Slashdot Mirror

I guess they need a blue penguin.

They have one.

There's also the mobile realm, where I don't think IBM has even stepped foot in.

The IBM JVM is used in mobiles. Lenovo (part owned by IBM) has/had a cellphone division.

I think they want some of these really.

Well, I wouldn't mind one or two to play with.

(For those not interested in following the link, it's a blade style pizza-box server with dual (next-gen)Cell and up to 32GB of RAM)

Are we still at the point where we can't get hold of Cell processors for machines specifically designed for this sort of task?

I haven't checked the details yet, but I was told that IBM QS21 is Cell based blade system

They shoul have repeated Chinese, not Italian. From IBM's site: "...It can convert English to and from Arabic, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish."

http://www.research.ibm.com/daisy/

You're still running a RS/6000? The rest of the world moved to the P Series years ago.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/

Get with the times already :)

Sybase? I think you mean MSSQL. Also, the Eclipse IDE actually has some capability for .NET development now. This can easily be used with open version control solutions. It may not be good for developers who are doing large projects, but for anyone developing plug-ins for office apps or something similar it's not too bad.

Linux has been ported to various non-x86 architectures. See: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-nonx86.html

And some folks have even ported a Linux subset to 8086. See: http://elks.sourceforge.net/FAQ-English.html

Still, it would be quite a small subset to fit on the 4004. Being so small, you could consider it a subset of virtually any OS.

I haven't tried it, but it exists.Have fun

Or try finding information about IBM's operating system for System i boxes.

The OS is called "i".

http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/hacking397.html

There's your proof that your engineers are indeed total fucking morons.

We're VERY vulnerable to this. Slashdot reported on this a year or two ago - http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/hacking397.html

IBM researchers were able to gain control of the controls of a nuclear power plant from the outside.

GET OUR FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE OFF THE INTERNET!

a much more credible report, IMO because they are at least honest about their methodology and the weaknesses or strengths of how to look at different data: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/iss/xforce/trendreports/xforce-2008-annual-report.pdf

Nitpick, but reference counting isn't the ony form of garbage collection out there. Reference counting is actaully fairly attractive as you get very incremental collection , not simply your application freezing dead while you examine the entire heap (as android does currently, and Go's current collector).

Also, IBM's Recycler which they are proposing was designed by David Bacon. Some of his more recent work is on hard-real time collectors for Java.
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/metronome.index.html

Finally, using the MMU on a cpu to assist with garbage collection is generally a disaster. Your program needs to be able to inspect and modify it's own page tables, or you're using the memory fault mechanism to allow the collector to progress. The first is a security + OS nightmare, and the second tends to be very slow.

>A lot of cloud APIs don't allow full relational database access,

if you mean stuff like this, its for the good reason that yr data might actually be all over the place. cloud data access strategies are necessarily different.

I think I've heard of non-relational databases before. There's a particularly famous one, in fact. What could it be? Let's see: first started shipping in 1969, now in its eleventh major version, JDBC and ODBC access, full XML support in and out, available with an optional paired transaction manager, extremely high performance, and holds a very large chunk of the world's financial information (among other things). It also ranks up there with Microsoft Windows as among the world's all-time highest grossing software products.

....You bet non-relational is still highly relevant and useful in many different roles. Different tools for different jobs and all.

The standard way to remove setuid requirements from ping is to implement the capabilities API, which was finally done in 2.6.26 even though the basic idea goes back to the 2.1 kernel in 1998. A good intro is available from IBM.

$130 million to IBM is like me paying for my friend's lunch. It really is not a lot of money to IBM. If the amount was $10-20 billion, that would be more tempting. Also doesn't IBM sell AMD based servers? Yes they do here:
http://www.ibm.com/systems/hardware/browse/amdpro/index.html

This should give some insight into the problems with Linux and how it could be addressed: for all it's strengths, it's not something people want. They want Windows, despite it's weaknesses. Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.

The problem with Linux's market share is that few PCs sold in stores come with Linux installed. And not many people have heard of Linux. Sure geeks and hackers on Slashdot have but they are not the typical computer user. Also most people do not necessarily want Window but think they need it. Talking with others about computers I've heard a lot of complaints about their PCs, and almost every tyme the problem is Windows. When I ask them if they thought of trying Linux or a Mac I'm asked if they can run MS Office, they say they have to have Office. When asked why they can not give an example of what only Office can do except Office macros, while Open Office can use Excel macros macros for Word have to be rewritten. There is also WordPerfect Office, Lotus SmartSuite, and other office suites.

Simply many people have the perception they need Windows because they need MS Office.

Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.

Fact is is no one knows what Linux's market share is. Estimates are Linux has a market share in the single digits on desktops with Linux, and Apache, having large shares of servers. Even with internal servers though it's hard to know how many MS Windows servers there are because IT departments of businesses and other users of servers switch from Windows and IIS to Linux and Apache without telling others. There have been articles linked to on Slashdot about how the London and New York Stock Exchanges have moved from MS Windows and .net to Linux and other open source platforms. The London Stock Exchange not only switched to Linux but actually bought the company that developed the trading system the exchange will use.

Falcon

The real question though is, if it makes sense to switch why doesn't everyone do it?

You have to know an alternative exists before you can use it, that is unless someone else sets it up for you.

As you've pointed out, people wont switch unnecessarily.*

No I said people shouldn't switch unnecessarily, not that they don't. Some will upgrade if not switch even though they don't need to. A lot of software companies depend on that, software upgrades.

If open office is a perfect substitute for office, and if its switching costs are equivalent or lower than those of switching from office 2003 to office 2007 (a logical inference of your earlier points) why have we not seen a massive migration away from the expensive commercial product?

Besides the reason above there's FUD. Even of those who have heard of Open Office, I'd bet most think it can't do all they need or want to do. A big complaint I've heard is that the person wants compatibility and Open Office isn't compatible. Personally I have not found that to be true. I had one problem opening a Word 2007, .xdoc, document and someone else suggested I install the newest version. After I did the doc opened fine. However I have not opened complex spread sheets or documents using a lot of macros.

Also it's not all about ease of use or compatibility either. If that was it then people would be using WordPerfect Office or Lotus SmartSuite. Simply MS used anti-competitive business tactics.

Falcon

What you are probably unaware of is that Lenovo provides the Base Software Administrator which lets you define exactly what goes on in a system software recovery. Behind the scenes it merely places a text file in the recovery partition that sets what components are installed during a recovery. You can exclude all of what you consider crapware. They also have software on that page to make your own packages so they can be placed in the recovery partition. Finally they provide the means to run your own software update servers.

False dichotomy. If people want OS X but don't want to run it on Apple's hardware, then it's better for Apple to stay in the software business and pull out of the hardware business.

And what of the false dichotomy of giving up hardware for software? That would be an even faster road to bankruptcy, look at BeOS. Microsoft has been pretty successful at killing compeating OSes with the exception of OS X and Linux. I seriously doubt MS would hesitate if Apple were to start selling licenses to OS X to OEMs. Apple would be compeating right on MS's turf. Right now though Apple makes it easy to install and use MS Windows, Apple even sells Windows as well as VMWare. Microsoft even threatened Apple with discontinuing MS Office for Macs, and as much as geeks, hackers, and slashdotters may not like to admit it most people only think of MS Office when it comes to office suites. I know there are alternatives, I use NeoOffice the native Mac port of Open Office. Apple has released it's own office suite, I would be surprised if wasn't because of the threat. IBM still sells Lotus. But how many people know of these?

Falcon

Now compare that with some other companies:

http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pu/publications.aspx#p=1&ps=36&so=0&sb=d&fr=&to=&fd=&td=&rt=&f=ms&a=&pn=&pa=&pd=

http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/recent (last 30 days!)

http://www.parc.com/publications/

http://research.nokia.com/

Two conference publications by Apple employee is a joke for a company the size of Apple. Apple doesn't even have a site where they show their research.

(Apple used to have a research lab with real researchers and publications in the 1990's, but they closed it.)

And the poster session is not the output of R&D by Apple, it's people talking about using Apple products in their work.

If they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance.

But they aren't Rational. Rational is owned by IBM.

IBM is mainly a hardware vendor, and I see no problem with them competing on that level and reletively little for the software. Will IBM machines force users to keep Ubuntu installed and keep other OS installs off of their machines?

Wrong. And getting more wrong every year. IBM is now mainly a services and software company. Service and software generate at least four times the revenue than from systems and technology.

Here it is.

e.g. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/biography/10068.wss

[In case their scrubbers find this bio] "Robert W. Moffat, Jr.
Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Systems and Technology Group

Full biography

Robert W. Moffat, Jr. is senior vice president and group executive, IBM Systems and Technology Group. Named to this position in July 2008, Mr. Moffat is responsible for all IBM hardware offerings as well as the microelectronics division, which translates IBM research and development into semiconductor solutions for IBM systems and OEM clients. In addition, the company’s integrated supply chain operations, which include global manufacturing, procurement and customer fulfillment, report to him.

Mr. Moffat was senior vice president, Integrated Operations. In this cross-functional role created in July 2005, he led an initiative to transform and integrate the company’s supply chain and service delivery operations globally, leveraging new business process designs and advanced technology to achieve greater levels of efficiency while improving IBM's market responsiveness.

Prior to that, Mr. Moffat was senior vice president and group executive of IBM's Personal and Printing Systems Group, where he was responsible for worldwide sales, development, manufacturing and marketing of Personal Computers, Printing Systems and Retail Store Solutions. Before that, he was vice president, finance and planning for the Enterprise Systems Group.

Mr. Moffat has held a number of executive positions at IBM, including general manager of manufacturing, fulfillment and procurement initiatives for the PC business. He led the team that pioneered the Advanced Fulfillment Initiative, and channel collaboration initiatives, which were awarded the 1999 Franz Edelman Award, the highest recognition for achievement in operational research and management sciences, and supply chain management.

His other positions at IBM, since joining in 1978, included assistant general manager, finance, planning, and business support for the IBM PC Company in Europe, and vice president of finance and planning.

Mr. Moffat is a member of the IBM Performance Team and the IBM Corporate Operations Team. He serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for The Manufacturing Institute, an educational and research affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers. He is also a non-voting observer on the Board of Directors of Lenovo Group Limited.

Mr. Moffat is a graduate of Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a B.S. degree in Economics. He also holds an MBA in Management Information Systems from Iona College in New Rochelle, New York.

July 2008"

You're right, I was able to find it: here. The link was removed, but the page is there.

I have no idea about the Android JVM, but in a regular Java JVM object creation is actually significantly faster than malloc. This article is quite old, but shows that even back in 1.4.2 days it was nothing to be scared of.

IBM has done some research into this: http://domino.watson.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/0/e7437d40ec477c7385257100007be30a?OpenDocument

Supposedly, it was even able to handle missiles crossing regions.

When you say accessed, do you mean accessed or accessed quickly?

As far as I know, there's no direct way to share memory across nodes. Of course, strictly speaking any node can access any memory location in the computer using a combination of MPI and local memory access, but that's no longer a simple pointer dereference, and isn't related to the size of a pointer.

If you're curious about the details of this computer, IBM's documentation is here: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247287.pdf

They need to have same lesson which Nokia had with Cabir worm resulting in billions of dollars of brand value loss and users still getting robbed by AV vendors for non existent threat. Cabir was just a first warning and Nokia took it very serious and fast, coming up with their Symbian Signed initiative which has _nothing_ to do with apple app store.

Of course, I don't believe you can code such deep level running utility such as AV on an OS named "WebOS". So, malware will be there and protection won't. Palm shows every kind of example how you shouldn't try to race with Apple. They stupidly ignore what Nokia does and did to stay afloat.

This is what you do if you don't want to be Apple and yet have App Store: https://www.symbiansigned.com/ or a way more secure thing fits excellently to their "WebOS" http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wireless/library/wi-secj2me.html (code signing part)

http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a .pdf with a huge list of ebook sites (and one for how to swear in all languages!). Haven't tried any of them, but go for it:
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww

Lotus Notes and Lotus iNotes are 2 different client products that both use the same backend Domino services. LotusLive iNotes is neither Lotus Notes nor Lotus iNotes. LotusLive iNotes is based on the OutBlaze product built on top of MySQL and Linux and does not use the Domino backend.

LotusLive iNotes screenshot: https://www.lotuslive.com/en/services/inotes
Lotus iNotes screenshot: http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/inotes

> It's just yet another technology invented in a lab for academics' sake.

Yeah, and what's that ever given us?

http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~ianb/history/
http://www.research.ibm.com/about/past_history.shtml
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards.shtml
http://www.parc.com/about/milestones.html ...

> It's just yet another technology invented in a lab for academics' sake.

Yeah, and what's that ever given us?

http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~ianb/history/
http://www.research.ibm.com/about/past_history.shtml
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards.shtml
http://www.parc.com/about/milestones.html ...

Companies exist to make money. They'd better be concerned about "that financial stuff."

It's nice if they can pay nice salaries, provide insurance, and pay taxes. Sometimes it's necessary to have good employees and keep the government off your back.

From IBM's Certificate of Incorporation:
Article Two - Purpose and powers The purpose of the Corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized and to exercise powers granted under the Business Corporation Law of the State of New York, provided that the Corporation shall not engage in any act or activity requiring the consent or approval of any state official, department, board, agency, or other body without such consent or approval first being obtained.

Which really doesn't tell you anything, but there's not any mention of existing to try to employ people with nice salaries and insurance.

I'm curious, DARPA, IBM and Lucent were working on proprietary holographic storage medium solutions. HDSS exerpt (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDSS):

"During CES 2006, a workable holographic drive was tested and stored 300 GB of memory compared to blu-ray's 100 GB. It has been announced that hologram disks will be a post-blu-ray storage device."

I'm just curious since IBM was one of the groups working on this technology if there have been any advances that apply to the main article.

From the IBM website http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/rsc.holo.html:

"Unique to holographic data storage is the ability to perform essentially immediate data searches through huge digital libraries by simply illuminating the media with all of the stored information (a holograph) with a pattern of the requested information."

Why aren't we hearing more about this?

reference links

TwistedStorage

XTreemFS

Tahoe

XAM

GPFS

Honestly, there really aren't that many unsolved problems in computing if you are sufficiently aware enough to include mainframes and mainframe operating disciplines in your consideration. The basic way the mainframe community solved this particular problem long ago was to, first, take a holistic view about mitigating data loss. Double concurrent spindle failures are just one possible risk element. What about, for example, an entire data center exploding in a spectacular fireball? (Or whatever.) IBM, for example, came up with several different flavors of GDPS and continues to refine them, and they include multiple approaches to data storage tiering across geographies, depending on what you're trying to achieve. Data loss, whether physical or otherwise (such as security breaches), is not a particular problem with this class of technology and associated IT discipline, nor does there seem to be any signs of a growing problem in this particular technology class.

VM/CMS is very much alive and well, thank you. It is now known as z/VM and runs on the IBM z series mainframes ...

http://www.vm.ibm.com/

You can even run Linux in z/VM virtual machines now as well as CMS.

There is an emulator available, called Hercules ...

http://www.hercules-390.org/

And an old VM/CMS is available for free, with source ...

http://www.cbttape.org/vm6.htm

What IBM needs to do now is make a new version of DB2 that's fully software-compatible with the Oracle API

See here and here for example.

The Oracle compatibility feature will enable Oracle applications to run natively on DB2. In discussions with Gartner, reference customers tell us that DB2 runs 95% or more of Oracle-specific functionality found in SQL statements and natively runs PL/SQL, Oracle's stored procedure language. This is native functionality; it is not an emulator, nor does it require changes to the application code (other than the 5%, which is mostly minor functionality, not found in many applications).

Having said that, and while it is a worthy and very valuable feature, there is more than compatibility in play when trying to pitch a change in DB engine.

they can't upgrade to the newest multi-core processor hardware because Oracle's licensing costs are so expensive.

Not only that, but Oracle applies modifiers according to the processor type. This is in principle not something odd: it makes sense to differentiate per CPU type given the sometimes staggering difference in terms of processing capacity (IBM does the same with the PVU-based pricing). However, given the Oracle acquisition of Sun this could mean that Oracle will tilt the modifiers even more (last time I checked Sun cores had a 0.25 modifier value, the lowest of the lot).

"Not long ago, IBM's standard word processor was Lotus WordPro."

Still available as part of SmartSuite:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/smartsuite/wordprofeatures.html

Not like IBM's "version" of OpenOffice is free. Its proprietary and costs you money...

http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/nochargesearch.jsp?cat=&q0=&pf=&k=ALL&pn=&pid=&rs=&S_TACT=104CBW71&status=Active&S_CMP=&b=&sr=1&q=symphony+1.3&ibm-search=Search

* * * * *

I'd horse whip you, if I only had a horse!
—Groucho Marx

I downloaded Lotus Symphony for free off of their website. I had to give them my email address, but it didn't cost me money. It is definitely proprietary, however, and in my experience it really doesn't do anything that OpenOffice.org doesn't already do. But it does support open formats, and if enough big companies like IBM promote ODF and things like that, it might make it easier for non-Microsoft office suites to compete in the market and share data with each other.

This goes far beyond IBM's employees. Many other large organizations are strongly influenced by IBM still. In my work as a process improvement consultant, I have seen many people using the Lotus environment, particularly in financial institutions. Does this mean that they too will start using ODF?

If they use Lotus Symphony, they are using ODF already!

Storing sessions in memory cached in a single server, with a router to get you to the right server, backed by a clustered database seems like a good solution

No, it doesn't. It sounds like a mediocre solution.

The proper solution is to replicate sessions across servers.

Tell me, should blunt lying be modded down?

Printer drivers should NOT need to be in the fricking kernel to work!

Give me example of printer driver in the kernel. CUPS for instance live in userland. And you CAN just give proprietary drivers.

It is just that if manufacturers care enough about Linux, they usually care enough to make open drivers.

Apple's detractors consider the company to be a bunch of control freaks, which is true, but that's exactly why their user interfaces are so consistent and usability is so high. Their mania for controlling every aspect of the user's experience has an upside and a downside.

And the downside lies clearly in usefulness. The problem of Apple's website is that, in maintaining cleanliness and consistency, they sacrificed the actual *information* on their webpages, besides their self-serving marketing.

No, Microsoft's isn't any better, as it somehow manages to be both cluttered *and* useless at the same time. But a website that's both consistent, usable, and most importantly *useful* is that of IBM, in particular DeveloperWorks. Of course, that's probably a result of both having competent developers *and* regularly running surveys to rate the usability of the website, something I've never seen at either Apple or Microsoft.