In relation to the below, I do have a question,


     If HP is killing off PA-RISC, why did they kill off a number of core
guys on the IA-64 project?  A bit ago on slashdot, there was a post about
the closing of the NewJersey facility and the dropping of some 120 or so
kernel developers.  Not penny ante guys, deep guys with lots of years in,
most were rumored to be working on the Intel port of HP-UX.  Now, we work
closely with HP at my work, and the rumors I've gotten from our guys are
that Tru-64 is out, they are looking to HP-UX on Intel (not strongly, but
someday), and they are keeping PA-RISC as the primary in order to avoid
what Sun and Intel went through, because HP can "do what they like",
because of their size (not my words).
     I also see Sun keeping Sparc, it wouldn't make much monetary sense to
just can that architecture, especially for an arch that most of Sun seems
to see as substandard.  I also see SGI keeping MIPS, they thought about
spinning MIPS off a few years ago, and then they realized how much taht
could hurt them internally, so they didn't do it.  I don't think all of teh
vendors *want* a single architecture, they see from SGI's mistakes in
marketing to the commodity market at proprietary rates (that's the main
reason the early SGI Intel boxes died out, no one would pay $5K for a
standard Intel Pent III with a really wicked, but proprietary, video (now
without drivers)).  That did not go unnoticed.
     So, I see the archs hanging around for quite some time, and if for no
other reason than they do certain things very well and their OSes run best
on them.  There is no plan to take IRIX to Intel, they will prolly look at
64-bit linux, but that's about it, and it may or may not be the flagship.
I don't see Sun using Intel outside of trying to attract new laptop
customers into the OS, or new customers, period.  I also think that HP
feels that they are enough to keep PA-RISC around, but that is just what I
hear from my sources at HP, they like the OS and they have invested a lot
in the architecture, their name in Intel circles is MUD, but I don't know
how the whole merger deal will turn out.  I will say that if they drop
HP-UX, you will see a LOT of businesses scrambling, and I don't think HP
will let that happen to their market share, especially if they know that a
lot of those clients will switch to Sun as opposed to buy Linux, even from
HP.  That's just the facts of corporate IT, and sad as it is, it's true.
The company I work for would rather not change from what they use now, but
if they had to, they'd look for another partner like HP, and not one that
was peddling something that was labeled in the trade rags as "almost" ready
for the data center.  I jsut see that as too big of a market for HP to
lose.



                              Gracias,


                              mbutler



Getting people to build boxes around a chip is nowhere near as tough
-- I think that could be done.  But big money has big inertia.  HP
killed off PA-RISC to deal with the Compaq merger, and Alpha's gone too.