OS/2

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Sun May 28 10:58:30 2000

On Sun, May 28, 2000 at 05:26:29AM -0400, Bill Pechter wrote:
>I think the info is up on hobbes. I bought Warp4 and stuff... but I
>don't think I'm tossing IBM any more money for the final client packages
>if they're not going to continue to support it past Dec.

IBM really seems to have an attitude this time around. A customer of mine
that was thinking of switching to OS/2 got a variety of stories from IBM,
but the one thing they really pushed was their "Total Content Ownership"
(???) scam. The way that works is, you get whatever version is shipping right
now, and they freeze it. Then you pay through the nose for support, *forever*,
and they say they'll fix whatever bugs crop up in that version only, just
for you. If they release new versions in the mean time, you don't get 'em,
and you don't *ever* get any feature upgrades, just fixes for bugs you find
yourself. I can't imagine how they thought customers would like this idea!!!

>I would've bought Warp 5 with the new IP stack and the Logical Volume
>Manager if they would have made it available in a client edition at a
>reasonable price.

The LVM is EEEEEEEVIL!!!! I really don't like it, the "sticky" drive letter
assignments are particularly annoying if you're swapping disks around (our
boxes have hot-swappable disks, obviously we don't expect the hot-swapping to
work, but we were moving drives a lot between boots to copy big files around,
and LVM really mixes things up when you do that). And the LVM is the only
thing that knows how to read its own partition table, so it's easy for it to
get out of sync with the normal FDISK partitions if you have other OSes around.
We couldn't figure out what advantage the LVM was supposed to be giving us,
it was just one more configuration headache.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Sun May 28 2000 - 10:58:30 BST