[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-08-23 20:40:44 +0000, Howard S Shubs said:

> In article <k159e8$1ea$1 at dont-email.me>,
>  Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> And perversely, if you squint at a classic hierarchy of devices,
>> directories and files, you can see the Microsoft registry; the primary
>> keys and the hives, the keys, and the data.  (Or maybe if you squint at
>> the registry...  That squinting seems to be somewhat more common.)
> 
> You seem to be regarding the Windows registry as a good thing!  Hoff,
> are you sure you're sane??  Such centralized control is a wonderful way
> to run into single point of failure problems.  The Windows Registry is
> so often broken!  Last I looked, it was one of Windows' biggest
> weaknesses.  MUCH more redundancy is required.  Or have they fixed it
> somehow?

I was referring to the construction, not the implementation.  You'll 
have to ask somebody else about the reliability of the registry within 
OpenVMS, or particularly within recent Microsoft Windows releases.  I 
simply haven't spent much time with either the OpenVMS registry in 
recent years, nor with Microsoft Windows.

> 
> 
>> With some platforms, it's common to be handed a relative path (which
>> itself might include a GUID) for various storage tasks (volatile
>> storage, permanent storage, your libraries, executable code, etc) and
>> to then resolve what your application needs to do, relative to those
>> available paths.
> 
> The only GUID I'm familiar with is group user id.  What is... nevermind,
> looked it up.  I'll have to learn more about that, and where it gets
> used.  I've seen this kind of thing before, in HP-UX and other places,
> and I find it very user-unfriendly.


The GUID is very handy for tasks involving collision avoidance, or (in 
some cases) for making life somewhat more difficult for folks that are 
attacking your applications or your system.  OpenVMS necessarily uses 
GUIDs on Itanium (that's a requirement of EFI), and now includes a 
system service API for generating GUIDs; the $create_uid call.


> 
>> The nice thing with these bundles: it avoids getting applications
>> tangled, and completely avoids "DLL hell".   Yes, at the cost of some
>> storage; usually negligible.
> 
> I'm still not a major fan of Windows.  Then again, I'm no longer a major
> fan of any operating system I've ever used.  They all have major
> problems.


I was not referring to Windows, there.


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