Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Setting aside the fact that all CEO's everywhere are nothing but crooks, doesn't HP have accountants ? they just cough up the ten billion based on fantasies and bedtime stories ? Where is Mark Hurd, the fantastically talented leader who got paid millions because he took the big gambles, the big risks, and steered his company through parlous straits to profitability ? And how many more companies do Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman and all their little butt-buddies have to run into the ground before the US public wakes up ? Who is stupider, the "leaders" with an IQ of three who walk off with hundreds of millions despite ruining their companies, or the drooling fools who put up with this retarded scheme where the few con artists take all the cookies while the many scrounge for crumbs?

How about we tar and feather all the lousy thieving bastards running mnc's ? Then break these pieces of shit down into manageable size ?

...and lawmakers, they sit on their ass doing nothing but guess who gets a nice 2.2% pay raise here in PA on December 1st while I've been mostly unemployed the past three years. Thank you Bush and all you republican bastages!!!

Hamei, your rubbing off on me

Want to make yourself sick ? I was looking for some info on an Alteon device, stopped by Wikipedia :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel

The writing is a little amateurish but the question remains : why aren't these MBA's in prison ? Forever ? Serving a useful role in society as Bubba's loyal female canine companion ?

p.s. The fruits and nuts in California government are taking a 5% hit

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ro ... 063971.php

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/hp-says-itanium-hp-ux-not-dead-yet/

I guess Oracle is pulling the plug on their support for Itanium and HP-UX platforms. HP can't really be secretive anymore about moving away from HP-UX and Itanium. Their big project for bringing the "mission critical" reliability features into Linux is an effort hilariously titled "Project Dragon Hawk." Like the others, they will be pushing RHEL 6, even though RHEL 6 kind of sucks and has a tasteless design..... At least HP-UX doesn't have services for Bluetooth, ISDN, and PC Smart Cards enabled by default....

The ksh88 scripts on HP-UX would port alright to ksh93 on Linux, but some might have to be tweaked a little. Fortunately ksh93 is now open source, because the old pdksh (Public Domain Korn Shell) had some subtle but serious incompatibilities with ksh88.

This brings HP even further toward the commodity computing market. It's kind of scary to see a classic and powerful SVR4 Unix being phased out in favor of Linux. About ten years ago, Linux was basically regarded as a hobbyist operating system for white boxes at home, not scaling well beyond 1 or 2 CPU's. Things have certainly changed, and it will be interesting to see if HP contributes in a significant way, or if their extensions for mission critical stuff will just be proprietary.

Will this one be more successful then their big project to bring the advanced features from DUNIX/Tru64 into HP-UX?

The one I don't want to see die is OpenVMS.

10 years ago was 2002 not the 90s.

Right, but that reputation persisted for quite a long time after the 90s. When Linux was used heavily for Beowulf clusters, and when IBM started getting behind Linux more, then the tide really started to turn.

Linux was handling SMP fine by 99, IBM and Oracle started to push Linux right about that time. By 2000 Linux was being deployed by everybody and their mother during the dot com boom. By '02 companies like amazon and google had been literally built on linux. And by '03 SGI was scaling it up to 512 processors on a single image. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that on this matter your perception and reality may be divorced.

Then it's probably best to close your eyes.

In my perception and reality... in 1999 I guess the kernel would still have been on the 2.2 series. So while it was moving from the single "big kernel lock" to more fine grained parallelism, it was still mostly a per subsystem thing in 2.2. I don't recall too many specific details any more, but I think for example the IO subsystem at this time would demonstrate that it wasn't quite fine grained yet. Even if it was handling SMP "fine", I think the SMP work done in subsequent years on kernel 2.3, for eventual stable release as kernel 2.4 indicates that in 1999 there was still a quite a lot of room for improvement SMP-wise.

In 99 the 2.3 kernel was out as well, which supported both SMP and NUMA. And yes, there was (and there is) room for improvement. The point still stands regarding the perception of the previous poster and reality not being correlated; by 2002 Linux was scaling and was not considered a "toy" by plenty of organizations using it for their infrastructure.

Back to the scheduled "moronic HP leadership" thread...

For an update on that, the drooling oatmeal lady who is tough on immigration but accidentally had a river-swimmer cleaning her toilets for the past twenty years is once again caught between a rock and a hard place. She is now babbling about "how great the technology is" while at the same time blaming Autonomy for cheating them ... while at the same time trying to downplay the fact that she approved the purchase without bothering to look at the books, In short, she's trying to cover up the fact that she's an incompetent bonehead.

Basically, it's time that Americans accepted the fact that their much-revered "business leaders" are nothing more than a pack of ignorant thieves and crooks. Meg Whitman wouldn't know technology from a tomato. But she sure does know how to grab a dollar for herself. Carly, Mark, et al likewise. But hey now, you guys figure these job creators need to be grossly overcompensated for their advanced business skills and the big risks they take to make us all happier and more secure and safer fwum tewwowists.

This fucking useless mess is coming down bigtime. Too bad the only people who get hurt are the average Joes. Oatmeal Lady, the titless wonder and the guy who can't keep it in his pants will do fine like always because, like, ya know, they are important people while the rest of us are just peons.

Thirty years from a decent place to a cauldron of mewling shit, amazing.

Hehe, I always have a good laugh at your descriptions of the world Hamei, especially the western world. Not sure if I'm laughing because of the irony, or because I'm afraid.

For whatever it's worth, Sweden seems to be heading the same way. I see more and more incompetent idiots with free cards running business here. And when they are done raping the business, either because their completely incompetent as leaders or because they are greedy, they get a nice multi million dollar bonus when they have to go (when jail would be the only logical conclusion, throw away the key and let 'em rot for all I care), but the average Joe's who lost the job because of him/her, gets nothing.

For about 10 years ago this was relatively rare in my mind and would get a lot of attention in the press and such. But today it seems to be how it is. I wonder where the pride of doing a good job went, instead of trying to get as much cash you can before you get caught? What about doing a good job, even if someone isn't looking?

My political views are usually on the right, but I have a feeling even a Democrat would call my views as being too much on the left. Talk about contrasts. But in general I think I just vote on the lesser of evils. Next time I might vote for the green alternative. lol

Some times I just wanna move up in the mountains, or deep into the dark Swedish woods, and just minding my own business, completely cut of from the rest of the world. But sticking your head into the sand isn't very productive though, it certainly wont change anything at least.

Anyway, regarding HP, I do love their portable Elitebook Workstations, never leave my home without one. If not for work, they can also serve as weapons of mass-skull-destruction.

How do you figure CEO's everywhere are crooks? Make no mistake, there's a fair share of incompetence out there. Look at General Motors for example, a shining example of executive stupidity. But each turd, there are plenty of talented competent executives.

On the subject of HP, that fail boat has been sinking for over a decade now. It started with the Compaq merger, burial of Alpha in favor of Itanium, and followed by a long string of failed mergers, poor investments, and mass layoffs. I know exactly how rotten that company is - I worked for them for many years. I wouldn't go back if they begged me.


Huh? I'm pretty sure Obama and his cronies have been at the helm for right about 4 years now, making poor decisions that hurt everyone. But really, what do you expect from a politician from Chicago, the most politically corrupt city in the nation? Corruption breeds more corruption, and right now, it's rotten all the way to the top.

That's true, I was probably wrong. Germany seems to be slightly better in this regard.

Otherwise, the preponderance of the evidence indicates that yes indeedy, CEO's are all crooks and thieves.

Here are two scenarios, you tell me the difference :

One : Downtown Oakland at ten p.m., black teenager walks up to you with a gun and demands all your money.

Two : Martha's Vineyard, white CEO makes some phone calls, buys a few laws. Population of Cliffordsville taxes themselves to pay for police "protection." Guys in blue (or grey, or black) armed to the teeth go around enforcing Mr Martha's Vineyard's laws.

What's the real difference ?


Nice try. But the evidence shows that no matter how "incompetent" the CEO is, he walks off with a big pot of money. That's not incompetence. That's greed, corruption, avarice, whatever. But incompetence, no.


I challenge you to name one. Currently, not twenty years ago.


So who was making those decisions ? The janitor ?

Meg is taking home fifteen million after this wonderful year for HP. She was on the board, she voted for the purchase of the current debacle (I forget the name - ten billion down the toilet, is it ?), she is now ceo. Apotheker got nine for his fiasco tenure so she figures she's gotta get fifteen. Meanwhile, they have to send work overseas and lay people off "to save money." Incompetent ? Nice try.

SGI is the poster child for American business over the past twenty years. I'm not ranting : this is the ordinary ol' plain as the nose on your face truth. Shed your beliefs and look at the numbers.

Do you go to Las Vegas ever ? have you figured out yet that this game is rigged ? Sure, one guy every fifteen years puts all his chips on 23 red and comes up a winner. But statistically, there's no chance. Eventually the job creators, the investors and the ceo's have all the money. And everyone else is a slave.

The "talent and skill" of a CEO have nothing to do with it. They aren't. They just own the green pockets. Which they bought with our money.

Just curious hamei, I don't think I've seen this yet and I was listening to some "Best of 2012" coverage of the IPO -- what do you make of Mark Zuckerberg?

You can't really get upset over Zuckerberg, just like you can't get super upset over P.T. Barnum.

What is upsetting is the government and financial sectors of the United States of America, a nation of 350 million people now who once touted themselves ... oh, still do ... as the cradle of Freedom and Democracy and the very home of Exceptionalism, Competence, and Capability -- all acting as the boot-licking running dogs for a bunch of con artists. All three branches of government have been bought by the shysters. They are soooo sure they can run the country by putting up "This Way to the Egress" signs, then forcing people to visit the egress at gunpoint. That's working so well.

Zuckerberg is a schmuck, but he isn't the real problem. The entire government is a problem but again, not the real problem.

The US is a democracy. People put those assbreaths in power. Then they cheer for "innovative Apple !" while their buddies in Cupertino disembowel the economy of the United States. "They can't help it, it's a Business Decision !"

A majority of the American populace would excuse any CEO who ass-raped his grandma, cut her throat, then poured five gallons of gasoline on her and set her afire if she had a nickel in the bank. "Oh, that was just a business decision. The company has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize their profits ! She had five cents, statistically she was overdue to die anyhow. Nothing personal, you understand."

Whose fault is it, anyway ? I wrote this the other day, then looked at it and realized it was true : the United States is evil. Stupid and evil.

But the voting system in the US with its "winner takes it all"-approach yields the current two-party systems, and if there are only two parties, there's no real need for parties to differentiate substantially. Winner takes it all practially eliminates the chance of a third party getting involved, which might cause them to build coalitions to have legislative power. Not that coalitions cannot do silly stuff either, but it's far better than the single-party rulings in the US.

My point is: Yes those people do elect, but the system makes it impossible for a fresh movement to ever get into power, so basically they have no choice but the established parties.

Hamei, your rants remind me, sometimes, of some of my favorite essays, like Lewis Lapham's 'Waiting for the Barbarians' or Robert Hughes's 'Culture of Complaint'.

^ i'd add the "waist high culture" & the "transparency of evil" among others :)

(if you liked lapham's take you'd most likely enjoy the original (poem) by c. cavafy which also inspired coetzee's take on the same title)