Third Party Watch
by
Shawn M. Gordon
President of S.M. Gordon & Associates
0893
Good morning, I turn 30 this month and I am afraid I am going to get real moody real soon now. I hope my wife can take it. Now on to business. I want to follow up a couple of software reviews that I did this year. First off is for Model Maker from Programmers Tool Shed. My biggest complaint on the product had been it’s manual. Well I got a new version of the manual and it is 1000% better. Thanks Steve for doing such a nice job. Along the same line I received the updated manual for SortMagic from MagicSoft, and here again I want to thank Jerry for listening to my complaints and doing something about it. The new manual looks great.
So Bradmark sent me some info the other day and it appears they now have DBGENERAL for Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server. It is actually called SQLWatch and is a product of Pace Systems. From what I understand, Pace will be doing all the work to add support for various RDBMS packages. Who knows, they may eventually merge with Bradmark if they are both making money.
I just read something that seems to verify a speculation that I was hearing from someone else. HP is thinking about having their PA-RISC line be a uniform platform for high performance hardware and let you load up just about any popular operating system that you are interested in. This would make it kind of like a PC that can run DOS, OS/2, UNIX etc. Think about the implications of this both good and bad. You will have to buy MPE from HP, or someone else if they sell it off, but you will also be able to put on the operating system of your choice. How about CP/M for the 3000?
OK, now that I know end-users read my column too, I want to take a moment to do a little more wrist slapping. We all hear every day<:f> how bad the economy is, and we fear for our jobs every day it seems, but many companies out there are looking to hire people and run ad’s in the newspapers or employ agencies to find good help. What I see happening, is an attitude on the<:f> part of the potential employer to treat the potential employee very badly because they feel they can pick from a long list of great people and pay them half of what they were making. I have seen attitudes ranging from not even acknowledging that they received your resume to dragging out the interview process over months without ever telling you what is going on. I myself have told two companies to not bother considering me because they handled the interview process in such an unprofessional manner that I felt I couldn’t work for them. I have many friends who have experienced similar things.
We are all professionals and deserve to be treated that way, if you run an ad and someone goes to the trouble to respond to it you should go to the trouble to let them know they are, or are not going to be considered for the job. Sure it’s a little extra work, but that’s what the HR department is for. Almost everyone I know hates their employer but loves what they do for a living. Why don’t we all work together a little so we can also love doing or job for our employer. (Usually I am not this philosophical).
Now I have a couple of hot items to tell you about. At the recent NeXT conference there was a big announcement that NeXTStep is going to run on PA-RISC by the end of the year. This is supposed to include Portable Objects (don’t ask me) so you can go between the 700 and 800 series. It will require that you have 16 bit color and higher end 700, so no 715 Samsung clone is going to work. I understand that they are going for the financial trading workstations, which are all SUN and total around 100,000 units.
This should be the dream software on the dream hardware. I also understand that the new workstations from HP coming out around the end of the year are going to include built in JPEG compression and should drop even more in price.
Along the same line it is rumored that APPLE is porting the MAC interface to HP-PA around late ’93. Seems everyone wants a piece of the high performance line.
The news I got from SIGSOFVEND wasn’t particularly earth shaking, but it was encouraging. MPE/iX 4.7 will not arrive until early ’94. It will include NM MSG files finally and an optical disk drive manager. They have fixed some things so now doing a STORE @.@.@ will also include the POSIX files, and I understand that they are even trying to implement temporary files under POSIX which is not part of the standard. I have heard about a big price drop from HP but I haven’t been able to get a straight line on it yet. The rumor is that the 937 is going to become the bottom end and be priced about the same as a current 917. The 977 is supposed to be dropped down to the price of a 967. This is totally a rumor so don’t quote me, but if you need hardware make sure to check the prices.
Sadly I must report that at the time of this writing I am out of work, seems the economy in California isn’t so great these days. Don’t worry because I am still in touch with all my contacts and should have no problem in maintaining this article. Hopefully this will be the last issue were I am out of work. Tally Ho