[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <49DD45A1.9AA54DFB at spam.comcast.net>,
	David J Dachtera <djesys.no at spam.comcast.net> writes:
> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> 
>> In article <00220d0f$0$15048$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>,
>>         JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
>> > yyyc186 wrote:
>> >>  Let's look back to 9/11.  All
>> >> of those companies running HP/UX, Windows, Linux and various Unix
>> >> flavors in the Twin Towers.
>> >
>> >
>> > Application availability trumps clustering capability. When the
>> > application you need is discontinued from VMS, you have no choice but to
>> >  move to another platform, even if its disaster recovery capabilities
>> > are inferior but still acceptable.
>> 
>> And, as I have said in the past, all of this assumes someone actually
>> wants these features.  Likeit or not, the majority of systems owners
>> don't. 
> 
> ...or do, but don't know it. "Marketing", remember? (VMS may have
> forgotten, but no one else has.)

I doubt there is anyone who doesn't know about shadowing.  Of them, a small
subset probably is interested in long distance shadowing.  But the number
is still too small for anyone in the Unix world to take it too seriously.
I also think this is changing and I expect to see an open source version
in the not too distant future.  I think both Linux and BSD have all the
needed hooks already in place and need only a nudge in the right direction.

> 
>> I have personally looked into things like long-distance disk
>> mirroring and it is really trivial to add to Unix.  Most of the needed
>> code is already there.  But, guess what, I have yet to find anyone who
>> actually sees enough value in it to ask for it. 
> 
> Like as not, they only need to be shown the way. Did you know you needed
> a newsgroup interface before c.o.v. enetered your life?

Bad choice of examples.  I have been doing USENET since before there even
was an INTERNET.  I used to run a rather high ranked server until, like
with VMS, my bosses, failing to see the value it, forced me to pull the
plug.

> 
>> There may actually be
>> people doing it but because the interest is so low it doesn't even make
>> it onto the radar.  VMS has a lot of really nice features.  Unfortunately,
>> some of them come with real and costly overhead and the number of people
>> who are willing to accept that overhead is just too small.  People who
>> don't need the feature are unwilling to accept the overhead.
> 
> Trouble is, of course, most of that cost is artificial. It exists
> because bean-counters and other suits say it does. 

Being a techie and not a beancounter, I was talking about performance
overhead.  Cost is not my problem.  I have a boss for that.  :-)

>                                                     In reality, it
> doesn't - as has been proven by the open source software movement.

Considering how little of the open source software runs on VMS I see
that only as another reason to run some other OS.

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>