INFO-VAX Sun, 06 Feb 2005 Volume 2005 : Issue 73 Contents: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Re: FBI gets hacked - should have been on OpenVMS! Re: How do I use terminal emulator with escape sequences? Re: How do I use terminal emulator with escape sequences? Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 13:49:53 -0500 From: Bill Todd Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: Rob Young wrote: > In article <6tadnV2nw4vsdpnfRVn-2w@igs.net>, "John Smith" writes: > >>Sue, >> >>I appreciate your opinion and thoughts. >> >>Curly was less Napoleonic in his dealings with staff than carly(tm) - it's >>actually nice to hear - but don't forget I never badmouthed the man >>personally....only his decisions. >> >>As to carly(tm), never equate 'smart' with 'wise'. >> >> >>I won't ask you to answer these in a public forum but I will ask you to >>consider the following questions I'm sure you have opinions on, and reflect >>upon how hubris has been the downfall of man good people and corporations: >> >>- Do you agree with the report published by DEC/Compaq engineers about the >>relative merits of Alpha vs. IA64? (see the recently posted url from Keith >>C.) > > > That paper has been around for quite some time. It is a great > paper. But alpha is no more and it isn't as if Itanium is > a dog. That's not the issue, Rob: the paper in question never asserted that Itanic was a dog, just that its potential was unimpressive compared with Alpha's - an assertion which certainly seems to have been borne out over time. > > >>- Do you believe that killing Alpha in favor of IA64 was the correct >>decision for all Compaq's product lines that were slated to continue to use >>Alpha or were slated to use it (NSK)? > > > Yes. For the same reason when UltraSparc goes away it will be > quite apparent that was a good decision. The problem as Paul > DeMone outlines at RWT is merchant vs. house. Merchant will > always win. > > Here Paul is tutoring Linus on the advantages of merchant > versus house, a key segment: It's rather ironic (though perhaps not all that surprising) that someone of your religious convictions appears to have confused a blowhard like Paul with God. Paul has some experience in the industry (though primarily in memory rather than processor manufacturing) and a while ago parlayed that into a position of prominence at a moderately obscure Web site. However, his ego far exceeds his competence, and since not long after the Alphacide he has consistently been significantly over-optimistic in predicting Itanic's performance relative to its competition. His predictions about Itanic's market success have been even farther from reality. Paul has a financial stake in Intel: it's not clear whether that or his ego is at fault, but something clearly is. ... >>- Do you believe that the loss of revenue and resulting profits, and the >>porting costs incurred from that decision were justifiable to Compaq/HP >>shareholders? > > > Can you specify exact dollar amounts? The relative magnitudes make the situation sufficiently clear that exact amounts are superfluous, Rob - just another red-herring demand from someone in abject denial, I'm afraid. Compaq stated in March, 2001, that Tru64 systems generated $3 billion in annual revenue and VMS systems $4 billion, and Rich Marcello indicated 9 months earlier that VMS systems generated $800 million in annual profit (stating the same $4 billion annual revenue figure). Rich also stated at the time of the Alphacide that Alpha development costs ran $150 million annually (whether that included EV7 costs that would not be cut by the Alphacide or just EV8 was left unstated, but any way you look at it it was a real bargain). 6 months after the Alphacide Compaq stated (in a letter to Gartner) that VMS system revenues were only $2 billion annually. Since Tru64 had already been consigned to the dustbin by HP by then, one can make a very reasonable guess that their revenues were far lower. Last year Keith quoted a Gorham figure for VMS revenue of $2.5 - $3 billion - a slight rebound that's not too surprising given the industry-leading EV7 systems which had appeared by then, but still a far cry from the earlier figures. Considering that VMS *service* revenues alone likely accounted for something close to half of the $4 billion annual system revenue before the Alphacide, it seems clear that VMS *sales* fell off a cliff after that point and have never recovered all that much - with Tru64 sales likely hovering right around zero since then. Can you also show > the win transitioning house to merchant and where on the timeline > that becomes obvious? No, Rob: it's up to people who actually believe such a win will someday occur to trot out figures supporting that thesis so that others can point out how laughable they are. For SGI, they have just about turned the > corner. You mean from a company at the edge of bankruptcy because they prematurely abandoned their bread-and-butter architecture for a pie-in-the-sky replacement to a company which might, someday, return to its previous position in the industry? I guess that's better than nothing, but it's hardly a glowing recommendation for such a sequence of actions. As Paul points out in another post, SGI is now 80/20 > IPF/MIPS. Perhaps with HP the crossover will occur 50/50? A reasonable criterion for success would be when, say, VMS annual system profits return to $800 million, I'd say (assuming, of course, that they are continuing to trend upward from that point). While that ignores the significantly higher potential which VMS had if Compaq had only promoted it, it's at least an apples-to-apples comparison (given that HP isn't promoting VMS either). I'm not exactly holding my breath. > > >>- Do you agree that most of the delays in advancing Alpha design were a >>result of on-again/off-again funding for chip design/development? > > > It is dead. Get over it. Just as soon as those responsible join it, Rob. Bit of unfinished karma still to take care of yet, but we're getting there. > > >>- Do you believe that the performance of IA64 will match the expected >>performance of Alpha at like points in time had Alpha development been >>continued on a properly funded timetable?, ie. IA64 without DEC/Compaq chip >>people in 2007 vs. Alpha fully funded with DEC/Compaq chip people in 2007 >>(just to pick a date - choose another date if you wish). > > > Small consideration. Larger consideration for Enterprises is > IPF value add (see above) and increased feature set of Itanium > (Foxton, Pellston, etc.) Rob, you've been vigorously selling Itanic futures since June 25, 2001 - getting close on to 4 years now. Isn't it about time you had something a bit more *current* to sell? Of course, if you *want* to compare futures, then you've really got to give the Alpha roadmap its due as well - which, as usual, makes even the current Itanic prospects look pretty sick. But while we no longer have Alpha to do that job in the present day, POWER5 seems to have taken up at least a lot of the slack. > > >>- Do you believe that the low-volume high-cost chip called IA64 is a better >>bet even if it is $100 cheaper than a low-volume high-cost Alpha given the >>billions sunk into IA64 and its relative sales volume? > > > Absolutely. Intel has FAB space. FABs cost big money and fortunately > Intel cranks out millions of CPUs to offset the cost. IBM doesn't > and of course loses money with IBM micro. > > >>ie. how many hundred >>million Alpha's would it take at $100 more per chip to equal the money sunk >>into IA64? > > > This is the wrong question. The question to ask that SKHPC answers > is how much was lost on each Alpha CPU manufactured? It is quite > obvious that IBM micro is losing money on every CPU they manufacture > as IBM micro consistently turns in a loss. A paper loss, Rob. Just as Alpha generated significant profits *overall* for Compaq at the system level (even after taking those per-chip 'losses' into account), so POWER generates similar gravy for IBM. If we were talking about high-volume commodity products you might have more of a point. But of course by Intel's own admission we're not, and by all appearances never will be (save for the POWER variants in embedded systems, that is). ... >>- Do you agree that the lack of public comment about VMS between Sept. 2001 >>and May 2002 when indeed all other major products were being commented on >>publicly by curly and carly(tm) introduced FUD with the customer base and >>'froze' potential commitment to VMS by *new* customers? > > > Who knows. But Mark reports a reasonable percentage of new customers > - 15%. Given the continuing superiority of EV7 systems in some applications, that's hardly surprising. Still, 15% of a small number is an even smaller number, and such numbers are extremely susceptible to large percentage variations with only small absolute changes. - bill ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 14:54:36 -0500 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <1107632608.52b14b7eb5cb211b87a084431c76333b@teranews> susan_skonetski@hotmail.com wrote: > give it. Michael, I knew and did meet on several occasions enough to > form an opinion. He also did something that I respect he told me "I > have your back on this" and really did protect me. That is pretty rare > from his level to mine (he was a president and I am well a nobody. Sue, remember that Curly wasn't really president. He was just some high level accountant who got the job because they coudln't find anyone else to replace Pfeiffer. So he would have definitely felt very insecure initially and not felt so separate from the grunts since he was way over his head with his new job. Carly, on the other hand, got in at the very top with all the perks and business jets she could negotiate. She felt over secure and doesn't need to talk to the grunts. To me, no matter how Curly was nice to you and/or other individuals, he is still the one who knewingly lied about his plans for Alpha, selling Alpha to the Québec government big time just a few months before the annoucnement that Alpha was being killed. This is very dishonest and I'd say that you were lucky you didn't get screwed by Curly. My feeling is that he was perfectly capable of screwing people if it helped save his job, and would help people if it helped save his job. Mafia leaders can be very nice and help a lot of people, but they are also perfectly capable of killing their own mothers if the mother gets in the way. Sue, when you see how Curly lied and was dishonest to customers, doesn't that devalue any nice thing he did for you ? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 14:54:25 -0500 From: "John Smith" Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: Rob Young wrote: > In article <6tadnV2nw4vsdpnfRVn-2w@igs.net>, "John Smith" > writes: > >> - Do you agree that the lack of public comment about VMS between >> Sept. 2001 and May 2002 when indeed all other major products were >> being commented on publicly by curly and carly(tm) introduced FUD >> with the customer base and 'froze' potential commitment to VMS by >> *new* customers? > > Who knows. But Mark reports a reasonable percentage of new customers > - 15%. Example: T(0) = 100,000 customers T(1) = 80,000 customers Between T(0) and T(1) the following occurred: T(0) customers shrank by 30,500 10,500 *new* customers were added - 15% of the attritted customer base. A far different model than 100,000 + 15%. Which is true? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 15:15:12 -0500 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <1107633842.005de4ac32d91d42ff64947da9e1ff8f@teranews> Bill Todd wrote: > That's not the issue, Rob: the paper in question never asserted that > Itanic was a dog, just that its potential was unimpressive compared with > Alpha's When I was on the DECUS Canada board, the then rep gave a presentation to the board on alpha vs IA64 based on internal documents. This was just after the merger was announced, but before Compaq started to dismantle DEC facilities). The arguments were damning on IA64. Not "unimpressive", but "fatally flawed". Some time ago here, someone posted a link to a long on-line presentation by an ex Intel 8086 engineer and he too used description similar to "fatally flawed" when looking at the IA64 project. So it wasn't just some DEC propaganda against IA64. I suspect SUN probably had similar documents as well. And you don't see AMD trying to make an IA64 clone. And I remember seing a presentation by John Loether who, while more diplomatic than the wording I got in that decus board presentation, was also pretty damning of IA64. Of course, post Alpha Murder, he gave presentation that forced him to toe the Compaq corporate line. There were arguments not on the actual implementation, but on the concepts of IA64. And those concepts are what constitute the fatal flaws because they won't go away. I suspect that EV7 work started to slow down under Palmer. (remember that Palmer had begun to port DEC-Unix to IA64, but not VMS). had EV7 work progressed at its original rate, despite technical delays, it would have been on the market a few years earlier. And it would have further proven how pathetic that IA64 thing was. Alpha is very much like VMS. Despite attempst to kill it, it still outshines the competition. ------------------------------ Date: 5 Feb 2005 14:58:45 -0600 From: Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: In article , "FredK" writes: > > "John Smith" wrote in message > news:cN2dnczkqY90Y57fRVn-iQ@igs.net... >> Sue, >> >> I respect your opinion of Curly. >> >> At a personal level I'm pretty sure that carly isn't a bad person either. >> She probably doesn't beat her dog or kick little kids. She can probably be > a >> great dinner date, and maybe she's great in bed too. >> > > Am I the only one who is just outright offended by this? Certainly he did not (this time) offend those of us who have him killfiled. Why do you make such things visible Fred :-) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:44:14 -0500 From: Dave Froble Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <42053E2E.8040605@tsoft-inc.com> FredK wrote: > "John Smith" wrote in message > news:cN2dnczkqY90Y57fRVn-iQ@igs.net... > >>Sue, >> >>I respect your opinion of Curly. >> >>At a personal level I'm pretty sure that carly isn't a bad person either. >>She probably doesn't beat her dog or kick little kids. She can probably be >> > a > >>great dinner date, and maybe she's great in bed too. >> >> > > Am I the only one who is just outright offended by this? Probably not, but I've seen much worse. Your pointing it out just intensifies the statement. It isn't appropriate. Let such pass quietly. Dave ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 18:53:29 -0500 From: "Neil Rieck" Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: "Dave Froble" wrote in message news:42053E2E.8040605@tsoft-inc.com... > FredK wrote: > [...big snip...] >> Am I the only one who is just outright offended by this? > > > Probably not, but I've seen much worse. Your pointing it out just > intensifies the statement. It isn't appropriate. Let such pass quietly. > > Dave > More than several people, from time to time, have behaved badly in this news group. Aside from being generally uncivilized, I find it odd that people would do while knowing every key stroke is being recorded for posterity at Google via www.deja.com To make things worse, the price of storage continues to plummet which means this stuff might hang around for decades. Let's forget about the personal comments and get back to a discussion of OpenVMS related technology. Neil Rieck Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/cool_openvms.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 19:50:52 -0500 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <1107650357.e6fe05a5826f23df7e8d7a4861f4a492@teranews> Neil Rieck wrote: > More than several people, from time to time, have behaved badly in this news > group. Aside from being generally uncivilized, I find it odd that people > would do while knowing every key stroke is being recorded for posterity at > Google via www.deja.com People will learn that many many many comments can be and are quoted out of context. Personally, I saw that "offending" post in context and saw it as an insult/joke to Carly's competence. One needs to remember that this is a worldwide forum. In some cultures, some comments can be considered taboo and inappropriate, while in other cultures, they are common jokes and comments that are never seen as "offensive". In the USA, it si now inappropriate to call someone "black" and one must call him/her "african american", even if the person is from south pacific roots. Elsewhere in the world, one would never call a black person "african american". And calling someone "black" wouldn't have the taboo/racist connotations that the USA gave the word (or whatever the USA gave "black" to make it politically unacceptable). It seems that the rest of the world has underestimated the cultural shifts occuring in the USA if even such an innocuous comment/joke is now seen as offensive. High profile people are fair game for jokes. They are fair game for caricatures. And Carly is about as high profile as one can get for a CEO in the world. Bill gates is the butt of many jokes too, even in the USA. ------------------------------ Date: 5 Feb 2005 18:39:50 -0600 From: young_r@encompasserve.org (Rob Young) Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: In article , Bill Todd writes: > Rob Young wrote: >> >> That paper has been around for quite some time. It is a great >> paper. But alpha is no more and it isn't as if Itanium is >> a dog. > > That's not the issue, Rob: the paper in question never asserted that > Itanic was a dog, just that its potential was unimpressive compared with > Alpha's - an assertion which certainly seems to have been borne out over > time. > True - if you quit measuring time. According to Paul, Montecito puts IPF ahead of Power5 - even Power5+. But we shall see and know a whole lot more in the coming months. >> >> >>>- Do you believe that killing Alpha in favor of IA64 was the correct >>>decision for all Compaq's product lines that were slated to continue to use >>>Alpha or were slated to use it (NSK)? >> >> >> Yes. For the same reason when UltraSparc goes away it will be >> quite apparent that was a good decision. The problem as Paul >> DeMone outlines at RWT is merchant vs. house. Merchant will >> always win. >> >> Here Paul is tutoring Linus on the advantages of merchant >> versus house, a key segment: > > It's rather ironic (though perhaps not all that surprising) that someone > of your religious convictions appears to have confused a blowhard like > Paul with God. Not at all. Just that he is very good at what he does and I certainly don't see you lecturing him about the industry. > Paul has some experience in the industry (though primarily in memory > rather than processor manufacturing) and a while ago parlayed that into > a position of prominence at a moderately obscure Web site. However, his > ego far exceeds his competence, and since not long after the Alphacide > he has consistently been significantly over-optimistic in predicting > Itanic's performance relative to its competition. But performance is getting consistently better and Montecito will obtain much greater performance at 100 Watts to boot. > His predictions about Itanic's market success have been even farther > from reality. Paul has a financial stake in Intel: it's not clear > whether that or his ego is at fault, but something clearly is. As Paul points out, Intel is less than 5% of his portfolio, so his financial stake is not an issue. > > Can you also show >> the win transitioning house to merchant and where on the timeline >> that becomes obvious? > > No, Rob: it's up to people who actually believe such a win will someday > occur to trot out figures supporting that thesis so that others can > point out how laughable they are. > But it will happen. > For SGI, they have just about turned the >> corner. > > You mean from a company at the edge of bankruptcy because they > prematurely abandoned their bread-and-butter architecture for a > pie-in-the-sky replacement to a company which might, someday, return to > its previous position in the industry? I guess that's better than > nothing, but it's hardly a glowing recommendation for such a sequence of > actions. > No. MIPS as a computing CPU was doomed - they had to do something. John Mashey says in comp.arch that several mis-steps really put them behind the curve: http://tinyurl.com/5dc2h 1) People comment that MIPS chips are behind in clock rate, and then ascribe all sorts of architectural reasons to this. This is mostly silly, as the primary reason is some decisions (in my view, not good ones, but I was distracted by a heart attack at the time) made by some no-longer-with-SGI executives around 1995, which essentially starved the R10K team of resources. In particular, they didn't staff the followon tuneup projects that engineers begged for, in favor of staving 1 and then 2 separate high-end projects (H1 & H2), both of which were eventually cancelled. But that was then, this is now and SGI using IPF merchant is a good thing (as they wind down anything to do with MIPS cpus). Who will be the last house CPU standing - Power - no doubt. How many years you give UltraSparc? I give them 3 years - at most. Remember that Sun is the only major OEM that hasn't adopted IPF - they're going to be feeling pretty lonely and left out in a year or so. > As Paul points out in another post, SGI is now 80/20 >> IPF/MIPS. Perhaps with HP the crossover will occur 50/50? > > A reasonable criterion for success would be when, say, VMS annual system > profits return to $800 million, I'd say (assuming, of course, that they > are continuing to trend upward from that point). While that ignores the > significantly higher potential which VMS had if Compaq had only promoted > it, it's at least an apples-to-apples comparison (given that HP isn't > promoting VMS either). > Can't depend on VMS as a criteria. Overall IPF adoption would be more accurate. >> >>>- Do you agree that most of the delays in advancing Alpha design were a >>>result of on-again/off-again funding for chip design/development? >> >> >> It is dead. Get over it. > > Just as soon as those responsible join it, Rob. Bit of unfinished karma > still to take care of yet, but we're getting there. > Still dead. Get over it. >>>- Do you believe that the performance of IA64 will match the expected >>>performance of Alpha at like points in time had Alpha development been >>>continued on a properly funded timetable?, ie. IA64 without DEC/Compaq chip >>>people in 2007 vs. Alpha fully funded with DEC/Compaq chip people in 2007 >>>(just to pick a date - choose another date if you wish). >> >> >> Small consideration. Larger consideration for Enterprises is >> IPF value add (see above) and increased feature set of Itanium >> (Foxton, Pellston, etc.) > > Rob, you've been vigorously selling Itanic futures since June 25, 2001 - > getting close on to 4 years now. Isn't it about time you had something > a bit more *current* to sell? > Nah - futures are the exciting part. After all, strategically you have to know what is coming and how it will affect you. Montecito is quite exciting with Foxton and Pellston and much better performance. > Of course, if you *want* to compare futures, then you've really got to > give the Alpha roadmap its due as well - which, as usual, makes even the > current Itanic prospects look pretty sick. But while we no longer have > Alpha to do that job in the present day, POWER5 seems to have taken up > at least a lot of the slack. Forget Alpha - it is dead. Get over it. And yes - Power5 is a wonderful performer and Montecito will do better. > >> >> >>>- Do you believe that the low-volume high-cost chip called IA64 is a better >>>bet even if it is $100 cheaper than a low-volume high-cost Alpha given the >>>billions sunk into IA64 and its relative sales volume? >> >> >> Absolutely. Intel has FAB space. FABs cost big money and fortunately >> Intel cranks out millions of CPUs to offset the cost. IBM doesn't >> and of course loses money with IBM micro. >> >> >>>ie. how many hundred >>>million Alpha's would it take at $100 more per chip to equal the money sunk >>>into IA64? >> >> >> This is the wrong question. The question to ask that SKHPC answers >> is how much was lost on each Alpha CPU manufactured? It is quite >> obvious that IBM micro is losing money on every CPU they manufacture >> as IBM micro consistently turns in a loss. > > A paper loss, Rob. Just as Alpha generated significant profits > *overall* for Compaq at the system level (even after taking those > per-chip 'losses' into account), so POWER generates similar gravy for IBM. This is correct. But by the time you shift the paper profit to cover the paper loss - at the end of the day you have a much less profitable business teetering on a money losing business. Paul's whole point merchant versus house CPU. Dell is a big clue in this regard, by the way. Because of the OEMs unburdened by infrastructure support costs, the ones that have the infrastructure to support - whether IBM soup to nuts or Sun. Now Sun is smart in that they have shifted some of the burden to Fujitsu, but we'll see how long that lasts when Fujitsu sees declining Sun/Solaris (this isn't new - old discussion, as we know the Sun is setting). > If we were talking about high-volume commodity products you might have > more of a point. But of course by Intel's own admission we're not, and > by all appearances never will be (save for the POWER variants in > embedded systems, that is). Right - even less of a reason not to go merchant. You have all the infrastructure for a small number of CPUs, hence IBM micro is a big money loser. >>>- Do you agree that the lack of public comment about VMS between Sept. 2001 >>>and May 2002 when indeed all other major products were being commented on >>>publicly by curly and carly(tm) introduced FUD with the customer base and >>>'froze' potential commitment to VMS by *new* customers? >> >> >> Who knows. But Mark reports a reasonable percentage of new customers >> - 15%. > > Given the continuing superiority of EV7 systems in some applications, > that's hardly surprising. Still, 15% of a small number is an even > smaller number, and such numbers are extremely susceptible to large > percentage variations with only small absolute changes. > I highly doubt folks are buying because of EV7. At this point - they are buying in spite of EV7. After all, Alpha is dead. If it wasn't for the fact there is a good story in IPF (and the story gets much better Montecito on), you certainly wouldn't want to take up a bunch of Alpha infrastructure as a new customer without a good path forward. Rob ------------------------------ Date: 5 Feb 2005 19:06:38 -0600 From: young_r@encompasserve.org (Rob Young) Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <1N6CEX95dWMl@eisner.encompasserve.org> In article <1107633842.005de4ac32d91d42ff64947da9e1ff8f@teranews>, JF Mezei writes: > Bill Todd wrote: >> That's not the issue, Rob: the paper in question never asserted that >> Itanic was a dog, just that its potential was unimpressive compared with >> Alpha's > > > When I was on the DECUS Canada board, the then rep gave a presentation > to the board on alpha vs IA64 based on internal documents. This was just > after the merger was announced, but before Compaq started to dismantle > DEC facilities). The arguments were damning on IA64. Not "unimpressive", > but "fatally flawed". And in hindsight "fatally flawed" was just pompous bluster. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041216/sfth046_1.html "MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- After searching the world over for the most powerful computing technology, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) has selected the latest generation of SGI. Altix. systems from Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI - News) to power Germany's new national supercomputing system. The new system, which eventually will incorporate 3,328 dual-core Intel. Itanium. 2 processors, will be capable of generating 69 trillion calculations per second of performance, effectively boosting the computing capacity at Germany's Leibniz Computing Center (LRZ) 30-fold. LRZ, the BAdw computing center, also will deploy a 660-terabyte SGI. InfiniteStorage solution to accommodate its rapidly growing stockpile of scientific of data." "In early 2006, SGI will begin installation of the SGI Altix system, which will feature 40 terabytes of globally addressable memory and will be integrated with 660 terabytes of storage. Named "Hoechstleistungsrechner in Bayern" (HLRB-II), the new system will replace LRZ's existing Hitachi SR8000 system, which runs more than 200 projects requiring top performance from scientists and researchers from all over Germany. The system will be upgraded to its final configuration in 2007." [snip] The aggregate revenue to SGI for hardware and services under the contract is anticipated to be in excess of $50 million, the bulk of which will not be recognized until 2007. --- That is 3328 Montecitos/Montvales delivering 69 Teraflops. And they are dropping $50 million on it after an extended search. Very impressive no matter how you measure it, certainly not "unimpressive." To suggest at this point that Itanium is "fatally flawed" is quite the chuckle. > Some time ago here, someone posted a link to a long on-line presentation > by an ex Intel 8086 engineer and he too used description similar to > "fatally flawed" when looking at the IA64 project. Yes - just a disgruntled ex-Inteller. There are disgruntled people all over the place. > So it wasn't just some DEC propaganda against IA64. I suspect SUN > probably had similar documents as well. And you don't see AMD trying to > make an IA64 clone. Funny you should mention Sun, they are the only major OEM that hasn't adopted Itanium. > There were arguments not on the actual implementation, but on the > concepts of IA64. And those concepts are what constitute the fatal flaws > because they won't go away. I'm sitting here laughing. IPF isn't fatally flawed. If you repeat it often enough, someone actually believes it? And you certainly wouldn't trot out any of these "fatal flaws" for closer examination. Sorta like school yard rumours - "if you drink Pepto Bismol, you will grow faster." I'm sure there are a few gullible kids that would actually believe such a thing. There are hints all over the place about just how much of a screamer it is. It will dominate HPC (at 100 watts , and screamer performance, no one comes close to Montecito for HPC applications and you can bet it will do very well at TPC benchmarks). > Alpha is very much like VMS. Despite attempst to kill it, it still > outshines the competition. I have no idea what you are comparing Alpha to or what metric you would be using. Rob ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 20:33:25 -0500 From: Bill Todd Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: Rob Young wrote: > In article , Bill Todd writes: > >>Rob Young wrote: >> >>> That paper has been around for quite some time. It is a great >>> paper. But alpha is no more and it isn't as if Itanium is >>> a dog. >> >>That's not the issue, Rob: the paper in question never asserted that >>Itanic was a dog, just that its potential was unimpressive compared with >>Alpha's - an assertion which certainly seems to have been borne out over >>time. >> > > > True - if you quit measuring time. According to Paul, Montecito > puts IPF ahead of Power5 - even Power5+. Which I fully expect will just be another in his long string of overly optimistic projections. Hardly a good record on which to base your own prognostications. ... >>It's rather ironic (though perhaps not all that surprising) that someone >>of your religious convictions appears to have confused a blowhard like >>Paul with God. > > > Not at all. Just that he is very good at what he does and I > certainly don't see you lecturing him about the industry. Only because it got too boring to continue to do so. There's a point at which repeating oneself starts seeming silly, though Paul doesn't seem to share that view. > > >>Paul has some experience in the industry (though primarily in memory >>rather than processor manufacturing) and a while ago parlayed that into >>a position of prominence at a moderately obscure Web site. However, his >>ego far exceeds his competence, and since not long after the Alphacide >>he has consistently been significantly over-optimistic in predicting >>Itanic's performance relative to its competition. > > > But performance is getting consistently better and Montecito > will obtain much greater performance at 100 Watts to boot. Well, duh: funny how the passage of time and the advance of technology seem to have that effect on things. Just *how much* better has always been the real question, and so far Itanic has always come up short. ... >> Can you also show >> >>> the win transitioning house to merchant and where on the timeline >>> that becomes obvious? >> >>No, Rob: it's up to people who actually believe such a win will someday >>occur to trot out figures supporting that thesis so that others can >>point out how laughable they are. >> > > > But it will happen. Ah - an article of faith, I see. Why not apply the same criteria you wanted to apply to John's statements and pony up some actual figures which one could laugh at, as I suggested? > > >> For SGI, they have just about turned the >> >>> corner. >> >>You mean from a company at the edge of bankruptcy because they >>prematurely abandoned their bread-and-butter architecture for a >>pie-in-the-sky replacement to a company which might, someday, return to >>its previous position in the industry? I guess that's better than >>nothing, but it's hardly a glowing recommendation for such a sequence of >>actions. >> > > > No. MIPS as a computing CPU was doomed - they had to do something. > John Mashey says in comp.arch that several mis-steps really put > them behind the curve: > > http://tinyurl.com/5dc2h > > 1) People comment that MIPS chips are behind in clock rate, and then ascribe > all sorts of architectural reasons to this. This is mostly silly, as the > primary reason is some decisions (in my view, not good ones, but I was > distracted by a heart attack at the time) made by some no-longer-with-SGI > executives around 1995, which essentially starved the R10K team of resources. Why not actually try to understand the material you just quoted, Rob, rather than present it as a confirmation of your thesis when in fact it rather clearly refutes it? MIPS was doomed only because SGI gave up on it in its enthusiasm for becoming an Intel OEM - first with its misguided emphasis on NT workstations, then with its misguided emphasis on Itanic, both of which contributed to the starvation of MIPS resources which Mashey referred to. The same kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which now makes Alpha increasingly uncompetitive: nothing to do with technical potential, everything to do with managerial incompetence. > How many years you give UltraSparc? I give them > 3 years - at most. Is 'UltraSPARC' even still being developed? Hasn't Sun moved on to Niagara, Rock, and in cooperation with Fujitsu SPARC64? I suspect those products, or their successors, will keep SPARC around at least well into the next decade - and quite possibly long after Itanic has sunk beneath the waves. But you're the one who has such complete confidence in your ability to predict the future despite such extensive historical evidence of your complete incompetence at such endeavors: I just make reasonable guesses based on the evidence rather than categorical pronouncements based on my prejudices. Remember that Sun is the only major OEM > that hasn't adopted IPF - they're going to be feeling pretty > lonely and left out in a year or so. Or pretty smug at not having wasted the kind of resources on a sinking architecture that HP and (though to far lesser extents) other Itanic OEMs did. ... >>> This is the wrong question. The question to ask that SKHPC answers >>> is how much was lost on each Alpha CPU manufactured? It is quite >>> obvious that IBM micro is losing money on every CPU they manufacture >>> as IBM micro consistently turns in a loss. >> >>A paper loss, Rob. Just as Alpha generated significant profits >>*overall* for Compaq at the system level (even after taking those >>per-chip 'losses' into account), so POWER generates similar gravy for IBM. > > > This is correct. But by the time you shift the paper profit > to cover the paper loss - at the end of the day you have a much > less profitable business teetering on a money losing business. Much less profitable than what, Rob? Than a CPU business into which Intel has sunk $billions and so far only received $millions in return? Being less profitable than that would be quite a challenge. In fact, most corporations couldn't afford to be even significantly *more* profitable than Itanic. The real question, now that Intel has been forced to come up with a 64-bit x86 extension, is just how much longer they will choose to be that unprofitable in an increasingly unpromising cause. ... >>If we were talking about high-volume commodity products you might have >>more of a point. But of course by Intel's own admission we're not, and >>by all appearances never will be (save for the POWER variants in >>embedded systems, that is). > > > Right - even less of a reason not to go merchant. You have > all the infrastructure for a small number of CPUs, hence IBM > micro is a big money loser. You just don't get it, Rob (not that this is anything new): For low-end, high-volume servers, there's x86-64. For higher-end, low-volume servers there's whatever you're currently using (assuming your vendor is willing to continue selling it to you, as most non-brain-dead vendors seem to be) - because the cost of the CPU in those servers is such a minor component of their overall cost of ownership that any savings from using a merchant CPU would be lost in the noise (whereas the costs of *moving* to another hardware or software architecture would be significant indeed). Of course, IBM and Sun have demonstrated that they can sell POWER and SPARC systems that are just as inexpensive as HP's Itanics (in Sun's case, at an entry price of about $1K considerably *less* expensive than the least-expensive HP Itanic). So the 'merchant CPU advantage' argument doesn't even seem to apply to the low end: just another failed hypothesis foundering upon the shoals of reality. - bill ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 01:30:44 GMT From: winston@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU (Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing) Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <00A3EF30.E2CB059D@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> In article <1107650357.e6fe05a5826f23df7e8d7a4861f4a492@teranews>, JF Mezei writes: >Neil Rieck wrote: >> More than several people, from time to time, have behaved badly in this news >> group. Aside from being generally uncivilized, I find it odd that people >> would do while knowing every key stroke is being recorded for posterity at >> Google via www.deja.com > >People will learn that many many many comments can be and are quoted out >of context. > >Personally, I saw that "offending" post in context and saw it as an >insult/joke to Carly's competence. [snippage] > >High profile people are fair game for jokes. They are fair game for >caricatures. And Carly is about as high profile as one can get for a CEO >in the world. Bill gates is the butt of many jokes too, even in the USA. I think the problem isn't jokes about Carly's competence, so much. You wouldn't care about Carly's hairstyle if you thought she was a good CEO, so it seems like cracks about her hairstyle aren't really earned. I hold no brief for Carly's competence, or for her participation in the discussion of the traditional HP Way. I think it's absolutely fine to slam her for her job performance. But I think I detect a strain of misogyny in some of the comments about her that makes me kind of nervous, as though the problem weren't that she's a bad CEO but that she's a woman trying to be a CEO. I'm not completely sure that's what's going on, which is why I haven't spoken up before. But it looks a little suspicious. (I've seen this stuff from you and sometimes from "John Smith." Without doing a literature review, I don't recall Bill Todd saying anything misogynist in a considerable volume of ranking on Carly.) -- Alan ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 20:43:54 -0500 From: Bill Todd Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: Rob Young wrote: ... > The aggregate revenue to SGI for hardware and services under the contract is > anticipated to be in excess of $50 million, the bulk of which will not be > recognized until 2007. Wow - $50 million! Only another 140 such sales each and every year, and they'll be generating about the same revenue that VMS and Tru64 systems used to. Please post the relevant press releases every 2 - 3 days or so so we can keep track of their progress. > > --- > > That is 3328 Montecitos/Montvales delivering 69 Teraflops. And > they are dropping $50 million on it after an extended search. Very > impressive no matter how you measure it, certainly not "unimpressive." Well, there used to be a sense in which Cray systems were 'impressive', but it wasn't in any commercial capacity. For that matter, Merced certainly qualified as 'impressive' in terms of generated BTUs per unit of work completed. If HP's and Intel's goal was to create the HPC core for the new decade, I can't argue convincingly that they haven't come at least *somewhere* near achieving it. But my impression was that they had something more resembling commercial success in mind. - bill ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 21:02:00 -0500 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <1107654630.828fd851d1ca025dae50b7b54af5c912@teranews> Rob Young wrote: > "MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- After searching the > world over for the most powerful computing technology, the Bavarian Academy of > Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) has selected the latest generation of SGI. > The aggregate revenue to SGI for hardware and services under the contract is > anticipated to be in excess of $50 million, the bulk of which will not be > recognized until 2007. Yep, that says a lot about IA64. They have to give them away in the hope that maintenace/support revenus will pay for these boxes in the long term. But this is not sustainable in the long term, especially now that HP had to pay Intel real dollars to purchase those IA64 chips. > Funny you should mention Sun, they are the only major OEM that > hasn't adopted Itanium. Your definition of "adopted" is flawed. While many vendors offer a token model of an IA64 based box, they certaintly have not adopted it. Dell is still very much an 8086 shop, and IBM is certaintly not an IA64 shop. Of the well known player, only HP and SGI have bet their business solely on that IA64 thing. > I'm sitting here laughing. IPF isn't fatally flawed. If you > repeat it often enough, someone actually believes it? The DEC engineers that had made that presentation to us was very credible. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 21:04:15 -0500 From: Bill Todd Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing wrote: ... > I think the problem isn't jokes about Carly's competence, so much. You > wouldn't care about Carly's hairstyle if you thought she was a good CEO, so > it seems like cracks about her hairstyle aren't really earned. > > I hold no brief for Carly's competence, or for her participation in the > discussion of the traditional HP Way. I think it's absolutely fine to slam > her for her job performance. But I think I detect a strain of misogyny in > some of the comments about her that makes me kind of nervous, as though the > problem weren't that she's a bad CEO but that she's a woman trying to be a > CEO. I'm not completely sure that's what's going on, which is why I haven't > spoken up before. But it looks a little suspicious. > > (I've seen this stuff from you and sometimes from "John Smith." Without doing > a literature review, I don't recall Bill Todd saying anything misogynist in a > considerable volume of ranking on Carly.) Well, since you brought me into it... Though I was not entirely comfortable with John's comment, I could imagine having said something similar myself if in the proper frame of mind. It would have been because I suspect Carly of having largely gotten a free ride because of her sex: national public exposure as Fortune's 'most influential businesswoman' (or whatever she was until getting dethroned recently), plus considerable slack from people who either felt that a woman deserved some or were loath to risk being considered male chauvinists if they subjected her to the kind of criticism she deserved. Now, *some* such consideration may in other cases be reasonable as compensation for the very real additional hurdles which a woman must still clear in order to reach the top. But once she's gotten there I don't see them as being appropriate any more: CEOs should be judged on their performance, and hers has been execrable while receiving nothing like the examination it deserves. And to all appearances she has no reluctance to take advantage of such unearned forbearance. Now, one could argue that using any and all advantages is her *obligation* as a CEO, and I'd find such an argument at least partly persuasive. But I also think it makes gender-related attacks fair game in return. - bill ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 22:08:51 -0500 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Curly soon to be out of a job Message-ID: <1107658627.0a142c897ac32b3d0151a4ba98ffa1f5@teranews> Bill Todd wrote: > advantages is her *obligation* as a CEO, and I'd find such an argument > at least partly persuasive. But I also think it makes gender-related > attacks fair game in return. Why has the dumb blonde been staring at the can of frozen orange juice for over half an hour ? Because it says "CONCENTRATE "on it. --- Today, at the supermarket, there were USA magazines talking about Jenifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. The one on the bottom proclaimed on its cover "Brad fights to get Jen back". The one just above it had "Jen fights to get Brad back". How is one, outside the USA, supposed to know that americans don't find t acceptable to joke about dating when US exports such as those supermarket magazines talk about nothing but that ? ----- A blonde sits down in first class section of an aircraft. The flight attendants, upon checking her ticket, find out she should be seated in coach. They try to explain to her that she is in the wrong seat, but she refuses to move. So the FAs call the captain. Captain whispers a few words to her, and then she runs to the coach section. FAs ask the captain "how did you do this ?". Captain responds "Simple, I am married to a blonde, so I know how to handle those cases. I just told her that the first class section wasn't going to new york, it was going to Cleveland, so she moved to the section going to new york". --- Are dumb blonde jokes now off limits because the CEO of HP is a blonde ??????? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:58:59 -0800 From: "Jack Peacock" Subject: Re: FBI gets hacked - should have been on OpenVMS! Message-ID: "John S." wrote in message news:edydnQLRmNAo2ZnfRVn-qw@comcast.com... > Photos of a DEC system used by the FBI > http://www.vistadome.com/fbi.html > I understand there's a budget request before Congress to upgrade that particular machine to one of the new PDP-20 systems (aren't bigger numbers better?). Even now FBI field offices are scouring museums all over the US in search of bidders... Jack Peacock ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 14:46:36 -0500 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: How do I use terminal emulator with escape sequences? Message-ID: <1107632143.259088e3c5e26de8cf3ae57af93bc2f9@teranews> prep@prep.synonet.com wrote: > > SYS$BRKTHRU to put messages on line 24 of selected terminals and it > > works like this. > > Why not use the terminal driver to do the work? It has terminal independant > addressing built in. Out of curiosity, how does one use the terminal driver to have it generate terminal independant escape sequences to position cursor ? I know that the terminal driver can use escape sequences for the current line (ctrl R, ctrl U for instance), but didn'T know how you could use it to position cursor without including escape sequences yourself. For the original poster, if you want to know about VT escape sequences, you can go to www.vt100.net and you'll have all the stuff you need there. Essentially, you want to save current cursor position, then move to line 24 column 1, write your alarm, then restore cursor position. Make sure your message does not exceed 80 characters (which woudl cause screen to scroll down and mess everything up). ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:19:40 -0500 From: Dave Froble Subject: Re: How do I use terminal emulator with escape sequences? Message-ID: <4205386C.7080907@tsoft-inc.com> JF Mezei wrote: > prep@prep.synonet.com wrote: > >>>SYS$BRKTHRU to put messages on line 24 of selected terminals and it >>>works like this. >>> >>Why not use the terminal driver to do the work? It has terminal independant >>addressing built in. >> > > Out of curiosity, how does one use the terminal driver to have it > generate terminal independant escape sequences to position cursor ? > > I know that the terminal driver can use escape sequences for the current > line (ctrl R, ctrl U for instance), but didn'T know how you could use it > to position cursor without including escape sequences yourself. > > For the original poster, if you want to know about VT escape sequences, > you can go to www.vt100.net and you'll have all the stuff you need > there. Essentially, you want to save current cursor position, then move > to line 24 column 1, write your alarm, then restore cursor position. > Make sure your message does not exceed 80 characters (which woudl cause > screen to scroll down and mess everything up). > I'm guessing we're discussing SMG. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 21:34:46 +0100 From: Keith Cayemberg Subject: Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Message-ID: <42052de8$0$18559$9b4e6d93@newsread4.arcor-online.net> Neil Rieck wrote: > Our team is "considering" a shift from HP-BASIC to HP-C++ on OpenVMS. Can > anyone recommend an IDE (Interactive/Integrated Development Environment) for > use with HP-C on OpenVMS? > > Neil Rieck > Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, > Ontario, Canada. > http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/ > > As others have already mentioned there is the Plug-in for Netbeans. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/ips/netbeans/modules.html A potential alternative would be jGRASP. jGRASP Wedge for OpenVMS http://perso.wanadoo.fr/thierry.uso/jgrasp-en.html jGRASP Homepage http://www.jgrasp.org/ Also there is the OpenVMS ETK for MS Visual Studio. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/et/et_index.html or the DECwindows interfaces to the DECset tools http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/decset/decset_index.html or Whisper Technology Limited - Programmer Studio develop beyond your code editor... http://www.programmerstudio.com/index.htm or dare I mention - Sun ONE Unified Development Server (says it can integrate C Code)C++ Code Generation Converts the native transactional object oriented language into C++ code, which can then be complied on any client or server machine http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/unified_devsrvr/home_unified_dev.html Cheers! Keith Cayemberg ------------------------------ Date: 5 Feb 2005 15:01:21 -0600 From: Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) Subject: Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Message-ID: In article , Nigel Barker writes: > On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 12:22:12 -0500, "Neil Rieck" wrote: > >>Our team is "considering" a shift from HP-BASIC to HP-C++ on OpenVMS. Can >>anyone recommend an IDE (Interactive/Integrated Development Environment) for >>use with HP-C on OpenVMS? > > Take a look at NetBeans http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/ips/netbeans/ > It started life as a pure Java IDE but the OpenVMS NetBeans team have produced > plug ins or extensions for C++, FORTRAN, CMS & even EDT. So can anyone create such an extension ? Could I do one for things I use on VMS (none of which are on that list) ? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 15:49:35 -0500 From: "Neil Rieck" Subject: Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Message-ID: "Tom Linden" wrote in message news:opslqlfpmvzgicya@hyrrokkin... > On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 12:22:12 -0500, Neil Rieck > wrote: > >> Our team is "considering" a shift from HP-BASIC to HP-C++ on OpenVMS. Can >> anyone recommend an IDE (Interactive/Integrated Development Environment) >> for >> use with HP-C on OpenVMS? >> >> Neil Rieck >> Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, >> Ontario, Canada. >> http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/ >> >> > > Why? > Why? I don't know how to answer this question without using the word "religion". Younger people have joined our team and they are pulling us in a different direction. I am not a language bigot (although I prefer Pascal), but have to admit that "HP-BASIC for OpenVMS" has been a very successful watering-hole language at my employer's company for more than 20 years and I have never found it a road block to any problem. IMHO, if your work is modular and well documented, who cares what you use? But on the HR front, we were always able to find programmers who either knew BASIC or easily could be taught BASIC so it became the defacto standard for us. We all know that bad programs can be written in any language but some of the C++ advocates have correctly pointed out a significant number of "bad code" examples (written by less disciplined BASIC programmers) which might have been avoided had we used an object oriented language. (p.s. it is my belief that this only works by raising the skill-bar high enough to exclude less disciplined programmers in the first place; but programmers still need to be on their best behaviour no matter what). I've written a number of C++ programs for Windows-2k but came to realize that large object-oriented programs can only be properly maintained by people (other than the original author) when an IDE is available. Anyone who has experienced the inteli-sense features of "MS-Visual Studio" or Eclipse (JAVA) will find it difficult to go back to a vanilla editor. So the bottom line is I'll check out any IDE's available for HP-C++ and see if they're something we can use. If the IDEs look promising then we may have to slowly migrate away from HP-BASIC (probably new code only). If they do not look promising then I'll recommend to the decision makers that we stick with HP-BASIC. Neil Rieck Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/cool_openvms.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 22:16:09 +0100 From: Keith Cayemberg Subject: Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Message-ID: <4205379b$0$817$9b4e6d93@newsread2.arcor-online.net> Larry Kilgallen wrote: > In article , Nigel Barker writes: > >>On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 12:22:12 -0500, "Neil Rieck" wrote: >> >> >>>Our team is "considering" a shift from HP-BASIC to HP-C++ on OpenVMS. Can >>>anyone recommend an IDE (Interactive/Integrated Development Environment) for >>>use with HP-C on OpenVMS? >> >>Take a look at NetBeans http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/ips/netbeans/ >>It started life as a pure Java IDE but the OpenVMS NetBeans team have produced >>plug ins or extensions for C++, FORTRAN, CMS & even EDT. > > > So can anyone create such an extension ? > > Could I do one for things I use on VMS (none of which are on that list) ? Based on the Netbeans.org code - Yes http://www.netbeans.org/community/contribute/index.html *Contributing Code* As mentioned above, NetBeans is an open-source project - all of the source code is available, and if there's a feature you'd like to see, or a bug you'd like to see fixed, you have the power to make that happen. See the sections on contributing patches and contributing modules for more information. The OpenVMS adaptations appear to be submitted back to the main project. http://www.netbeans.org/catalogue/ Cheers! Keith Cayemberg ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 18:09:16 -0800 From: "Tom Linden" Subject: Re: Need an IDE for C++ (CXX) on OpenVMS Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 15:49:35 -0500, Neil Rieck wrote: > > "Tom Linden" wrote in message > news:opslqlfpmvzgicya@hyrrokkin... >> On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 12:22:12 -0500, Neil Rieck >> wrote: >> >>> Our team is "considering" a shift from HP-BASIC to HP-C++ on OpenVMS. >>> Can >>> anyone recommend an IDE (Interactive/Integrated Development >>> Environment) >>> for >>> use with HP-C on OpenVMS? >>> >>> Neil Rieck >>> Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, >>> Ontario, Canada. >>> http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/ >>> >>> >> >> Why? >> > > Why? > > I don't know how to answer this question without using the word > "religion". > Younger people have joined our team and they are pulling us in a > different > direction. > > I am not a language bigot (although I prefer Pascal), but have to admit > that > "HP-BASIC for OpenVMS" has been a very successful watering-hole language > at > my employer's company for more than 20 years and I have never found it a > road block to any problem. IMHO, if your work is modular and well > documented, who cares what you use? But on the HR front, we were always > able > to find programmers who either knew BASIC or easily could be taught > BASIC so > it became the defacto standard for us. > > We all know that bad programs can be written in any language but some of > the > C++ advocates have correctly pointed out a significant number of "bad > code" > examples (written by less disciplined BASIC programmers) which might have > been avoided had we used an object oriented language. (p.s. it is my > belief > that this only works by raising the skill-bar high enough to exclude less > disciplined programmers in the first place; but programmers still need > to be > on their best behaviour no matter what). > > I've written a number of C++ programs for Windows-2k but came to realize > that large object-oriented programs can only be properly maintained by > people (other than the original author) when an IDE is available. Anyone > who > has experienced the inteli-sense features of "MS-Visual Studio" or > Eclipse > (JAVA) will find it difficult to go back to a vanilla editor. So the > bottom > line is I'll check out any IDE's available for HP-C++ and see if they're > something we can use. If the IDEs look promising then we may have to > slowly > migrate away from HP-BASIC (probably new code only). If they do not look > promising then I'll recommend to the decision makers that we stick with > HP-BASIC. > > Neil Rieck > Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, > Ontario, Canada. > http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/cool_openvms.html > > Neil, your response is at best apologetic. You either lead or you follow. You set your standards based on criteria to which you have given, presumably, some thought. The fact that you are hiring kids who seem comfortable in C++ and are willing to accomodate their petulence is your problem and it will get worse. Now I have programmed in most languages and most people know my biases and I won't expand on them here, but at least I have intellectual arguments for my choice, and am willing to debate those on technical merits. Your hiring practices are wrong. Hire people who have an aptitude and attitude that is to your liking and train them. They don't need a degree in Computer Science, probably even better, they will be more creative. -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/ ------------------------------ End of INFO-VAX 2005.073 ************************