>But, if you really want to find worried system managers, talk to any UNIX
>purchaser. In general, they are much more worried and are much less sure of
>the correctness of their decisions than any HP3000 user is. They know what
>[...]
>NT.
 
Microsoft continues to hype NT but consistently fails to deliver. Nobody I
know of is terribly concerned that NT is going to dominate the marketplace.
Especially considering its laughable instability compared to MPE or Unix.
*I* wouldn't trust *MY* payroll system to NT.
 
>Ultimately, the only standards are always proprietary. "Open systems
>standards" that are defined by a committee, or by a committee of committees,
>can never work for locking down anything more complicated than the shape of
>the prones that plug into a wall socket. Otherwise, innovation inherently
>kills standards. And innovation inherently becomes increasingly easier as the
>subject under consideration becomes increasingly complex.
 
See POSIX. Something that MPE and NT desperately want to be.
 
You really don't know a *thing* about standards until you can write a
program that with only minor changes, will compile and run on 15+ completely
different architectures, with very little effort.
 
Case in point: Pixar's Renderman software, originally written to run on
Crays and other super-high-end hardware, took only an afternoon to port to a
486 running Linux. Of course, it runs much slower, but... :-)
 
>But the real problem is that standards kill innovation -- and no
>profit-seeking organization is likely to pay much attention to the rules that
>it help create, even if it is a member of the committee that set the rules
>(Netscape is as good an example as currently exists; they go to all of the
>meetings and agree to all of the standards -- but do precisely as they wish
>because it is to their great advantage to do so. If you're dominant in a
>marketplace, it is simply foolish to allow everyone else to play on "a level
>playing field").
 
This statement is totally naive. Without standards there is no
interoperability. Period.
 
Without standards there are no floppy disks, no DATs, no SCSI and no IDE.
Without standards there are no modems. (V.34 etc.)
Without standards there is no internet. (TCP/IP)
Without standards there is no ASCII.
Without standards there are no computers. At least, none worth using.
 
There is plenty of opportunity for innovation even within so called
'rigidly' defined standards. Look at the myriad of TCP/IP stacks out there.
Each edging the other out performance wise and feature wise.
 
Even within the POSIX world there is room for innovation, as there are
different levels of POSIX compliance (POSIX.1, POSIX.2, POSIX.4a etc.) and
there's plenty of room for performance tuning. POSIX simply defines an API,
but doesn't define the underlying OS mechanisms. See MACH, for example.
 
I don't see POSIX impeding innovation at all. In fact, I see it doing
exactly the opposite since it spurs competetion within the *same playing
field*. If there's no playing field, who is there to compete with?
 
Of course, this flawed thinking doesn't suprise me coming from MPE'rs,
considering the difficulty HP3000's have talking to anything except other
HP3000's.
 
It's easy to rant about standards when you've had no real experience with
them. :-)
 
-Dan
.----------------------------------------------.
|Dan Hollis -- Pharmacy Computer Services, Inc.|
[log in to unmask]      -     (503)476-3139|
`----------------------------------------------'