Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!hao!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!uoregon!jqj
From: jqj@uoregon.UUCP (JQ Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: Why I'm suspicious of NeWS
Message-ID: <1566@uoregon.UUCP>
Date: 14 Feb 88 23:34:07 GMT
References: <1677@desint.UUCP> <3835@megaron.arizona.edu> <2936@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: jqj@drizzle.UUCP (JQ Johnson)
Organization: University of Oregon, Computer Science, Eugene OR
Lines: 25

Finally, some interesting observations from the Martillo side of the
recent "martillo vs the world" debate.  Let me try a reply:

In article <2936@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> martillo@athena.mit.edu (Yakim Martillo) writes:
>As far as I can tell, bandwidth like memory just gets cheaper and more
>available.
I think I agree.  Note, though, that there are several different
product spaces.  I expect to have 100Mb rates on my campus backbone in
2 years, but will be lucky if I have telephone lines into every student
dorm room; if I *do* have telephone lines, it is unlikely that we will
be able to afford anything faster than 2B+D ISDN.  A fortiori, I don't
expect to see data rates to mobile stations (e.g. portable PCs in
cars.  Rates to/from tanks will obviously be much higher) of much above
9600b for a decade.  So I *do* care about having a network windowing 
technology that works well over slow links!

>...  As for context switching,
>it would seem that situations could easily exist where NeWS could
>actually require more context switching than X because in addition
>to context switching between client and server there would be context
>switching within the server as well.
There are different kinds of context switching, obviously, with different
overheads.  That's the whole point of the lightweight-process argument.
Martillo's argument would be stronger if he could demonstrate that
the "contexts" necessary in a NeWS server were actually fairly heavyweight.