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It is still wasted space and adds considerable thickness to the phone, not to mention making it more fragile, both to impact and liquids. Above all though, there are much better input methods for a handheld device than a shrunken conventional keyboard!

Most of the people who are attached to physical keyboards are simply creatures of habit. Unfortunately, existing physical and virtual keyboards (as on the iPhone) are targeted at people who are averse to change, even if they are both far from optimal.

One of the main problems with AIX is learning AIX. ... How the hell do you learn AIX except at an AIX shop? And how do you get into an AIX shop if you don't have experience? IBM and AIX have no community engagement. It's all golf buddies and three martini lunches with expense accounts.

You're fucking hilarious. I thank you sincerely for the LOL.

AIX is UNIX, so if you know UNIX, you're better than halfway there (I'd suspect!). And besides the third party training materials (google AIX training), IBM has training materials

(source)

Abstract Machine Test Utility for Linux Common Criteria Certificate
Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) is an administrative utility to check whether the underlying protection mechanism of the hardware are still being enforced.

AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications
AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications contains a collection of open source and GNU software built for AIX 5L for IBM pSeries systems and IBM RS/6000.

Ami - Korean Input Method
Korean IMS (Input Method System) Ami.

Anaconda
Anaconda is the installation program for Red Hat distributions.

Apache
Home of the Apache Web server and several dozen related projects.

Apache Ant
Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool.

Apache APR
Apache Portable Runtime

Apache Cocoon
A Web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based Web development.

Apache DB project
Open source database solutions

Apache Directory
The Apache Directory project aims to produce a high-performance and production-quality LDAP server written in Java.

Apache Excalibur
Excalibur's primary product is a lightweight, embeddable Inversion of control container named Fortress that is written in Java code.

Apache Forrest
Apache Forrest is an XML standards-oriented documentation framework based upon Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images, and other resources.

Apache Geronimo
Apache Geronimo is the J2EE server project of the Apache Software Foundation. The aim of the project is to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open-source, certified J2EE server that: is licensed under the Apache License, passes Sun's TCK for J2EE 1.4, and reuses the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today, with new ASF code to complete the J2EE stack.

Apache Gump
Apache's continuous integration tool

Apache HTTP Server
The Apache project develops and maintains an open-source HTTP server for various modern desktop and server operating systems.

Apache Jakarta
A diverse set of open source Java solutions

Apache James
The Apache Java Enterprise Mail Server (Apache James) is a 100% pure Java SMTP and POP3 Mail server and NNTP News server. James was designed to be a complete and portable enterprise mail engine solution based on currently available open protocols.

Apache Lenya
Apache Lenya is an Open Source Java/XML Content Management System and comes with revision control, site management, scheduling, search, WYSIWYG editors, and workflow.

Apache Logging Services
Cross-language logging services for purposes of application debugging and auditing.

Apache Maven
Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

Apache mod_Perl
mod_perl brings together the full power of the Perl programming language and the Apache HTTP server

Apache Portals
Apache Portals is a collaborative software development project dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, and freely available portal-related software on a variety of platforms and programming languages.

Apache SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures.

Apache Struts
The goal of the Apache Struts project is to encourage application architectures based on the "Model 2" approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. Under Model 2, a servlet (or equivalent) manages business logic execution, and presentation logic resides mainly in server pages.

So, goto *f() is a no-no (as is probably &&a)

Lets follow the citation about computed goto in C/C++ found in Wikipedia.

Macs have a history of having far less vulnerabilities than Windows.

From IBM research: IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force® 2008 Trend & Risk Report

Look under "most vulnerable operating system". Yes, right at the top, for several years going sits OS X. It actually consistently experiences 3 times the number of vulnerabilities compared to Vista.

You can also do some secunia digging yourself. It shows the same tendency even in the raw data.

OS X may be less exploited but it has far more vulnerabilities. On top of that OS X lacks many of the anti-exploit mechanisms found in both common Linux distros and in Windows Vista.

Vulnerabilities does not have much to do with exploits. A single vulnerability may leads to several independant exploits. Many vulnerabilities will pass unexploited. The difference is incentive. And if pwn2own has showed us anything it certainly confirms this. Macs have consistently been the first to fall, literally within seconds.

The IBM 353 Disk Storage Unit used in the IBM 7030 in 1961 had a capacity of (2^21) 72-bit words (64 data bits and 8 ECC).
I happen to think that the early drives set a precendent which has value, and don't appreciate what the modern disc manufacturers are doing. It's worse than dumbing down; because it's lying.
Have non-computer people learned anything about computers since the Apple II? Maybe not. Why not? Because the people from the 1970's that founded personal computer companies with the paradigm that computers were alien and mysterious rocket science to the consumers of the 1970's are still in charge, instead of younger people who might allow computer users to grow up.
There is a page with good pictures of their earlier drive, the 350, here: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html

The point of the research is that nothing so far has come close to creating images of molecules this detailed before. We've seen poorly-resolved images of polymers and macromolecules like C60, and we've seen images of individual atoms on surfaces; hell, we've even seen standing electron waves on metal surfaces, but we've never been able to image a molecule quite like this before. This is one of those science pictures I see every once in a while that just takes my breath away. Amazing work.

A lot of microscopy like this will be done using very carefully prepared atomically smooth surfaces. A good example would be Cu(111). I haven't' dug in, but they might also work with something akin to the "depth of field" in optical work to largely exclude the effect of the background.

Impressive, so in 1989 they were able to image atoms, and only 2 decades later they already went on to molecules?

Just imagine what we'll see another twenty years from now! At Moore's law speed, we might even see cameras able to take images of macroscopic objects in our lifetime!

Are there people out there who have more than 4GB of memory but still run old 32b operating systems?

Yes.

(In all fairness, though, we don't have more than 4GB of memory per processor.)

IBM would not last a month if it were prohibited from selling products or services in the United States.

A few minutes with Google suggests otherwise.

"At the beginning of 2009, 71% of IBM's nearly 400,000 employees are working overseas - a 65% increase from two years prior." http://seekingalpha.com/article/131421-ibm-s-broad-global-presence-should-boost-q1-earnings

"IBM cut U.S. workforce by 6,000 while adding 18,000 overseas in 2008" http://localtechwire.com/business/local_tech_wire/news/story/4783439/

"IBM is aggressively selling to small businesses and local governments around the world." http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2009/01/22/ibm-is-dead-long-live-ibm.aspx

"Not so gradually over the next five to 10 years, the 70/30 split between domestic and foreign investment could invert, resulting in an optimal placement of 70 percent of U.S. investment capital in international ventures."
http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/financialservices/us/detail/resource/B069979J37301Z69.html

Because of exceptions, credits, deductions, depreciation and amortization, plus a little lawful and unlawful income shifting, tax deferments and shelters, the effective rate paid by corporations in the US (13.4%) was below the average (16.1%) for the 19 OECD nations in 2000-05. So, sure, lower the tax rate and close off the deductions, then watch those very sources have a collective heart attack.

IBM's effective tax rate varies between: 26 to 28%. If it is so easy to pay 13.4% why isn't IBM doing so?

You're misinformed. Have a look at page 9 of the quarterly results presentation here: http://www.ibm.com/investor/2q09/presentation/2q09.pdf

Perhaps the parent comment should have been rated funny, the zombie simulator at kevan.org is a model of a city where humans are getting infected. However, the work by Kephart and White is prior art which wasn't cited. However, the models used in this paper are pretty standard fare for population dynamics and epidemiological modeling, and use the classical simplifying modeling by treating the population as continuous (i.e. they aren't using a discrete individual based modeling approach). Additionally, these are homogeneous mixing models (every host can reach every other host with equal intensity). I'll need to look closer, they did ask an interesting question about how to model a system where some of the infected machines are repaired, I'm not sure that this is truly novel (Bilogists have Susceptible Infective, Susceptible Infective Removed models and Susceptible Infective Removed Susceptible models) so this may be old hat.

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/percentage-of-dependence-of-us-agric
A huge percentage of US crops require bees for pollination.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/si...cid=MIGR-64409

Because I want the garantee that the garbage is collected the moment the last reference is gone. I hope you understand why that garantee is critical

In that case, you want reference counting with cycle detection, rather than mark and sweep, but you do need garbage collection.

No. That would only be the case if I did not have a clear owner for my object... a rare case, and one that would be better addressed by mark and sweep.

The static analysis required to do this in any program involving passing pointers to shared libraries is not possible in the general case.

Really? Depends on what you *mean* with a pointer. There is no requirement that a pointer is a memory address for pointer arithmetics to be possible.

Runtime analysis of instrumented real-world programs (see the LtU archives for an interesting paper on this subject) has demonstrated that there is often a significant delay between the last time the contents of an object is accessed or modified and the time the last reference is destroyed in programs employing manual memory management. This is due to the fact that a developer has to be very conservative about deallocations, destroying the object after the last time it might be needed, rather than after the last time it is needed.

I think that just illustrates that releasing memory instantly is not a priority for most; a fact which makes GC a useful tool for memory management at all (unlike most other resources)

Surely, we can do better than Djikstra for GC? I haven't actually implemented as memory graph, but surely you can get a better heuristic than h(v)=0?

As a place to start, there's nothing better than Djikstra.

Of course there is. E.g, the a mark+sweep looks several times through the same graph... surely there is information that can be exploited in that, possibly using a derivate of A* or similar. Just guessing here, as I said I have never dabbled in that application of graph theory. I agree though that Djikstra is an excellent place to start: robust, easy to understand and performs reasonable.

For modern techniques I'd recommend looking at the work done at IBM's T J Watson lab in the last few years, in particular their paper on a unified theory of garbage collection. The same group has published a number of interesting papers since then, in particular a very efficient cycle detection algorithm and a concurrent version of the same.

Yeah, but how many cycles does a well-designed program have? Mine tends to "0". Thus I can design a very efficient cycle detection algorithm without those papers at all :P

That garantee is too expensive with a garbage collector, since every deallocation (or perhaps smarter, every allocation) would have to do a graph-walk of some kind.

If you read the paper I mentioned above, you'll see that you only need a graph walk when you decrement a reference counter and the don't free the object.

Eh, that was what I meant, except the bit about "not free the object..." which I just overlooked. Not what I wrote, I see. My apologies

You can defer this and in a later paper the team runs the cycle detector in a separate thread and in many cases this results in the object's reference count reaching zero before the cycle detector needs to run.

But that is just not good enough! I need that object deleted *now*, not sometimes later... something I get for *free* with stack based allocation, single ownership and shared ownership. And never have I needed anything besides those three (most common first). And considering a well-designed program needs to consider ownership *anyway* to avoid clashes and raceconditions among other things, GC gains me nothing but pain. Which is why I have moved away from GC-languages over to languages which support a richer set of allocation methods.

Because I want the garantee that the garbage is collected the moment the last reference is gone. I hope you understand why that garantee is critical

In that case, you want reference counting with cycle detection, rather than mark and sweep, but you do need garbage collection. The static analysis required to do this in any program involving passing pointers to shared libraries is not possible in the general case. Runtime analysis of instrumented real-world programs (see the LtU archives for an interesting paper on this subject) has demonstrated that there is often a significant delay between the last time the contents of an object is accessed or modified and the time the last reference is destroyed in programs employing manual memory management. This is due to the fact that a developer has to be very conservative about deallocations, destroying the object after the last time it might be needed, rather than after the last time it is needed.

Surely, we can do better than Djikstra for GC? I haven't actually implemented as memory graph, but surely you can get a better heuristic than h(v)=0?

As a place to start, there's nothing better than Djikstra. For modern techniques I'd recommend looking at the work done at IBM's T J Watson lab in the last few years, in particular their paper on a unified theory of garbage collection. The same group has published a number of interesting papers since then, in particular a very efficient cycle detection algorithm and a concurrent version of the same.

That garantee is too expensive with a garbage collector, since every deallocation (or perhaps smarter, every allocation) would have to do a graph-walk of some kind.

If you read the paper I mentioned above, you'll see that you only need a graph walk when you decrement a reference counter and the don't free the object. You can defer this and in a later paper the team runs the cycle detector in a separate thread and in many cases this results in the object's reference count reaching zero before the cycle detector needs to run.

This does exist as a browser plugin for Google Calendar: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-googlecal/

Thank you for your sale of Blue Gene/P to Russia.

Yours In Novosibirsk.
K. Trout

You mean like this where IBM ported a bunch of Linux development tools to AIX so that more people would develop apps for their proprietary system?

You miss the point, IBM also give lots of other stuff to OSS as well as the stuff you mentioned to make their proprietary systems work better. Microsoft doesn't.

It's also important to note that in both of the cases where they've done this, the contribution wasn't a general "here's some improvements" code, it was "here is some code which would allow you to work better with our proprietary services, so more people would be willing to use those."

You mean like this where IBM ported a bunch of Linux development tools to AIX so that more people would develop apps for their proprietary system?

You could also make a case for COBOL.

It's called something else.

Good to see that the users of /. are completely biased against Microsoft no matter what they do.

Not everyone is biased, your comment got moderated insightful didn't it ?

This Microsoft = Evil crap gets really old after awhile.

I agree BUT, based on their history, it may be wise to look at what the motives for this move may be.

They are one of the most innovative companies ..

For things like virtualization and Hypervisor:

• the original hypervisor was CP/CMS, developed at IBM in the 1960s
• The major UNIX vendors, including Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, and SGI, have been selling virtualized hardware since before 2000
• As of late 2006, Solaris, Linux (Ubuntu and Gentoo), and FreeBSD have been ported to run on top of Hypervisor

Microsoft doesn't appear in the list until 2008, so they can hardly claim to be 'one of the most innovative companies' in this particular field.

.. and now they're trying to put out drivers for Linux under a license that guarantees they will be open and free

IF this is the case, then I agree, this move should be welcomed.

.. At every University they presented studies comparing open and closed source software.

Are you basing your statements on what the University studies said, or do you have personal experience of working with both open and closed source software yourself ?

Closed source wins on almost every level; fewer errors, quicker fixes, better performance.

As always your mileage may vary, and if this is what you have found then then this is good. This hasn't been my experience having working in IT developing both open source and closed source software. Many people find that closed source software does exactly what they need, which is fine by me. Best tool for the job and all that.

Open source is a great ideal but just because someone COULD go through and edit and contribute code doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors

Having worked in (closed source) commercial software for a number of years, I know from experience that the same applies there too. Wherever you are, priorities are subject to a cost benefit analysis.
Just becuse we COULD fix a bug, doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors, until an important customer notices it.

It could also be argued that Microsoft were able to contribute because the Linux kernel is open source. How many people have the opportunity to see and contribute to the code for the Windows kernel ?

.. very few people are going to sit day after day and produce quality code and products if they don't get paid for it ..

Indeed, and some of the best open source software is produced by people explicitly employed to do just that. By companies like IBM, Sun, Redhat, Oracle, Canonical ... and many many more. I am currently working on a project funded by the UK government to produce open source software for the science community to use.

Microsoft has contributed more to computing than any single company ..

Um, not convinced on that .. I suspect that companies like IBM might be a better contender for that title. Not only do they have a longer history and a wider range, they have also contributed some their patents to the community.

.. but everyone on this site just loves to hate them

there are only 2 other major OS makers who are publicly traded, that are in competition to RH

HPQ HP-UX
ORCL Solaris
IBM AIX
NOVL SUSE

Looks like Red Hat has plenty of competition. Red Hat's business performance selling support services for their distribution of linux has been outstanding and their inclusion in the S&P 500 is well deserved.

If you run your render farm on PowerPC's you can put their eieio instruction to good use!!!!!

And yeah, the GCN article sucks ass, but then journalists are pretty much computer illiterate and it doesn't help that they talk to managers and not the actual engineers.

So why has nobody bootstrapped themselves a bit by writing some libraries or extending/improving the language?

On IBM mainframes, there are the Language Environment (LE) callable services that provide a bit more functionality than native COBOL. Otherwise, most corporations write their own.

Or at least written a good editor. It's been around for a long time. Hasn't some bored guru written his own vi/emacs clone for it in the last 40 years?

There is an Eclipse-based product.

Or improved the compiler to make the errors easier to understand?

IBM reportedly asserts that the error messages from their Enterprise COBOL product are all self-explanatory. IBM's customers have varying opinions of that assertion.

Or addressed any of the other complaints I've seen upthread?

Seriously... Is there something about cobol that makes that effectively impossible?

Like what?

"no pointer/references" - COBOL has had pointers since the 1985 standard.

"low functionality" - What does that mean, specifically?

"[...] not only is all of your data global to your program, in a typical batch cycle all of the data is global to ALL of the programs" - The first part is as true as your application design makes it (you can have more than one program in a source code member (read: file) and it's your choice whether or not the data in the enclosing program is visible to the nested program(s). The second part is true in the same sense that all data in the database is global to an application. Again, if you design something badly, don't blame your tools.

Really, COBOL has its faults, but these aren't them.

"peculiar" "awful" "miserable" "weak" "arcane" - these are just people exhibiting a personal preference. No doubt there is (or was) a problem they needed to solve and COBOL was a bad fit. Or maybe they're just parroting what some instructor or TA told them.

Over the last couple of decades I've been paid to write code in a baker's dozen programming languages on a half-dozen operating systems. No matter which language I'm using, I always get to a point where I wish I could add in just a bit of another's features. I find the most important thing to remember is that different languages have different problem spaces in which they're appropriate.

So why has nobody bootstrapped themselves a bit by writing some libraries or extending/improving the language?

On IBM mainframes, there are the Language Environment (LE) callable services that provide a bit more functionality than native COBOL. Otherwise, most corporations write their own.

Or at least written a good editor. It's been around for a long time. Hasn't some bored guru written his own vi/emacs clone for it in the last 40 years?

There is an Eclipse-based product.

Or improved the compiler to make the errors easier to understand?

IBM reportedly asserts that the error messages from their Enterprise COBOL product are all self-explanatory. IBM's customers have varying opinions of that assertion.

Or addressed any of the other complaints I've seen upthread?

Seriously... Is there something about cobol that makes that effectively impossible?

Like what?

"no pointer/references" - COBOL has had pointers since the 1985 standard.

"low functionality" - What does that mean, specifically?

"[...] not only is all of your data global to your program, in a typical batch cycle all of the data is global to ALL of the programs" - The first part is as true as your application design makes it (you can have more than one program in a source code member (read: file) and it's your choice whether or not the data in the enclosing program is visible to the nested program(s). The second part is true in the same sense that all data in the database is global to an application. Again, if you design something badly, don't blame your tools.

Really, COBOL has its faults, but these aren't them.

"peculiar" "awful" "miserable" "weak" "arcane" - these are just people exhibiting a personal preference. No doubt there is (or was) a problem they needed to solve and COBOL was a bad fit. Or maybe they're just parroting what some instructor or TA told them.

Over the last couple of decades I've been paid to write code in a baker's dozen programming languages on a half-dozen operating systems. No matter which language I'm using, I always get to a point where I wish I could add in just a bit of another's features. I find the most important thing to remember is that different languages have different problem spaces in which they're appropriate.

There realt isn't a reason to "restart" an IBM mainframe. LPARS are IPL'd every few months if there is a major PTF or such going in. But that only happens a few times a year (depending on your use of the system). I've got 30+ years in on them and their reliabilty is incredivle In the past 7 years we've had 2 unscheduled IPLs that I can remember. Here is our next upgrade, scheduled to be put in in 2 weeks: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/news/announcement/20080226_annc.html
That would be the first time our mainframe has been completely shut down in years. The disk drives need to be recabled for the upgrade. And for those who want a car analogy, I don't have one. But I view the mainframe as a 747, *NIX as fighter jets, and Windows servers as prop planes. They all fly, but all have different purposes.

Right, "Type Erasure" means that none of the semantic information is preserved in the produced bytecode or metadata.

This has several problems, for example, the following is invalid in Java:

class Stack {
        T [] storage;

        Init ()
        {
              storage = new T [20];
        }
}

You might want to read "Generic Gotchas" for Java. There is no such problem with the C# version as they are first class citizens:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp01255.html

The implementation is so arcane that it requires documents like this encyclopedic FAQ:

http://www.angelikalanger.com/GenericsFAQ/JavaGenericsFAQ.html

Or even Sun's Ken Arnold stating that "Generics are a mistake":

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/arnold/archive/2005/06/generics_consid_1.html

None of this problems happen in C# and .NET.

I use a keyboard with an IBM trackpoint so i don't keep moving my right hand between keyboard and mouse.

It takes a little to get used to it, but it worth the try!

http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/healthycomputing/trkpnt.html

I heartily second this. I've been using Thinkpads (T-series) for the past 10 years. The trackpoint is great -- you can navigate quickly and precisely while keeping your hands on the keyboard. No batteries, wires, or desk space needed.

It sits in the center of the keyboard, between the G, H, and B keys, where you can reach it with either index finger. That puts your thumb right over the mouse buttons that are under the spacebar.

They corrected some early kinks with resistance and calibration, and the trackpoints work about perfectly now.

It's true that for mouse-heavy activities, like drawing or editing graphics, it still feels a bit more fluid to use a real mouse or a tablet -- I have a lovely Graphire-4 tablet with a pressure-sensitive pen. But I never seem to use them, because almost everything I do needs the keyboard too, and the context-switch slows me down too much compared to the trackpoint.

I use a keyboard with an IBM trackpoint so i don't keep moving my right hand between keyboard and mouse. It takes a little to get used to it, but it worth the try! http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/healthycomputing/trkpnt.html

There is for sure some free alternative out there, but on the off-the-self side non-free software, but for sure you cannot ignore IBM/Tivoli Netcool.

The Netcool suite have been purchased by IBM a few years ago. That portfolio came from Micromuse which was really telecom oriented. That suite can monitor easily the required 5000 nodes. Across the suite, there are multiple products that covers most of NMS needs from basinc alarm/stats collections such as receiving/parsing SNMP traps, SNMP pooling, node discovery; up to higher-level business requirement like alarm management, ajax or java GUI for alarm display; dashboarding, etc.

Feel free to have a look: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/sw-atoz/indexN.html

I think Jazz is a great technology and Team Concert is a wonderful tool. But the license model kills it. Dead on arrival. Not many companies are buying into it and here is why, and why you should not care either:

Three free user license are a joke. The free edition is useless except for student projects. It's just a marketing gag.

No edition includes free contributor licences needed for people reporting bugs. Say you have 1000 end users, you should buy contributer licences at $630 each. This make RTC useless for product companies.

Floating licenses are another pain point. They are not available for the free or the medium edition. They are only available in the $35k Standard edition.

Usually you get a discount if you buy more licenses. Not at IBM. If you seem to like the product and want more licenses, IBM inflicts massive financial pain on you. First, you can't use the free server for more than 10 developers. It is known to scale nicely beyond 70 users but it is artificially limited to max 10 users. Has IBM ever heard of volume discounts? Hello??? Sure, if you are Fortune 500 company you get 60-70% discounts but if you are not, you won't even get a sales guy talking to you, possibly giving you 5% when you kiss his feet.

If you want say >50 users, you need the 35k server. As if that would not be enough, the price of a developer license jumps from $1260 to $4k on the 35k server. If you go so far, IBM is so nice to offer you floating developer licenses at $7.1k each. A setup with 10 floating licenses is $115k. You still need contributor licenses for bug reporting at $630 or $2k floating.

Stop considering it. Look somewhere else. IBM does not want to sell it. Don't make a fool of yourself suggesting this to your boss.

IBM has a webcast explaining the license model in 10 minutes. 10 minutes!? Why can't the licence model be so simple that it can be explained in 30 seconds, e.g. like for the MS Team Foundation Server? Just take out all these pain points!

IBM also has a ROI calculator online. For my scenario I only got negative ROI. I truly respect that IBM has the guts to list the prices publicly on their website. No need to call an "IBM representative" and getting dragged into professional sales talk. At http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rtc/standard/ they list their brain-dead model. Other companies would be ashamed. The arrogance that IBM shows there makes many people hate IBM right away even if they like Jazz and Team Concert.

At that IBM page you can put all those licenses mentioned above in your shopping cart, say the $35k server, 100 developers, 100 contributors, and then pay with your credit card. Or print it for your boss. You get into the range of millions quicly. In a shopping cart! It's pretty funny. IBM has really lost any sense for reality.

Open-source anything? Nothing. You can get the OSLC specifications for free. That's all.

The Rational Requirements Composer is a nice tool as well and has a license model that is broken in a similar way as that of RTC. The licensing starts with three users for $33k. Not even a free edition.

About Erich, I think he is a nice guy and he did a great job. He's the #1 guy suffering from the Incredible Bullshit Machine around him.

Please, read this changelog:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/systems/support/system_x/ibm_fw_aacraid_5.2.0-15427_anyos_32-64.chg

If this doesn't make you fucking afraid of RAID controllers, i don't know what will :)

Separation of concerns is a concept in object-oriented (OO) software design that allows you to build more-modular applications. Modular applications are easier to maintain and add new features to. PHP's OO language features allow you to apply design concepts to build more robust, maintainable applications.

Exactly, and you could use something with a high density like molten lead in titanium pipes to move the heat off the chips. And by chips I mean a single piece of silicon 19" wide and 24" deep. That's going to be the only way to do it with today's tech.. I mean, according to this, the PowerXCell 8i die size is 212mm^2 and they do about 100GFLOPS each. So to hit 1PFLOP, which is 1000000GFLOPS, you'd need 10000x212mm or 212000cm^2 or 2120m^2 of silicon. The aforementioned 19x24" chips would be 2207cm^2 each so you'd need about 100 chips. You could probably do 100 in a rack. Each of these chips would be dissipating 9.6KW for a total of 960KW/PETAFLOP.

Starting with that as a basic design, you could build on it to increase the FLOPS per mm. And it'll have to start using signals in the EHF to FIR range, which means new, faster switches are needed. Carbon nanotubes will probably be present on top of the silicon. The silicon will probably be a support structure for the optical processors, probably. You could probably get to their specs in 5-10 years with this plan.

Microsoft has plenty of money. If they don't like the way the mainframe market looks then they should enter and build their own. IBM has already been through the anti-trust wringer for their mainframe hardware and has spent decades under supervision by the Justice Department.

The article is missing the fact that T3 bought it's technology from Platform Solutions. Platform Solutions was acquired by IBM. Without reselling Platform Solutions' product I don't see how T3 has any offerings that IBM competes with. They look like a distributor that has been cut off form a supplier, that's not grounds for anti-trust.

I don't know what currency you're talking about, but the only single-core POWER 520 available is $5576US. Its still overpriced IMHO, but not nearly as much as you're saying. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/browse_aix.html

Facebook uses PHP, and yes you can, on both z/OS and Linux. Probably on z/TPF, too. And Facebook wouldn't be the first Internet company to buy a mainframe.

Facebook uses PHP, and yes you can, on both z/OS and Linux. Probably on z/TPF, too. And Facebook wouldn't be the first Internet company to buy a mainframe.

"IBM Research is home to the largest team of cryptography researchers outside of the academic and government communities. For more information about IBM Research, please visit http://www.research.ibm.com/."

Wow, 9 days, yea, thats how Macs work now, they stay up pretty much until you need to do a software update that requires a reboot. Uptime on my iMac here is 31 days, 17:55, because I've not patched it yet.

My xserve has done over 365 serving files/html.

Vista/XP it doesn't matter, OS X since 10.1 has just been more stable in my experience.

I didn't say USB/Wifi were Apple inventions, I said they were the first to deploy them across the product lines. They did the same thing with DVD-ROM drives, but missed the boat on CD-R/RWs.

Go back to the launch of the iMac and show me what makers deployed USB that vocally, then to iBook launch and show who had Wifi.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html

IBM's history of the USB standard credits the iMac.

http://www.coe.montana.edu/ee/rwolff/EE580/history_of_wifi.htm

"The technology had been standardised; it had a name; now Wi-Fi needed a market champion, and it found one in Apple, a computer-maker renowned for innovation. The company told Lucent that, if it could make an adapter for under $100, Apple would incorporate a Wi-Fi slot into all its laptops. Lucent delivered, and in July 1999 Apple introduced Wi-Fi as an option on its new iBook computers, under the brand name AirPort. âoeAnd that completely changed the map for wireless networking,â'

Well, the analysts were wrong. Without warning, Oracle just abruptly terminated a product line on which its customers may have built their entire information-technology infrastructure. This kind of approach to customer service is not how IBM treats its customers.

Look at how IBM handled the sunsetting of OS/2. IBM issued a warning long in advance of ceasing sales and distribution of the product. Then, after the termination date, IBM continues to sell service contracts to support the product if a customer continues to need support.

Hmmm. Maybe the time has come to short my Oracle stock.

buy an IBM i http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/index.html

If the company has an IM solution, such as IBM Lotus SameTime, you can measure gaps. Look for holes in user availability.

If I am available on work IM 8-5, then my workstation was up during that time. If I am on work IM 8-9:12 and 9:18-5, I probably had a six minute downtime.

Computers still fill up entire rooms!

In fact, supercomputers seem to be getting bigger:

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/rsc.bluegene_2004.html (Blue Gene/L, 2004)

http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ccd/literature/ccd_annual_reports/p002.htm (Cray X/MP, 1986)

Bah!

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/

Computers have entered new niches over time, but no format has ever gone out of use. Mainframes are still around, as are minicomputers, workstations, desktops, laptops, and subnotebooks. Even smartphones aren't anything terribly new, being just a combination of PDAs and cell phones.

Rather, I think people will look back at our time and laugh at us for thinking that portable computers with full-sized keyboards would ever fall out of use :)

I have a personal bias, but I think IBM's FileNet would solve this quite neatly. I've done implementations of it that are pretty much exactly what the OP describes.

Customer has a share that's gotten totally out of control, just stuffed full of files. They want to make them available across multiple offices, generally without getting into complex VPN crap, and also want to simplify management, add more security / compartmentalization, or integrate it with corporate SSI. All doable. Runs on your choice of platforms, too. (Linux, Unix/AIX, Windows all OK as servers.)

There are even tools that basically take a share drive and walk the directory structure, importing documents at extremely high volume and using the folder structure to categorize and tag the documents within FileNet. It's quite slick and can either be used as a one-shot migration from a traditional fileserver to FileNet, or as an ongoing thing (take all files in a particular directory or set of directories and commit them).

Once you have the documents into FileNet you can access them over a web interface or via various desktop clients, and there is a nice API for integrating it with custom in-house applications if that's a requirement. Also, IBM makes some add-ons for Word and Excel (and maybe PowerPoint) that allow you to work directly with items stored in a FileNet repository. Plus, if down the road you want to get into "workflow" (basically building your document management system around your business process), that can be easily bolted on.

Email is in profile if you want specific case studies or whitepapers, or if you want me to put you in touch with people who do these sorts of things regularly.