Friday, December 05, 2003
Why a mac?
Ask Bill Joy... the kicker is the last line of this snippet.
Wired: But innovation is supposed to be dead.
Joy: Nonsense. Moore's law still has at least a decade to go with conventional silicon. That's a factor of 100 in performance, which means that with some work to make the algorithms run faster, we've got maybe a factor of a thousand improvement still to come. If you give me machines that are a thousand times as powerful as today's at the same price, I ought to be able to do something radically better. Thirty years ago a supercomputer was 80 megahertz. Now a personal computer is 2 gigahertz, and yet the software isn't 25 times better. I just got a new Mac with two 2-gigahertz processors, 8 gigabytes of memory, and a half a terabyte of internal disk.
Wired: Good for Apple. So what?
Joy: So you have the ability to hold a huge simulation all in memory - a database becomes a data structure. Add 64-bit computing and I can do breathtaking visualization. But that's not a space I'm going to go into, by the way. People's expectations in three dimensions are so high. On the other hand, existing operating systems, especially the ones provided by the reigning monopolist here, are deeply flawed. So there's enormous opportunity.
Wired: Is that something that you'd want to take on?
Joy: Jini networking technology was a partial attempt. Rather than writing distributed applications, you write a program - the whole system is an application program. But Jini was a solution to a problem that people didn't know they had.
Wired: Which was?
Joy: Reliable and secure systems. We all know that now - 4,000 known Microsoft viruses later, The Wall Street Journal says.
Wired: And yet you've been famously cool about Linux.
Joy: Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux. ¶ 12:24 PM
Wired: But innovation is supposed to be dead.
Joy: Nonsense. Moore's law still has at least a decade to go with conventional silicon. That's a factor of 100 in performance, which means that with some work to make the algorithms run faster, we've got maybe a factor of a thousand improvement still to come. If you give me machines that are a thousand times as powerful as today's at the same price, I ought to be able to do something radically better. Thirty years ago a supercomputer was 80 megahertz. Now a personal computer is 2 gigahertz, and yet the software isn't 25 times better. I just got a new Mac with two 2-gigahertz processors, 8 gigabytes of memory, and a half a terabyte of internal disk.
Wired: Good for Apple. So what?
Joy: So you have the ability to hold a huge simulation all in memory - a database becomes a data structure. Add 64-bit computing and I can do breathtaking visualization. But that's not a space I'm going to go into, by the way. People's expectations in three dimensions are so high. On the other hand, existing operating systems, especially the ones provided by the reigning monopolist here, are deeply flawed. So there's enormous opportunity.
Wired: Is that something that you'd want to take on?
Joy: Jini networking technology was a partial attempt. Rather than writing distributed applications, you write a program - the whole system is an application program. But Jini was a solution to a problem that people didn't know they had.
Wired: Which was?
Joy: Reliable and secure systems. We all know that now - 4,000 known Microsoft viruses later, The Wall Street Journal says.
Wired: And yet you've been famously cool about Linux.
Joy: Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux. ¶ 12:24 PM
