On 2/24/06, Jim Bohnsack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At first I was pretty much in favor of the changes Alan was suggesting, but > Mike brought out an excellent point. I realize, or suspect, that IBM > Endicott and perhaps a lot of other shops may run with RSCS as the standard > userid for the RSCS machine, but in 2 out of the 3 companies for which I > have worked in my professional career, we didn't. One of them was IBM and
:soapbox type=long apologies. Yep. Back in the old days (so I am told ;-) there were lots of installations inside IBM with different teams running the new releases and reveal the need for flexbility and robustness. This has been optimized such that the remaining VM installations in IBM are enforced to be customized by IGS in a standard way. This does not generate sufficient requirements for the lab to deliver function that meets all requirements. And obviously staff reductions have made it harder for people to spend time on such things. It was interesting to see a similar discussion in the Linux arena recently. Novell had decided to simply build what they thought best rather than involve the &community in the design. Their claim is that such involvement leads to endless debates that take a lot of time and in the end will be put aside anyway. Alan Cox pointed out in http://lwn.net/Articles/171161/ the difference between "design by community" and "design in the community" and stated stated that design in the dark will lack the extra brains and eyes that are needed. Something seems to encourage people to walk away with half an idea and implement half of that without soliciting enough peers to get design review. I don't know why that is. It's not just Alan, and not just Endicott. We've seen the same with Linux on zSeries. I remember heavy arguments with folks in Boeblingen when I assured them that OS labels on S/390 DASD were a must, and they insisted Linux would write its own incompatible labels. And yes, we now do have standard OS labels on disk (and the old incompatible format, with at least one scenario where your data will be lost automatically). :esoapbox. Rob -- Rob van der Heij
