Well, after having driven much of the night before, having Al Franken for a speaker turned out to be a good thing . . . his speech kept getting farther and farther off-color and I gave up and walked out and went back to the hotel for some much-needed sleep. Consider this my vote, too, that the Franken mistake not be repeated. At least Dave Barry was aware that he was talking to computer people and attempted to tailor his speech to the audience. Franken said, "I find that I talk to a lot of corporate groups which tend to be made up mostly of Republicans, but I've discovered that the Democrats can't afford me. So the way it works is that I make fun of Republicans, you laugh and then you pay me." With the exception of the laughing (which I pretty well didn't) I suspect he was right. The speeches by Carly Fiorina and Ann Livermore were both good. Carly worked in some good 3000 references without seeming to have to go out of her way to do so (nicely done) and Ann stopped and made a big deal of assuring us that HP is glad for us. She seemed to have had to make a special effort to do so and she said that HP would be happy to help anyone who wished to move off the platform, but I would say we definitely got heard. Now to find out if they can do more than preach to the choir . . . :-). Alfredo made a very efficient job of the SIGIMAGE meeting. I would have been glad to take some time and hash at the Enchilada some, but I think that if he'd opened up that issue, we'd've likely gone overtime by a couple of hours, so it's just as well he didn't. The discussion we did have ended in asking HP to appoint an Enchilada representative so we have someone with whom to talk. Perhaps Wirt could provide the representative with some samples to, uh, chew on :-). Dave Wilde spoke at some length with the group as did Jon Bale. There is definite interest on the part of SIGIMAGE to keep the Oracle customers on the platform, moving them to Allbase and they wanted to know if HP has the same interest. It appears that HP does. Then I spent an hour plus at the Adager booth putting together a Tensegrity model with (am I getting her name right?) Michelle Paul. The booth is, as the Adager booth seems always to be, an island of peace in a sea of chaos (a lot like IMAGE and the 3000 in the workplace :-). The theme is Tension and Compression and how complex structures can be built out of those two simple ideas. After lunch and some more time in the expo, I headed for the SIGSysman meeting. That was a tough decision as it was scheduled at the same time as the Management Roundtable, MPE System Configuration and MPE/iX Intermediat Performance (as well as a number of other sessions). They'd scheduled it in a double-size room and with that competition, there weren't more than about a dozen warm bodies there at the beginning (though more trickled in as time went on). Kris Rant held a useful discussion on the HP Grant program. There's a significant need for networking between businesses which need MPE professionals and Universities. The grant program can put 3000s in the schools, but the schools need a good business case for using them and may need some teacher training or contract/volunteer teaching--with which the companies can help. Also, there are HP-employed trainers who would be willing to get involved in their local areas. Walter McCullough gave an update on High-availability Failover. As of 6.5PP2, MPE will have the ability with and XP256 box to reroute disk packets through a single channel if one of the controllers goes down. This is also true (or soon to be true, I don't remember which) with the XP512 and autoraid (someone correct me if I have that one wrong). He also described a product which will be available which will allow a disk array owned by one 3000 to be quickly switched to a second 3000, allowing very fast recovery in case of a down box. He also took a quick survey to find out how many would be interested in a hardware mirroring option costing the same as Mirrored Disk/iX which would also mirror LDEV 1. Then a thank-you to HP for two 6.0 patches. MPEKXY7 with various BULDACCT enhancements (including getting rid of the inline Pascal code) and MPELX11 which has store-to-disc, an enhanced CI INPUT() function and AbortProc. Thanks also for DBUTIL patch available on Jazz. Then Donna spent some time expressing her concern that we keep our 3000s up to date and that we explore the new technologies on the box and share them with our programmers or users. Followed some extensive discussion of various SIB items. In particular, we spent a lot of time considering the integration of the MPE and UPS and the related :shutdown (and possibly :reboot) request. The upshot of that was, I think, that the big concern is the UPS connection. We can live without the other fairly comfortably, but we want some way to tell the 3000 what to do with the last few electrons from the UPS (or at least the ones just prior to those being used to write main memory to disk :-). After the SIB items, we discussed how we can partner with CSY and Jeff Vance reported that he has, if I understood correctly, the green light to make available, in some fashion or other, code and basic support for external programmers to help out with the top SIB items. SIG MPE did a lot of housekeeping with various items which are no longer of interest or which have been completed being weeded out and the others getting approximate interest numbers put to them so that CSY will know where to direct their efforts. It seems fairly clear that CSY is stretched fairly thin at this point and I think it worth while to say again how much we appreciate all they are doing. CSY, we're proud of you and very grateful. Keep up the good work and let us know how we can help. Ted -- Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University ========================================================== Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere. -- Anglin, W.S. ========================================================== Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted