* Posts by Bill Karwin

7 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2008

Waterfall Niagara speakers

Bill Karwin

Waterfall 2006

Reading the headline, I thought this story would be about people who present technical seminars at the Waterfall Conference 2006 at Niagara Falls, New York.

http://www.waterfall2006.com/

Novell (not SCO) owns UNIX, says jury

Bill Karwin

Thanks jake

Thanks for the additional info. I agree, "The SCO Group" are a bunch of worthless litigants who have no business being in the tech field. I live in Santa Cruz, and I have a lot of friends who worked for SCO over the years. We all think the company has become a pariah.

Bill Karwin

Slight correction

OpenServer was not based on Xenix, except for a few devices drivers that were ported over.

Xenix was derived from AT&T System 7 UNIX, circa 1979. Microsoft combined the AT&T code with BSD UNIX code. SCO developed it further and ported it to the IBM PC. I was a junior engineer at SCO in 1991, and I did some work on the last release of SCO Xenix 2.3.4.

Around 1989, concurrently with late-stage Xenix work, SCO licensed a new set of source code for System V UNIX 3.2.0 directly from AT&T, and developed Open Desktop (ODT) from that code. Later they called it OpenServer. This product was the commercial successor to Xenix, but code-wise they had only the slightest of commonality.

All Xenix code was ultimately removed, so that SCO would not have to continue paying royalties to Microsoft.

Microsoft’s UML roundtrip routed through Oslo

Bill Karwin
Unhappy

UML is useless for maintenance & enhancement

UML is great for describing the structure or behavior of an OO system in diagrams, but it fails in one crucial area: it can't describe succinctly the delta between one version of a system and the enhanced version of that system. A great majority of software engineering projects involve modifying an existing system, either to fix bugs or enhance features. It would be great for modeling tools to represent not only the class hierarchy, but the changes necessary to implement an upgrade from an existing system to the modified version of that system. So far UML cannot do that, even in UML 2.0.

Backlash starts against 'sexy' databases

Bill Karwin

Recent? Hardly

Look through a few old journal articles from the 1970's -- shortly after the RDBMS was proposed and before one had actually been developed. People have been saying that the RDBMS doesn't support the way they need to store data since the beginning of time.

Sure, there are better ways of storing data for specialized purposes, like search engines and semantic web. We should embrace technology to solve those needs. But specialized tools tend to be great at one thing and not so great at others. The RDBMS continues to be the best general-purpose data storage paradigm.

Smut peddlers and spammers invade Google Groups

Bill Karwin
Stop

Cockroaches aren't all bad

It can be argued that cockroaches have a legitimate place in their ecology.

Spammers are simply parasites -- they destroy the host system in which they feed.

But like cockroaches, spammers shun the light and are very hard to kill.

Never buy anything offered in spam. It's 99% likely to be fraudulent anyway, and buying it just encourages more spam. Educate your friends!

US boffins create darkest material ever

Bill Karwin

The Researchers

Predictably, the first thing the researchers did with the new substance was to spill it on their white lab coats.