Still with the Itanium?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/11/20 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/11/20/10094190.aspx

She was telling me about some show she had been at in Los Angeles, and the time she spent with the band after the show.

The band itself did not impress me much and I told her so. But she said I was just being a music snob.

Anyway, she was talking about how interesting it was to just be hanging out with the band when a small meet and greet happened, and fans got to come in to the meet the band. She enjoyed watching people come in and gush about how much they loved the music, etc.

I was non-committal about how interesting that sounded. Maybe it was me just thinking they didn't deserve to be celebrities. :-)

    "You've got to be Michael Kaplan!" he excitedly stated.
    I turned to Sam as I replied. "Yes, I've got to be."
    "I knew it had to be you because of the chair. And the license plate on it. Dude, I love your blog!"
    I smile a little, and again turn to Sam and tell her "He loves my blog."
    "Well I can't blame him, I love it too Michael."
    "Probably not for the same reasons," I suggest.
    Sam looks the guy over. "Probably not," she agrees.
    He pauses, nervous. "Can I ask you a question?" I nod to this.
    "I love MKLC, it's amazing," he gushes. Hurrying on quickly, he continues, "but I was wondering why it still supports IA64 if Microsoft doesn't."
    I point out that I no longer own MSKLC, so I can't say for sure, but the team that does is working on other stuff.
    " Wow, does that make you mad?" he asks.
    "No, I can't really control what they do with their time. I know they're busy...."
    He seems disappointed. "I guess I understand," he offers.
    "Hey, it's still a cool too. And they did sell a few of those IA64 boxes. You can just not ship the MSI and the IA64 subdirectory and chop 120kb off your setup if you know you don't need to support it."
    Sam chimes in at this point. "Michael, how the hell do you know how much space it takes up?"
    "Just an estimate. The keyboards are all like 6-8kb each, but the MSIs are like 110kb. I rounded up slightly."
    Sam rolls her eyes and the guy nods thoughtfully. "That makes sense."
    "I'll mention it to them," I say. "Maybe write something up in the blog about it."
    The guy is suddenly feeling shy. "Oh, you don't have to do that. Um, I mean, Unless you want to."
    "No worries. What's your name?"
    "Dan."
    Sam puts on her best 'Boon from Animal House' voice. "He's damn glad to meet you, Dan."

After that, Sam decided she understood how I wasn't really impressed by the celebrity thing. Because a lot of times, the person of interest may not see themselves as a celebrity. I mean, I certainly don't. :-)

Support for IA64 adds about 7mb to the MSKLC package itself, plus the extra code to generate the MSI and the DLL. That could be worth removing. After all as Dvorak pointed out, Itanium killed the computer industry. No need to keep supporting it further, right?

C'mon, Michael, why do you think people form and join Grade Z rock bands anyway? To get free drinks and pick up chicks/twinks, period. That's celebrity-ness at its most fundamental level.

People who have something to *do*, don't care about their celebrity status. Look at Larry Wall, or Linus. Even Henry Kissinger didn't, until he was basically finished with active participation in war crimes and genocide.

(By the way, why do I have to click on the Post button twice nowadays?)

The 70's really were That Decade, weren't they? I mean, here we are, four decades later, all running Unix (1972) or VMS (1975, later incremented to "WNT") on x86 chips (1978).

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