MacHack 18 Opens with a Keynote Address from Ken Arnold

from Saturday, June 21st

As is traditional, MacHack 18 opened first thing Thursday morning at 12:00 am with its keynote address. This year the opening keynote speaker was Ken Arnold who is currently the Chief Architect of EventMonitor, Inc. Ken's longevity in the computer industry is marked by many notable and high profile achievements. He was a member of the BSD team at the University of California at Berkeley and developed the curses library. Curses, which allowed characters to be placed anywhere on the text only terminals of the time forming a rudimentary graphical like interface, led to the development of the well known game called Rogue. At Sun Microsystems, Ken was an original architect of the Jini platform and the lead engineer on Sun's JavaSpaces project. He has also authored and co-authored numerous books on topics such as Java and C.

The first topic that Ken covered in his keynote address was titled Designing for Change, in which he opines that "A design is finished when there is nothing left to throw out." He discussed design methodologies versus real world methods for creating a design taking into account the human factors that are involved. In summary, Ken relates that the human design process varies greatly but can eventually reach a good design. However, Ken states that there is no such thing as the right design and thus a good design is all that anyone can ask.

The second topic covered in the keynote was titled Evolutionary Networks. Here, Ken described the nature of "The Network" which applies to everything from home networks to the Internet and all the devices that are attached to the network. He explained that network complexity is growing and is already more than humans can administer. Ken relates that no one designed the network. It has grown in an ad hoc fashion and will continue to grow in that manner. Ken then talked about some methods and technologies that can be employed to keep up with the changes and expansion in a system in which it is impossible to replace everything.

The keynote closed with a question and answer session. One of the more interesting questions posed asked Ken's thoughts on the JAVA ordeal between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Ken's response was that, in a nutshell, it comes down to the question of who was stupid? The answer, determined by the courts, revealed that it was Microsoft. To paraphrase Ken's summary of this topic, he feels it can be viewed as a battle of good versus evil in which we (the users) are good and Microsoft is evil. He concludes that Sun just happens to be on the right side of battle for now.

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