Slashdot Mirror

An IBM developer figured out how to use "make" to start services in parallel (once you have determined the dependencies). A link to the article is here. Bear in mind, this is circa 2003. 8)

Very good article. The utility of Make is highly underrated.

I really wish IBM's metapad got out of the prototype stage.

That's what I always expected the iPod to turn into: a portable device that you could plug into a workstation or laptop to perform more complex tasks.

Perhaps when the iPhone graduates from RISC to x86 we can get mobile/desktop convergence like this, with processes migrating from one cpu to another as necessary.

I really wish IBM's metapad got out of the prototype stage.

http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/learn/html/e.8.2.shtml

"They encountered a - problem - that could not be fully analyzed within the lifetime of the Universe. Though it involved only six operators, they became totally obsessed by it."

I think it is safe to say that there are many games that could be invented that has more possible moves then atoms in the universe. A simple application of maths to the problem would be all that is needed.

Given enough pieces, and enough possible combinations...

An IBM developer figured out how to use "make" to start services in parallel (once you have determined the dependencies).

A link to the article is here.

Bear in mind, this is circa 2003. 8)

1. This is not an app, but a web app: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino-web-access/ultralite/
2. Even if it WAS an app, I can't use iPhone's Mail app to access a Domino Directory (such as the one at my employer). mail app can access GMail and this is why the app got rejected. Seems these two scenarios are different. 3. All aboard the /. failboat...

Combine these efforts with IBM's recommended use of Make for startup dependencies, and Fedora's One Second X project and we should have some marked improvements in boot time.

....I thought that was the philosophy behind AppArmor (http://en.opensuse.org/Apparmor).

It's been deployed in SuSE products for years.

Apparmor seems to be a relatively sophisticated least-privilege system, i.e. the idea that if a BIND DNS server should never need to (for example) modify the routing table, then it also should not be able to modify the routing table. That way, if an attacker compromises said DNS server, he won't be able to do very much with it that isn't directly related to serving DNS requests (this is why I would personally refer to such a system as damage control, useful for containing/limiting an attacker who has already compromised something). The system discussed in the article is different in that it seems to be less concerned with what specific tasks a program should or should not be doing and more concerned with whether the code that is executed and the way that it is executed is what you would expect from the program's source. That way, if someone exploits i.e. a buffer overflow and inserts their own shellcode, it would deviate from the pattern that you would have expected from the exploited program and this deviation would be detected.

Both can be compared to systems like PaX (kernel) and SSP (userspace) which are intended to make sure that an attacker will fail to exploit an existing vulnerability, such as an unpatched buffer overflow, in the first place.

"It's strange how Linux gets easily picked up by leftists"

Linux & IBM ..

"There are now more than 15000 IBM Linux customer engagements worldwide, allowing customers to reduce their computing costs with solutions .."

If you haven't been following the cryptography area lately, let me assure you that this action by the NSA was the crypto equivalent of the Pope coming down off the balcony in Rome, working the crowd with a few loaves of bread and some fishes, and then inviting everyone to come over to his place to watch the soccer game and have a few beers. There are some things that one just never expects to see, and the NSA handing out source code along with details of the security mechanism behind it was right up there on that list. Up to this point, the NSA has embodied in itself the classic Cold War paranoia imperative of the past 50 years ("If you knew what we knew, you'd agree with us"). To see it spewing source like some long-haired Stanford student was enough to make for uncontrollable twitching.

Source

I googled Blue Gene/P after posting that. It's from IBM, it's a supercomputer. Duh. What else would it be running?

The article quotes on of the leads as saying that they have no legacy restrictions, so they are probably going to go with something very fast and very state of the art.

From http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21791.wss

The Blue Gene supercomputer operating system is based on the open-source Linux operating system. Applications are written in common languages such as Fortran, C and C++ using standards-based MPI communications protocols. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer is compatible with the diverse applications currently running on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, including leading research in physics, chemistry, biology, aerospace, astrophysics, genetics, materials science, cosmology and seismology.

I've been looking. The best I can find quickly is this article on ibm.com:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cranky29.html

Search for "refuse to carry"

Actually, IBM is not primarily a hardware company, but their hardware is definitely big. According to their last annual report, hardware (along with financing) was only 23% of their pre-tax income, down 2% from 2003. Software made up 40% and Services made up the remaining 37%. But their hardware is now focused on bleeding edge tech and R&D, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers.

PDF Warning: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/annualreport/2007/2007_ibm_annual.pdf

A few years ago I followed:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lwl1/

over a long weekend. It took about 2.5 days off-and-on to bring it up. You get a hand-compiled linux install with busybox providing all of your tools. The only issue I had was that copied-over binaries worked better if you compiled them against uclibc as well. It was a fun project. One neat trick it taught me was to tar directly to the floppy device. The instructions can probably be adapted to USB media. Once I finished, I build vim and nano against uclibc and copied them over.
If I recall correctly, it was a 486 laptop and most of the boot time was the BIOS setting up. If you can adapt the process to a modern machine, it will do that for which you are asking.

-Adam

Apples and oranges. Mainframes and VMWare both address similar problems but each have their own place in the data center. Even IBM uses and re-sells VMware on their x86 hardware. http://www.ibm.com/virtualization/vmware

There's a more in-depth article on Javascript's functional capabilities here:

http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Functional_Javascript

Other stuff I pulled out of Google for your perusing:

http://dankogai.typepad.com/blog/2006/03/lambda_calculus.html
http://math.ucr.edu/~mike/lc2js.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/wa-javascript.html

What this all means is that Javascript is the most widely deployed functional language in existence! And that's a fact you can take to the bank.

Via their press release:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/25147.wss

Via is in on this too?
 
--
  ip

Try the horse's mouth - there's more detail.

Via their press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/25147.wss

From mainframe to PC. I used this language a lot: IBM REXX: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rexx/ The Rexx Language Association: http://www.rexxla.org/ Regina Rexx Interpreter: http://regina-rexx.sourceforge.net/

Not necessarily. Lenovo may not preinstall Linux on their laptops for you, but they still certify their laptops for certain Linux distros - you can have a look at their distro support sheet. For models on that list, they do guarantee that it will run those specific distros (which usually means that it will run pretty much every other modern distro out there).

Lenovo UK still seem to be selling the R61 with Linux pre installed. http://www5.pc.ibm.com/uk/products.nsf/$wwwPartNumLookup/_NB0NCUK?open&OpenDocument&epi=web_express

Strange post. Maybe I am missing something? For your first paragraph...

• Distributed transactions
• High performance message queues
• Filesystems
• SOAP

Of course there's much more out there.

Regardless, the bulk of this setup is clustered processing a shitload of data very fast, which is something that COM+ triggers on MSMQ is pretty damn good at. The automation event processing system I work on at the moment can handle a full gigabit eth pipe using MSMQ on my shitty $700 laptop at about 20% cpu, including processing, logging and updating appropriate stuff in a database and HMI app.

...and this is just a bunch of subjective MS fan boy ranting.

Any company that includes Linux is RTP/STP should go out in the street with them. Though at least you got Solaris correct.

You have no clue. When people mention Linux in these environments they mean Linux running on one of these, not a home-brew distro running on a $150 PC.

BULLSHIT. Per capita spending is all that matters.

Then here's what matters:

District of Columbia:
population: 581,530
Fed Money: $58,600,000,000.00
per-capita: $100,768.66

State of Alaska:
population: 670,053
Fed Money: $8,500,000,000.00
per-capita: $12,685.56

Washington DC gets about 8 times the money per-capita than Alaska does.

BULLSHIT. Per capita spending is all that matters.

Then here's what matters:

District of Columbia:
population: 581,530
Fed Money: $58,600,000,000.00
per-capita: $100,768.66

State of Alaska:
population: 670,053
Fed Money: $8,500,000,000.00
per-capita: $12,685.56

Washington DC gets about 8 times the money per-capita than Alaska does.

I don't usually reply to my own posts, but while looking around further, I found this chart showing the actual federal dollars spent among the states. It also includes spending for the District of Columbia (58.6 BILLION DOLLARS). Alaska received such a small amount that there isn't enough room on the graphic to even write the state's name. The USA Today article referenced in the grandparent post doesn't mention total federal spending per state.

This kind of bullshit -- trying to show that Alaska is a boondoggle dollar sponge by listing per capita breakdown of a portion of federal spending per state instead of actual totals -- is why people think that the mainstream media is in the tank for Obama.

JFS2 on AIX can shrink and it's silly to say it doesn't need to.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/Wikip5/Lesson+2+-+AIX+5L+Features+and+Benefits

The JFS2 file system shrink function supports optimizing storage utilization by removing unused disk space from the file system environment. Administrators can dynamically add and delete disk space as needed to manage both the JFS2 and LVM environments in place, without the need to copy and reboot.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds1/chfs.htm

To reduce the size of the /test JFS2 file system, enter:

chfs -a size=-16M /test

JFS2 on AIX can shrink and it's silly to say it doesn't need to.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/Wikip5/Lesson+2+-+AIX+5L+Features+and+Benefits

The JFS2 file system shrink function supports optimizing storage utilization by removing unused disk space from the file system environment. Administrators can dynamically add and delete disk space as needed to manage both the JFS2 and LVM environments in place, without the need to copy and reboot.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds1/chfs.htm

To reduce the size of the /test JFS2 file system, enter:

chfs -a size=-16M /test

AIX has some extremely snazzy LVM tools which fit so well into the system the sometimes people confuse JFS with LVM. JFS can grow but not shrink. However, because IBM's LVM rig is integrated so perfectly, any administrative action that would require more space simply calls on LVM to make the partition bigger and JFS to grow the filesystem to fill the partition. You don't really need to go in the downward direction.

... unless you're using RPM-based tools or custom tools and you resized the partitions to sane sizes that don't see so sane when you're out of space...

I use JFS primarily (on Linux) ... my response to this article was something along the lines of "whoa, ReiserFS can shrink?!"

Indeed. Once can add mount flags such as data=journal and noatime to bring performance very close to and occasionally exceeding Reiser3. IBM had an article about this years ago but more recent benchmarks and performance tuning guides do exist.

I thought JFS2 supported dynamic filesystem sizing. http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds1/chfs.htm

Of course, this may be dependent on AIX and IBM hardware and may not be available in Linux. I agree JFS doesn't support it.

How about providing a link that doesn't require payment or membership? Like, say this one: http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/publications.html#Bacon04Unified

Here's a non-ACM link.

It's been real for twenty years or more. IBM has long made a special cash register printer called the Fiscal Printer to meet with Italian sales tax regulations. (Other countries have since adopted the Fiscal Printer standards, but I think Italy was the first.) You can read the programming guide here: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/retail/pubs/hw/4610/3station/fiscal/italy/fit90n16.pdf

At its heart the Fiscal Printer has flash RAM that keeps totals of the amounts being printed by the cash register program. Every single line printed that represents money is added to the appropriate accumulators. When the tax collector shows up at a store, he has the printer dump the accumulators so he knows how much the merchant sold and how much sales tax he collected.

It's a clever approach. You can try cooking the books all you want, but in the end the official receipts have to come through the register printer, and that's what the tax man reads.

I must be lucky. I work at an family-owned single independent grocery store and when they told us three years ago we were going to get new POS systems, I thought for sure we would get Windows PC with some crappy software. Instead we got this: http://www-03.ibm.com/products/retail/products/pos/700/index.html Running this: http://www-03.ibm.com/products/retail/products/software/4690/index.html I couldn't believe it.

I must be lucky. I work at an family-owned single independent grocery store and when they told us three years ago we were going to get new POS systems, I thought for sure we would get Windows PC with some crappy software. Instead we got this: http://www-03.ibm.com/products/retail/products/pos/700/index.html Running this: http://www-03.ibm.com/products/retail/products/software/4690/index.html I couldn't believe it.

Finalizers are only superficially similar to destructors in C++. In C++, destructors are frequently used to deallocate resources, typically memory or internal references to other objects, that were allocated during construction. The Java garbage collection model makes this kind of activity unnecessary. Objects that are no longer in use are simply reclaimed by the garbage collector behind the scenes. Finalizers are invoked during garbage collection, but there are a number of restrictions placed upon code running in a finalizer. These restrictions are severe enough that the best advice is simply to avoid using finalizers. Here's a good IBM Developerworks article that describes the problems with finalizers.

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/wireless/weme/

Has a trial.

You used to be able to buy it for $6 at Handango, but they've redone their website to be totally unusable.

Java on PocketPC:

http://blog.vikdavid.com/2004/12/java_on_pocketp.html

"If it doesn't have to produce correct results, I can make my version use no memory and run in zero time."

That was actually the starting point of XP.

Surprisingly enough, there isn't much reference of it around but it was well described in the XP book i read.
Found one over at ibm:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-beck/ (read "creation").

I stand corrected, from the talkback link I followed a trail to an IBM blog with a LOT more details here, and this is the 70/30 SPC-1 benchmark numbers with cache disabled. This is freaking phenomenal performance! The storage is only 4TB, but if you put your logs, flashback, and temp tables on this beast and pinned your busiest tables in ram you would have a screaming OLTP database. I guess it's now just a matter of price, but a rack of x-series boxes with flash card's shouldn't be THAT expensive. Unless IBM asks for a crazy markup it should be affordable for most enterprises (ok, pretty much a given with IBM but still).

There was an qemu+linux screensaver for windows

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-scrnsave/

maybe the desktop background should be replaced too
with an compiz enabled on ...

I've seen so many of the big labs die. I happened to be at IBM Alamaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business, a sad day and the beginning of the end for Alamaden. Who in American industry is still doing basic research?

Well, IBM still is, and on a lot cooler stuff that just disk drives.

Each license bought allows for tech support from Microsoft. Is there any such tech support from open source developers?

Of course there is.
https://www.redhat.com/apps/support/
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid
http://www.novell.com/support/product/products.do
http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/prod_svc.html ....

Is the location of IBM's Managed Storage Services (MSS) division, which deploys SAN for customers in Boulder (including IBM internal) and other locations (over high speed fibre links) on IBM "Shark" (ESS) and DS6000/DS8000 devices. When I worked at IBM their marketing materials stated they were managing over 4 petabytes of data for enterprise customers out of that location alone - that was four years ago! That doesn't count for other MSS locations either, nor all the other areas where IBM implements large amounts of storage for customers. Remember, many if not most of IBM's customers are governments and Fortune 100 companies, particularly high finance. I think they've got some data.

So you want to talk about high levels of storage - IBM has the game covered, considering they invented the HDD.

Check out this article from the IBM Systems Journal about the work done at MIT on Project Athena and the model they developed for calculating the number of required IT staff based on the number of workstations, users, applications, licenses, etc.

"Real" PeeCee servers can compete with that stuff.. You just have to look for them See http://www-07.ibm.com/systems/in/x/hardware/enterprise/x3950m2/index.html. Its just the market isn't large enough to gain a lot of attention. That machine is a quad socket/quad core/quad chassis machine, where the chassis are just NUMA SMP nodes.

• 16U
• 64 2.93GHz Xeon Cores
• 1T RAM PC2-5300 DDR2, chipkill, mirrored, etc
• 28 8x PCIe slots (partially hotswap, the slot count is less in this generation)
• Lots of RAS features

In the end there are probably a lot of situations where this machine is better than the IA64 superdome machines hp is currently selling.

The LPARs on a modern z9 mainframe are certified EAL 5. The z/OS is certified to be EAL 4, but (I am not an expert in this area) it's probably on par with SELinux or so (however, mainframes had such features for ages).

The source is http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/ccs_certification.html

"My favorite mainframe story: "A guy called to ask what procedure he should follow to reboot his mainframe. Tech support told him to just follow the same procedure he did last time. The guy responded, "but only knows how to do that." And so, tech support said "well, get him to do it." At which point the guy remarked: "Well, the problem is he quit 6 years ago.""

If you look at the IBM mainframe cases you will notice they have PS/2 like red power button but it is covered by thin glass, just like fire alarm. It should give idea about in what kind of disaster you may want to turn it off ;)

http://www-903.ibm.com/kr/pressroom/files/IBM_System_z91.jpg

What made me surprised is the use of IBM PS/2 power button design.

In fact they probably have a "twin" running 60 miles away in sysplex fashion so even if you turn it off, the twin will happily keep running with exact same data where the other left.

Keep an eye on this IBM contests page. IBM should announce a "Master the Mainframe" contest for 2008. (There's one for Australia listed already.) Sign up and enjoy -- that's a great way to get hands-on z/OS learning experience.