[Info-vax] OT: Arun Kishan

[Neil Rieck]

On Jan 10, 12:55 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > Microsoft" by G. Pascal Zachary I have come to the conclusion that
> > someday soon (perhaps 5 years) Windows will be as stable as OpenVMS.
> > Why? Because of the influence of the ex-DECies at Microsoft.
>
> Posting such scandalous material on c.o.v. could be hazardous to your
> health... Don't be surprised if Mr Vaxman shows up at your door step in
> the middle of the night and starts throwing empty Guineess bottles at
> you :-) :-)

Oh well, maybe I can convince him that we should share a few bottles
then trow the empties at HP management. They are to blame for the
current situation.

>
> Remember the "VMS is today where Windows 8 wants to be" ? Well, we are
> at Windows 7. So Windows 8 is likely in 2-3 years.
>
> However, I think that Linux is a far likelier candidate to replace VMS.

Maybe. Linux developers have created some unique things (like the
built in software firewall which came out of the Honeypot Project
which MS stole for Windows-XP SP2). Solaris is pretty cool but, like
OpenVMS, development has slowed to a crawl. At least these OSs run on
x86-64 and AMD64.

>
> > Whistler etc. and it shows. Too bad MS stuck with the name "Windows"
> > because everyone associates the new stuff with the old stuff.
>
> MS's focus on marketing precludes an image of having a robust high
> perfornance kernel. They were given the VMS clustering code, and despite
> an apparantly high number of exDECies at MS, they did nothing with it.
>

Arun's video states that they rewrote the kernel's process dispatcher
so Windows would scale on to a larger number of cores (Vista supports
64 while Win-7 supports 256). The last time I heard something like
this is when HP had problems scaling OpenVMS onto 32-CPUs at the Bank
of Austria (the fixes came out in OpenVMS-7.2-1). Anyone who is
analyzing OS performance in a virtualized environment will be doing
the same thing.

I think I heard the Bank of Austria story in February-2005 (TUD in
Toronto) but the Arun video was posted August-2009. So I think it is
safe to assume that Windows-7 and Windows Server 2008 is 4 years (or
less) behind OpenVMS-7.3-2. There were minor performance increases
associated with OpenVMS-8.2 and 8.3 but we all realize that OpenVMS
development has slowed to a crawl with the exodus of American
employees from OpenVMS engineering.

>
> If MS just rewrote its lock manager, why didn't they architect it to
> support locks across nodes ?
>

Not sure but it would not be wise to think that they won't ever do it.
Remember the story of the Tortoise and the Hare.

> > like that again and it will work. When that happens programmers who
> > can only write code for OpenVMS will be put out to pasture.
>
> Cows get fed at the pasture. VMS skills don't generate food.
>

Sometimes a successful stallion is put out to pasture for STUD
SERVICE. But in our "extreme capitalism" economy I suspect anyone put
out to pasture will be put there to die. And when they go down
(probably due to starvation) the worms and bacteria will decompose
your body to fertilize the fields. So be sure to learn some alternate
skills so you never starve!

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/