for the BBC Microcomputer, which Furber played a major role in developing.
A Conversation with David Shaw:
In a rare interview, David Shaw discusses how he’s using computer science to unravel the mysteries of biochemistry.
In this interview, Hanrahan and Shaw discuss Shaw’s latest project at D. E. Shaw Research: Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer designed to speed up molecular dynamics simulations by several orders of magnitude. Four 512-processor machines are now active and already helping scientists to understand how proteins interact with each other and with other molecules at an atomic level of detail. Shaw’s hope is that these "molecular microscopes" will help unravel some biochemical mysteries that could lead to the development of more effective drugs for cancer and other diseases.
A Conversation with Arthur Whitney:
Can code ever be too terse? The designer of the K and Q languages discusses this question and many more with Queue editorial board member Bryan Cantrill.
When it comes to programming languages, Arthur Whitney is a man of few words. The languages he has designed, such as A, K, and Q, are known for their terse, often cryptic syntax and tendency to use single ASCII characters instead of reserved words. While these languages may mystify those used to wordier languages such as Java, their speed and efficiency has made them popular with engineers on Wall Street.
A Conversation with Van Jacobson:
The TCP/IP pioneer discusses the promise of content-centric networking with BBN chief scientist Craig Partridge.
To those with even a passing interest in the history of the Internet and TCP/IP networking, Van Jacobson will be a familiar name. During his 25 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and subsequent leadership positions at Cisco Systems and Packet Design, Jacobson has helped invent and develop some of the key technologies on which the Internet is based.
A Conversation with Steve Bourne, Eric Allman, and Bryan Cantrill:
In part two of their discussion, our editorial board members consider XP and Agile.
In the July/August 2008 issue of ACM Queue we published part one of a two-part discussion about the practice of software engineering. The goal was to gain some perspective on the tools, techniques, and methodologies that software engineers use in their daily lives. Three members of Queue’s editorial advisory board participated: Steve Bourne, Eric Allman, and Bryan Cantrill, each of whom has made significant and lasting real-world contributions to the field (for more information on each of the participants, see part one). In part two we rejoin their conversation as they discuss XP (Extreme Programming) and Agile.
A Conversation with Steve Bourne, Eric Allman, and Bryan Cantrill:
In part one of a two-part series, three Queue editorial board members discuss the practice of software engineering.
In part one of a two-part series, three Queue editorial board members discuss the practice of software engineering. In their quest to solve the next big computing problem or develop the next disruptive technology, software engineers rarely take the time to look back at the history of their profession. What’s changed? What hasn’t changed? In an effort to shed light on these questions, we invited three members of ACM Queue’s editorial advisory board to sit down and offer their perspectives on the continuously evolving practice of software engineering.
A Conversation with Erik Meijer and Jose Blakeley:
The Microsoft perspective on ORM
To understand more about LINQ and ORM and why Microsoft took this approach, we invited two Microsoft engineers closely involved with their development, Erik Meijer and Jos Blakeley, to speak with Queue editorial board member Terry Coatta.
A Behavioral Approach to Security:
Analyzing the behavior of suspicious code
The CTO of Finjan, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, makes a strong case for a new approach to security that relies more on analyzing the behavior of suspicious code than signatures that have to developed after the attacks have already started.
The Silent Security Epidemic:
Developers are challenged by attacks that target certain types of applications.
Although the industry is generally getting better with dealing with routine types of security attacks, developers are today being challenged by more complex attacks that not only flow below the radar, but also specifically target certain types of applications. In this Queuecast edition, Ryan Sherstobitoff, CTO of Panda Software describes what new types of sophisticated attacks are being created and what proactive steps developers need to take to protect their applications.
The Power of IP Protection and Software Licensing:
Software Digital Rights Management solutions are the de-facto standard today for protecting IP.
Intellectual Property (IP) - which ranges from ideas, inventions, technologies, and patented, trademarked or copyrighted work and products - can account for as much as 80% of a software company’s total market value. Since IP is considered a financial asset in today’s business climate, the threats to IP create a real concern. In an interview with ACM Queuecast host Michael Vizard, Aladdin vice president Gregg Gronowski explains how Software Digital Rights Management solutions are the de-facto standard today for protecting software IP, preventing software piracy, and enabling software licensing and compliance.
Custom Processing:
Today general-purpose processors from Intel and AMD dominate the landscape, but advances in processor designs such as the cell processor architecture overseen by IBM chief scientist Peter Hofstee promise to bring the costs of specialized system on a chip platforms in line with cost associated with general purpose computing platforms, and that just may change the art of system design forever.
Today we’re going to talk about system on a chip and some of the design issues that go with that, and more importantly, some of the newer trends, such as the work that IBM is doing around the cell processor to advance the whole system on a chip processor.
Reporting for Duty:
All too often the reporting tools that developers select for their applications are a little more than an afterthought. In this Premium ACM Queuecast, Vice President of Product Management for Actuate, Paul Clenahan, explains why it’s in the interest of developer to select richer sets of reporting tools and how these tools more readily accessible though the Eclipse Foundation’s BIRT project, spearheaded by Actuate.
Joining me today is Paul Clenahan, Vice President of Product Management at Actuate, and a member of the BIRT Project Management Committee, who’s here to discuss future trends in reporting tools.
Five Steps to a Better Vista Installation - Transcript:
Unravel the mysteries and learn the best practices associated with mastering the new application installation routines for Vista applications. In this Premium Queuecast hosted by Michael Vizard, Bob Corrigan, senior manager for global product marketing at Macrovision, and Robert Dickau, principal trainer, reveal the five most crucial things you need to know about Vista application installations.
Joining me today is Bob Corrigan, Senior Manager for Global Product Marketing at Macrovision; and Robert Dickau, Principal Trainer for Macrovision. Today’s topic is Vista, and the installation routines around Vista and the opportunities that bring developers.
Software Operations’ Profit Potential:
Today’s software producer faces many challenges in building and keeping a satisfied customer base. In this ACM Premium Queuecast, Macrovision FLEXnet Publisher Product Manager Mitesh Pancholy discusses how companies can solve their license management challenges and turn their software operations into a profit center.
Joining me today is Mitesh Pancholy, Product Manager for Macrovision, and Abby Domini, also with Macrovision. We’re going to talk about license management today.
Large Scale Systems: Best Practices:
Transcript of interview with Jerod Jenson, Enron Online
Time again companies moving to build large scale systems and networks stumble over the same problems. In an interview with ACM Queuecast host Michael Vizard, Jarod Jenson, the brains behind the Enron Online trading site, talks about the best practices he emphasizes now that he is the chief architect for Aeysis, a consulting firm that specializes on advising clients on how to build manageable high performance systems.
Business Process Minded:
Transcript of interview with Edwin Khodabakchian, vice president of product development at Oracle
A new paradigm created to empower business system analysts by giving them access to meta-data that they can directly control to drive business process management is about to sweep the enterprise application arena. In an interview with ACM Queuecast host Michael Vizard, Oracle vice president of product development Edwin Khodabakchian explains how the standardization of service-oriented architectures and the evolution of the business process execution language are coming together to finally create flexible software architectures that can adapt to the business rather than making the business adapt to the software.
Discipline and Focus:
Transcript of interview with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon
When it comes to managing and deploying large scale systems and networks, discipline and focus matter more than specific technologies. In a conversation with ACM Queuecast host Mike Vizard, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says the key to success is to have a relentless commitment to a modular computer architecture that makes it possible for the people who build the applications to also be responsible for running and deploying those systems within a common IT framework.
Automatic for the People:
Transcript of interview with Rob Gingell, CTO of Cassatt
Probably the single biggest challenge with large scale systems and networks is not building them but rather managing them on an ongoing basis. Fortunately, new classes of systems and network management tools that have the potential to save on labor costs because they automate much of the management process are starting to appear.
A Conversation with Kurt Akeley and Pat Hanrahan:
Graphics veterans debate the evolution of the GPU.
Interviewing either Kurt Akeley or Pat Hanrahan for this month’s special report on GPUs would have been a great opportunity, so needless to say we were delighted when both of these graphics-programming veterans agreed to participate. Akeley was part of the founding Silicon Graphics team in 1982 and worked there for almost 20 years, during which he led the development of several high-end graphics systems, including GTX, VGX, and RealityEngine. He’s also known for his pioneering work on OpenGL, the industry-standard programming interface for high-performance graphics hardware.
A Conversation with Jason Hoffman:
A systems scientist looks at virtualization, scalability, and Ruby on Rails.
Jason Hoffman has a Ph.D. in molecular pathology, but to him the transition between the biological sciences and his current role as CTO of Joyent was completely natural: "Fundamentally, what I’ve always been is a systems scientist, meaning that whether I was studying metabolism or diseases of metabolism or cancer or computer systems or anything else, a system is a system," says Hoffman. He draws on this broad systems background in the work he does at Joyent providing scalable infrastructure for Web applications.
A Conversation with Mary Lou Jepsen:
What’s behind that funky green machine?
From Tunisia to Taiwan, Mary Lou Jepsen has circled the globe in her role as CTO of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Founded by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte in 2005, OLPC builds inexpensive laptops designed for educating children in developing nations. Marvels of engineering, the machines have been designed to withstand some of the harshest climates and most power-starved regions on the planet. To accomplish this, Jepsen and her team had to reinvent what a laptop could be. As Jepsen says, “You ask different questions and you get different answers.” The resulting machine, named the XO, is uniquely adapted to its purpose, combining super-low-power electronics, mesh networking, and a sunlight-readable screen, which Jepsen designed herself.
A Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore:
The future of file systems
This month ACM Queue speaks with two Sun engineers who are bringing file systems into the 21st century. Jeff Bonwick, CTO for storage at Sun, led development of the ZFS file system, which is now part of Solaris. Bonwick and his co-lead, Sun Distinguished Engineer Bill Moore, developed ZFS to address many of the problems they saw with current file systems, such as data integrity, scalability, and administration. In our discussion this month, Bonwick and Moore elaborate on these points and what makes ZFS such a big leap forward.
A Conversation with Joel Spolsky:
What it takes to build a good software company
Joel Spolsky has never been one to hide his opinions. Since 2000, he has developed a loyal following for his insightful, tell-it-like-it-is essays on software development and management on his popular Weblog “Joel on Software”. The prolific essayist has also published four books and started a successful software company, Fog Creek, in New York City, a place he feels is sorely lacking in product-oriented software development houses. Spolsky started Fog Creek not with a specific product in mind, but rather to create a kind of software developers’ utopia, where “programmers and software developers are the stars and everything else serves only to make them productive and happy.” So far, he has succeeded.
A Conversation with Michael Stonebraker and Margo Seltzer:
Relating to databases
Over the past 30 years Michael Stonebraker has left an indelible mark on the database technology world. Stonebraker’s legacy began with Ingres, an early relational database initially developed in the 1970s at UC Berkeley, where he taught for 25 years. The Ingres technology lives on today in both the Ingres Corporation’s commercial products and the open source PostgreSQL software. A prolific entrepreneur, Stonebraker also started successful companies focused on the federated database and stream-processing markets. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and currently is adjunct professor of computer science at MIT. Interviewing Stonebraker is Margo Seltzer, one of the founders of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, a popular embedded database engine now owned by Oracle.
A Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Hal Stern:
Considering the open source approach
For years, the software industry has used open source, community-based methods of developing and improving software—in many cases offering products for free. Other industries, such as publishing and music, are just beginning to embrace more liberal approaches to copyright and intellectual property. This month Queue is delighted to have a representative from each of these camps join us for a discussion of what’s behind some of these trends, as well as hot-topic issues such as identity management, privacy, and trust.
A Conversation with Cullen Jennings and Doug Wadkins:
Getting the lowdown on SIP
In our interview this month, Cisco Systems’ Cullen Jennings offers this call to arms for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol): "The vendors need to get on with implementing the standards that are made, and the standards guys need to hurry up and finish their standards." And he would know. Jennings has spent his career both helping define IP telephony standards and developing products based on them. As a Distinguished Engineer in Cisco’s Voice Technology Group, Jennings’s current work focuses on VoIP, conferencing, security, and firewall and NAT traversal.
A Conversation with Jamie Butler:
Rootkitting out all evil
Rootkit technology hit center stage in 2005 when analysts discovered that Sony BMG surreptitiously installed a rootkit as part of its DRM (digital rights management) solution. Although that debacle increased general awareness of rootkits, the technology remains the scourge of the software industry through its ability to hide processes and files from detection by system analysis and anti-malware tools.
A Conversation with John Hennessy and David Patterson:
They wrote the book on computing.
As authors of the seminal textbook, ’Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach’, John Hennessy and David Patterson probably don’t need an introduction. You’ve probably read them in college or, if you were lucky enough, even attended one of their classes. Since rethinking, and then rewriting, the way computer architecture is taught, both have remained committed to educating a new generation of engineers with the skills to tackle today’s tough problems in computer architecture, Patterson as a professor at Berkeley and Hennessy as a professor, dean, and now president of Stanford University.
A Conversation with Douglas W. Jones and Peter G. Neumann:
Does technology help or hinder election integrity?
Elections form the fundamental basis of all democracies. In light of many past problems with the integrity of election processes around the world, ongoing efforts have sought to increase the use of computers and communications in elections to help automate the process. Unfortunately, many existing computer-related processes are poorly conceived and implemented, introducing new problems related to such issues as voter confidentiality and privacy, computer system integrity, accountability and resolution of irregularities, ease of administration by election officials, and ease of use by voters—with many special problems for those with various handicaps. Overall, the issues relating to computer security provide a representative cross-section of the difficulties inherent in attempting to develop and operate trustworthy systems for other applications.
A Conversation with David Brown:
The nondisruptive theory of system evolution
This month Queue tackles the problem of system evolution. One key question is: What do developers need to keep in mind while evolving a system, to ensure that the existing software that depends on it doesn’t break? It’s a tough problem, but there are few more qualified to discuss this subject than two industry veterans now at Sun Microsystems, David Brown and Bob Sproull. Both have witnessed what happens to systems over time and have thought a lot about the introduction of successive technological innovations to a software product without undermining its stability or the software that depends on it.
A Conversation with Jordan Cohen:
Speaking out about speech technology
Jordan Cohen calls himself ’sort of an engineer and sort of a linguist.’ This diverse background has been the foundation for his long history working with speech technology, including almost 30 years with government agencies, with a little time out in the middle to work in IBM’s speech recognition group. Until recently he was the chief technology officer of VoiceSignal, a company that does voice-based user interfaces for mobile devices. VoiceSignal has a significant presence in the cellphone industry, with its software running on between 60 and 100 million cellphones. Cohen has just joined SRI International as a senior scientist.
A Conversation with Leo Chang of ClickShift:
In the world of component software, simplicity, not standards, might be the key.
To explore this month’s theme of component technologies, we brought together two engineers with lots of experience in the field to discuss some of the current trends and future direction in the world of software components. Queue Editorial board member Terry Coatta is the director of software development at GPS Industries. His expertise is in distributed component systems such as CORBA, EJB, and COM. He joins in the discussion with Leo Chang, the cofounder and CTO of ClickShift, an online campaign optimization and management company.
A Conversation with Werner Vogels:
Learning from the Amazon technology platform: Many think of Amazon as ’that hugely successful online bookstore.’ You would expect Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to embrace this distinction, but in fact it causes him some concern.
Many think of Amazon as "that hugely successful online bookstore." You would expect Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to embrace this distinction, but in fact it causes him some concern. "I think it’s important to realize that first and foremost Amazon is a technology company," says Vogels. And he’s right. Over the past years, Vogels has helped Amazon grow from an online retailer (albeit one of the largest, with more than 55 million active customer accounts) into a platform on which more than 1 million active retail partners worldwide do business.
A Conversation with Chuck McManis:
Developing systems with a purpose: do one thing, and do it well.
When thinking about purpose-built systems, it’s easy to focus on the high-visibility consumer products: the iPods, the TiVos. Lying in the shadows of the corporate data center, however, are a number of less-glamorous devices built primarily to do one specific thing: and do it well and reliably.
A Conversation with Steve Ross-Talbot:
The IT world has long been plagued by a disconnect between theory and practice.
Academics theorizing in their ivory towers; programmers at "Initech" toiling away in their corporate cubicles. While this might be a somewhat naïve characterization, the fact remains that both academics and practitioners could do a better job of sharing their ideas and innovations with each other. As a result, cutting-edge research often fails to find practical application in the marketplace.
A Conversation with Jarod Jenson:
Pinpointing performance problems
One of the industry’s go-to guys in performance improvement for business systems is Jarod Jenson, the chief systems architect for a consulting company he founded called Aeysis. He received a B.S. degree in computer science from Texas A&M University in 1995, then went to work for Baylor College of Medicine as a system administrator. From there he moved to Enron, where he played a major role in developing EnronOnline. After the collapse of Enron, Jenson worked briefly for UBS Warburg Energy before setting up his own consulting company. His focus since then has been on performance and scalability with applications at numerous companies where he has earned a reputation for quickly delivering substantial performance gains.
A Conversation with Phil Smoot:
The challenges of managing a megaservice
In the landscape of today’s megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day. What’s interesting is that despite this enormous amount of traffic, Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all.
A Conversation with Ray Ozzie:
Cooperate, Communicate, Collaborate
There are not many names bigger than Ray Ozzie’s in computer programming. An industry visionary and pioneer in computer-supported cooperative work, he began his career as an electrical engineer but fairly quickly got into computer science and programming. He is the creator of IBM’s Lotus Notes and is now chief technical officer of Microsoft, reporting to chief software architect Bill Gates. Recently, Ozzie’s role as chief technical officer expanded as he assumed responsibility for the company’s software-based services strategy across its three major divisions.
A Conversation with Roger Sessions and Terry Coatta:
The difference between objects and components? That’s debatable.
In the December/January 2004-2005 issue of Queue, Roger Sessions set off some fireworks with his article about objects, components, and Web services and which should be used when (“Fuzzy Boundaries,” 40-47). Sessions is on the board of directors of the International Association of Software Architects, the author of six books, writes the Architect Technology Advisory, and is CEO of ObjectWatch. He has a very object-oriented viewpoint, not necessarily shared by Queue editorial board member Terry Coatta, who disagreed with much of what Sessions had to say in his article. Coatta is an active developer who has worked extensively with component frameworks.
A Conversation with David Anderson:
Supercomputing on the grassroots level
Millions of PCs on desktops at home helping to solve some of the world’s most compute-intensive scientific problems. And it’s an all-volunteer force of PC users, who, with very little effort, can contribute much-needed PC muscle to the scientific and academic communities.
A Conversation with Peter Tippett and Steven Hofmeyr:
Two leaders in the field of computer security discuss the influence of biomedicine on their work, and more.
There have always been similarities and overlap between the worlds of biology and computer science. Nowhere is this more evident than in computer security, where the basic terminology of viruses and infection is borrowed from biomedicine.
A Conversation with Tim Marsland:
Taking software delivery to a new level
Delivering software to customers, especially in increments to existing systems, has been a difficult challenge since the days of floppies and shrink-wrap. But with guys like Tim Marsland working on the problem, the process could be improving.
A Conversation with Pat Selinger:
Leading the way to manage the world’s information
Take Pat Selinger of IBM and James Hamilton of Microsoft and put them in a conversation together, and you may hear everything you wanted to know about database technology and weren’t afraid to ask. Selinger, IBM Fellow and vice president of area strategy, information, and interaction for IBM Research, drives the strategy for IBM’s research work spanning the range from classic database systems through text, speech, and multimodal interactions. Since graduating from Harvard with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, she has spent almost 30 years at IBM, hopscotching between research and development of IBM’s database products.
A Conversation with Tim Bray:
Searching for ways to tame the world’s vast stores of information.
Tim Bray’s Waterloo was no crushing defeat, but rather the beginning of his success as one of the conquerors of search engine technology and XML. In 1986, after working in software at DEC and GTE, he took a job at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, where he managed the New Oxford English Dictionary Project, an ambitious research endeavor to bring the venerable Oxford English Dictionary into the computer age.
A Conversation with Alan Kay:
Big talk with the creator of smalltalk - and much more
When you want to gain a historical perspective on personal computing and programming languages, why not turn to one of the industry’s preeminent pioneers? That would be Alan Kay, winner of last year’s Turing Award for leading the team that invented Smalltalk, as well as for his fundamental contributions to personal computing. Kay was one of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he led one of several groups that together developed modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing, and network client-servers.
A Conversation with Bruce Lindsay:
Designing for failure may be the key to success.
Designing for failure may be the key to success.
A Conversation with Mike Deliman:
And you think your operating system needs to be reliable.
Mike Deliman was pretty busy last January when the Mars rover Spirit developed memory and communications problems shortly after landing on the Red Planet. He is a member of the team at Wind River Systems who created the operating system at the heart of the Mars rovers, and he was among those working nearly around the clock to discover and solve the problem that had mysteriously halted the mission on Mars.
A Conversation with Donald Peterson:
What will the coming revolution merging voice and data communications with business applications bring?
That light we see at the end of the tunnel is the convergence of voice and data communications with business applications. As chairman and chief executive officer of Avaya, Donald Peterson is in a position to help make that convergence happen sooner rather than later. Peterson has been with Avaya since it was spun off from Lucent in 2000. Prior to that he was chief financial officer of AT&T’s Communication Services Group and Lucent.
A Conversation with James Gosling:
James Gosling talks about virtual machines, security, and of course, Java.
As a teenager, James Gosling came up with an idea for a little interpreter to solve a problem in a data analysis project he was working on at the time. Through the years, as a grad student and at Sun as creator of Java and the Java Virtual Machine, he has used several variations on that solution. “I came up with one answer once, and I have just been repeating it over and over again for a frightening number of years,” he says.
A Conversation with Brewster Kahle:
Creating a library of Alexandria for the digital age
Stu Feldman, Queue board member and vice president of Internet technology for IBM, interviews the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Internet Archive.
A Conversation with Sam Leffler:
A Unix and BSD pioneer discusses the open source movement.
The seeds of Unix and open source were sown in the 1970s, and Sam Leffler was right in there doing some of the heaviest cultivating. He has been actively working with Unix since 1976 when he first encountered it at Case Western Reserve University, and he has been involved with what people now think of as open source, as he says, “long before it was even termed open source.” While working for the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley, he helped with the 4.1BSD release and was responsible for the release of 4.2BSD.
A Conversation with Matt Wells:
When it comes to competing in the search engine arena, IS bigger always better?
Search is a small but intensely competitive segment of the industry, dominated for the past few years by Google. But Google’s position as king of the hill is not insurmountable, says Gigablast’s Matt Wells, and he intends to take his product to the top.
A Conversation with Teresa Meng:
The founder of Atheros analyzes the role of signal processing in the evolving world of wireless communications.
In 1999, Teresa Meng took a leave of absence from Stanford University and with colleagues from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, founded Atheros Communications to develop and deliver the core technology for wireless communication systems. Using a combination of signal processing and CMOS RF technology, Atheros came up with a pioneering 5 GHz wireless LAN chipset found in most 802.11a/b/g products, and continues to extend its market as wireless communications evolve.
A Conversation with Will Harvey:
In many ways online games are on the bleeding edge of software development.
That puts Will Harvey, founder and executive vice president of Menlo Park-based There, right at the front of the pack. There, which just launched its product in October, is a virtual 3D world designed for online socializing.
A Conversation with Steve Hagan:
At Oracle, distributed development is a way of life.
Oracle Corporation, which bills itself as the world’s largest enterprise software company, with $10 billion in revenues, some 40,000 employees, and operations in 60 countries, has ample opportunity to put distributed development to the test. Among those on the front lines of Oracle’s distributed effort is Steve Hagan, the engineering vice president of the Server Technologies division, based at Oracle’s New England Development Center in Nashua, New Hampshire, located clear across the country from Oracle’s Redwood Shores, California, headquarters.
A Conversation with Peter Ford:
The IM world according to a messenger architect
Instant messaging (IM) may represent our brave new world of communications, just as e-mail did a few short years ago. Many IM players are vying to establish the dominant standard in this new world, as well as introducing new applications to take advantage of all IM has to offer. Among them, hardly surprising, is Microsoft, which is moving toward the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as its protocol choice for IM.
A Conversation with Dan Dobberpuhl:
The computer industry has always been about power.
The development of the microprocessors that power computers has been a relentless search for more power, higher speed, and better performance, usually in smaller and smaller packages. But when is enough enough?
A Conversation with Wayne Rosing:
How the Web changes the way developers build and release software
Google is one of the biggest success stories of the recent Internet age, evolving in five years from just another search engine with a funny name into a household name that is synonymous with searching the Internet. It processes about 200 million search requests daily, serving as both a resource and a challenge to developers today.
A Conversation with Chris DiBona:
Chris DiBona has been out front and outspoken about the open source movement.
He was hooked from the moment he installed Linux on an old PC when he was a teenager.
A Conversation with Jim Gray:
Sit down, turn off your cellphone, and prepare to be fascinated.
Clear your schedule, because once you’ve started reading this interview, you won’t be able to put it down until you’ve finished it.
A Conversation with Mario Mazzola:
To peek into the future of networking, you don’t need a crystal ball. You just need a bit of time with Mario Mazzola, chief development officer at Cisco.
Mazzola lives on the bleeding edge of networking technology, so his present is very likely to be our future. He agreed to sit down with Queue to share some of his visions of the future and the implications he anticipates for software developers working with such rapidly evolving technologies as wireless networking, network security, and network scalability.
A Conversation with Jim Ready:
Linux may well play a significant role in the future of the embedded systems market, where the majority of software is still custom built in-house and no large player has preeminence.
Linux may well play a significant role in the future of the embedded systems market, where the majority of software is still custom built in-house and no large player has preeminence. The constraints placed on embedded systems are very different from those on the desktop. We caught up with Jim Ready of MontaVista Software to talk about what he sees in the future of Linux as the next embedded operating system (OS).
Interview with Adam Bosworth:
The changes that are going to be driven by web services will result in a major language extension.
Adam Bosworth’s contributions to the development and evolution of Web Services began before the phrase "Web Services" had even been coined. That’s because while working as a senior manager at Microsoft in the late ’90s, he became one of the people most central to the effort to define an industry XML specification. While at Microsoft, he also served as General Manager of the company’s WebData organization (with responsibility for defining Microsoft’s long-term XML strategy) in addition to heading up the effort to develop the HTML engine used in Internet Explorer 4 & 5.