[Richard Crowley]

"Scott Dorsey" wrote...
Richard Crowley wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in ...
Richard Crowley wrote:
The former DEC fab in Hudson is now Intel Fab 17 and is still running
(on MSwin, now :-)

Shameful. That's all I can say.

Easy for you to say. You are not only a one-man-band but you also
run your own computing "infrastructure". It was becoming increasing
difficult to find competent employees to support the 20 different
flavors of Unix on the 10s of thousands of systems that run the factories.

I don't think it is any harder to find competent Windows people... I think
it's just that there are a lot of people out there who know enough Windows
to get by. In a lot of environments, that's enough, but I would hope for
better in an embedded control environment.

Perhaps, but there are these significant factors (and likely others)....
1) A single OS (and version) vs. a nearly infinite number of Unix/
Linux/Sunos/et.al. brands, flavors, distributions, versions, and builds.
2) A single target for vendors to interface with (vs. #1 above)
3) Fairly rigorous certification in many specific areas of competency.
4) Real support from a commercial vendor. (Granted, only when one
is a huge multi-national corp with lots of $$$, but then as you say,
there is a lot at stake.)

I must admit that the reliability appears to be significantly up since we
emigrated from the balkanized Unix/Linix/Sunox/et.al. landscape.