21 Nov
1999
21 Nov
'99
4:57 a.m.
I have to agree, though they never could build a
'scope that would trigger
they way you'd have liked . . .
Their downfall, by the way, seems to have coincided with their move into
computers. For a time this seemed OK. Their notion of "user-friendliness"
was looking like a pretty good one in their logic analyzers too, but I don't
remember an HP computer product, particularly once they absorbed APOLLO, for
which any installation/upgrade, no matter how minor didn't involve 3 layers
of system downtime, on the order of 3 days per workstation, i.e. if you had
one server and three stations, you had 3 instances of 9 days of downtime,
say, to get the updated simulator libraries realigned, though they were
supposed to work "out of the box" but didn't. We had more servers and
more
stations, so there were more instances of longer downtime.
Dick
Gee, I've been away from HP-UX pretty much for a couple of years
(spending time with FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, SunOS, and AIX and I've
found AIX the easiest to work with followed by FreeBSD, SunOS, Solaris
and Linux. I'd rate HP-UX ahead of SunOS, with the exception of the
large number of patches they rolled out evey month. Next month another
set of patches to the patches to fix the stuff they never got right.
Their support center for HP printers is excellent, however, the Unix
folks and hardware folks (this goes for Sun as well) range from clueless
to very good -- but you have to go through layers of clueless to get
escalated to someone clued. Their contracted folks (and Sun's Wang -ex
Honewell-Bull folks) couldn't find their er-processors with a roadmap
and are really as clueless as CompUSA PC techs.
...And you folks make fun of old DEC Field Service guys 8-(
The level of cluelessness in service has gone up exponentially.
Chip chasers made fun of us board swappers, but now these folks get away
with parts swapping with no clue as to how the machine works.
On PC's with no parity on the busses or memory or cache you can have
unexplained failures... but on workstations I expect better diags and
design. Gimme a Vax or PDP11 with errorlog over what's out there now.
(Even SysV's errorlog was an improvement over Solaris...) The AIX stuff
is the best I've seen out there since VAX/VMS. IBM understands systems.
bill