Jeffrey Snover - More talking about Monad

The Discussion

• 

  Hmm...the video is upside down and all green when it streams at 111kbps. When the connection is happy and at 216 kbps it all looks ok.
  

• 

  Stream works fine here.
  
  Very inspiring video!
  
  Here's a 11 minute clip (from 33m to 44m) that really hit me.
  http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=127819&pvrid=135

• 

  Windows Management INFRASTRACTURE? Really?

• 

  "Hmm...the video is upside down and all green when it streams at 111kbps."
  
  Dude, I get that all the time.  About 50%.  Was starting to think I was the only one.

• 

  What a fascinating discussion.  I personally have been following Monad from the very beginning and have found it to be quite an awsome technology.  The only thing I would have to ask is "when will I get IntelliSense on the command line?"  I have been so spoiled using IntelliSense and some other utilities like VisualAssist when programming that I just feel empty when I am without tools like that.

• 

  staceyw wrote:

  "Hmm...the video is upside down and all green when it streams at 111kbps."
  
  Dude, I get that all the time.  About 50%.  Was starting to think I was the only one.

  
  
  No you're not. I had it a lot just after I upgraded from Media Player 9 to a pre-release of 10. I am not entirely sure if that had anything to do with it but after I got the final release of 10 it didn't happen that often anymore and 9 never gave me any trouble.
  
  Occasionally it still flips into upside-down-green-mode but typically only for a couple of seconds so it seems something did get better along the upgrade path. The IP stack video still gave me a couple of these glitches, it may be a combination of a bug and lack of bandwidth. Then again, I can only remember experiencing this with Channel9 videos. A codec related problem perhaps?
  
  This Monad video didn't give me any trouble at all, it was perfect.
  

• 

  I’m was surprised to hear that Monad has generated so much interest, yet at the same time the attention is so germane. As far as I know the semantics of the command line haven’t changed much since Doug McIlroy came up with the pipe, yet I know of no gifted programmer or admin who doesn’t appreciate the command line. MSH is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge over the last year and it’s one of only two Microsoft betas I’ve ever downloaded and used. I don’t hear people ranting about it on too many forums so I assume it’s kind of a silent (serious) majority thing. I think it's going to be a wonderful surprise for so many IT pros out there.
  

  
  Ace work Jeffery!

   
  In this video, and one of his previous ones, Jeffery talks about economics, he also mentions Jim Hugunin’s Iron Python project (the other beta I’ve downloaded and used). Now, Jim’s work is open source, open source is a hot topic a lot of figures comment on, and open source has an interesting economic aspect that people debate (and companies like Apple and Google use to great commercial advantage). I’d love to hear Jeffrey’s views on open source; I believe he’d have something interesting to say.

   
  Go on Scoble, can you ask when you go back to do the team tour? Please?

   
  Does everyone else love these interviews with people like Ward C. and Jeffery as much as I do? I love it when the interviewee is happy to go off on interesting tangents.
  

• 

  " (and companies like Apple and Google use to great commercial advantage). "
  
  Is Apple's OS open source?  How about Google?

• 

  Microsoft should rename the Nomad project from "MSH" Microsoft SHell" to "MOSH" Microsoft Object SHell
  
  so we would have
  csh (unix)
  zsh (unix)
  bash (unix)
  mosh (msft)
  
  Heston
  

• 

  Balclutha wrote:

  Go on Scoble, can you ask when you go back to do the team tour? Please?

  
  
  I would love to!
  
  And, yes, I love these interviews a lot too (the ones where I get some real conversation going rather than just a product pitch). I'm trying to get more of these style interviews.

• 

  Hey - monad looks good, even upside down and green (yes it happens here too - I just upgraded to MP10 and it took out videos but seriously this is going to revolutionise server and workstation management.

• 

  Scoble I agree this is one of the better videos because you feel the passion the developer has for his work. I didn't know what this C9 video was about really, and I had an hour to kill in between classes, you know what I enjoyed every minute of this video.
  
  I didn't take advanced programming classes but i understood many of the concepts he was talking about and from what i understood he is trying to built a scripting engine that can interact not just with the data that a program outputs but with the actual objects and coms associated with it to make it a more powerful solution.
  
  this guy was just relentless and kept an upbeat pace for the entire 53 minutes. i was shocked when the video was over and realized it was 53 minutes long. At the end you asked him to do a follow-up interview with him and the team showing off a few demos.
  
  I understand, theoretically, how powerful this new shell is. But i need to see a demo of it to see exactly what it is capable of.
  
  This video along with Amar Ghandi, the RSS Enthusiast, are thus far my favorite developer style interviews. Some vids it was obvious that they felt their job was just that, a chore to bring home some meat and cheese for their kids and wives. Other videos such as this one, you really get to see people passionate about their work. It is uplifting knowing that people enjoy what they do.
  
  I keep on saying to myself, and everyone, I am not looking to vista as revolutionary, but merely as a stepping stone to the OS that is to follow. That one, whatever code name (black comb i think) will be when we start seeing the nice, matured, things.

• 

  I must say that Jeffrey is one of the most interesting and passionate guy I ever saw! It's really encouraging to see such quality people working on software we'll be using daily.
  
  One thing that I find surprising is that the issue of security has never been raised yet. With the power of Monad, it seems that evil scripters gnomes are just waiting for all of us to have this great tool running on our computers.
  
  Maybe you guys could raise that issue on your next interview with Jeffrey and his team?
  
  Great interview!
  
  --Eric
  
  
  

• 

  efortier wrote:

  One thing that I find surprising is that the issue of security has never been raised yet.
  

  
  
  http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/DemonstrationOfMonadsSecurityFeatures.aspx
  
  
  Another Monad blog
  
  http://blogs.msdn.com/monad/default.aspx
  

• 

  I am all for this Monad thing.  I'm a little ashamed to say this, but I'm a recovering Unix addict.  Between about 10 years ago and 6 months ago I was STAUNCH anti-Microsoft, but after finally deciding to gather evidence and prove that all MS technologies were inferior to free Unix-based alternative, what I actually found was that there was no evidence for that.  Not a substantial amount, anyway.  Apache's plugin system beat IIS's hands down, but that's going to change with IIS 7, etc.  All I found were little things like that.  Unix shells beat cmd.exe easily, is another example, and we all know that's changing because of Monad.
  
  Monad is where shells need to go: deep OS penetration, object orientation, and easy extensibility.  Everything you can do in Windows (with regards to System Administration, at least) should have a programmatic paradigm where everything can be done without a gui.  As Jeffrey mentioned, he doesn't know what's happening when he changes settings in the control panel; why?  There is no real reason that you can't automate the changing of system settings due to situation X instead of turning to the control panel.
  
  Monad will make that possible and I'm 100% ready for it to come out of beta.
  
  --
  a recovering Unix addict.
  

• 

  I really like MSH and I think it's on the right path to create a really nice programming and management enviroment.
  However what left me shocked with this video is how much weight did Snover loose
  I should do some workout myself I think...
  

• 

  However what left me shocked with this video is how much weight did Snover loose  I should do some workout myself I think...
  
  Its amazing what a couple hundred hours in the gym will do for you.
  
  jps
  

• 

  Here is a pointer to the Marc van Orsouw's (aka /\/\o\/\/ )  blog.  He is the guy I mentioned in the Video.  He is doing some very noteworthy stuff with Monad.
     http://mow001.blogspot.com/
  
  jps

• 

  " (and companies like Apple and Google use to great commercial advantage). "
  
  Is Apple's OS open source?  How about Google?
  
  Why do you ask when you already know the answer?  Oh yeah, to be condescending, that's why.
  
  I believe he was saying that Apple's OS is built on an open source OS (with a proprietary kernel), and that Google is using tens of thousands of Linux machines without a single penny paid to any vendor thanks to open source.
  
  Sounds like commercial advantage to me.
  

• 

  Naikrovek wrote:

  " (and companies like Apple and Google use to great commercial advantage). "
  
  Is Apple's OS open source?  How about Google?
  
  Why do you ask when you already know the answer?  Oh yeah, to be condescending, that's why.
  
  I believe he was saying that Apple's OS is built on an open source OS (with a proprietary kernel), and that Google is using tens of thousands of Linux machines without a single penny paid to any vendor thanks to open source.
  
  Sounds like commercial advantage to me.
  

  
  
  They are using an open kernel (Darwin which is based off of FreeBSDs kernel and open sourced) but they are using a proprietary OS (There OS isn't FreeBSD, just the kernel.).
  

• 

  Exactly! Achieving leverage through components (as discussed in the video) gives one kind of advantage. Reusing software written by others is another. For example, Apple builds on CUPS and Samba, and benefits from improvements made by those who might never own an Apple machine, let alone work for Apple. Some might argue that the balance of power in the software industry is such that this kind of re-use is the only realistic way a company could build a desktop OS that’s competitive with Windows – that’s an interesting form of economic advantage.

  Besides, I think now days most people think of an OS as more than a kernel and APIs, and the fact is OS X would be a non-starter without the ton of open source stuff that Apple includes (Samba, CUPS, gcc, Ruby, Python, Emacs, bash, and the GNU text tools are the ones I use often – and of course there are loads I’ll never know about).

  What I think is interesting is that Microsoft could use a similar trick one day, if it so desired.
  
  As an aside, I’d love to see every Windows machine ship with IronPython one day (a fantastic open source project at Microsoft) and I think there should be a Scoble interview with Jim (you can watch a talk on IronPython from the LL4 workshop held at MIT at http://ll4.csail.mit.edu/).
  

• 

  Afternoon All,
  
  Just spending a Sunday morning catching up with a few things and Monad caught my eye. I've been aware of it for a while but didn't realise the Beta2 was available........
  
  Anyway is now Sunday afternoon and I've read the starter guide and got it happily runnning on a SP2 VM. Very nice fellas, very nice indeed. Being an Exchange geek I am interested as to what you will be doing with it (you mentioned they were first customer in video).
  
  Just a couple of questions though - when do you expect to ship the final release? Don't get me wrong I'm not looking for a specific day - or even a month

  I'd happilly settle for a 'before 2006' or a 'before Vista ships' or even a 'after Vista ships'.

  Cheers

  Joe

• 

  We'll ship in 2006.  I'd put my money on "before Vista" but much of that will be determined by the overhead of the process to get out the door.

• 

  "We'll ship in 2006.  I'd put my money on "before Vista" but much of that will be determined by the overhead of the process to get out the door." Just curious.  Will there be some kind of LINQ syntax in msh or is that v2? --wjs

• 

  "I believe he was saying that Apple's OS is built on an open source OS (with a proprietary kernel), and that Google is using tens of thousands of Linux machines without a single penny paid to any vendor thanks to open source. Sounds like commercial advantage to me."
  
  I just don't understand what the OP was trying to say.  Apple is not free or open, and you have to pay for Redhat now as I don't think google is using the free Fedora bits (that must have been back in 2000).  And I could be wrong, but all the Redhat bits are not open source (except Fedora).  Moreover, all/most of googles client stuff is windows based only.  Besides, if they want to run unix, I would rather run AIX and consolidate into fewer boxes and bigger iron.
  --wjs 

• 

  I only watched 14 minutes of the interview but I already want to post here, although my questions might be answered later on I haven't looked at Monad deeply since Beta2, I only saw the PDC demonstration which of course had new stuff since the last Channel9 video but didn't satisfy my hunger for more
  
  Jeffrey, you talk a lot about LINQ and Anders Hejlsberg's efforts with the 'future'. It seems to me you imagine those concepts to be an integral part of Monad and how we will use Cmdlets and Providers / Provided Objects.. Does that mean Monad will be a C# 3.0 based platform? Are you now bridging the gap between C# 2.0 and the 3.0 features with an infrastructure that revolves around MshObjects or as you call it, synthetic objects? Or is C# 3.0 that close? I remember Anders talking about bringing the basic concepts of data access into the language and how data access should change a long time ago. I can't wait to look at LINQ as I've grown grey hair using O/R mappers although I'm young enough to not grow grey hair just yet
  
  Did you ever think of bringing Monad to not just the IT Pro crowd but to anybody who wants to do automation on Windows? I would love to see Vista have something like Scheduled Tasks is today, running Monad scripts. As I literally already have access to everything through .NET, COM interop, WMI, etc., this will just get even better by us writing Cmdlets for literally everything. I want a Cmdlet that sends SMS. I want a Cmdlet that sends an IM message through Windows Live Messenger and I would love to see some sort of integration of this in Windows Vista, or if not on the consumer side, definitely on the server-side.
  
  Later..

• 

  I know I'm a little bit late to this party, but Jeffrey Snover is my new hero!

  Awesome work.

• 

  Jeffrey is great! And I think it's time we have another update on him and Monad!