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Kill the % format operator? WTF?

There's the distinct possibility that I don't know what I am talking about, but one quick Google search tells me that % format wasn't killed, just replaced with something better.

From the link:

Many Python programmers felt that the built-in % operator for formatting strings was too constrained, because:

• It is a binary operator and can take at most two arguments.
• Exempting the format string argument, all other arguments must be squeezed in with either a tuple or a dictionary.

This style is somewhat inflexible, so Python 3 introduces a new way of doing string formatting. (Both the % operator and the string.Template module are retained in version 3.)

Using the break statement violates structured programming. I feel maintaining structured code without gotos, breaks, and continues everywhere is worth making an effort.

Firefox manages to run on Mac, Linux, Windows, and BSD.

...and (from a quick google search) AIX, OS/2, Solaris, HP-UX, BeOS, and something called RISCOS that I haven't even heard of before now... and probably more!

Sony's payback comes when Playstation3 programmers learn to fully utilize the Cell architecture.

Yeah, that EIEIO instruction is a real bitch: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/systems/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.aixassem/doc/alangref/eieio.htm

Or maybe it is a joke. I dunno.

Actually for this thing, there's probably a whole new layout that's optimal.

Yes, and it's already been invented a few times:

• ATOMIK from IBM, which became SHARK, which became ShapeWriter, available on the iPhone
• FITALY from Textware, available on PPC and Palm

This looks like the Shark typing method created for IBM a few years back.

I really liked the Shark idea when it first came out, so it's good to see something similar again. (Plus Shark worked on non-QWERTY 'boards as well, you just changed the settings on its initialisation)

Well, when I was a wannabe Palm hacker, I always saw the need for an onscreen keyboard that didn't follow the QWERTY layout. (I always believed that there was a more speedy way to input things than drawing each letter one at a time) This layout is anything but optimized for one-finger-or-pen-point-swiped-input. So in my own search for perfection, I collided with the ATOMIK keyboard and relevant thesis from IBM research (1, 2, 3) Unfortunately, English is just my second language so anything optimized for English couldn't work out with enough success rate to be useful so I embarked on the journey to program out the algorithms on those thesis to develop my own Spanish arrangement of letters, to make my own atomic keyboard layout. After a while, I ended up with a very useful layout that, as the thesis states, ended up with common word endings available as gliphs from the pen. If any person in the world attempts to make a keyboard for swiping a finger or a pen, is a fool if doesn't try to optimize the layout and to throw out the qwerty once and for all. (PS, the program and the layout were lost on a HDD crash but probably I will recreate this thing again, just for the sake of it...)

Well, when I was a wannabe Palm hacker, I always saw the need for an onscreen keyboard that didn't follow the QWERTY layout. (I always believed that there was a more speedy way to input things than drawing each letter one at a time) This layout is anything but optimized for one-finger-or-pen-point-swiped-input. So in my own search for perfection, I collided with the ATOMIK keyboard and relevant thesis from IBM research (1, 2, 3) Unfortunately, English is just my second language so anything optimized for English couldn't work out with enough success rate to be useful so I embarked on the journey to program out the algorithms on those thesis to develop my own Spanish arrangement of letters, to make my own atomic keyboard layout. After a while, I ended up with a very useful layout that, as the thesis states, ended up with common word endings available as gliphs from the pen. If any person in the world attempts to make a keyboard for swiping a finger or a pen, is a fool if doesn't try to optimize the layout and to throw out the qwerty once and for all. (PS, the program and the layout were lost on a HDD crash but probably I will recreate this thing again, just for the sake of it...)

Well, when I was a wannabe Palm hacker, I always saw the need for an onscreen keyboard that didn't follow the QWERTY layout. (I always believed that there was a more speedy way to input things than drawing each letter one at a time) This layout is anything but optimized for one-finger-or-pen-point-swiped-input. So in my own search for perfection, I collided with the ATOMIK keyboard and relevant thesis from IBM research (1, 2, 3) Unfortunately, English is just my second language so anything optimized for English couldn't work out with enough success rate to be useful so I embarked on the journey to program out the algorithms on those thesis to develop my own Spanish arrangement of letters, to make my own atomic keyboard layout. After a while, I ended up with a very useful layout that, as the thesis states, ended up with common word endings available as gliphs from the pen. If any person in the world attempts to make a keyboard for swiping a finger or a pen, is a fool if doesn't try to optimize the layout and to throw out the qwerty once and for all. (PS, the program and the layout were lost on a HDD crash but probably I will recreate this thing again, just for the sake of it...)

Take a look at this demo of ShapeWriter from IBM. It's the same thing as Swype and was invented 5 years ago. Dr Zhai has formed a company around the tech and you can see it here: ShapeWriter.

I remember taking a tour of the datacenter of a large utility many years ago - they had drum storage units that used the spinning drum to power the electronics long enough to write any buffered data and park the heads. As I recall, it was an IBM product.

Bruce Perens was well-known in the open source community as the project leader of Debian and for founding the Open Source Initiative (and creating the Open Source Definition) long before his 2-year stint at HP.

and i don't recall Perens or any other open source leader ever claiming that Linux was a 'sure thing.' though pretty much every major system vendor (HP, Lenovo, IBM, Dell, Apple, etc.) today has a Linux division or is involved with FOSS in some way--a situation which Perens has played no small part in creating.

Bruce Perens was well-known in the open source community as the project leader of Debian and for founding the Open Source Initiative (and creating the Open Source Definition) long before his 2-year stint at HP.

and i don't recall Perens or any other open source leader ever claiming that Linux was a 'sure thing.' though pretty much every major system vendor (HP, Lenovo, IBM, Dell, Apple, etc.) today has a Linux division or is involved with FOSS in some way--a situation which Perens has played no small part in creating.

Without a doubt the best book to learn how real computers work. http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/dz9zr006.pdf Putting on asbestos under ware now.

Try it by writing "IBM" on silicon in individual atoms, then using the same method to scan the area

"Details of the implementation have been left as an exercise to the reader" isn't a particularly good way to get R&D funding.

(sigh) sorry, this was done long ago by IBM labs using a scanning tunnelling microscope. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20360.wss/ I thought that was fairly well known by now.

For the rest of you, apologies for the explanation.

From what is sounds like, the problems of a SSD device warrant a differently designed file system.

There already exist a number of file system implementations designed specifically flash such as JFFS, JFFS2 and YAFFS. (I'm sure there are others I have not bumped into yet...)

N.B. There's an IBM Devworks article discussing flash file systems for linux.

IBM BladeCenter QS22

If you want your cell system without the PS3's, get a couple of these. Each comes with two Cell 8i CPUs in a 1U case. Upgradeable dedicated processor memory slots and general use RAM slots. A bit more expensive than the PS3's, but might be easier to get the institutions to pay for...

since CUDA is roughly C

Not quite. CUDA looks a lot like C in that it has C-family syntax but the biggest limitation it has is that there is no application stack - which means no recursion. CUDA also lacks the idea of a pointer, although you can bypass this by doing number to address translation (as in, the number 78 means look up tex2D(tex, 0.7, 0.8)). The GPU also has other shortcomings, in that most architectures like to have all their shaders running the same instruction at the same time. For this code

if (pixel.r < pixel.g){
//do stuff A
}else if (pixel.g < pixel.b){
//do stuff B
}else{
//do stuff C
}

The GPU will slow down a ton if the pixel color causes different pixels to branch in different directions. Basically, the three sets of shaders following different branches of that code will be inactive 2/3 of the time.

In the Cell, you really do just program in C with a number of extensions added onto it like the SPE SIMD intrinsics and the DMA transfer commands (check it out). The Cell really is 9 (10 logical) processors all working together in a single chip (except in PS3, where there are only 7 working SPEs). Furthermore, your 8 SPEs can be running completely different programs -- they're just little processors. Granted, you have to be smart when you program them to deal with race conditions and all the other crap you have to deal with for multithreaded programming. The Cell takes about 14 times longer to calculate a double precision floating point than a single (and there aren't SPE commands to do four at once like you can with singles).

So which is more powerful? It really depends what you're doing. If your task is ridiculously parallellizable and doesn't require the use of recursion, pointers or multiple branches, the GPU is most likely your best bet. If your program falls into any of those categories, use a Cell.

Actually, there is a Tivoli product that does more or less exactly what the OP asks for: IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Dynamic Content Delivery

Personally I like the portable media shipment suggestions. But if your CIO/company requires enterprise software from a large vendor with good support, have a look at IBM's Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Software:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/prov-mgrproductline/

Besides the usual software distribution, this package has a peer-to-peer function. It also senses bandwidth. If there's other traffic it slows down temporarily so it won't saturate the link. Once the other traffic is done (like during your off-hours or maintenance windows) it'll go as fast as it can to finish distributing files.

Just wanted to add that you should also read Chief programmer team management of production programming by F. T. Baker. This is the study that eventually lead to Brook's Surgical Teams in Mythical Man Month.

We're planning a migration off of ext3 to zfs for our data, and we use IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backups, which provides a way to back up and restore individual files using a ZFS snapshot as a reference point. I would imagine other backup software support a similar feature. Is this the kind of external backup support you are talking about, or something more extensive?

• Linux free
• IBM Linux
• Sun Linux
• HP Linux

oh well at least it sounds more promising than whatever this was supposed to achieve:
http://www.research.ibm.com/BurrPuzzles/

While Fedora 9 isn't an official PS3 distro it is one of the official Cell distro's. While I don't know of anything right now that has been updated for Cell I'm sure it has a newer kernel which has bug fixes and newer things for Cell. You can read more about Cell here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/index.html?S_TACT=105AGX16&S_CMP=LP

ECF home, articles at IBM DeveloperWorks, InfoQ.

From the latter: ECF is...

• Real-time communication and collaboration features for teams using Eclipse such as peer-to-peer file sharing, remote opening of Eclipse views, screen capture sharing, and real-time shared editing.
• A set of communications APIs and frameworks built upon existing protocols (like Google Talk, XMPP, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS, Rendevous, IRC, and others) for developers to add communications and messaging to their own Equinox-based plugins, or customize and extend the ECF applications.

You will be able to get a Power 520 in tower format, look at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/configs/8203e4a1a.html

This looks like you could put it on your desk if you wanted, but you certainly could put it under your desk, so it's going to be a similar experience to "desktop AIX". We got one in this week for $5k where I work - not cheap but not mainframe prices.

However, unfortunately, the noise these things make is unforgivable, so you'd be best off getting the rack-mount version, putting it in the machine room and accessing it remotely, unless you absolutely need AIX with fast local graphics.

At startup it makes a noise like a jet engine during landing, and then when it settles down it makes a noise that is audible and annoying half a floor away. The thing is packed with small high-speed fans.

Kind of makes me appreciate my Sun Blade 1000. It's not a fast machine of course, but it also has a hot cpu inside and yet is so quiet people walking by my desk don't realise it's on and fiddle with the power switch (it is on top of a pedestal/shelf unit next to my desk).

Presumably the POWER6 inside the POWER 520 EXPRESS machine is not just hot but ludicrously hot.

This is Slashdot. Should talk about how IBM is withdrawing Linux on POWER from the desktop.

Because the Windows Defender and other Microsoft AV software are almost total crap and not a real AntiVirus program. Non-MS Antivirus programs seem to find malware that Windows Defender won't like trojans and rootkits and spyware and adware.

MS-DOS 6.X had Central Point Antivirus with the Microsoft name on it.

Windows Defender etc did not come built in with Windows like CPAV did. It was an add on, but in many geek's opinion a commercial Antivirus or even a free one like Avast! Home Edition or AVG Free was better than Windows Defender.

You could still get one of these chumpies..

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/common/ssi/pm/sp/n/pod03014usen/POD03014USEN.PDF

It's a Power Server and just run that as your desktop. I mean, the original 386 was dubbed the "mainframe" on the chip, linux is a multiuser OS. There's no more difference between a desktop and a mainframe anyway, except size of the box. Workstations are just big honking computers that you can fit nearby you. The only question would be what sort of graphics you can get on one of these jobs... but if you are just in it to crunch numbers, who cares?

Is there really any workstation software that is available on AIX that isn't available on Linux?

Due to the size of our world, I'm afraid the answer to your question is probably "yes". I'm thinking specifically of their OSL. Which (last I checked) was also abandoned; their recommendation was to use COIN-OR. Not that I think COIN-OR is inferior, but porting thousands of lines of CASE generated code does not sound like fun to me!

Could it also be they are partnering with Canonical, Novell and Redhat to produce a desktop system?

Things that make you go hmmmmm.

IBM's Cell Broadband Engine processor comes with an Eclipse/CDT-based IDE:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/
-disclosure, I work for IBM.

IBM research developed back in '02 an interesting way of revoking and replacing biometrics already.

I thought the Thinkpad was named after IBM decades old corporate slogan, which is THINK.

But it is not possible for garbage collection to perform better than a competent engineer.

It is. In addition to the link posted by the other reply, I've got another argument. I think a lot of this comes from here though I haven't looked at that page for a while.

First, realize that memory allocation in a C world can actually be fairly expensive. I've been tangentially related to a program where the team responsible for it saw a substantial performance improvement simply by switching malloc implementations. Current malloc implementations can be fairly complex, using one of several allocation strategies depending on the size.

By contrast, a malloc in a GC'd language can be dirt simple; in almost-C pseudocode:

void* malloc(size_t size)
{
    static void* next = [start of heap];
    void* mem = next;
    next += (size + sizeof(struct malloc_header));
    (struct malloc_header*)(mem)->size = size;
    (struct malloc_header*)(mem)->gc_info = 0;
    return mem;
}

Basically, just keep advancing a pointer.

Second, deletion in the C malloc world can also be expensive for the same reason allocation is. (In that case depending on the allocation strategy you also have to coalesce neighboring blocks, etc.) Deletion in the GC world -- in the strictest sense -- is free, because the GC will do nothing. If we want to be more fair we compare C's deletion costs to GC costs. There C will usually, but depending on the memory behavior, perhaps not by as much as you'd think. If the program allocates a lot of short-lived objects, that's a lot of deletion work that C will have to do but a GC'd program won't, because the GC cost is only determined by the live objects. Sure each live object will be much more expensive than a C delete, but there could be far fewer of them.

Third, I would argue that to be correct, a C program needs to behave correctly with respect to deleting stuff, or else a long-lived process could run out of memory or start using enough that the system starts behaving very poorly. But at the same time, it's easy to see program types out there that are very short-lived; most of the standard Unix utilities fit this bill. In a GC'd world, it's entirely possible for such a process to have zero deletion cost period if the GC is never invoked. The C version is chugging around deleting things because it needs to in order to be safe, but the GC version is being more optimistic in the sense that it doesn't bother incurring any cost until it figures out that the process is using too much memory. In the case where the process is short lived it wins: the C program incurs extra cost from all its allocation and deallocation, while the GC version incurs none. In the long-lived case, the GC version still behaves correctly and won't put the sort of pathologically bad memory pressure that the C version would have if you didn't delete stuff.

(It is true that in practice this benefit basically isn't seen because languages with GC tend to also have large VMs that take a while to start up and will greatly overshadow the allocation costs the C program incurs.)

Fourth, the extra cost of getting memory allocation right can easily come at the expense of other optimizations that someone working in a GC language would have time to do, or bugs that the GC developer would have time to fix, or features that the GC developer would have time to implement. It's true that this doesn't apply in the sort of ideal "give a great C programmer and a great GC language programmer the same task, give them as much time as they need, and measure the result" problem, but it the real world it still matters.

Now, the concession. I still suspect that almost all the time, a well-written program written in a manually-managed language will win out over an equally well-written version in a GC'd language. But at the same time, this is far from necessarily the case.

Back in 2003 Belkin introduced a router that periodically redirected HTTP connections to advertise its own software:
    Help! my Belkin router is spamming me

Some commentary:
    Ease-of-use or marketing-driven sabotage: Does your hardware's software do only what you expect of it?

It seems to me that it's somewhat silly to actually "discontinue" a software product. After all, it's software. It's not a physical product. It's something you can download, and it seems somewhat nutty to not accept coin for it if asked.

There are exceptions when you don't want a prior product like XP to compete with a current product, say vista, but win3.1 is some of those cases where there is really no threat of it competing with a current generation product.

I'm not saying that microsoft shouldn't abandon support for win3.1. Far from it, only it seems to make little sense since win3.1 was used on a number of systems, and if you lose your drive and for some reason simply have to have that legacy system operational, there is some wisdom is keeping the product available for purchase. Otherwise you run into some questionable situations where you "need" win3.1 but can't buy it.

IBM for example at one point offered PC DOS 5.0 as a free download. It was a commercial product but by 1998-1999 it had NO commercial value. According to wiki you can get PC-DOS 2000 (Chinese Edition) for free. They seem to understand the value of this being a vital port of legacy systems, and make it available. Microsoft offers a ton of files from their dos distribution available.

That's my only bitch, if you need it, the only solution is hunting around for it, or pirating it.

ftp://ftp.boulder.ibm.com/software/dos/

In the mid-to-late 80s, a "laptop" was the size of a substantial suitcase and weighed ~20 pounds. Examples were the Osborne and Compaq "luggables". Which name I like because it brings forth the proper picture of a big piece of luggage. That was 20 years ago, nowhere near 40.

OK, try more than 30 years ago... The first luggable computer that I used was the IBM 5100 in 1976. It weighed about 50 lbs, and had a screen that was 16x64 (though 16x32 was more readable and all we needed for APL code). The 16-bit CPU emulated an IBM mainframe, and it ran an OS that offered APL or BASIC (selected from another toggle switch). I used it for APL programming. It had 64 KB of memory and a cartridge tape drive. IBM link: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_2.html Someone's good photos: http://wandel.ca/ibm5100/ This was arguably the first personal computer. (Another contender that I had used years earlier would be the Datapoint 2200, but it was larger, and wasn't pitched as a PC, and it wasn't intended to be portable.) Tags: historical olderthanyouthink nothingisnew GOML

Actually, my number one gripe with OpenBSD is the time involved in keeping the whole system up to date. It's great that they audit the whole base system and manage to deliver a very secure operating system (written in C, of all languages!) which nevertheless has all or most of the familiar Unix APIs, but I have to wonder what happens to that security once you install ports and keep the system running for a while. The ports aren't subject to the same security auditing as the base system, neither the base system nor the ports are updated regularly, and when they are, upgrading definitely isn't as fast and simple as apt-get dist-upgrade.

At some point I had to wonder if the OpenBSD systems I ran but rarely updated (because it would have to be done by hand) were really more secure than the Debian systems I ran that might have started with many more vulnerabilities, but that were kept up to date. There is really no way to know, but, in the end, I decided that OpenBSD wasn't worth all the effort it cost me if I couldn't convince myself that it really ended up being more secure. That and the fact that all my efforts to contribute had been rejected (politely, I might add) made me decide to abandon OpenBSD and use Debian everywhere. I only wish Debian used stack smashing protection and PaX.

If you've got enough money lying around, you could get a Blet--er.. probably shouldn't use the code name. You could get a MR10is "VAULT" RAID adapter from LSI and IBM (for SAS and sata drives). I got to QA test it, put it through its paces. It seems to be pretty decent (now) and lets you fully, transparently encrypt your hard drives.

They're over $1,000, but if performance and security are that important to you it may be worth it. The VAULT only supports internal drives, but I think a morg--er.. I don't even know what the non-code name for those cards are... I think an encrypted version of the MR10m, which is for external SAS/SATA hard drive enclosures, is in the works.

You HAVE to be kidding me. That is what the Republicans SAY, but you have to look at what they DO. The government has grown more under Republicans in the last 40 years than it has under Democrats. That is a FACT. Reagan, Bush I and Bush 2 all grew the government more than Clinton or Carter. The data is out there and it is CLEAR and INCONTROVERTIBLE.

In addition, although Republicans like to pretend they are the party of fiscal conservatism, they are NOTHING OF THE KIND. Again, the facts, the data bears this out completely. They say one thing and do the EXACT opposite. Again, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush1 and Bush2 all spent more money than the government took in in taxes than did Carter or Clinton.

Take a look at the historical data from the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) uploaded to Many Eyes. It is very, very clear that Republicans are basically big government lovers who spend and spend and spend more money than they make. http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SkWN8RsOtha6iO0l5WlGR2~

Again, I'm tired of Republicans trying to pretend they are somehow against Big Government when they make more Big Government than anyone else.

I know individual Republicans actually believe this, but as a recovering Republican, I urge you to look at the DATA. It says something COMPLETELY different.

don't forget about blade servers. (signup required)

Anyone can sign up. The current contest iteration is running through the end of the year. There are some COBOL programming exercises. This contest is also a recruitment vehicle. You could end up with a full-time job if you do OK in the contest and want the job.

Enterprise COBOL for z/OS Manuals http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/cobol/zos/

A couple of things people should realize when thinking about getting into mainframe/cobol:

1. COBOL programmers are 99.9% baby boomers. If you want to spend your next decade getting talked down to by a 50-something or 60-something who thinks they're a programming god because of their teaching degree and 30 years writing COBOL, then you're probably into leather and whips, and would be happier staying in your dungeon. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

2. COBOL is not challenging to learn (it's designed that way), and the programming tasks are largely mundane. You'll be working almost exclusively on data processing tasks, because that's what the mainframe does best: massive throughput of number crunching.

3. You shouldn't just learn COBOL, you should spend time with JCL and DB2's version of SQL, and some CICS concepts would serve you very well. But without JCL and DB2, you're practically useless anyway. But they're not hard to learn.

4. zOS also runs Java now, so if we just stay back and let it rot, eventually perhaps they'll just throw it all to Java.

5. It's hard to just "take a class" on COBOL, but forward-thinking companies are starting to train people like disaffected teachers, just like what was done in the 70's. So if you want to work with/clean up after that sort of developer....

If, after all this, you really want to know more, IBM has most of the useful documentation online.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/cobol/zos/library/

But the "dummies" book should serve you very well.

Oh, and once you start working with them, expect lots of, "Why does my PC do this", kind of questions, because most of the COBOL people I've met in shops aren't very technical. (IBM people are bright enough though)

IBM publishes lots of mainframe benchmarks and has for years. They're called LSPR tables, and there's a ton of data available. There are several different types of workloads measured. But there's this mythology out there, including among many on Slashdot, that benchmarks give you a single number and then you just pick the higher number and you're done. Oh, that'd be so simple and wonderful, but it just doesn't work that way. First of all, your workloads (and time of day patterns) won't match the ones in LSPR (or any other benchmark) exactly, so you have to run some careful adjustments. If you're comparing to some other environment, you have to correlate LSPR values with other values (such as rPerfs or VMmarks or whatever), which also aren't going to match your actual workloads. And then you've got a whole bunch of other considerations, like software licensing and labor costs, capacity and virtual image provisioning capabilities, disaster recovery and other non-functional requirements, data center space/power/cooling limitations, proximity effects for data access (one area where large SMP architectures really shine), execution integrity, and so on. These and other factors go into a careful business case analysis.

But you know what? I think VMware and Xen are wonderful, too. But they have significant limitations. They aren't universal solutions either. I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand, but let me repeat: there's huge mainframe growth because people are running business case analyses and coming to the thoughtful conclusion that they do have a vital role -- probably along with VMware and/or Xen -- in their infrastructure. And they use benchmarks as part of the equation, but frankly they're a necessary but overwhelmingly not sufficient requirement in the overall calculus.

Do people really think somebody buys a mainframe (or indeed, any high-end server) on a whim, without assessment and justification? Come on.

for everyone out there does your website have a p3p policy? IBM has a free tool to build one. Of course, be sure to revisit your policy once a year to make sure that you retain your high and mighty standards.

... and to this day have refused to release the logs from the machine which would prove how it made such an improbable (for a computer at least) move.

Log from game 6

From here: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.shtml

... and to this day have refused to release the logs from the machine which would prove how it made such an improbable (for a computer at least) move.

Log from game 6

From here: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.shtml