On Public Foot-shooting

[unixronin]

The following anonymous account of a prime piece of public foot-shooting was brought to my attention (on the Archive, originally archived from blackangel.net):

I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.

One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share.  Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform.  The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep.  It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell.  He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.

The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs.  (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell.)

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence.  So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?

Comments

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

LoL. It's due to an argument that was similar to this one in tone and end result that I will no longer read Kim Stanley Robinson. :)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Do tell....? :)

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

I was at a convention, *YEARS* ago. This was right when Green Mars had come out, and he was the Keynote Speaker at a dinner. After the speech (which I mostly remember, kinda) he opened the floor up to questions and answers about his books.

After answering a couple about the politics, and unaging characters, etc, etc, a man stood up and asked a question about the orbital insertion scene.
The following is a paraphrased, and admittedly possibly poorly remembered, but the spirit is right:

Question Asker: "When the landing craft inserts, it slows down much quicker then the Martian atmosphere would allow. Did it have extra long wings? And if so, how did it maneuver so tightly?

Kim Stanley Robinson: "Oh, it's a common misconception that just because the atmosphere is lighter, you need more drag. Remember, the gravity is much lighter, so the orbital speed is significantly lower."

QA: "Yes, this is true, but the difference isn't all that great. Some quick back of the envelope calculations show that your landing craft would need to have a tensile strength and melting point several dozen times that of current materials for that kind of manueverability in atmo..."

KSR (Cutting question off): "Look, man. I don't know who you are, but I'm a physicist, and my math is spot on."

QA: (Politely) "I'm the lead engineer for Mars insertion for Pathfinder down at NASA/Ames."

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

What's really funny about this, is that the response of 'Dude, I write fiction. I made up some goodish numberish things.' would have been a) funny, b) Humanizing, and c) Not made him look like an idiot. :-)

[hrrunka]

Yeah. I'm sure he's not the first SF author to try to put more authority on his fiction than his research merited.

[lonewolf545.livejournal.com]

Most SF writers would just reply "It's what fit the story".

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

"I'm a lighthouse. Your call."

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Heh. That too. :)

Doomed to repeat it...

[tetsujinnooni.livejournal.com]

More history at the c2 wiki:

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?KornShellStory

As mentioned there, very similar to the Oberon1 vs Alan Kay story.

[hrrunka]

Good one! :)

[mazianni.livejournal.com]

I'm walking through the mezzanine of whatever hotel Usenix was in a few years back. Friend #1 spots a guy wearing a "Sendmail Early Adopter" t-shirt and sort of snarkily whispers, "I bet I'm an earlier adopter of sendmail than he is."

Friend #2 glances over at the subject of Friend #1's derision, then turns back to us and says, "I doubt it. That's Eric Allman."

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

That's hysterical...thanks for sharing it. I forwarded it to David who will truly appreciate it given that he's being forced to install Visual Studio this week and recode a project on it. He is .not. happy.