| RSI, Mac and Tru64 [message #27551] |
Fri, 26 October 2001 13:23  |
viggohan
Messages: 1
Registered: October 2001
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Junior Member |
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After writing a quite irate letter to RSI bemoaning the loss of support
for Mac OS X (native mode) and Alpha Tru64 RSI sent us a representative at
the beginning of last week. A short report for your enjoyment:
Well, then ITA's meeting with RSI's representative is just concluded
(actually the meeting was on Monday, my how time flies when one is having
fun). I thought I would send a little report on my impressions from the
meeting (if you're not interested, sorry, please delete).
Unfortunately, and though RSI's representative was very professional and
sympathetic to our plight, I came out of the meeting more pessimistic than
when I went in: In short, the impression I got was that RSI does not see
us (the space science community) as an "interesting" source of income
anymore.
Their reaction to this is to get out of the market as quickly as possible,
"the large number of platforms we support is a now a millstone" (actual
quote) and to concentrate on the "core" market, which I understood to be
Windows, Intel Linux, and Solaris. I assume this is what is used in the
medical community or some such, I personally have never seen IDL running
on a Windows machine (P�l Brekke's laptop excluded), but what do I know.
It seems that RSI's decision was taken very suddenly, the European offices
were actively flogging Mac licenses up to a few days before the
announcement, much to their spokepersons embarrassment. The impression
came through that the decision was made under severe financial pressure
and that it was made in haste.
On the Mac front we heard the X11 tale ("perhaps it would have been better
if we had come with this possibility before our announcement of
discontinuing support." Quite). On the Tru64 front we received no help: "I
will speak your concerns, but frankly, unless you can put money on the
table (as AIX has done) this will not help".
What to do? I would like to hear your thoughts on the following dilemma:
We have an investment of ca. 2-3M$ in Alpha workstations, servers and
clusters. This is not going to be replaced anytime soon by "RSI core"
platforms. We have been running IDL since 1985 and now have 50 floating
licenses. We are in charge of writing the QL software for one of the
Solar B instruments and have been asked to do the same for Solar Orbiter,
for Sunrise and perhaps for a few others. We were, of course, planning on
using IDL for these. But. By the time Solar B is launched IDL will have
reached version 7.2 or whatever - we cannot develop the QL on a frozen
platform starting now. Buying a couple of Linux boxes is possible, but
then the spinoff in writing the software to our institution is moot, and
anyway I strongly feel that QL software should be as universal as
possible. What do you guys at NASA think about these type of questions?
Perhaps we should go for Java? (On the other hand, this is another system
Bill Gates is doing his damndest to kill...)
There is a Solar B software meeting in January on Hawaii were the
instrument teams will discuss how to proceed....
Arrrrg, best wishes for a good weekend, I personally am reaching for the
Aquavit bottle as I write
Viggo.
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Viggo Hansteen
Institute of theoretical astrophysics
University of Oslo
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