ACM Queue: A Conversation with Jim Gray
by Volker Weber
Via Hugh Pyle, a really interesting interview. This is the kind of stuff that always reminds me how limited my own thinking is:
Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? (Really, just what type of throughput does the USPS offer?) Jim Gray would do it, that's who. And we're not just talking about Zip disks, no sir; we're talking about shipping entire hard drives, or even complete computer systems, packed full of disks.
Gray, head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, sits down with Queue and tells us what type of a voracious appetite for data could require such extreme measures...
