Craig Fairchild <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>On Mar 7,  8:07am, F. Alfredo Rego wrote:
>> Subject: HP Champions Unix-to-Windows-NT migration
>> >From Information Week Daily:
>>
>> _____Uniforum Preview: Data General And Hewlett-Packard_____
>> Data General and Hewlett-Packard will be in the spotlight at
>> next week's Uniforum trade show in San Francisco. Data
>> General will be introducing new clustering technology for
>> its high-end servers, while HP is expected to roll out
>> technology that will enhance Unix-to-Windows-NT migration.
>>
>...                                                        .
>>-- End of excerpt from F. Alfredo Rego
>
>Wow! As Superman would say, "Great Scott!"

Have you ben skiing in Snowbird lately?  There is a "Great Scott" advanced
run.  And there is an "Adager" super-advanced run.  Small world :-)


>Someone got their information ***REALLY*** mixed up. I was just at a talk that
>Dick Watts gave last week where he discussed some of HP's HP-UX strategy. The
>HP-UX strategy is actually for industry leading ***INTEROPERABILITY*** between
>HP-UX and NT. This is actually very similar to the MPE/iX strategy of
>improving
>interoperability with UNIX and with NT - this is a requirement to be a good
>citizen in a hetrogeneous environment.

This is good to hear.  Variety is, after all, the spice of life :-)


>I suspect, as Hamlet said, that "something [may be] rotten in Denmark." I've
>heard that a particular UNIX-only competitor is spreading the rumor that HP is
>giving up on the UNIX business and that all HP-UX customers should switch over
>to them ASAP. In addition to being really sleazy, it is totally untrue. It
>might be an accident that something like the above article was printed in
>error, or perhaps not.

Could that "particular UNIX-only competitor" be Sun Microsystems, by any
chance?  If so, here is an ironic report from today's InformationWeek Daily:

        _____HP Licenses Sun's Java WorkShop______
        Hewlett Packard will announce today that it has turned to
        rival Sun Microsystems for a Java development environment.
        HP will license Sun's Java WorkShop toolkit and create a
        version for its Unix operating system, HP-UX.

        Hewlett-Packard also plans to license the Windows NT version
        of the Sun product and will market both versions through its
        standard channels. In picking the all-Java Sun toolkit,
        sources say, HP dropped its own Java toolkit plans and
        bypassed Microsoft's Visual J++ product.


Poor Microsoft!  Is this just another innocent case of "strange bed fellows"?


>Well, as long as I'm in a quoting mood, let's hope that John Lennon is right
>and "instant karma's gonna get [them]."

Is HP's "instant" Java-from-Sun move "karmic"?  Who am I to know?  I am
just a programmer, not a manager :-)


>Craig "setting the record straight through way too many quotes and
>wondering if
>they have the same effect as bangs (!) in contributing to global warming
>an the
>general entropy of the universe" Fairchild

I wonder whether ANY record can be straightened at all.  Jeff Woods had
this wise observation in a recent e-mail signature:

        "If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points
        may be the crooked line."  --  Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)


And, to top everything off, here is the end of the today's InformationWeek
piece, contributing to more global warming:

        HP will begin selling the NT version of WorkShop
        immediately, and will develop an HP-UX version for release by
        the end of the second quarter. Both products will be priced at
        $99. --Jeff Sweat

Hmmm...  NT has "instant" availability and HP-UX has to wait a couple of
quarters...  I wonder what the pundits will make of this :-)


I must quit speculating and I must get back to my programming work.
Several Adager customers are banging at my virtual door requesting an
"instant" (well, not quite, but a "high availability") MASTER capacity
changer that is redefining the rules of the worst time-hog database
transformation.  If I am successful (and I am awfully close), IMAGE users
will have a huge operational advantage over common database management
systems such as Oracle.

What I am doing is converting Adager's MastCap process (with its karmic and
dreadfully slow I/O-intensive rehashing) from a synchronous "pain in the
neck" procedure (that forces people out of the database for a long time) to
an asynchronous combination of parallel processes that allows concurrent,
normal read/write & update mode to the users WHILE I rehash their masters.
I am using multithreading concepts from Java (created at Sun) to improve
the availability of IMAGE databases (created at HP) so that our mutual
customers may access them via their NT workstations (powered by Microsoft)
and Macs (created at Apple) and Sun workstations (created at Sun) and HP-UX
workstations (created at Apollo, a long-time Adager customer) WHILE I
rehash their masters.  Pretty esoteric stuff.

Strange bed fellows, indeed.  As Craig so wisely said, all of us must improve
interoperability -- this is a requirement to be a good citizen in a
heterogeneous environment.  I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.  As
I stressed in the technical paragraphs above, my agreement with Craig is
more than "words only" and is rooted in fundamental technological
strategies that serve as the basis for all of my tactical implementations.

Variety is the spice of life :-)




 _______________
|               |
|               |
|            r  |  Alfredo                     [log in to unmask]
|          e    |                           http://www.adager.com
|        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego               Tel 208 726-9100
|      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs           Fax 208 726-2822
|    d          |  Adager Corporation
|  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
|               |
|_______________|


                                                                .