Patrick Santucci <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Scenario: an Engineer is called into the Boss's office at CSY (perhaps in
>the mid- to late 1980s?) and told, "The Company wants to sell more HP-UX,
>but jacking up the price on MPE boxes and licenses hasn't helped HP-UX sales
>enough. Marketing says we're making the UX division look bad. We need to
>come up with a way to slow down MPE, give the other guys a chance to catch
>up performance-wise, relatively speaking. Can you add some extra no-op
>cycles or something to MPE?" (Assuming a somewhat PHB here -- no offense
>intended to anyone!) Who knows, he may have even reassured the engineer
>with, "Don't worry, once HP-UX sales take off we'll be allowed to pull out
>the idling code. We'll send out a patch and tell the customers they're
>getting a 'performance enhancement,' that'll make everyone happy. We just
>need to put it in temporarily. For the good of HP as a whole, you
>understand."
>
>Assuming this scenario, if that engineer (or group of engineers) would come
>forward and tell his/her/their story, *that* would be the "smoking gun."
>
>Patrick (What did I say about not believing in conspiracies?)

Changing Patrick's "smoking gun" a little bit into "smoking SUN" (to
give HP a break and to aim at the Sun), you might want to look at
this ("academic" -- Heaven forbid!) Stanford link:

http://soi.stanford.edu/

So far, so good.  Just standard scientific stuff.  However, please
dig deeper to find this gem having to do with their NoOp blues:
http://soi.stanford.edu/sssc/ug/man1/noop.1.html (and PLEASE read
that Unix-oriented man page as you would read a love letter).


Now, back to Earth and back to tweaking TurboIMAGE data structures
so that they don't drop any bits due to NoOp idiosyncrasies,

   _______________
  |               |
  |               |
  |            r  |  Alfredo                     [log in to unmask]
  |          e    |                           http://www.adager.com
  |        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego
  |      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs
  |    d          |  Adager Corporation
  |  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
  |               |
  |_______________|

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