Real Time View

Richard and I got engaged on a barge in Paris – the idea was to have a romantic dinner and exchange rings. The dinner out turned to be anything but romantic … we were seated behind a group of three couples, and each man in that group tried to outdo the others in a conversation. Finally one of them decidedly won – he started talking, and every sentence contained a cliché … grass is always greener, strike while the iron is hot, opposites attract, what goes around comes around … You get the idea? It was painful! I was thinking about these exchanges as a few   clichés of my own came to mind on this cold December day; another holiday, another year ending, and I am thinking … every cloud has a silver lining. As I remember our time at Insession, when we introduced WebGate, it was so much like this year’s introduction of maRunga by Infrasoft: putting the horse before the carriage, or a solution ahead of the problem! When WebGate was introduced ...

Even as there are those within the NonStop community who continue to “hold the breath” when it comes to predicting the future for NonStop, there are many more who argue why not NonStop for decades to come?   In a clever turn of phrase, our local Niwot village coffee shop calls itself the Winot! And with the sudden drop in temperatures – almost 40 degrees Fahrenheit overnight – we see the seasons changing once again, and we continually ask ourselves shouldn’t we be in Florida? California? Perhaps Australia? Then again, part of the balanced life we enjoy from simply being in Colorado is watching the seasons’ change, so this holiday season, Margo and I are electing to stay put in Boulder, reminding each other, why not? Taking advantage of our village name with an anagram the way our coffee shop has done, was just one way to draw attention to the shop and many of us can be excused for doing something similar, at one time or another. However, watching the snow come down, as I d...

There is still much that can be learnt checking social media posts and commentaries as well as web sites – but doing nothing is not really an option in the informed world we all belong to … At this time of year, driving on roads paved with ice in extremely cold conditions, the lowest sustained cold spell in decades even by Colorado standards, has reinforced the notion that it’s never good to have something between your vehicles tires and the road surface. Each year, as winter descends, we see it; students, new to the local university, driving Jeep AWDs looking astonished as they find themselves in the ditch with everyone else. Aside from fitting metal-studded tires, there’s really no safe way to negotiate ice. There are occasions when we take advantage of friction, and there are times, too, when it’s best left alone. When we drive, the amount of grip our car develops is commensurate with the amount of friction we generate between our tires and the road, and that’s a good thing....

HP announced plans for NonStop to support Intel x86 architecture and the reverberations continue as users and vendors alike take it all in … but one thing is for sure, extending fault-tolerant computing to the largest server architecture worldwide will broaden the appeal of NonStop! One of the earliest memories of my wife, Margo, that I have of her going back to when we both worked for Tandem Computers, is of her telling an audience “not to set goals too low in case they will achieve them”. Not to be confused with the anonymous, yet better known, quote by motivational gurus, "Set your goals high enough to inspire you and low enough to encourage you!" with her expression, Margo made it very clear that she didn't suffer  mediocrity  well. Many of us within the NonStop community have publicly held the NonStop architecture in the highest of esteems and yet, in private, have expressed anxiety over just how much longer the NonStop architecture will prevail.  A fail...

I have been following InkaBinka since the beginning of this year and now there are folks within HP, too, that see plenty of opportunities as we all become newscasters. “Capturing your world!” could involve us all and NonStop may very well be involved …   To the dismay of many, Margo and I drove from Boulder, Colorado, to Orlando, Florida. What were we thinking? After road trips for business to Atlanta, Georgia, to Mississauga, Canada, and then the extended travel we did while in Australia, you would have thought a 2,000 plus mile trip to sunny Florida would be a bit much – but we love the travel. The picture above was taken of Margo and me after making a detour to Daytona Beach for lunch, Sunday.  We have checked in to one of Disney’s kingdoms specifically, Magic Kingdom; looking down on this fantasy world from high atop Disney’s Contemporary Resort. When you enter Disney, the “wonderful world of meetings” that is, there’s a tag line displayed on their folios – “the se...

The timelessness of NonStop on display as Intel's x86 is embraced - yes, the plan to support of x86 architectures as part of the NonStop product family has been unveiled at this year's NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp. While I was visiting Australia, I was kept informed of a young up-and-coming racecar driver. While only in his early teens, he was featured on American television as one of three youngsters worth watching as likely future stars. Colton Herta, the son of Indy Racing League (IRL) team co-owner, Bryan Herta, this year raced in two programs for open wheel racecars (smaller versions of F1 cars). In doing so, he managed to win the major series (in an F1600) while narrowly missing out, as we heard while travelling, on winning the second series (Skip Barber formula) by a margin of two points even though conflicts with the F1600 series meant he missed many Skip Barber events. For 13 year old Colton, campaigning against much older participants with years more ...

It’s all positive news with the availability of the NonStop BladeSystem NB56000c and when you look closer, you can see that the ongoing investment in NonStop remains strong and that the roadmaps presented by HP NonStop continue to be pursued aggressively and passionately.   Greetings from within the world’s tallest residential tower, the Q1, on Australia’s famous Gold Coast, Queensland. While we are not residing on the highest floor, the “hotel” does include floors much higher than the surrounding buildings, so the views are spectacular to say the least. I have been a visitor to the Gold Coast since 1962 as it became a popular vacation option for my family, but nothing quite prepared me for how other-worldly the experience is proving to be. The picture above was taken on the first night of our stay by a highly skilled photographer – no trickery involved – and almost 40 floors above the street! With business in Sydney behind us and just a couple of more “catch-ups” and site v...

Greetings from Sydney, Australia! However, it was the trip to Canada, to participate in CTUG, that influenced this post – Tandem was good but NonStop today is so much better! Given the opportunity would we still invest in good when better is available? I don’t think so … There have been a number of posts since I referenced boats, cars or travel – but it seems appropriate to, once again, dip into this pool to pull  out some well-meaning metaphors and this time, the connections or associations will not be hard to miss. It’s been some time, but we finally replaced the ten plus years old Cadillac Escalade. With more than 175,000 miles on the odometer there was sense of imminent doom with every outing we took, and later this year we will be driving to Orlando for a major event that Margo will be overseeing. The Escalade was good, and served us well, but was there something better? After testing a number of SUVs, including the new Escalade, the Mercedes Benz ML550 and ever so br...

It was many years ago, shortly after arriving in the U.S., that I moved to Boston and began my career in IT. If it wasn’t for the generosity of those prepared to give me a chance, I probably wouldn’t have had any opportunity to get a toehold on what was then considered an industry in its infancy. Keydata Corporation, the first commercial time-sharing computer firm, was my very first employer in the US. Most of the processing was done in batch, with reports generated nightly. The businesses sent Keydata their daily transactions logs which we processed for them. There was nothing real time about it, as I recall. Perhaps the concept of time-sharing and cloud computing differs by just that one fine point – cloud computing assumes real time processing, otherwise, conceptually, these are the same approaches to data processing! When you look back at early service bureau companies supporting time-sharing, they were just providing a big resource (for computing) with an archaic interfac...

Once again, it’s all about user groups and the benefits they provide. I continue to support them as I see few alternatives when it comes to better understanding their passion for all things NonStop! It is a common observation of mine, and coming as it does so soon into my eight year of blogging, it should not come as a surprise to anyone. I like participating in NonStop regional user group meetings, and this week I have the privilege of participating in the CTUG fall event. The turnout was encouraging and the engagement amongst the user group’s stakeholders was hard to miss. As Randy Meyer, HP VP and GM of Integrity Servers observed in his opening remarks, “If you want to see an example of how to run user group events, then you only need to visit CTUG!” HP Canada Sales VP, Roger Walker, who was clearly excited by the prospects of NonStop, rattled off numbers that surprised many in the audience. It’s not only hard to ignore how engaged the user group’s stakeholders were, but ig...