HPE To Spin Out Its Huge Services Business, Merge It With CSC (cio.com) 147
itwbennett writes from a report via CIO: Hewlett-Packard Enterprise announced Tuesday that it will spin off its enterprise services business and merge it with IT services company Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) to create a company with $26 billion in annual revenue. The services business "accounts for roughly 100,000 employees, or two-thirds of the Silicon Valley giant's workforce," according to the Wall Street Journal. In a statement, HPE CEO Meg Whitman said customers would benefit from a "stronger, more versatile services business, better able to innovate and adapt to an ever-changing technology landscape." Layoffs were not a topic of discussion in Tuesday's announcement, but HPE did say last year they would cut 33,000 jobs by 2018, in addition to the 55,000 job cuts it had already announced. The company also split into two last year, betting that the smaller parts will be nimbler and more able to reverse four years of declining sales.
I worked on the IRS's anti-fraud system... (Score:1)
and we billed nearly $300 billion and delivered nothing. CSC is a rotten and dishonest company.
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I come from one of those hippie countries with socialized healthcare, and doctors' income is usually not really a concern here.
What we did was kicking frivolous lawsuits out of the window where you could sue a hospital for a few billions based on "mental anguish" or similar bullshit, lowering their insurance bills and enabling them to provide FAR cheaper rates.
We also made a distinction between necessary and elective treatment. Reattaching a severed finger is necessary. Moving your nose a few inches up beca
Doctor's salaries aren't the big problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I come from one of those hippie countries with socialized healthcare, and doctors' income is usually not really a concern here.
Doctor's income has very little to do with the skyrocketing cost of health care here in the US. In fact a huge portion of doctors don't actually have take home pay much different than a well paid software engineer. An internal medicine doctor in solo practice can work 70-100 hours per week and maybe take home $80-150K/year when all is said and done. Other doctors do better financially (particularly specialists) but the big drivers for health care costs are demonstrably not doctor's salaries. Those doctors who do make bigger salaries tend to be economically far more valuable than their take home pay.
The big drivers of cost (in no particular order) are perverse treatment incentives relating to insurance, high drug costs, uncontrolled hospital billing, ridiculous administrative burden, lack of modern and interconnected computer systems, fraud, lack of a single payer entity, torts and actions to protect from torts, overuse of expensive medical equipment, and a few other things. Salaries of staff is a consideration too but it's not even in the top 10 problems driving health care costs. In fact there is a shortage of adequately trained staff in many parts of the country.
What we did was kicking frivolous lawsuits out of the window where you could sue a hospital for a few billions based on "mental anguish" or similar bullshit, lowering their insurance bills and enabling them to provide FAR cheaper rates.
And what do you do when you really do get screwed by an incompetent hospital? I'm quite sure that happens just as often as it does here in the US. What is your recourse when something goes horribly wrong?
We also made a distinction between necessary and elective treatment. Reattaching a severed finger is necessary. Moving your nose a few inches up because you think it's not pretty enough is not. The former is paid by your insurance, the latter not.
That is no different in the US. Elective cosmetic surgery is rarely covered by insurance except for cases related to reconstruction following an accident or serious illness. Your botox injection will not be covered by any insurance that I am aware of. My wife is a physician in a dermatology practice and they make a ton of money from elective cosmetic procedures not covered by insurance. (Vanity literally has a price)
And finally we got free routine check ups, the older you get the more frequent they get.
They're not free. You just pay for them with tax dollars instead of insurance premiums. I agree that they are a good idea and I think the US does it in a retarded way but let's not pretend it's free just because you didn't get presented with a bill when you left the office.
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Doctor's income has very little to do with the skyrocketing cost of health care here in the US. In fact a huge portion of doctors don't actually have take home pay much different than a well paid software engineer. An internal medicine doctor in solo practice can work 70-100 hours per week and maybe take home $80-150K/year when all is said and done. Other doctors do better financially (particularly specialists) but the big drivers for health care costs are demonstrably not doctor's salaries. Those doctors who do make bigger salaries tend to be economically far more valuable than their take home pay.
Actually, I think it is a part of the cost as well. Doctors are supposed to pay for malpractice insurance which takes a big chunk out of the doctor's paid. In order to keep $80k~$150k/year, the real gross income for doctors is much higher than that (could be about double). As a results, a doctor visit (seeing a doctor) becomes higher charges. The cost of higher charges is kicking down to health insurance. Who is paying that? Of course, you. Reducing and/or getting rid of malpractice insurance would in turn
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Actually, I think it is a part of the cost as well. Doctors are supposed to pay for malpractice insurance which takes a big chunk out of the doctor's paid. In order to keep $80k~$150k/year, the real gross income for doctors is much higher than that (could be about double). As a results, a doctor visit (seeing a doctor) becomes higher charges.
What? Malpractice insurance isn't nearly as expensive as you think it is. From http://truecostofhealthcare.net/malpractice/ [truecostofhealthcare.net]:
Insurance myths (Score:3)
Doctors are supposed to pay for malpractice insurance which takes a big chunk out of the doctor's paid. In order to keep $80k~$150k/year, the real gross income for doctors is much higher than that (could be about double).
Not as a general proposition. The amount you pay for malpractice insurance varies by specialty and by location but it very rarely doubles the cost of a doctor. Something between $10K-30K/year is fairly typical. Larger practices and hospitals can typically get better rates than smaller ones. Some specialties like OBGYN in certain locations can get socked with outrageous malpractice insurance fees due to the tort laws in that area. Most of the doctors I personally know about pay somewhere between $10K-15
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And finally we got free routine check ups, the older you get the more frequent they get.
They're not free. You just pay for them with tax dollars instead of insurance premiums. I agree that they are a good idea and I think the US does it in a retarded way but let's not pretend it's free just because you didn't get presented with a bill when you left the office.
No, the tax burden IS LESS than if they didn't provide them, due to the saving they enable, so yes they are entirely free, they are in fact better than free since they pay for themselves and more.
Less cost does not equal free (Score:2)
No, the tax burden IS LESS than if they didn't provide them, due to the saving they enable, so yes they are entirely free, they are in fact better than free since they pay for themselves and more.
Less does not equal free. By taking advantage of preventative medicine the average cost to a patient is less. Health care is NEVER free. The fact that you pay with tax dollars instead of private insurance doesn't change the fact that you still are paying some amount for the visit.
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No, the tax burden IS LESS than if they didn't provide them, due to the saving they enable, so yes they are entirely free, they are in fact better than free since they pay for themselves and more.
Less does not equal free. By taking advantage of preventative medicine the average cost to a patient is less. Health care is NEVER free. The fact that you pay with tax dollars instead of private insurance doesn't change the fact that you still are paying some amount for the visit.
No, but we are talking about a specific part they provide that results in you having to pay less. The part they provide that causes you to pay less, doesn't cost you anything extra, it in fact cost you less.
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Our drug costs took a pretty quick dive once pharma corporations noticed that there is ONE BIG insurance company in the country (along with a few private ones that make up about 1% of the market). If you have 99% of the market share and everyone pretty much HAS to be a member with you, your bargaining leverage is slightly improved. Mostly with medication that is available from different sources because the patent is gone. In other words, "we get it cheaper, Pfizer, because Roche over there is already beggin
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"Doctor's income has very little to do with the skyrocketing cost of health care here in the US." - Spot on and you have outlined the real reasons quite nicely. In my view, Doctors should make more money not less. There are very few professions that require the amount of formal education and rigor that it requires to become a physician. Don't even get me started on how much athletes and entertainers make. It is obscene.
I think the problem with the healthcare system is that nobody has any real skin in the ga
The remaining 1/3 will turn off the lights. (Score:4, Insightful)
They spun of 2/3 of the company? The enterprise services? They already spun out all manufacturing to HPQ. What's left? Reselling VMWare?
Is a asset stripper in charge? (Score:3)
This has a rotten smell to it. Seems to me HP is being slowly dismantled for money. A great company slowly being flushed down the toilet by short termist used car salesman types.
Re:Is a asset stripper in charge? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so sure HP has been a "great company" for some time.
I wonder what sort of debts they will try and push onto whatever this remainder-of-HPE company is going to be. Gotta find a way to get that "clean slate" by scuttling the old ship with undesirably consequences of past leadership's transgressions, not to mention least favorite people. Those brave souls who remain will steer the old wreckage to the bottom of Bankruptcy Bay. A few will plan golden life rafts to escape the undertow that pulls hapless stockholders down with it.
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Survivors of sinking ships report having been sucked down with their ship. Perhaps not all ships are created equal.
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Mythbusters did it:
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... [discovery.com]
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Yes, but their test was fairly meaningless, because it was a pretty small ship. The people who have survived to report being sucked down were on larger ones. As usual, myth not busted.
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A great company slowly being flushed down the toilet by short termist used car salesman types.
The decline of HP had little to do with short-termism, and much more to do with long-term technological change. HP did well when computers cost $5k, and printers cost $3k, and people were willing to pay a few thousand extra for top quality. Now, computers cost $500, printers cost $50, and there is little difference is quality between brands. HP's old business strategy just doesn't work anymore. You can't charge a premium when you are selling commodity goods, and you can't compete on price against Foxcon
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What's funny is HP slowly dying while people scream "OMG LAYOFFS!", complaining HP is an unprofitable behemoth and then freaking out when they fire people who aren't useful for anything because HP has employees to provide 1 billion hours of service but has customers to buy 200 million hours of service.
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This has a rotten smell to it. Seems to me HP is being slowly dismantled for money. A great company slowly being flushed down the toilet by short termist used car salesman types.
The rotten smell could be coming from the services division. Sounds like Meg noticed the EDS acquisition wasn't panning out so toss the mess to someone else and cut your losses.
I'm really not sure what HPE has left. x86 servers, storage systems, some network stuff. The servers and blades are pretty well respected. I work at a storage competitor and we kind of laugh at HPE storage. The network gear they had when I worked at HP was pretty good but not nearly well respected as Cisco and other giants. There's n
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Dismantling Carl's and the two clowns legacy. HP Inc. was mostly Compaq and ES was the purchase of EDS. Which isn't too bad of an idea.
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oops. I meant Carly
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HP is a real estate management and financial management company. They just sell electronics stuff so they don't have to deal with those pesky banking regulations.
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The HP Inc. builts printers and end user equipment.
Re:The remaining 1/3 will turn off the lights. (Score:4, Informative)
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"We're still a major player in hardware"
Yeah, just not "printers, laptops, notebooks, desktops and workstations, and a lot more", you know, the things that actually make money...
"We make servers, from smaller rack servers up to huge Enterprise scale servers. We make storage hardware, network hardware, etc. Basically, if it's something you'd find in a corporate data center, we make it AND support it"
You're still a runt of a company hived off from a once great corporation. No one cares about HP big iron any m
Re:The remaining 1/3 will turn off the lights. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if HP did go straight to x86, they might have fared better. But they made a huge misstep with IA-64, and hung HP on a more obscure, unstable architecture than anyone else. At that point, they started leaking huge amounts of midn-share, and intel/linux was consistently 1/2 to 1/3 the cost.
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Yeah, Itanium was a disaster, however PA-RISC was competetive. They could have kept developing it but I guess some clueless suit decided to save money and get into bed with Intel.
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Yeah, Itanium was a disaster, however PA-RISC was competetive. They could have kept developing it
Not only was PA-RISC not competitive on a cost basis making it difficult to sell, but it's also expensive to develop a computing architecture. Doing it badly is part of what killed Sun; they developed a whole architecture they just had to throw away because PC processors surpassed the shit out of it before they brought it to market.
HP could not afford to keep PA-RISC going. If they had just chosen to go to PC processors they would have done better than dicking with Itanic.
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I think you're being a bit unfair to Sun there. Sparc , along with most old style Risc CPUs is more efficient with a smaller die size on a Mips basis than the dogs dinner that is x86 with its massive amounts of microcode and legacy baggage.
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Doing it badly is part of what killed Sun; they developed a whole architecture they just had to throw away because PC processors surpassed the shit out of it before they brought it to market.
I think you're being a bit unfair to Sun there.
It is a well-known fact that Sun threw an entire generation of UltraSPARC design in the wastebin because it was hopelessly outclassed in every way by x86-compatible processors. So no, I am being perfectly, completely, utterly, and in all other ways fair to Sun here. They failed badly. If they hadn't, they might still be with us today.
Sparc , along with most old style Risc CPUs is more efficient with a smaller die size on a Mips basis than the dogs dinner that is x86 with its massive amounts of microcode and legacy baggage.
zzzzzfail. You have no idea what you're on about. All modern processors are internally RISCy and the x86 decoder is a fucking footnote in die space compared to stuff like cache
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"All modern processors are internally RISCy "
Bollocks. The x86 FPU and GPU instructions are risc like , the rest of it is not.
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Hint: Since the days of the Pentium II, the instructions and registers programmer perceives have had almost zero resemblance to the internal instructions and registers actually used inside the CPU.
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Bollocks. The x86 FPU and GPU instructions are risc like , the rest of it is not.
Alas, you have proven that you are spectacularly mistaken. Wait, not alas. Hilariously. The processor core is RISC-like, and x86 instructions are decomposed into series of micro-ops before actually being executed. This has been true of AMD since the Am586 and of Intel since the Pentium.
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So what? Thats the same in most modern CPUs. The point is that CISC instructions execute a lot more microcode and hence use more energy than RISC instructions and with CISC the compiler is more limited in what it can do with opcode order shuffling which is unfortunate since the compiler has a much broader view of the program than the CPU will in its instruction cache.
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The most commonly used x86 instructions need no classical microcode. They're no more complex than three RISC instructions (address computation, load plus ALU). They get split into corresponding micro-ops by hardware (not microcode), and are run concurrently in the various CPU logic units, just like modern RISC CPUs. An added bonus is the compact encoding is very beneficial to instruction cache bandwidth.
I think that you're confusing the issue with the poorly-conceived 80286 era task-level instructions, whic
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If the compiler had more valuable insight into low-level instruction ordering than the actual CPU itself does, then the Itanium would not have been such an epic failure.
And if anyone would have got it to work, it would have been intel; their compiler is top-notch and they are clearly pretty good at this silicon thing
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The so what is the fact that you're laughaby wrong in your statements and characterizations. So you're saying that accuracy doesn't matter?
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The processor core is RISC-like, and x86 instructions are decomposed into series of micro-ops before actually being executed. This has been true of AMD since the Am586 and of Intel since the Pentium.
Pentium Pro, not Pentium.
I infer from IBM's use of "micro-operation" in papers about recent z/Architecture processors that it's also true of z/Architecture. (BTW, two of the first implementations of the System/360 ancestor of z/Architecture, the System/360 Models 75 and 91/95, implemented the instruction set entirely in hardwired logic rather than microcode; the other models used microcode.)
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If the compiler had more valuable insight into low-level instruction ordering than the actual CPU itself does, then the Itanium would not have been such an epic failure.
Perhaps leaving all instruction scheduling up to the compiler, as with Itanium, was harder than having the compiler schedule instructions (as is done by many compilers, including x86 compilers) and then having the processor reorder them (as is done on RISC processors) or chop them into micro-ops and recording them (as is done on x86 and z/Architecture processors).
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I infer from IBM's use of "micro-operation" in papers about recent z/Architecture processors that it's also true of z/Architecture.
IBM is huge on microcode, they are more into it than anyone else. I always forget which x/ notation corresponds to which name of old, so I will just use the old names and you can figure out which is which. I presume that POWER itself when implemented for RS6k has about a normal amount of microcode; I know there is some. Last I looked, AS/400 systems even when they were still being called that were being implemented as a wrapper around POWER or even PowerPC, depending on model. They had literally no other pl
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I infer from IBM's use of "micro-operation" in papers about recent z/Architecture processors that it's also true of z/Architecture.
IBM is huge on microcode,
So I guess they abandoned that whole silly "801" "RISC" project when they found it didn't have any microcode. Good thing they did, or they'd have ended up with a line of RISC processors.
I presume that POWER itself when implemented for RS6k has about a normal amount of microcode; I know there is some.
And how do you know this?
Last I looked, AS/400 systems even when they were still being called that were being implemented as a wrapper around POWER or even PowerPC, depending on model.
The predecessor to AS/400, System/38, was an interesting system. They had two layers that they referred to as "microcode" but, as Frank Solt
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And all modern processors of any complexity have microcode, and you have no idea how much.
What do you mean by "microcode" here? Do you mean it in the traditional sense, wherein the CPU's instruction-execution state machine is implemented as a set of microinstructions? If so, could you cite some papers indicating that, for example, the SPARC M7, or the POWER8, or the Itanium 9500, have microcode in that sense?
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If so, could you cite some papers indicating that, for example, the SPARC M7, or the POWER8, or the Itanium 9500, have microcode in that sense?
It probably does not apply to SPARC, I am fairly certain that there is microcode involved at minimum in some POWER processor coprocessors but can't find a reference, there is absolutely microcode in Itanium and Intel has used it to fix errors.
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If so, could you cite some papers indicating that, for example, the SPARC M7, or the POWER8, or the Itanium 9500, have microcode in that sense?
It probably does not apply to SPARC, I am fairly certain that there is microcode involved at minimum in some POWER processor coprocessors but can't find a reference, there is absolutely microcode in Itanium and Intel has used it to fix errors.
There's firmware [intel.com] , but it's not clear from what Intel says there that it's "microcode" in the conventional sense, as opposed to low-level Itanium instruction set (the instruction set formerly known as IA-64) code.
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I agree. There was a time when workstation meant a computer used for technical/business stuff, and a PC was a "toy". And during those times workstations were Sun, HP, DEC, etc. I remember using HP-UX machines with "unheard" amounts of RAM (128MB), while a typical PC was still playing games with Expanded vs Extended memory in DOS, typically 4 or 8MB maximum RAM. Linux was not a thing yet. PC's could run Windows 3, but "real" work which needed a Unix workstation meant, Sun, HP, IBM or DEC.
The Sparc/UltraSparc
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I agree. There was a time when workstation meant a computer used for technical/business stuff, and a PC was a "toy".
And then the PC processors began to spank the workstation class CPUs on nearly every basis.
And during those times workstations were Sun, HP, DEC, etc.
All of which also built x86 Unix systems and sold Unix for x86 PC clones. You're also conspicuously leaving out IBM, which also made PCs and Unix for PCs and even something weird and in between, the IBM PC/RT; on which you could run AIX or BSD. It had an ISA bus and the most fancy-pants model had a whoppin' 16MB RAM.
I remember using HP-UX machines with "unheard" amounts of RAM (128MB), while a typical PC was still playing games with Expanded vs Extended memory in DOS, typically 4 or 8MB maximum RAM.
Sure. There was a time like that. PCs used cheap 8-bit SIPPs or SIMMs if they didn't actually use DIP
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And during those times workstations were Sun, HP, DEC, etc.
All of which also built x86 Unix systems and sold Unix for x86 PC clones.
Sun did, when they made the Sun386i running SunOS 4.0.x; it wasn't a big success (and wasn't PC-compatible). HP and DEC made PCs, but didn't port their own UNIXes to them, and so obviously neither ran HP-UX nor Ultrix nor Digital UNIX on them nor sold HP-UX nor Ultrix nor Digital UNIX for other people's PCs.
You're also conspicuously leaving out IBM, which also made PCs and Unix for PCs and even something weird and in between, the IBM PC/RT; on which you could run AIX or BSD. It had an ISA bus and the most fancy-pants model had a whoppin' 16MB RAM.
...and a non-x86 processor (and it was the "IBM RT PC", not the "IBM PC/RT").
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...and a non-x86 processor (and it was the "IBM RT PC", not the "IBM PC/RT").
Yes, it had the first commercial RISC processor, in fact. And who cares what it was called, I had five model 135s, and I gave them away. There was just no point.
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I agree. There was a time when workstation meant a computer used for technical/business stuff, and a PC was a "toy". And during those times workstations were Sun, HP, DEC, etc. I remember using HP-UX machines with "unheard" amounts of RAM (128MB), while a typical PC was still playing games with Expanded vs Extended memory in DOS, typically 4 or 8MB maximum RAM. Linux was not a thing yet. PC's could run Windows 3, but "real" work which needed a Unix workstation meant, Sun, HP, IBM or DEC.
...the first of which had an, admittedly unsuccessful, 386-based workstation (along with their 68k and SPARC-based workstations).
As all the RISC CPUs migrated to IA-64,
They didn't. Only PA-RISC did.
and then got beat by x86-64, there was also the movement away from the different Unices (HP-UX, Solaris, VMS, etc.) to Linux.
Presumably you meant "(HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc.)"; VMS wasn't a UNIX, but AIX is one of the three remaining Big Server Commercial UNIXes, along with HP-UX and Solaris.
It was the combination of x86-64 performance and cost improvements coupled with the explosion of Linux on PC hardware
...and the availability of 32-bit and later 64-bit Windows, and of versions of traditional "engineering workstation" software for Windows, so that you no longer needed a traditional co
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They had the DEC Alpha and then gave it away to Intel for promises. So yes, it was the clueless suits.
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Problem with VLIW was that each new CPU was guaranteed to break backwards compatibility,
Only if you do it in a way that either 1) changes the instruction encoding from CPU to CPU or 2) doesn't have rules for code that's guaranteed to work on all future processors. The IA-64 documentation [intel.com] gives the instruction encoding for all processors, and does have rules of that sort (see, for example, section 3.4 "Instruction Sequencing Considerations"), so they didn't do it in one of those ways, so each CPU is guaranteed not to break backwards compatibility for valid code (which means that the code doesn
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Problem with VLIW was that each new CPU was guaranteed to break backwards compatibility,
Only if you do it in a way that either 1) changes the instruction encoding from CPU to CPU or 2) doesn't have rules for code that's guaranteed to work on all future processors. The IA-64 documentation [intel.com] gives the instruction encoding for all processors, and does have rules of that sort (see, for example, section 3.4 "Instruction Sequencing Considerations"), so they didn't do it in one of those ways, so each CPU is guaranteed not to break backwards compatibility for valid code (which means that the code doesn't, for example, have any of the dependencies that are "not allowed" by section 3.4).
That actually assumes that Intel can't add new instructions to future versions of the Itanium that may not have been anticipated during the work on Merced. I wasn't assuming that opcodes would change, just that new ones would be introduced that might improve, say, loop unrolling, and that to make use of that, the VLIW compiler would have to kick in. Like if the number of registers in a subsequent generation CPUs is increased, and register renaming is in the hands of the compiler, recompilation would automatically be required to get any performance enhancement, or worse, prevent a performance degradation.
That's a bit more than what happens with every other type of CPU, but not all that much more - new instructions are added, and some instruction sets even acquired more registers (z/Architecture added some instructions to manipulate the lower half and upper half of registers, so that a single 64-bit GPR can act as 2 32-bit GPRs, for example).
But that doesn't break binary compatibility, it just requires recompilation for more performance. If not recompiling causes a significant performance hit, that's a sev
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HP servers and networking gear are still well regarded in the industry. Yes, you pay a premium
Disclosure, I
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I personally have had good luck with HP/HPE stuff over the years. The Moonshot has yet to be duplicated by anyone, and for places that can't expand or add rack capacity, the only way to add more (other than machine upgrades) is to go with denser racks/blades. iLO holds its own, on the par with iDRAC.
I do wish HPe would make some G9 MicroServers. For an entry level box in an environment where rackmounting isn't that feasible, they are nice little machines and are definitely worth it for price/performance.
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Cheap commodity hardware from China is cheap commodity hardware from China regardless of who you buy it from. It's all ODM as none of the big IT consulting firms designs their own hardware anymore. It's all re-branded SuperMicro or Intel reference designs.
I.e., all the HP Integrity [hp.com] system boards, including the Itanium-based ones, are Intel reference designs?
(Obviously, neither Oracle's SPARC machines, nor IBM's Power ISA or z/Architecture machines, are based on Intel reference designs, as Intel don't make SPARC, POWER, or z/Architecture processors.)
(I'm ruling SuperMicro out here, as I rather doubt they make any Itanium, SPARC, Power ISA, or z/Architecture boards.)
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s/x86/itanium
Fixed that for you
If it ain't broke, don't break it by trying to fix it. When HP decided that Itanium was the way forward, that was "HP-UX on Itanium" for their machines, so they didn't "[decide] HP-UX was yesterdays news" at that point.
Presumably by "decided HP-UX was yesterdays news and x86 was the way forward" the person whose statement you're "fixing" was referring to HP announcing Xeon-based Superdome servers not running HP-UX, and HP-UX not being ported to x86 [enterprisetech.com].
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Sad thing is neither company should have the name. Agilent should have kept the HP name and logo since that's what actually started HP.
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We spun of HP Incorporated which does the more consumer oriented products that most consumers associated with HP, so that is why they got the original logo.
As an ex-HP from the long ago HP, I still think that the original logo really belongs to what is now Keysight Techonologies.
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Huh? Full disclosure, I'm an HPE employee.
Are your job prospects that poor? Why would anyone stick around at a company whose management is gutting it to make a quick buck?
Writing meet Wall - Probably (Score:1)
I used to work for a little company called Nortel Networks, they outsourced their entire IT group to CSC. 18 months later CSC announced massive layoffs in 6 months meaning people were given "adequate notice" and their history of severance payments wasn't anywhere as good as Nortel's. This meant that severance packages could be minimal. The rest is history. The rumor mill said that a big part of CSC's business was helping large companies downsize and avoid some of the costs of layoff, I never researched it b
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ES is dying and the industry is consolidating. It makes sense. What is left is mostly storage (including support for legacy tape drives!), networking, and software. And yes VMWare but also Open Stack.
Those who don't learn from history... (Score:1)
Tech mergers rarely work. Why are they gambling? Is there a hidden shell game here that make a few select executives and lawyers rich while screwing everything else?
Re:Those who don't learn from history... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's restructuring. It's what company managers do when they notice that their revenues plummet and they somehow try to hold on to their comfy chairs, which they could not if it seems like they do nothing to deal with the plummeting revenue.
Once they notice that they can't do anything sensible (usually after spending a million or two on consulting, which usually makes me wonder what the fuck these goofballs are doing if they need someone telling them what to do any time a serious decision that goes beyond choosing the correct iron on the golf course is due), they need to do SOMETHING to appease shareholders.
Restructuring is perfect for this. One, it looks like you're doing something, two, it makes you look like you know what you're doing and three, it may cost whatever it costs because, hey, restructuring takes time and costs money, everyone knows that. But afterwards it's going to be SO much better that the new revenue boost will easily recover this in a year. Two, tops.
And two years later, you have a new CEO.
Re:Those who don't learn from history... (Score:5, Funny)
On a lighter note, a topical joke:
A new CEO is examining his new office. In a drawer, he finds a note and three sealed envelopes. The note says "Hello, dear successor. You find here three numbered envelopes. Every time your numbers look bad and the board wants your head, open them, in order, and do what you find inside."
Well, not even a month after he took the helm, he creates his first huge blunder. Desperately he opens the first envelope and reads
"Blame your predecessor"
He does at the meeting and the board is appeased. Everything keeps going ok for a while until his numbers start to plummet and the board wants answers. He opens the second envelope and reads
"Restructure"
He does, everyone's busy restructuring and nobody can identify who is to blame for the increased costs. But after a while, restructuring is pretty much done but the increase in revenue is not coming in. Desperately he opens the third envelope and reads
"Prepare three envelopes"
Re: (Score:2)
What worked in 1790 doesn't work in 2016. Companies need to restructure as markets change; and markets change as technology changes.
Millions of people working to produce and manage servers... and then we moved to cloud technology and virtualization, and now one person provides that server management for 20 companies who are all dangling off 1 VM host with 5 times the hardware as a single of the (20) servers it replaces. It suddenly takes 8% as many employees to do the same job, and people start leaving
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Nobody said that you should work as you did 200 years ago. But many companies are locked in permanent restructuring. And we're not talking about introducing a new technology, this is about shuffling personnel and, more important, departments from one management position to the other in what I liked to call "corporate gerrymandering" when I was still in consulting. The goal is basically to ensure he controls all the profitable areas of the company and manages to push all the unprofitable (but necessary) ones
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Sometimes I really wonder how these companies survive.
The answer is simple: they're run by executives who actually know what they're doing, and who aren't actually playing out the fanciful narrative you've described. Some businesses are projectized, and so don't have firm functional divisions; others operate in less-rigid ways, and so are able to restructure on-the-fly without the mass expense an old-style 1920s office would face when trying to reorganize. We've done a lot of research since 1970 on how to get things done and how to minimize the risk of cha
Re: (Score:1)
Indeed. BS is America's comparative advantage. [wikipedia.org]
Anti-trust? (Score:3)
I wonder if that will be allowed.. Won't the new company have a near monopoly on incompentent consultancy, generally being bloody useless?
Re:Anti-trust? (Score:5, Funny)
Won't the new company have a near monopoly on incompentent consultancy?
Not at all. There is IBM, Andersen, McKinsey, etc. Incompetent consulting is a big and competitive business.
Re: (Score:1)
I hear there's a mutant space goat about to eat the planet so we need to build three space arks...
Undoing the EDS merger...interesting. (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems like a pure financial engineering transaction, but I wonder about the long term health of "IT Services" firms like CSC. I have worked both on the services and the "serviced" side doing various tasks over the years. The services firms cut every single corner they can to provide just enough service to avoid losing their contract; it's frustrating not being allowed to do something for a customer because it might make us less money but be more efficient. The companies hiring them use them as an excuse to wash their hands of anything IT related, dump staff, etc. without having to pay severance or take massive charges against earnings. And in the end, neither side ends up doing anything useful. I just wonder if companies have finally woken up to that fact and aren't just buying whatever the IT services sales guys tell them to anymore. I have seriously never heard of or experienced any good results of an IT outsourcing...it always puts the two companies at odds with each other.
The only long term future I see for these kinds of companies is with government agencies. Agencies in most countries basically aren't allowed to spend agency money on in-house resources. It's always assumed that services companies provide more value for taxpayers' funds, but we know that's not the case. I think that now that companies can offload lots of their day to day IT to cloud providers like Amazon or Microsoft, there will be fewer places for the CSCs of the world to ply their "best practices" trade. It'll be the totally lazy companies that want nothing to do with IT, or agencies that have no choice but to outsource.
I'm amused that HP is unwinding basically all of the mergers that they did to get so big. So many executive decisions like this are basically made by some 26 year old MBA from McKinsey or Booz Allen Hamilton, rather than the executives themselves. Granted, someone may have seen the writing on the wall for CSC/EDS/IBM/Accenture and others, but I doubt that. Like I said originally, it's probably financial engineering to squeeze out as much money as they can from HP before destroying it completely. IBM of late is famous for this.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Undoing the EDS merger...interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
The only long term future I see for these kinds of companies is with government agencies. Agencies in most countries basically aren't allowed to spend agency money on in-house resources. It's always assumed that services companies provide more value for taxpayers' funds, but we know that's not the case. I think that now that companies can offload lots of their day to day IT to cloud providers like Amazon or Microsoft, there will be fewer places for the CSCs of the world to ply their "best practices" trade. It'll be the totally lazy companies that want nothing to do with IT, or agencies that have no choice but to outsource.
Don't be so quick to dismiss CSC. CSC bought Servicemesh, which provides them with one hell of a cross-cloud management platform. Agility Platform ties together AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc... and a company's in-house vSphere clusters. It's kind of a DevOps monster... Setup the blueprint templates, and policy engine... You can literally have a team of three or four people managing 20+k instances... Add / Drop capacity as needed, and float to which cloud provider is cheapest at the moment.
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In November 2015, CSC split in two; CSC "private sector" (who is merging with HPE); and CSC "public sector" who merged with SRA to form CSRA.
CSRA kept the FedRAMP approved 'Cloud' in the divorce.
Re: (Score:2)
So in the long term, would we see a return of first Compaq,
There's now a PC and printer company named "HP"; I'm not sure what form of spinoff would restore Compaq.
and then DEC?
Alpha's dead, so they'd either have to bring that back to life, or spin off the OpenVMS-on-Itanium part to bring DEC back.
IT Admin & HP Shop here - (Score:1)
CSC? (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work for a fortune 500 company who farmed out all server operations to CSC... I was on a core applications support team and would often need to work with CSC to spin up new servers or do restores or refreshes. I would say that 1 in 3 times the results of a request were actually what was expected. Most of the time something would go wrong and we would have to go into damage control mode.
There was one time where we requested some new servers be brought up.... which they did... by reformatting production servers... I was always amazed at the novel ways in which CSC would screw things up.
I got the impression that CSC probably had some competent people, they would have to in order to architect and maintain that level of server infrastructure, but we (the customer) never got to talk to those people. We dealt with the drones.... who were less than impressive.
Consulting life cycle (Score:5, Interesting)
So many companies go through the same sequence of events:
1) Build a successful business selling hardware
2) Customers ask for help with infrastructure and applications
3) Build a successful consulting business supporting hardware sales
4) Brilliant MBA notices consulting has a much higher profit margin than hardware
5) Company outsources hardware business and focuses on consulting
6) Pipeline of customers needing consulting dries up because they no longer buy hardware from company
7) CEO panics, has massive layoffs
8) New CEO looks around and sees that company no longer has a product to sell
Sounds like HP is in trouble (Score:1)
Where's Carly when you need her?
Re: (Score:2)
Where's Carly? She's busy laying off Ted Cruz's campaign staff.
And the Meg meltdown continues.... (Score:3)
Meg Wittman has to go down as one of the worst CEO's in history. HP, the once proud company, is being reduced to a steaming pile. So now EDS is being spun off, which HP massively overpaid for in the first place. This is after Meg triumphantly declared that HP was going to be a huge player in the "services" market.
Same mistake that IBM and DELL made. Another hardware vendor tries to become a services player and falls flat on its face.
Pretty soon HP will be reduced to a company with some patents and selling printers. Meanwhile Meg feathers her nest in anticipation of the golden parachute jump. But before that happens thousands more will lose their jobs and the company continues to be gutted.
Bill and David must be rolling in their graves.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty soon HP will be reduced to a company with some patents and selling printers.
So what will happen to HPE (which sells no printers)?
Re: (Score:2)
HPE becomes the steaming pile I referred to above :-)