On Jun 21, 12:40*pm, Robert Redelmeier <red... (AT) ev1 (DOT) net.invalid> wrote:
the help of paid assistance, I even have some insight as to why.

As with anyone you will ever speak to, you have no idea of the whole
story. If you did know the whole story, perhaps you would be more
tolerant--and perhaps not. There are lots of people in technical
disciplines who have all kinds of problems with others, and many are
very, very bright. None are deserving of the abuse they get from
those who should be capable of better. If you've ever found a serious
bug in a computer program, you know how badly some apparently
unimportant little thing can screw things up.

understand the words you wanted to explain to me, but I *have*
actually spoken directly to the person in question about them.

defenses was that your defense in depth puts you beyond the
possibility of verbal abuse. If I was wrong, please accept my humble
apologies.

thoroughly are you surrounded by what a psychiatrist would call
defenses.

psychological interactions that allow someone to obtain one or more
allies. The more allies you have, the more you can claim you are in
the right. That is the basis of society, and it makes little
difference whether I reject it or not. It is the way people and most
particularly mobs and gangs behave. I've stood up to lots tougher
than you--and *lots* smarter.

Someone on a religious list asked me where I would find someone pure
enough for my taste. I did not give the answer that, for the context,
would have been immune to dispute. For purposes of this discussion,
the same answer that I gave there will serve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

People hate criticism, and they should. Most criticism, as in the
case of your criticism of me, is counter-productive.

and I was, in fact, making an allusion to it. My point was that you
don't even have to bother with statistics. You can just point to data
and use your imagination. Or, you can just tell a bald-faced lie that
treats the data as little more than a pretty picture. Computer
graphics, in particular, have encouraged that last practice.

As to when I was born, you have no idea who you are talking to, where
I've been or what I've done in life, both good and bad. It's truly
fortunate in this instance that my name is so common. I don't want
you or anyone else digging. My life could make a shelf full of
books. I could drop names endlessly. I took complex variables
sitting next to and as a personal friend of a person who is widely
credited with a contribution without which the Internet would not
function at all. I've been a disappointment to just about everyone,
precisely because of the perverse personality traits to which you
react without fail.

Robert Myers.

Yousuf Khan wrote:
Compiling isn't the big problem; shipping a product for multiple
architectures means you have to do QA and support for each of them, and
that multiplies your costs. Even closed-source vendors for the UNIX
world typically only support a handful of systems because supporting
_all_ of them is simply not feasible.

.... because a closed-source vendor has to do all the work of porting,
testing, etc., while anyone who wants to run an open-source app on a new
system can make any necessary changes themselves and share them with
others. Also, with the huge body of portable code out there to be
viewed by new open-source coders, better habits develop and new code is
more likely to be portable than an insular closed-source environment
where the code only has to work on one system and that's all the coders see.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Isaac Jaffe

Bill Todd <billtodd (AT) metrocast (DOT) net> wrote in
news:IMadnRLLI60Feq3XnZ2dnUVZ_hmdnZ2d (AT) metrocastcablevision (DOT) com:

I can't argue with that.

I know one senior person who survived the DEC->CPQ->HP transitions.
The surrender to Itanic was not just about the promised gains of
Itanium, it was the 'addition by subtraction' of costs needed to stay
in the workstation and server markets. Not only could DEC get rid
of the burden of its own fabs, it could also get out of needeing to
design, debug and manufacture the various enterprise servers, mid-
range servers, low-end servers and desktops that were all deemed
necessary. They were seeing such poor ROI on those efforts, they
felt whatever meagre cash they could make by selling rebadged Intel
boxes and services for those customers would be a better market than
the ones they then held. I was told in the EV6 server era, DEC was
making more money selling storage units than the servers, truly a
case of the tail wagging the dog, but it was the cash that mattered.
They felt if they could get a high quality server via Intel and/or HP,
then selling storage and service and software would be a pretty strong
business.

I think the Itanic was not only its own failures to deliver, but also
AMD64. The 4-way, 64-bit Opteron servers really undercut everything
but the enterprise class market. Once this became clear, even Intel
stoked up the x86-64 fires and back-burnered the Itanic. Fast-foward
to today where we see Nehalem is shipping long before Tukwila.

-- Lee

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 23:20:40 +0000 (UTC), Lee Witten <nospam (AT) nospam (DOT) com> wrote:

DEC never sold a single Itanium-based anything...

daytripper <day_trippr (AT) NOSPAMyahoo (DOT) com> wrote in
news:11m2555ihn34keom9sh3807c4j92n589sj (AT) 4ax (DOT) com:

Indeed not.

I may get the dates jumbled a bit, but it was the CPQ regime who decided
to kill the Alpha and go with Itanium. Shortly thereafter CPQ and HP
decided to merge. IIRC there were a few CPQ Merced boxes manufactured,
but clearly no DEC ones.

IIRC the decision to go to Itanium was made when EV7/21264 was in
development. A lot of the CPU and systems designers saw that for
what it was and headed on to greener pastures. Finding new jobs
wasn't too hard expecially if you were willing to relocate, DEC/CPQ
had a long series of pay freezes in place so these folks were
relatively underpaid.

-- Lee

On Jun 15, 7:40*am, Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no">
wrote:

Sorry to pick this up so late. I don't think that the problem with P4
and Itanium was as simple as that they couldn't clock it faster,
although I'm sure that's part of the story. The problem (from my
armchair architect point of view) is that Intel was always forced into
design choices it didn't want to make because of the active transistor/
power budget. I base my conclusion about P4 on comments by Bob
Colwell and comments by a lurking IBM alumnus who shall remain
nameless. I *know* that power consumption was a design problem for
Itanium, and I speculate, based on what I think I know about P4, that
it affected the design and not just the clock rate of Itanium. As
with everything I've ever said in my entire life, I could be wrong,
but that's my stubborn opinion. In the end, the design they had
envisioned in their mind's eyes just couldn't be squeezed into the
transistor budget, and the reason was power consumption. That's the
smoking gun of Itanium, in my best (amateur's) guess.

I doubt if anyone who really knows is ever going to tell us.

Robert.