Quick replies to "What are you interested in?"

Pip asks about why Cornell has switched CS314 from 68k to PPC to MIPS assembly. Since I graduated 10 years ago, I don’t know why they’ve made the switch to MIPS. My guess is that it is mostly up to the professor du jour. My advisor is the one who switched to PPC after teaching it in 68k, and I think it was because he was very gung-ho about RISC. At one time I knew some 68k, PPC, x86, and SPARC assembly because I took classes that used all of them. SPARC was weird — it has this concept of sliding register windows, so that data you put in one set of registers as output parameters to a function you call can be ‘slid’ to be called ‘input’ to the called function. I think we used that for my compilers class. Nowadays, I know PPC inside and out, but barely recall 68k. I had totally forgotten x86 assembly and am relearning it on a daily basis now… 🙂
sneumann and Nik want to know about Cocoa. Well, I can’t comment on specific directions the MacBU may be going with future products, but I think I can safely say that we are always looking to use the technologies that make sense (to us, at least.) We’ve already shipped small bits of Office 2004 using Cocoa, and we’ll be using it where it has the best bang for the buck as we go forward. Did you know that MERP, the dialog that comes up when an Office app crashes, is done in Cocoa? If you haven’t already seen it, you should read Rick Schaut’s (slightly) dated post on Carbon vs Cocoa.
Jack asks about rumor sites — do we read them, and do we officially learn things from Apple before everybody else, or do we have to follow the rumors ourselves? Yes, some of us read them. We actually have a team of people for whom part of their job is to spend some time reading the various forums on some of the sites and respond to posts asking about Office. They also take bug reports from those forums and enter them into our database. And sometimes we just bust a gut laughing at some of the rumors about Mac Office. As for learning things from Apple ahead of time, the answer is “It depends.” Since we have Non-Disclosure Agreements with Apple, we see some things early that they want to show us, like Software Updates, or Xcode, etc. The really big things, we learn about the same way everybody else does. For example, I personally learned about the Intel switch by following the keynote just like everybody else.
And yes, i did get some more sleep the next night… ZZZZZzzzzzzzz!