Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds good. Then Agilent can change its name to HP and all will be right with the universe :)
Only if they start making calculators again!
Only if they start making programmable RPN calculators again.
Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
111–119 of 119 posts
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#112Can we please have a rule against posting paywall links? I know we can find a cached version or search on Google or whatever, but it's still frustrating! I am not asking for a work-around to access WSJ articles. I'm asking HN to consider blocking domains that force users to pay money to access their content.
WSJ is an exception - you can always google the title to get a free copy. Also - they broke the news a good 2+ hours before any other sites - so they were the only source.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
My father worked for DEC; when it got bought out by Compaq, he worked for Compaq; when that got bought out by HP, he worked for HP (and still does). He's an enterprise-level field-service tech. He's the go-to guy for most HPs largest clients in Minnesota (UHG, USPS, 3M, UMN all come to mind), and in the Upper-Midwest. He's always said that DEC did the most incredible stuff out of all the generations of hardware he's…
I was really sad to see DEC SRC and WRL go the way of the dodo. Really good stuff. Microsoft picked up a lot of the folks, but, still...
DEC engineering was awesome, but management had issues keeping up with their chip geniuses.
There's a brilliant scene in DEC history where the chip guys had to explain to the board that their latest ceramic thing with legs cost $30 in quantity, and it outperformed the top-line million-dollar ECL-based room-filling VAX product.
But DEC were always B2B and B2A (Business to Academia). They never got B2C at all, which is sad for everyone.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's why we must understand that at executive level gender does not matter. What matters is strategy and ability to execute. When HP announced "Meg Whitman" as CEO everyone was so voraciously attacking how HP is is being in bad condition because of male CEOs. Being male does not matter. Whitman has failed tremendously. Not only HP has laid off thousands of people from US ( some of them I knew personally very we…
> Sorry if this came as too bold but I could not resist myself. No need to apologize, and the problem isn't boldness but what I think is a lack of factual basis and a bit of a rant: 1) I haven't seen anyone, including feminists, claim that female CEOs are better and certainly not that they are necessarily good managers (I'm sure you can find someone to back any statement, but it's certainly a very small minority). 2)…
> If there is a conspiracy to promote women in tech, it is doing very poorly.
Sad but true.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#115Can somebody enlighten me on where HP's high-end server business is going in the long run?
I read recently that they announced they would stop developing VMS in about 2020 and sold the VMS business off to some other company (which in turn might port VMS to x86_64 eventually). So at the high end, what remains after killing off HPPA, the Alpha, Tru64?
HP-UX and NonStop on Itanium? I am not being sarcastic, I am seriously asking. My impression so far is that Itanium is either slowly going down (Microsoft and Red Hat stopped porting their systems to IA64 a couple of years back) or simply replacing what HPPA used to be - but in that case it would appear they burnt a whole lot of money for nothing, except that now they are depending on an outside vendor. And Intel, as far as I can tell, does not seem to like Itanium too much, HP seems to be the only company buying them in substantial numbers, and there were already rumors Intel would cease development of IA64.
So where is all this going? Would it make sense for HP to buy the Itanium from Intel and continue developing and building them on their own? Could they pull it off as far as engineering and manufacturing go? Would it make sense to port HP-UX and NonStop to some other architecture?
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed regarding the graphing RPL models, but the scientific RPN calculators are pretty solid. The 12C financial calculator is more like those. The scientific equivalent, the 15C, is no longer in production, but the current 35S isn't bad for cranking out calculations. The tactile feedback sure beats hitting a touch screen phone.
The 35S is buggy as hell, poorly designed, the battery lasts too little time and the keys break easily. I owned one and regretted the purchase (I went through an "own every calculator phase") This is the best thing on the market at the moment in the same form factor: http://www.edu.casio.com/products/Calculators_%26_Dictionari... If you want programmable then there's (but you have to import it): http://www.casio-intl…
>I went through an "own every calculator phase"
That could be an interesting HN or blog post if you wanted to do it. I'm a bit of a calculator fan myself, though I haven't used many different models. There's something about physical products, even though virtual ones are more flexible / configurable, being software.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#117It is sad seeing this happening. I used to enjoy HP printers and HP-UX was the only commercial UNIX I ended up using across multiple employers.
HP-UX was a pretty good Unix OS. I worked on it for a while at a company years ago. I liked those PA-RISC machines. Pretty rugged and reliable. Did some Unix sysadmin work on those machines for a while. Managing 4 to 5 HP-UX servers, running Informix Dynamic Server, IBM MQ Series and many C, ESQL/C and Informix 4GL apps, later Java servlet and J2EE apps, an early Netscape Java app server (from Kiva, and it even had JavaScript or LiveScript in the server, IIRC - this was all a bit before J2EE first came out, i.e. very early days of Java). All good fun and learning.
HP also had some good Unix tools that were only on HP-UX, AFAIK. Ignite-UX was one of them. It allowed you to set up a configured OS (base OS + kernel parameter customization, patches, etc., init and shell scripts) and then image it onto multiple other machines very easily. Had a real need for such a tool, googled and found it on an HP site. Then installed and used it. The work went like a breeze. I guess there may be tools like that nowadays for Linux and other UNIX-like OSes.
Yes, sad to see this happening to HP. Many years back they had really solid products and tech, and I've read that they were called "the engineers' engineers." I worked in a company that had a joint venture with HP for a while, so saw some of that first-hand.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's why we must understand that at executive level gender does not matter. What matters is strategy and ability to execute. When HP announced "Meg Whitman" as CEO everyone was so voraciously attacking how HP is is being in bad condition because of male CEOs. Being male does not matter. Whitman has failed tremendously. Not only HP has laid off thousands of people from US ( some of them I knew personally very we…
> Sorry if this came as too bold but I could not resist myself. No need to apologize, and the problem isn't boldness but what I think is a lack of factual basis and a bit of a rant: 1) I haven't seen anyone, including feminists, claim that female CEOs are better and certainly not that they are necessarily good managers (I'm sure you can find someone to back any statement, but it's certainly a very small minority). 2)…
Oh, did I hurt feminist inside you ?
Here are claims[0] from prominent national news organization and many many reputed sources.
So that addresses your question #1.
#2. You are twisting the words. I said when "When HP announced "Meg Whitman" as CEO everyone was so voraciously attacking how HP is is being in bad condition because of male CEOs". It is not same thing as saying Whitman was chosen because of her gender. My point still stands though. In her tenure of last three years she has failed to turn around HP from lost focus despite whatever claim you see. Here is latest news on more layoffs from May [1] So she is doing no wonder than some male in same position being as CEO.
#3. I don't know about conspiracies and I would never see myself assimilate with one. But, here is thing I can tell you. Circle of powerful people do definitely want more women in powerful position. HP, Yahoo, IBM, Oracle( recently ) on and on. I don't know if these efforts are to get more women in tech industry or something else but there are sustained efforts across US for sure.
Regarding your claim "few women in tech industry " is blatantly false. I worked for four Org. on east coast. 8 out of 10 IT managers are women. 7 out of 10 women in mid to senior level mangagement up to VP.
This is not case of any one company , rather I would say there are more women in management than men.
I don't form my opinion from sustained campaigns run by someone and I certainly look far beyond San Francisco hypocrites.
[0] https://www.google.com/#q=woman%2B+ceo%2Bbetter%2B+than%2B+m...
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/hp-plans-more-...