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systems from the same vendor, as it is assumed that these systems have seen a priori more testing time and are thus more reliable than any multi-vendor combination has seen/would be. Should there be a problem, it is also a lot easier and faster to get support from a vendor, when he can't first try and blame the other vendors box, or the translator in between. Here, again, risk management... While the lock-in is indeed a bad thing, it is still considered the lesser evil, compared to the effort needed to do q/a testing in mixed systems on nation-size scale plus R&D for the translators plus battling for support with N competing vendors, all blaming each other. This is the oh-so-familiar argument on why many companies use exclusively Microsoft, or everything Apple, etc... Just my 0.05 chf on why translators did not happen... (yet?) Cheers, Thomas --=20 Excercise 17: If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand we'd be so simple we couldn't understand. Prove this by induction.