Err, no offense but that sounds like FUD; since when is Compaq killing OpenVMS? VMS is the core of the old Digital service business and is still driving a billion or more dollars of Compaq's revenue anually. Compaq Is currently readying the OpenVMS Galaxies architecture and Wildfire systems that it will run on, does that sound like they're killing VMS?
Whoops never mind I see from your website that you migrate customers from VMS to Unix and NT and therefore have a financial interest in convincing people that VMS is being killed.
6Gs is pretty extreme but for trained pilots/astronauts laying on their backs it shouldn't be an issue, its only going to be for a few seconds. Fighter pilots experience blackouts and tunnel vision during high G maneuvers but part of that is due to G forces pulling blood down into their legs and away from the brain. With the seating position in the shuttle or other launch vehicle blood rushing to the head is going to be more of a problem than blood rushing to the lower extremities. Top fuel dragsters are now routinely pulling 0 to 300 in under 5 seconds at 5Gs and the drivers are not yet experiencing blackouts.
As far as launching from Florida, its a velocity issue. You must accelerate to something like 17,000Mph to achieve orbit, at the equator you pick up 1000Mph free from rotational velocity. Florida is closer to the equator and thus gets more of that free velocity than a launch site further north would.
Intel has a big factory in Arizona, I don't think they make Pentium3s however. An Arizona state legislator did try to introduce a bill that would have banned the sale of the P3 and similarly equipped chips in the state. The bill wouldn't "ban Intel" just sale of the P3.
That makes no sense. Are you suggesting that We only oppress the law abiding citizen who registers their gun? Great idea. That way only criminals with unregistered guns will be able to enter schools and public buildings while law abiding gun owners who have legitimate business at the school (parents, teachers, administrators, students) will be prohibited from entering the building. Hey, lets start including supermarket club card data on those chips so we can identify potential alcohol abusers, or porn buyers 9we wouldn't want them around our children either).
I sounds like you believe that most of the Alpha business came from NT and that the loss of NT means the loss of most Alpha business. Where I work we do hundreds of millions of dollars in Alpha business every year. Less than 10% of that business was NT based, the rest is Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS and Linux. NT has been a marketing and financial boat-anchor for The alpha platform. Many customers believed that the long term migration path was from Unix/VMS to NT and they avoided Alhpa because they didn't want to be caught up in that migration. Compaq was losing money on NT, they make great profits on VMS, Tru64 Unix and Linux.
Ultrix is NOT Digital Unix. Digital Unix is/was DEC's brand name for its 64bit Unix on the Alpha Platform. Ultrix was DEC's 32bit Unix for Vax and MIPS systems. Ultrix was a Unix made by digital but it is definitely not Digital Unix(tm). Digital Unix was originally named OSF/1 prior to around version 3.2 Even at that point it was fully 64bit. There was an Open Software Foundation reference standard called OSF/1 which Digital used to develop Digital Unix and from which they licensed the name OSF/1, but Digital's implementation was always 64bit.
I was really suprised when support for future Windows products was dropped. I had expected there would be at least a 64bit Windows 2000 port. I retrospect I should not have been suprised, many obsevers of the DEC/Alpha market thought that NT was a boat anchor slowing adoption of the Tru64 Unix platform and steering customers away from OpenVMS. Many traditional Unix houses avoided Alpha systems for slower more expensive Unix machines from competitors because they took Digital's NT support as a sign that the company still didn't REALLY support Unix and might one day drop Unix support altogether. I have personally heard statements from multi-billion dollar Vax VMS customers saying that they would not migrate to AlphaVMS or Alpha Unix but to Alpha NT since they had heard rumors that Digital might force that migration in the future anyway. The move away from NT might give Tru64 Unix and perhaps even VMS a renewed respect in the industry.
An act of nature in the form of a multi-hour power outage cured me of that problem. The UPS can only hold out so long before it runs outta juice:-) I had to check one last time before shutting down by candle light. Just over 112 days, not even notable compared to some of the year plus uptimes out there but it freed me to do upgrades and experiment with new, buggy video drivers.
The settlement resulted in over $1billion dollars going from Intel to DEC in cash and other forms. DEC becoming a tier one OEM for Intel CPUs and Intel commiting to manufacture Alpha CPUs for 7 or 10 years for DEC. Alpha today is faster than Merced will be when/if it ships according to intel's own benchmark estimates. Merced is marketing and vapor. If you look at the projected performance of Merced its no better than x86 would be in the same time frame but its not an x86 native CPU. So what you really get is no performance improvement, 64bit addressing and you have to redesign all you systems and recompile all your apps. Thats one hell of a deal ain't it?
Your talking about MVI instructions. They are nothing like MMX. MVI is basically an MPEG encoder built into the CPU. If you have a video capture camera you can encode 640x480 30 frame a second video MPEGs without the need for a hardware encoder card. This feature is standard on all new Alpha CPUs.
The Alpha architecture has no need of MMX like gimics to hide multimedia shortcomings.
Compaq never made an NT only chip. NT and Tru64 require completely different BIOS. Most alphas include both BIOS flashed into CMOS but a few budget NT models do not have the TRU64 SRM BIOS. DEC made it very clear that these machines would not support anything but NT however a few small resellers thought they could get away with selling the NT model and copying the customers licenses from other Unix or VMS systems without bing new licenses. Also, in the OEM motherboard business DEC sould not sell Unix/VMS capable motherboards to resellers who were not Unix and VMS certified. Some of these board resellers sold NT boards to customers claiming they would run Unix when they couldn't.
BTW, if compaq wanted to kill the alpha line they would just halt production. Continuing production and purposely hampering sales is incredibly stupid.
The AMD Athlon is a cool CPU and I will probably buy one in the near future but its got NOTHING on the Alpha. 32bit x86 vs 64bit RISC there is just no comparison.
Intel owns some of the fabs, but as part of the SECs approval of the sale Compaq has to source more than 50% of its chip from vendors other than intel. The Alpha is actually rather cheap these days, its still.35 micron process and doesn't have those pesky external cache chips, just alot of onchip cache like the Celeron. In real world applications the 21264 is running about 3 times as fast as a 21164 at the same clock speed; about 60 SPECfp at 600MH.
BTW, Alpha NT isn't very popular but there are still alot of things you can only do with NT if you run it on an Alpha.
Compaq sells way more Unix and more VMS than NT on the Alpha. You're right about the profit though. Far more profitable to sell Unix and VMS than NT. I don't think Compaq is going to discontinue NT support any time soon though.
Compaq sells far more Tru64 on Alpha than NT on Alpha. Compaq sells larger more expensive systems with tru64 than with NT and Compaq makes far more profit from Tru64 than NT. Hell, all of those statements apply to VMS versus NT. NT was supposed to be a Volume leader for Alpha. It has not been one. Compaq has not ended support for NT on Alpha all they have done is laid off some programmers working on NT 4.0. Development on 64bit Windows2000 continues at Microsoft under the direct supervision on David Cutler who uses a quad processor Alpha as his primary development platform. Compaq has more muscle with MS than DEC did and is able to get MS to support more of the development workload. Its is theoretically possible that Compaq may choose not to support Win2000 some time in the future if the market were to shun that OS, but for the time being Compaq still supports NT and still plans to support Win2000 when it becomes available.
Yeah man, and if I can't run powerpoint and norton tools and after dark on my AS400 it can't be any good either. I think too many slashdotters,and industry analysts for that matter, view server products through desktop blinders. Most of the apps available for the desktop are useless or at least wasted on a server oriented system. Admittedly NT on Alpha is not a very big seller, but the market it aims at is the SQL/Exchange/Webserver market, not the desktop productivity market.
Alpha NT is the smallest fraction of Alpha business and the least profitable. NT sales were third behind both Tru64Unix and OpenVMS and rapidly sliding to fourth behind Linux. Unfortunately NT support gave Alpha a reputation as a competitor with x86 when its really targeted at Sun UltraSPARC and SGI MIPS/IRIX markets. You never hear anyone say 'its too bad that SPARC doesn't support NT, they could have some real market share if they did' or 'Gee AS400 is doomed since it only runs some minicomputer OS and not NT'.
Please don't take this personally but that was a pretty stupid move on the part of your former employer. All they had to do was look at how the market for Alpha systems breaks down to see that compaq sells far more Unix systems than NT Alpha.
Perhaps your not familiar with the Alpha market. Where I work we sell tons of Tru64 Unix Alphas, a suprising number of OpenVMS Alphas and darned few NT alphas. Lately we've seen a lot of demand for Linux on the Alpha platform as well. The profit margin on the NT systems is terrible too. In short Compaq is having trouble giving NT away and customers are lining up in droves for Unix oriented solutions. If compaq were to discontinue Alpha then they would have to discontinue their tandem line since future Himalaya systems are designed around Alpha. At that point Compaq throws away something like $15billion in recent aqcuisitions, admits they don't have what it takes to play in the enterprise, has nothing to differentiate themselves from Dell and risks Lawsuits from the worlds largest banks who expect decades long support and upgrade paths for their Tandem hardware.
We may be jumping to conclusions here. NT 4.0 is due to be superceded by Win2000 around the end of this year (if you believe MS). NT4.0 will probably only receive one or two more service packs at most before it becomes a legacy OS and the 64bit Win2000 development is being done at Microsoft by Cutler's team, not at Compaq. Perhaps Compaq decided it no longer needed to spend the effort on a soon to be obsolete version of Windows. It could be cost cutting totally unrelated to support.
Since when is commercialization a problem? Lots of Linux coders take money for their work. The issue isn't whether we sell our code or labor, the issue is whether we use a free license. Any commercial entity that tries to drop the free license is asking for trouble, they will see their market evaporate almost overnight since they now push a proprietary Unix instead of something open and therefore standard. They also risk being sued back to the stone age.
The one thing about the GPL that even non-opensource-zealots really appreciate is that it it holds the vendors feet to the fire with respect to keeping Unix open and standard. As long as its open and standard the customers will line up for miles. All of the long run incentive pushes the commercial vendors this way. Those that don't have this perspective will be trod under the feet of vendors that "get it".
Really, who cares if Bob Young or anyone else gets rich? Good for them. Bob didn't take any money out of the pockets of Linux or GNU coders. He didn't take food off their tables. OSS was not "raped". If Redhat hadn't floated an IPO would the free software community have been better off? Would thaey have had one red cent more than they have today? No. They might've been poorer but certainly no richer. It sounds like you're envious.
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Err, no offense but that sounds like FUD; since when is Compaq killing OpenVMS? VMS is the core of the old Digital service business and is still driving a billion or more dollars of Compaq's revenue anually. Compaq Is currently readying the OpenVMS Galaxies architecture and Wildfire systems that it will run on, does that sound like they're killing VMS?
Whoops never mind I see from your website that you migrate customers from VMS to Unix and NT and therefore have a financial interest in convincing people that VMS is being killed.
6Gs is pretty extreme but for trained pilots/astronauts laying on their backs it shouldn't be an issue, its only going to be for a few seconds. Fighter pilots experience blackouts and tunnel vision during high G maneuvers but part of that is due to G forces pulling blood down into their legs and away from the brain. With the seating position in the shuttle or other launch vehicle blood rushing to the head is going to be more of a problem than blood rushing to the lower extremities. Top fuel dragsters are now routinely pulling 0 to 300 in under 5 seconds at 5Gs and the drivers are not yet experiencing blackouts.
As far as launching from Florida, its a velocity issue. You must accelerate to something like 17,000Mph to achieve orbit, at the equator you pick up 1000Mph free from rotational velocity. Florida is closer to the equator and thus gets more of that free velocity than a launch site further north would.
Intel has a big factory in Arizona, I don't think they make Pentium3s however. An Arizona state legislator did try to introduce a bill that would have banned the sale of the P3 and similarly equipped chips in the state. The bill wouldn't "ban Intel" just sale of the P3.
That makes no sense. Are you suggesting that We only oppress the law abiding citizen who registers their gun? Great idea. That way only criminals with unregistered guns will be able to enter schools and public buildings while law abiding gun owners who have legitimate business at the school (parents, teachers, administrators, students) will be prohibited from entering the building.
Hey, lets start including supermarket club card data on those chips so we can identify potential alcohol abusers, or porn buyers 9we wouldn't want them around our children either).
Fast food and soft drink tie ins just inundate us with movie images and they do detract from the movie. Sometimes they even ruin the movie altogether.
So I was wondering, how is McDonalds going to work that toy suprise vomit-girl from the Sixth Sense tie in?
We'll call it the i-DEC :-)
I sounds like you believe that most of the Alpha business came from NT and that the loss of NT means the loss of most Alpha business. Where I work we do hundreds of millions of dollars in Alpha business every year. Less than 10% of that business was NT based, the rest is Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS and Linux. NT has been a marketing and financial boat-anchor for The alpha platform. Many customers believed that the long term migration path was from Unix/VMS to NT and they avoided Alhpa because they didn't want to be caught up in that migration. Compaq was losing money on NT, they make great profits on VMS, Tru64 Unix and Linux.
Ultrix is NOT Digital Unix. Digital Unix is/was DEC's brand name for its 64bit Unix on the Alpha Platform. Ultrix was DEC's 32bit Unix for Vax and MIPS systems. Ultrix was a Unix made by digital but it is definitely not Digital Unix(tm).
Digital Unix was originally named OSF/1 prior to around version 3.2 Even at that point it was fully 64bit. There was an Open Software Foundation reference standard called OSF/1 which Digital used to develop Digital Unix and from which they licensed the name OSF/1, but Digital's implementation was always 64bit.
I was really suprised when support for future Windows products was dropped. I had expected there would be at least a 64bit Windows 2000 port. I retrospect I should not have been suprised, many obsevers of the DEC/Alpha market thought that NT was a boat anchor slowing adoption of the Tru64 Unix platform and steering customers away from OpenVMS. Many traditional Unix houses avoided Alpha systems for slower more expensive Unix machines from competitors because they took Digital's NT support as a sign that the company still didn't REALLY support Unix and might one day drop Unix support altogether. I have personally heard statements from multi-billion dollar Vax VMS customers saying that they would not migrate to AlphaVMS or Alpha Unix but to Alpha NT since they had heard rumors that Digital might force that migration in the future anyway. The move away from NT might give Tru64 Unix and perhaps even VMS a renewed respect in the industry.
An act of nature in the form of a multi-hour power outage cured me of that problem. The UPS can only hold out so long before it runs outta juice :-) I had to check one last time before shutting down by candle light. Just over 112 days, not even notable compared to some of the year plus uptimes out there but it freed me to do upgrades and experiment with new, buggy video drivers.
The settlement resulted in over $1billion dollars going from Intel to DEC in cash and other forms. DEC becoming a tier one OEM for Intel CPUs and Intel commiting to manufacture Alpha CPUs for 7 or 10 years for DEC. Alpha today is faster than Merced will be when/if it ships according to intel's own benchmark estimates.
Merced is marketing and vapor. If you look at the projected performance of Merced its no better than x86 would be in the same time frame but its not an x86 native CPU. So what you really get is no performance improvement, 64bit addressing and you have to redesign all you systems and recompile all your apps. Thats one hell of a deal ain't it?
Your talking about MVI instructions. They are nothing like MMX. MVI is basically an MPEG encoder built into the CPU. If you have a video capture camera you can encode 640x480 30 frame a second video MPEGs without the need for a hardware encoder card. This feature is standard on all new Alpha CPUs.
The Alpha architecture has no need of MMX like gimics to hide multimedia shortcomings.
Compaq never made an NT only chip. NT and Tru64 require completely different BIOS. Most alphas include both BIOS flashed into CMOS but a few budget NT models do not have the TRU64 SRM BIOS. DEC made it very clear that these machines would not support anything but NT however a few small resellers thought they could get away with selling the NT model and copying the customers licenses from other Unix or VMS systems without bing new licenses. Also, in the OEM motherboard business DEC sould not sell Unix/VMS capable motherboards to resellers who were not Unix and VMS certified. Some of these board resellers sold NT boards to customers claiming they would run Unix when they couldn't.
BTW, if compaq wanted to kill the alpha line they would just halt production. Continuing production and purposely hampering sales is incredibly stupid.
The AMD Athlon is a cool CPU and I will probably buy one in the near future but its got NOTHING on the Alpha. 32bit x86 vs 64bit RISC there is just no comparison.
Intel owns some of the fabs, but as part of the SECs approval of the sale Compaq has to source more than 50% of its chip from vendors other than intel. The Alpha is actually rather cheap these days, its still .35 micron process and doesn't have those pesky external cache chips, just alot of onchip cache like the Celeron. In real world applications the 21264 is running about 3 times as fast as a 21164 at the same clock speed; about 60 SPECfp at 600MH.
BTW, Alpha NT isn't very popular but there are still alot of things you can only do with NT if you run it on an Alpha.
Compaq sells way more Unix and more VMS than NT on the Alpha. You're right about the profit though. Far more profitable to sell Unix and VMS than NT. I don't think Compaq is going to discontinue NT support any time soon though.
Compaq sells far more Tru64 on Alpha than NT on Alpha. Compaq sells larger more expensive systems with tru64 than with NT and Compaq makes far more profit from Tru64 than NT. Hell, all of those statements apply to VMS versus NT. NT was supposed to be a Volume leader for Alpha. It has not been one. Compaq has not ended support for NT on Alpha all they have done is laid off some programmers working on NT 4.0. Development on 64bit Windows2000 continues at Microsoft under the direct supervision on David Cutler who uses a quad processor Alpha as his primary development platform. Compaq has more muscle with MS than DEC did and is able to get MS to support more of the development workload. Its is theoretically possible that Compaq may choose not to support Win2000 some time in the future if the market were to shun that OS, but for the time being Compaq still supports NT and still plans to support Win2000 when it becomes available.
Yeah man, and if I can't run powerpoint and norton tools and after dark on my AS400 it can't be any good either. ,and industry analysts for that matter, view server products through desktop blinders. Most of the apps available for the desktop are useless or at least wasted on a server oriented system. Admittedly NT on Alpha is not a very big seller, but the market it aims at is the SQL/Exchange/Webserver market, not the desktop productivity market.
I think too many slashdotters
Alpha NT is the smallest fraction of Alpha business and the least profitable. NT sales were third behind both Tru64Unix and OpenVMS and rapidly sliding to fourth behind Linux. Unfortunately NT support gave Alpha a reputation as a competitor with x86 when its really targeted at Sun UltraSPARC and SGI MIPS/IRIX markets.
You never hear anyone say 'its too bad that SPARC doesn't support NT, they could have some real market share if they did' or 'Gee AS400 is doomed since it only runs some minicomputer OS and not NT'.
Please don't take this personally but that was a pretty stupid move on the part of your former employer. All they had to do was look at how the market for Alpha systems breaks down to see that compaq sells far more Unix systems than NT Alpha.
Perhaps your not familiar with the Alpha market. Where I work we sell tons of Tru64 Unix Alphas, a suprising number of OpenVMS Alphas and darned few NT alphas. Lately we've seen a lot of demand for Linux on the Alpha platform as well. The profit margin on the NT systems is terrible too. In short Compaq is having trouble giving NT away and customers are lining up in droves for Unix oriented solutions. If compaq were to discontinue Alpha then they would have to discontinue their tandem line since future Himalaya systems are designed around Alpha. At that point Compaq throws away something like $15billion in recent aqcuisitions, admits they don't have what it takes to play in the enterprise, has nothing to differentiate themselves from Dell and risks Lawsuits from the worlds largest banks who expect decades long support and upgrade paths for their Tandem hardware.
We may be jumping to conclusions here. NT 4.0 is due to be superceded by Win2000 around the end of this year (if you believe MS). NT4.0 will probably only receive one or two more service packs at most before it becomes a legacy OS and the 64bit Win2000 development is being done at Microsoft by Cutler's team, not at Compaq. Perhaps Compaq decided it no longer needed to spend the effort on a soon to be obsolete version of Windows. It could be cost cutting totally unrelated to support.
Most of the Alphaservers I sell are in, or below, the $10k to $30k server market. Most of them run Unix or VMS or, lately, Linux.
Since when is commercialization a problem? Lots of Linux coders take money for their work. The issue isn't whether we sell our code or labor, the issue is whether we use a free license. Any commercial entity that tries to drop the free license is asking for trouble, they will see their market evaporate almost overnight since they now push a proprietary Unix instead of something open and therefore standard. They also risk being sued back to the stone age.
The one thing about the GPL that even non-opensource-zealots really appreciate is that it it holds the vendors feet to the fire with respect to keeping Unix open and standard. As long as its open and standard the customers will line up for miles. All of the long run incentive pushes the commercial vendors this way. Those that don't have this perspective will be trod under the feet of vendors that "get it".
Really, who cares if Bob Young or anyone else gets rich? Good for them. Bob didn't take any money out of the pockets of Linux or GNU coders. He didn't take food off their tables. OSS was not "raped". If Redhat hadn't floated an IPO would the free software community have been better off? Would thaey have had one red cent more than they have today? No. They might've been poorer but certainly no richer. It sounds like you're envious.