6 ms·

Though, if your bias is towards action, how do you avoid stepping on toes? These discussions seem like MBA brain-teasers, ie. there can't be any hard and fast

by patrck 4y ago

Though, if your bias is towards action, how do you avoid stepping on toes? These discussions seem like MBA brain-teasers, ie. there can't be any hard and fast rules, so each case needs to be individually worked out. There's probably a sub-reddit for this.

kinos 4y ago
Delegate the prioritization by using a template similar to this one. > "Hey, I noticed [this thing that I think might be a problem]. Would you like me to [do a specific action that would probably fix it] or move onto something else?"
chasil 4y ago
True to form, Cutler had a break with DEC, and they gave him a carte-blanche VAX "skunkworks" with Prism/Mica. DEC eventually shut this down, which prompted his departure for Microsoft. This is unfortunate for DEC, as they eventually poured the company into their Alpha RISC processor, which did not live as long as DEC hoped. Prism might have been a superior design. At this time, Microsoft was maintaining a UNIX kernel in their Xenix product, so they knew a good kernel engineer when they met one. Microsoft was the leading UNIX vendor in the early 80's. Cutler famously disparaged the UNIX kernel (his notable saying was "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture). Microsoft dumped their Xenix onto SCO about this time. What is more interesting to me was Cutler's involvement with Azure. He must have had some sway over CBL-Mariner, Microsoft's RPM-based Linux distribution. Much of Cutler's earlier work is documented in the "Showstoppers" book: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717 https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic... The book doesn't really delve into the Xenix decisions, if I remember correctly. Without Cutler, Microsoft would likely have ended up on a BSD kernel, as Apple did.
- bluejekyll 4y ago
  Apple didn’t end up on a BSD kernel. They started on Mach (from NeXT) and then made it more performant with XNU by not being so pedantic about microkernels. BSD is just a supported kernel ABI. Edit: I just found these docs, so I suppose it’s a bit more complicated that I’m stating, I.e. there are portions of the FreeBSD kernel directly in macOS https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000905-CH214-TPXREF103 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
  - p_l 4y ago
    MacOS X essentially started by updating the NeXT core to latest OSFMK distribution, which was hybrid system (bsd server integrated into kernel space) powering the BSD alternative to SystemV - OSF/1 (most famous of them being DEC OSF/1 aka Digital Unix aka Compaq Tru64). They applied bits of FreeBSD to the bsd server code and over time improved its concurrency, but considerable portion of XNU is code that is called by bsd server but not part of bsd server (IOKit, among other things)
  - chasil 4y ago
    I only know what I've read. "XNU was a hybrid kernel derived from version 2.5 of the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, which incorporated the bulk of the 4.3BSD kernel modified to run atop Mach primitives..." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
    - jbverschoor 4y ago
      4.3BSD is not FreeBSD
      - teh_klev 4y ago
        I think you're replying to the wrong comment.
      - bluejekyll 4y ago
        This is from the link I provided: “The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. BSD variants in general are derived (sometimes indirectly) from 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2 from the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley.”
      - fluidcruft 4y ago
        After NeXTStep was adopted by Apple, they hired a bunch of the FreeBSD core developers and updated the BSD service and userland using FreeBSD. Apple was actually already messing around with Mach prior to that with MkLinux so there was some initial speculation that they might port to MkLinux rather than update NeXT's Mach+BSD hybrid.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  > Cutler famously disparaged the UNIX kernel (his notable saying was "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture). I'm pretty sure that had to be in reference to STREAMS, because the original UNIX I/O model certainly is not byte-oriented. So basically, entirely irrelevant.
  - chasil 4y ago
    Maybe I should have used this one instead? "Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs." -Dave Cutler
- foobarian 4y ago
  > Microsoft would likely have ended up on a BSD kernel IIRC their TCP/IP stack was FreeBSD's at least for a while
  - p_l 4y ago
    Berkeley was paid to port TCP/IP to unix and as far as I know, part of the deal was that the code should be available to quickly port TCP/IP to more systems including non-BSD. Thus considerable portion of Operating systems at one point or another used BSD4.3-derived network stack to detriment of network API evolution (sometimes updated with later code), some over time developing their own implementation.
- voidfunc 4y ago
  > What is more interesting to me was Cutler's involvement with Azure. He must have had some sway over CBL-Mariner, Microsoft's RPM-based Linux distribution. He was involved with Red Dog (the modified Windows host that powers Azure). He's not involved with CBL-Mariner team at all to my awareness. Mariner is mostly about solving a supply-chain problem at Microsoft... we have a ton of internal teams all using different flavors of Linux and packages have historically come from all over the place. With CBL-Mariner we are basically trying to unify on that and own the package build and distribution portion as well. There isn't much reason for a kernel designer to be involved in that as its a well-understood problem (and entirely different domain) and we already have internal upstream Linux kernel contributors (which is how produce -azure supported kernels).
- chasil 4y ago
  ...I just checked for Xenix in G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft." Xenix is not in the index, which really detracts from the motivations behind the story.
chasil 4y ago
I have another lost interview with Dave Cutler that Microsoft took down from their website about ten years ago. I can find and post it, if there is interest.
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Interested!
  - chasil 4y ago
    I'll dig it up tomorrow.
    - wging 4y ago
      Any chance it also exists on web.archive.org?
    - indigodaddy 4y ago
      Following!
- dewey 4y ago
  I just found one linked here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/ which points to "https://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news/fromms/kanoarchitect.asp&e=7620 https://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news...". Unfortunately I couldn't find a working copy in the Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20041101000000*/https://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news/fromms/kanoarchitect.asp&e=7620 https://web.archive.org/web/20041101000000*/https://www.micr...
- chasil 4y ago
  (1/3) I found this as an MHT file, edited as best I can. Maybe I should get this to archive.org? Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 09:40:05 -0700 From: Windows Contact Us <wincu@css.one.microsoft.com> We apologize for the delay in our response. I have attached "The Architects: First, Get the Spec Right" an interview with Cutler and Mark Lucovsky. Goldie, Microsoft.com Customer Support ___ The Architects: First, Get the Spec Right Once upon a time ... there was NT OS/2. Every month, Nadine Kano prowls the halls of Redmond to profile the real folks behind Windows 2000 development. This month: David Cutler and Mark Lucovsky, who helped guide the operating system from its infancy. "Well, we were just about to leave," David Cutler says from behind his desk. I'm five minutes late to my interview with Cutler and Mark Lucovsky, two of the original architects of the Microsoft Windows NT operating system. As I wilt into the carpet, I realize Lucovsky must have mentioned to his colleague how nervous I was about approaching them. After all, who the hell am I to be talking with these guys? They are developers' developers two of the visionaries behind the operating system that began as NT OS/2 and has evolved into Windows 2000. Cutler refuses virtually all interviews with the press, but he and Lucovsky are willing to talk to me, a program manager from down the hall. They probably find my nervousness amusing. Build it, ground up I was a college senior when Bill Gates personally recruited Cutler, Lucovsky, and others from Digital to begin the NT OS/2 project at Microsoft. Their quest was to build, from the ground up, an advanced PC operating system, something far beyond MS-DOS. NT signified "New Technology." One of my engineering classmates, David Treadwell, joined Microsoft to work on NT. I remember how excited he was to be a part of this obscure little development effort that none of us really understood. Remember that 1989 was before Windows 3.0. In 1989, Windows was still a nonentity.
bfung 4y ago
“Bias for action” is a nice catch phrase and not bad to get people out of paralysis. The other successful thing to add onto it, is to tell people what you’re going to do (ex, a high level 3 step plan, not more than 5), then do it. If there are objections, ask [what can be done] to mitigate the issue instead of arguing the points. Don’t “bias for action” and do something w/o setting expectations first.
- malfist 4y ago
  I believe (and I could be entirely wrong here), "bias for action" comes from Amazon's leadership principles, it describes this trade off: >Bias for Action >Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

by patrck 4y ago

kinos 4y ago

Delegate the prioritization by using a template similar to this one. > "Hey, I noticed [this thing that I think might be a problem]. Would you like me to [do a specific action that would probably fix it] or move onto something else?"

chasil 4y ago

True to form, Cutler had a break with DEC, and they gave him a carte-blanche VAX "skunkworks" with Prism/Mica. DEC eventually shut this down, which prompted his departure for Microsoft. This is unfortunate for DEC, as they eventually poured the company into their Alpha RISC processor, which did not live as long as DEC hoped. Prism might have been a superior design. At this time, Microsoft was maintaining a UNIX kernel in their Xenix product, so they knew a good kernel engineer when they met one. Microsoft was the leading UNIX vendor in the early 80's. Cutler famously disparaged the UNIX kernel (his notable saying was "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture). Microsoft dumped their Xenix onto SCO about this time. What is more interesting to me was Cutler's involvement with Azure. He must have had some sway over CBL-Mariner, Microsoft's RPM-based Linux distribution. Much of Cutler's earlier work is documented in the "Showstoppers" book: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717 https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic... The book doesn't really delve into the Xenix decisions, if I remember correctly. Without Cutler, Microsoft would likely have ended up on a BSD kernel, as Apple did.

bluejekyll 4y ago
Apple didn’t end up on a BSD kernel. They started on Mach (from NeXT) and then made it more performant with XNU by not being so pedantic about microkernels. BSD is just a supported kernel ABI. Edit: I just found these docs, so I suppose it’s a bit more complicated that I’m stating, I.e. there are portions of the FreeBSD kernel directly in macOS https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000905-CH214-TPXREF103 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
- p_l 4y ago
  MacOS X essentially started by updating the NeXT core to latest OSFMK distribution, which was hybrid system (bsd server integrated into kernel space) powering the BSD alternative to SystemV - OSF/1 (most famous of them being DEC OSF/1 aka Digital Unix aka Compaq Tru64). They applied bits of FreeBSD to the bsd server code and over time improved its concurrency, but considerable portion of XNU is code that is called by bsd server but not part of bsd server (IOKit, among other things)
- chasil 4y ago
  I only know what I've read. "XNU was a hybrid kernel derived from version 2.5 of the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, which incorporated the bulk of the 4.3BSD kernel modified to run atop Mach primitives..." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    4.3BSD is not FreeBSD
    - teh_klev 4y ago
      I think you're replying to the wrong comment.
    - bluejekyll 4y ago
      This is from the link I provided: “The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. BSD variants in general are derived (sometimes indirectly) from 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2 from the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley.”
    - fluidcruft 4y ago
      After NeXTStep was adopted by Apple, they hired a bunch of the FreeBSD core developers and updated the BSD service and userland using FreeBSD. Apple was actually already messing around with Mach prior to that with MkLinux so there was some initial speculation that they might port to MkLinux rather than update NeXT's Mach+BSD hybrid.
formerly_proven 4y ago
> Cutler famously disparaged the UNIX kernel (his notable saying was "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture). I'm pretty sure that had to be in reference to STREAMS, because the original UNIX I/O model certainly is not byte-oriented. So basically, entirely irrelevant.
- chasil 4y ago
  Maybe I should have used this one instead? "Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs." -Dave Cutler
foobarian 4y ago
> Microsoft would likely have ended up on a BSD kernel IIRC their TCP/IP stack was FreeBSD's at least for a while
- p_l 4y ago
  Berkeley was paid to port TCP/IP to unix and as far as I know, part of the deal was that the code should be available to quickly port TCP/IP to more systems including non-BSD. Thus considerable portion of Operating systems at one point or another used BSD4.3-derived network stack to detriment of network API evolution (sometimes updated with later code), some over time developing their own implementation.
voidfunc 4y ago
> What is more interesting to me was Cutler's involvement with Azure. He must have had some sway over CBL-Mariner, Microsoft's RPM-based Linux distribution. He was involved with Red Dog (the modified Windows host that powers Azure). He's not involved with CBL-Mariner team at all to my awareness. Mariner is mostly about solving a supply-chain problem at Microsoft... we have a ton of internal teams all using different flavors of Linux and packages have historically come from all over the place. With CBL-Mariner we are basically trying to unify on that and own the package build and distribution portion as well. There isn't much reason for a kernel designer to be involved in that as its a well-understood problem (and entirely different domain) and we already have internal upstream Linux kernel contributors (which is how produce -azure supported kernels).
chasil 4y ago
...I just checked for Xenix in G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft." Xenix is not in the index, which really detracts from the motivations behind the story.

chasil 4y ago

I have another lost interview with Dave Cutler that Microsoft took down from their website about ten years ago. I can find and post it, if there is interest.

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Interested!
- chasil 4y ago
  I'll dig it up tomorrow.
  - wging 4y ago
    Any chance it also exists on web.archive.org?
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    Following!
dewey 4y ago
I just found one linked here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/ which points to "https://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news/fromms/kanoarchitect.asp&e=7620 https://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news...". Unfortunately I couldn't find a working copy in the Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20041101000000*/https://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news/fromms/kanoarchitect.asp&e=7620 https://web.archive.org/web/20041101000000*/https://www.micr...
chasil 4y ago
(1/3) I found this as an MHT file, edited as best I can. Maybe I should get this to archive.org? Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 09:40:05 -0700 From: Windows Contact Us <wincu@css.one.microsoft.com> We apologize for the delay in our response. I have attached "The Architects: First, Get the Spec Right" an interview with Cutler and Mark Lucovsky. Goldie, Microsoft.com Customer Support ___ The Architects: First, Get the Spec Right Once upon a time ... there was NT OS/2. Every month, Nadine Kano prowls the halls of Redmond to profile the real folks behind Windows 2000 development. This month: David Cutler and Mark Lucovsky, who helped guide the operating system from its infancy. "Well, we were just about to leave," David Cutler says from behind his desk. I'm five minutes late to my interview with Cutler and Mark Lucovsky, two of the original architects of the Microsoft Windows NT operating system. As I wilt into the carpet, I realize Lucovsky must have mentioned to his colleague how nervous I was about approaching them. After all, who the hell am I to be talking with these guys? They are developers' developers two of the visionaries behind the operating system that began as NT OS/2 and has evolved into Windows 2000. Cutler refuses virtually all interviews with the press, but he and Lucovsky are willing to talk to me, a program manager from down the hall. They probably find my nervousness amusing. Build it, ground up I was a college senior when Bill Gates personally recruited Cutler, Lucovsky, and others from Digital to begin the NT OS/2 project at Microsoft. Their quest was to build, from the ground up, an advanced PC operating system, something far beyond MS-DOS. NT signified "New Technology." One of my engineering classmates, David Treadwell, joined Microsoft to work on NT. I remember how excited he was to be a part of this obscure little development effort that none of us really understood. Remember that 1989 was before Windows 3.0. In 1989, Windows was still a nonentity.

bfung 4y ago

“Bias for action” is a nice catch phrase and not bad to get people out of paralysis. The other successful thing to add onto it, is to tell people what you’re going to do (ex, a high level 3 step plan, not more than 5), then do it. If there are objections, ask [what can be done] to mitigate the issue instead of arguing the points. Don’t “bias for action” and do something w/o setting expectations first.

malfist 4y ago
I believe (and I could be entirely wrong here), "bias for action" comes from Amazon's leadership principles, it describes this trade off: >Bias for Action >Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.