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Oh come on! You're living in a fantasy world!

Notes 6.5.1 (the last version I have extensive experience with) did not come out a decade ago. It came out in 2004, and it a gigantic piece of crap. The only thing good I can say about it is that it *finally* worked correctly on NT with multiple users-- only 10 full years after every other piece of software on Earth did!

Are you really complaining that a version of software a over a decade out of date was unstable? If your apps were flimsy, you should have talked to your developers. The Domino system is and has been for a long time a very robust system.

Dude, reality check:

IBM sells Lotus Domino/Notes as an email system, "groupware" if you want to use that term. Look: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/ Right there on the website, it says the top two features are Email and Calendaring.

Email and Calendaring. Lotus Notes may work for many tasks, but two tasks is *does not* work for is Email and Calendaring. Not even close. Hell, I had to reset Palms at my workplace 3 times a week when Notes would reliably bug-out create appointments that ended before they began-- which of course confused the poor Palm software to no end.

The amount of lost data due to Notes' failure of a UI is legendary. Deleting a copy of an email filed into a folder *also* deleted any other copy in any other folder. Amazingly retarded design. Notes didn't open attachments in the Temp folder as Read Only, so it encouraged users to edit them and save their changes. While, at the same time, it was super-aggressive about cleaning up the Temp folder. I can't even guess at how many documents were lost that way by poor, understandably confused, users.

Yes, Lotus Notes can do all that and a bag of crap, but it's sold as groupware and that is how it shall be judged. I'd go as far as saying that I don't even give a shit what else it can do: it's sold as groupware, and it *sucks* as groupware, and thus it's a failure of a product. (It also costs twice as much per-seat as Outlook, for a far inferior product.)

The anti-Notes trolls always crack me up. They basically say "I once saw a badly implemented application in Notes a decade ago, and it didn't compare to applications that are being written today." It makes about as much sense as complaining about Windows because you didn't like WindowsME.

Oh please. Compare Notes 6.5.1 with Outlook 2003. NIGHT AND DAY. (Notes being "night.")

Here's what I'll acknowledge: there is a certain subclass of human being, you included among them, that are not only blind to Notes' downsides, but actually are huge fans of the program. I won't attempt to change your mind, because I know from experience that your brainwashing is total and complete. But I'd really appreciate it if you didn't just dismiss all criticism of Notes out-of-hand.

Seriously, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr/, formerly Adstar, is used by many large corporations.

IBM has, after all, been working on virtualisation for nearly 40 years. (for the GP's benefit)

Or, even better, a new layout with hexagon keys. This apprears to be the best option for stylus/finger based input, according to an IBM research paper. They used the Metropolis algorith to come up with the following layout:

.KWMUQ'
  CHTOFZ
JIEsNGB
  VRSAD[ret]
,XPITY[shift]

s == space. It looks much neater in the paper, on page 7.

The performance of this layout is estimated at 43wpm, vs 38 for OPTI II and 30 for QWERTY. The paper also mentions the FITALY layout (36wpm), which I've actually used on my PDA. It works, though it's hard to say what kind of improvemetn I was seeing (if any), since it obviously requires some time to get used to the new layout.

This might not actually be the best layout if people are using two fingers/thumbs at the same time, but this should be farily easy to change now in the simulation.

Or Linux containers for that matter.

(Or for something more mature today, but implemented as a large out-of-tree patch, OpenVZ)

A lot of other people have replied to the parent post, saying quite correctly that avoiding memory leaks is hard in practice. However, there are also other reasons as well:

• If you do allocation manually, you also have to worry about freeing something twice. The result of that is usually rather nasty, including creating ways for attackers to break into the system.
• Garbage collection is usually faster than manual allocation -- see Urban Performance Legends, Revisited
• Garbage collection allows objects to be compacted in memory, which increases locality and hence performance greatly.

One of the things I have done to describe things in the past where a consensus had not been reached is tell clients something was a "common practice". I think any practice has to spend time in the common practice area before it can become a best practice, and I would be explicit with my clients if something did not match best practices. I have also many times told clients that there is more than one "school of thought" when it came to something with contradictory common practices.

Sources of best practices that I have used beyond my personal experience:

• Companies such as Cisco, Altiris and Microsoft typically produce whitepapers and publish other work that describe best practices.
• Any number of forum sites also produce best practices.
• I read books that cover best practices, and study for new skills (presently getting ready to take my CISSP which is all about best practices)
• I read trade journals, attend user groups and hear what the vendor has to say
• I spend time on forum sites
• I continue my education taking classes at night.
• The best resource of all without question have been the people that were senior to me that were willing to let me ask 101 questions on "why" they did something. Learning to listen when someone describes why something was or wasn't done a certain way and to look past the immediate technical solution I thought was best was the most important thing I ever developed.

Sorry, I used information from outside the original article without a citation. This is from the team's web info:

... just like human competitors, Watson will not be connected to the Internet or have any other outside assistance.

Call IBM, I'm sure they will be happy to sell you one!

IBM sold processor upgrades this way on their big iron - ship machines fully configured and when customer wants to upgrade just turn on another CPU and bill more $. In my experience this didn't turn on/off software as it turned on CPUs. The following IBM link documents this type of feature on the OS400, on which I haven't worked. https://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/index.htm?info/rzakz/rzakzqprcfeat.htm

My SL400 works just fine with Linux. While they might not do customer support of Linux, they at least test Linux compatibility.

Products certified for use with Linux

This comes up every so often and I post these links every time I notice it:
IBM Metapad. It was a modular computing concept device and I've been waiting for it to become real since I first heard about it.
http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/MetaPad/metapad.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/designconsulting/port_metapad.html

You want a PDA? Netbook? Desktop? It's all three~

This comes up every so often and I post these links every time I notice it:
IBM Metapad. It was a modular computing concept device and I've been waiting for it to become real since I first heard about it.
http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/MetaPad/metapad.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/designconsulting/port_metapad.html

You want a PDA? Netbook? Desktop? It's all three~

I think HTML5, CSS3, et al have it covered:

http://standblog.org/blog/post/2009/04/15/Making-video-a-first-class-citizen-of-the-Web

http://www.w3.org/2009/03/web-demo.xhtml

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-html5/

IBM has a tool platform that is useful for developing C/C++ projects on.

Sounds like there's a bigger issue at hand here. Surely there is a way of setting the EBCDIC code page to determine this? Is there something I'm missing?

The link is bad. Try: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/

What do you mean "the IBM implementation"? Which IBM implementation?

Check out IBM's list

Nearly 400 different versions.

here's the correct one: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/

So here is the correct TFA address

I have been hoping (and reading that) the coming PHP6 would arrive with a built-in PHP accelerator APC - is it? Or is there a silent change of plans?

Link in original article is returning 404. I think this is it: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/

But if Python does it, its okay?

  If you don't like the new features, stick with the old one.

PPC largely remains inferior (performance-wise) to Intel offering. (*)

But.

POWER != PowerPC. POWER can PowerPC, but PowerPC can't POWER.

Frankly, I'm too at loss when it comes to defining what is POWER and what is PowerPC. I had impression that with actual generation - POWER6 - IBM simply unified/merged PowerPC/64 to its existing server architecture. (Or unified their marketing.) So now there is only POWER or Power Architecture.

Though they still sell heck of 4xx CPUs which are (1) PowerPC/32, (2) dirt cheap (3) (relatively) fast (4) power efficient and (5) dirt cheap. Also everybody buy them because they are dirt cheap.

(*) IBM/Apple divorce had little to do with PowerPC underperforming. IBM pushed hard Apple to invest more into PowerPC R&D. Apple refused. There were problems with power consumption of newer workstation chips too. And IBM failed several dead-lines, making Apple's PR look bad. As performance goes, some math applications are still faster on PowerPC than they are on Intel. It's just generally, Intel market has much more cheap solutions, compared to proprietary PowerPC architecture, designed especially for Apple. E.g. video encoding can be much faster on PowerPC, yet on Intel it is faster because it is simply more and better optimized. It's not black and white. Intel wins hands down mostly because there are so many people using the CPUs.

What size and resolution is it?

Better yet, look in this PDF for 4:3 models or this one for widescreens, for the part and FRU numbers. Google both. You may be able to even get an upgrade out of this, compare part numbers on the hinges, cables, and inverter.

What size and resolution is it?

Better yet, look in this PDF for 4:3 models or this one for widescreens, for the part and FRU numbers. Google both. You may be able to even get an upgrade out of this, compare part numbers on the hinges, cables, and inverter.

The T60s and T61s still ship without cameras.

The T60s and T61s still ship without cameras.

Indeed, different OSes comes prepackaged with vastly different extra software. Especially many Linux distros comes with OpenOffice, Gimp, etc.

Although they haven't spelled it out literally, the methodology IBM used in their analysis was to compare the "core" operating systems. As an example they used "Linux kernel" and not a distro with any extra software. That way no office suites, browsers, media players etc. were considered. Just the bare bones operating systems with basic services. I suspect that in the case of Linux and other *nixes this doesn't even include the desktop manager whereas for Windows and OS X the stats will include any vulnerabilities from the GUIs.

But you can check the IBM report for yourself here: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/iss/xforce/trendreports/xforce-2008-annual-report.pdf

The report also contains some good insights on the economy of exploits.

For speech-to-text, an obvious place to start is with the long-aged ViaVoice engine. If you can figure out how to buy it, as the page for that info is empty or broken.

Well, the article does mention Jim Braman, but it doesn't mention John Opel, IBM's President, and friend to his mom, Mary Maxwell Gates. After all, the contract between Microsoft and IBM is what effectively transferred the monopoly between those two companies, so any relationship prior to that deal should be highly relevant to how Bill Gates got his start.

The article also fails to mention that Bill's great-grandfather J. W. Maxwell was the original Founder (then-deceased), that his grandfather James Willard Maxwell was the President, and that his mom was sitting on the Board of Directors, of a prominent National Bank. For someone who gets started in business, one would think that having your family *being* the bank since its inception -- would somehow be useful -- or at least somewhat relevant -- I think (never mind the personal connection between John Opel and his mom).

ey also do things in small enough increments to make sure things don't blow up (like Vista: it's always a risk when you make too many changes).

Right because the switch to intel and mac os X were small increments? I'm no fan of vista, I recommend everybody i know to stick with xp, but the changes in the security and driver model were well overdue and needed, much like mac osX was and the change to intel.

Sort of, but if all you are doing is fixing bugs, what's the point of having a new version? Why not just stay with your old version, which people kind of like?

All the features were added pre beta, which is how you do it, well you normally let people miss their deadlines and slip them in to beta 2/3 if their worth it.

The main difference I see between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft is directionless.

What direction is apple heading in? every release requires more resources and sells more hardware but i can't think of any features that has really blown me away recently, even linux distros (since compiz) have really failed to do anything beyond improve/reduce performance/stability/security (ofc with Linux you do have upstream developments like, wireless mesh netowrking, mpx, mousegestures on most touchpads, but nothing is that impressive)

"Somehow i did hoped IBM would go and buy SUN, if this is really definitive .. how do IBM and Oracle play together ?"

IBM makes products that compete, no matter what segment of the IT industry a company is in. IBM also plays nicely with many of those companies, as IBM makes enormous amounts of revenue by introducing complexity into a customer environment, and providing consultants to glue it all together.

For example, IBM vends several databases already, including DB2 and Informix, yet they also provide IBM AIX servers to enterprise customers running Oracle on them.

Your XML version wasn't out of the JSON docs, that was your own contribution, and it was clearly minimizing use of tags and maximizing use of attributes.

If you're going to claim that's just the "right way", kindly link to some supporting documentation.

Would you say this is "bad" XML?

<menu>
    <menu-item>
        <portion unit="mL">250</portion>
        <name>Small soft drink</name>
    </menu-item>
    <menu-item>
        <portion unit="g">500</portion>
        <name>Sirloin steak</name>
    </menu-item>
</menu>

Because it's from an IBM article called Principles of XML design: When to use elements versus attributes.

The fact of the matter is, closing tags create redundancy that doesn't exist in JSON. Pretending that closing tags aren't a significant part of any real-world XML document is just asinine.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Server. Domino server can run on Linux and I think they either have, or are working on a native Notes client for Linux.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Server. Domino server can run on Linux and I think they either have, or are working on a native Notes client for Linux.

Here's the old Linux ad by IBM. It's pretty cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4

Interesting IBM product...
http://www.ibm.com/open

To bad it leads to a nasty 404
Linux is everywhere... Linux is nowhere

No COBOL-related article should go without a link to the list.

"How can I tune the disk subsystem for maximum contiguous write performance"[?]

Does section 4.6 of this document help?
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4285.pdf

Found via:
http://ipv6.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&safe=off&num=100&q=site%3Aibm.com+linux+maximum+contiguous+write+performance&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=

According to Wikipedia, China uses year-month-day, which means they'd write it 4/1. So at least one fifth of the world's population would write 4/1.

No, they don't. They usually specify which number is month and which is day, whether the year is given or not. In some cases which include the year, they use dashes as separators (never slashes), so it would be 2000-4-1 (NOT 2000/4/1). More typically, the characters for year, month, day are inserted after the corresponding number, giving something like 2000year4month1day or 4month1day. Here's the authority cited by Wikipedia:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/globalization/locales/China-SimplifiedChinese_Date.pdf
The only people who would write the first day of April as 4/1 are those listed as using the "middle-endian" date format in the Wikipedia article. And some of those use "little-endian" and "big-endian" forms as well (e.g. Canada).

--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?

Well, if you talk about large servers..

First of all, the IBM x3650 and HP DL380 G5 spend a lot of time initializing their RAID controllers. This takes seemingly forever (the most recent ServeRAID 8k is the biggest offender, needing almost 2 minutes). LinuxBIOS wouldn't help much here.

Secondly, that's what you have managment tools for. IBM offers a tool called ASU to deploy new BIOS settings:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/toolsctr/v1r0/topic/sgtk_sa_win/pe_asu_config.html?resultof=%22asu%22%20

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/?cm_re=masthead-_-products-_-sys-iseries

Yes it's a niche. But it's a HUGE niche. Enterprise server consolidation, webserving, java application servers, pretty much any multiuser application.

According to this IBM blog post, a Power6 core offers only 43% more performance than a UltraSparc T2 core.

That's not a big difference when you consider the T2 server is cheaper and has 4 times as many cores. Overall the system performs better than the IBM server by almost 3x.

Multithreaded applications aren't new, and today a lot of workloads benefit from them. Since linux and commodity servers became popular, applications began to parallelize work loads to take advantage of that. So sun put all those servers back in one box to reduce latency and save a lot of power.

In the case of a web application, being able to serve a page 300ms faster isn't that big a win, but being able to dramatically increase the number of simultaneous connections is huge.

IBM recently announced their Nehelem xeon processor which seems similar to the T2 chips. In a video they said it performs 1.7x better at 1/2 the cost of sparc, which I assume they meant the T2. (By the way, the power proc was even slower and 5x more expensive).

The UltraSPARC T1 has been selling in servers since 2005. T2 based servers have been selling since 2007. People that adopted that technology didn't have to wait till now for Intel to come up with something comparable.

I've only run across dual socket configurations of the Xeon 5500 motherboards, while sun is selling servers with up to 8 T2 chips.

... I.B.M. into the dominant supplier of high-profit Unix servers ...

Oh, how pleasent, what a smart move for IBM.

... and related technology.

Woh. Hold on. Wait. Please, I beg of you, save Sun's software from IBM's slow moving process and lack of usability.

I must confess that while I have used Solaris, the only thing I have ever cared about from Sun enough to bitch is Java and Java related thingies. Now, I'm not saying that this is going to fall apart if/when it transfers to IBM's hands and I certainly hope that the people involved in those projects stay there but if I look at the products of the two companies I must say that Sun is far better at Software.

This hasn't always been the case but let's look at web application servers. The free open source Glassfish container has been one of my favorites for development. Websphere, on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.

Although I'm sure you'd love to hear me bitch for hours about Rational products, I'm just going to say that I think competition is healthy and also I prefer Sun Software to remain Sun Software. I hope this deal falls apart. I've loved IBM's tutorials but do not care for their software.

Form a quick once over of from IBM ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/common/ssi/pm/sp/n/zsd03005usen/ZSD03005USEN.PDF
There z10 can hold a max of 1.5 tb of Ram

Lets say for the load that is processed by each server, Google needs 8 gigs of memory. Which they can supply for $2,000 each.
No lets be generous to IBM and its reliability and say that we need twice as many google servers per the equivalent ibm reliability.

We can replace 375 (1.5 TB of ram /8gigs per google mache * 2googlemachines/ibm equvalence) google servers per z10.
Assuming each google server costs google $2000 to make, they would spend $750,000 on google servers. Now lets assume the IBM is better at power as well, to the tune of $10,000 per year and both expected lifetimes are 20 years. That comes out to a 20 year cost for google servers of $950,000.

If the ibm price for the z10, is greater than $950,000, then google should continue making their own servers. Otherwise, they should switch.

Obviously these are all ballpark figures, which I don't expect to be correct. There are quite a few variables and just because a mainframe may be more reliable and power efficient, it may not be the best choice even when dealing with hundreds ore even thousands of servers. Typically the price per performance unit ratio goes skyward as you move towards bigger and bigger servers.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/401/ziegler.pdf
The article does mention concrete shielding, but nothing about metal?

"Recently, experiments on cosmic ray effects at airplane
altitudes have been published by IBM, Boeing, and others
[14, 151. We do not review this specialized field, other than
to note that the fail rate of electronics at airplane altitudes
is about one hundred times worse than at terrestrial
altitudes, as was predicted in an IBM paper 15 years
earlier [16]."

http://www.ida.liu.se/~abdmo/SNDFT/docs/ram-soft.html

This references an IBM study, which is what I think I actually remember but could not find quickly this morning.

"In a study by IBM, it was noted that errors in cache memory were twice as common above an altitude of 2600 feet as at sea level. The soft error rate of cache memory above 2600 feet was five times the rate at sea level, and the soft error rate in Denver (5280 feet) was ten times the rate at sea level."

IBM research is a wonderful resource in the area of soft errors. I do remember exactly reading your quote, I didn't bother to track the exact article, but it should be part of this special issue http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd40-1.html, the banner article mentions Denver but doesn't have the exact quote. The web shows it would be "Terrestrial Cosmic Rays", the second article in that issue. They have a more recent special issue on the same subject http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd52-3.html

http://www.ida.liu.se/~abdmo/SNDFT/docs/ram-soft.html

This references an IBM study, which is what I think I actually remember but could not find quickly this morning.

"In a study by IBM, it was noted that errors in cache memory were twice as common above an altitude of 2600 feet as at sea level. The soft error rate of cache memory above 2600 feet was five times the rate at sea level, and the soft error rate in Denver (5280 feet) was ten times the rate at sea level."

IBM research is a wonderful resource in the area of soft errors. I do remember exactly reading your quote, I didn't bother to track the exact article, but it should be part of this special issue http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd40-1.html, the banner article mentions Denver but doesn't have the exact quote. The web shows it would be "Terrestrial Cosmic Rays", the second article in that issue. They have a more recent special issue on the same subject http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd52-3.html

delightfully overkill

By "delightfully overkill" do you mean something like installing a fully-populated IBM Z10 Enterprise Class E64 for reading e-mail, surfing the web and playing a game or two of solitaire?