TheDash: Looking at Promising Potential

Editor’s Note: 3000 NewsWire First Look articles will preview software that’s still making its way to a first full release. As the rules change in the world of computing, products are taking on a lifecycle with very public birthing and shakeout phases. Marketing and trial versions now precede products more often. As this is our initial First Look article, we’d like to hear from you on this concept: Does it seem fair, and does it help you? Send us e-mail at editor@3000newswire.com, and let us know.

First Look by Steve Hammond

Years ago, a college classmate of mine interviewed at a fledgling medical college in New England. After the interview, he was taken on a campus tour. As the guide walked him through empty fields and construction trailers, she would say, “This is where the married student housing will be,” or, “This is the site of the biology building.”

I felt a lot like that when I gave TheDash a first look. TheDash is a GUI version that performs some of what you’d expect from Glance/XL, and it’s offered for free by Millware in one version (www.millware.com). To be fair, this version that I looked over was 00.00.18, which has minimal functionality compared to what will be offered eventually. The functionality is so limited that 38 of the 61 items in the Help system were labeled “NOT YET IMPLEMENTED.” But still, it’s out there as a free download to whet your appetite, and make you want to pony up the bucks for the full-blown version (available real soon now).

Installation is quite simple, although I had some problems getting a connection established. Millware support was quick and helpful in solving my problem.

The real interface is one of those ubiquitous listener jobs, running in background on your system. I currently have 18 running on my system, but I can’t complain, since their impact on performance is minimal. Once you get the job running, you just need to create a connection in the GUI, start up TheDash, and you’re able to keep an eye on the system without interrupting that important game of Tetris.

A performing dashboard

The actual GUI does, in fact, look like a dashboard. On the left are the displays, three dials, five bar graphs and four indicators below them (think of them as the ‘idiot lights’ on TheDash of that Plymouth your parents let you take to college). The right side of TheDash, aside from some items on the top launch bar appears to be ‘reserved for future use.’ And the center, well, we’ll talk about that.

The dials monitor the CPU, response time, and disc activity. The dials give an indication of the situation with each of these resources. The idiot lights below the dials are labeled ‘Response’,‘CPU’, ‘Disc’ and ‘Memory’. If any of these resources becomes critical, the responding light will turn yellow or red (see the driving theme again). The bar graphs on the left show transaction launches per second and memory faults per transaction launch to allow you to gauge how busy the system is and whether there is potential for a memory problem. Bar charts on the right show the number of jobs, sessions and processes in comparison to the current system limit. None of the thresholds used are configurable in this downloadable, free version.

The right side of TheDash lists Ecometry, MM/3000, PM/3000 and Adager — no doubt ‘hooks’ for other interfaces and functions in future releases. The launch bar has hooks to Adager (which were not functional) and ScreenJet, Millware’s product to allow you to convert View/3000 and VPlus screens to true GUI screens. You need to have that ScreenJet software on your system to get that to run, also. The most interesting launch bar feature is a green circle. It took me a while to figure out that was how you changed the polling TheDash would do on your system.

The one functioning feature I found most helpful was a display of the top five busiest processes on your system. As I was writing this, I noticed a job was using over 90 percent of my CPU and I could tell one of my programmers had moved the job into the C queue. It also came in quite handy as I tried to see which processes were keeping the job from getting its slice.

The drop-down menus and the Web site show future features including account management, operator functions, a hardware configuration GUI, and even the ability to manage queues and time slices dynamically. Glance/XL can be a bit intimidating to handle these chores, possibly to make them hard so only those who know what they’re doing will fool with them. TheDash will give the neophyte system manager the ability to better manage a 3000 — I hope they don’t really screw it up!

License and pricing

Now we need to talk about center of TheDash. On the version I tested, it had text telling me to “Upgrade now! 14 module bundle* - $50. Special offer $20 until end October. Www.millware.com *80 value - see Website for details.” I bring this up because of something buried in the Millware Web site. To download anything, you must register as a user. As part of this registration, you must accept “Registration Terms and Conditions.” Buried in that text at Paragraph 2 (Provision of Technical Support Services), item (h) states “Millware reserves the right to deliver advertising with the Services.”

Does this mean that center area of TheDash will carry pop-up ads? Will we be getting visual spam along with our system status?

As noted in the October issue of the NewsWire, it is possible that a site whose 3000 has an unlimited MPE user license could pay $40,000 (at the advertised sale price) to $100,000 (at full price) for their software. And then somewhere down the road you start getting pop-up ads? I certainly hope not, but by clicking ‘Submit’ without reading the fine print, it looks like that’s just what you could be getting!

There’s another difference. You do not purchase the product and pay support/maintenance costs thereafter. The Web site’s pricing policy states, “We charge an initial two-year fee, renewable annually for each additional year.” So taking the best-price scenario on my unlimited-user license 987, I’d pay $40,000 for the first two years and then $20,000 a year thereafter. That’s a 10-year investment of $200,000.

This is a new concept to me in software pricing for the 3000. I’m used to a big up-front cost, followed by about 15 percent of the purchase price each year, forever after, for support. Support of Glance/XL costs me $636 a year, so TheDash’s pricing might be a tough sell for my management!

TheDash has potential to provide a better interface to handle some tedious functions on your e3000. But at first look, its pricing policy still has this system manager keeping the checkbook closed.

Steve Hammond is a system manager for a trade association in Washington, D.C. who has been working with HP 3000s for 18 years and is chairman of the SIGPrint special interest group.