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A UI is a lot more than how something looks. I still think this is a valid reference:

https://www-306.ibm.com/software/ucd/designconcepts/designbasics.html

An interesting (if little known) fact about the guy (Edwin Black) who wrote that book is that he was a major proponent of OS/2 back in the 90's. At the time, he had absolutely NO PROBLEM with IBM's history, which IBM has always owned up to, and was more than happy to do a lot of business with the company. Around the time that Lou Gerstner announced that OS/2 was a "dead end", he started making noise about getting back at IBM for ruining his publishing business (he published books and magazines around OS/2). Shortly thereafter he wrote that book and launched a lot of high publicity lawsuits (all of which got thrown out almost immediately for lack of evidence and relevance). The guy made a LOT of money hyping a thin connection between modern IBM and the german nationalized subsidiaries that were involved with the Nazi's, and it is well known that he got a lot of the basic facts wrong. Still, because there is a lot of pent up anger at IBM for various reasons (you name it, the failure of OS/2, their previous domination of the computer industry, etc) this IBM-Nazi connection gets thrown around a lot as a sort of blood libel against the company.

Absolutely correct. Excel does not follow accepted standards when performing decimal arithmetic.

Here are a couple of good links relevant to this issue:

http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/

http://mesa.ece.wisc.edu/publications/cp_2005-14.pdf?PHPSESSID=643d8caaab9a8736654674ed089aa4aa

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ARITH_17.pdf

Rack mountable storage? HAH...

Unless you refer to it as DASD, you're just a kid. I cut my teeth on IBM 3370. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3370.html

Actually, I'd say that if the hypervisor is cracked enough to allow Linux access to 3D, then it's also probably cracked enough that it could be subverted for use as a tool to bypass the DRM on ordinary PS3 games, or assuming it's responsible for the DRM in the first place, cracking the hypervisor would probably mean you're already finished.

Perusing the info IBM supplies, I come to the conclusion that if the hypervisor is cracked by discovering the "Hardware Root of Secrecy" which is a kind of master key embedded in the PS3's CPU, then it's "game over" for DRM on the PS3.

One possible way of finding that key requires a lot of work with an electron microscope, I'd guess. There are others, but they also require a lot of exotic hardware, know-how, and hard work.

When you compare the DRM on the PS3 and on MS consoles, it kind of puts the STI initiative which invented the Cell CPU used in the PS3 in perspective: Sony gets good DRM by picking IBM's brain, and IBM gets a powerful CPU whose development is backed by a popular consumer device by "picking" Sony's market share.

And anyway - there has to be some code that accesses the TPM chip, and that also means that given enough time and effort it's possible to circumvent it, or even simulate the TPM chip.

That's why the TPM has sufficient functionality to verify it's operating environment.

That being said, there are a number of existing attacks, ranging from exploiting DMA to freezing and extracting the RAM.

The TPMs also aren't required to have symmetric encryption, and RSA is too slow to enable full encryption in realtime. So, you're stuck having the symmetric key used only after the environment is considered "safe". The key is then stored in RAM and used to decrypt the software in realtime.

Once this key is extracted, the software is relatively easy to break.

For more fun, there are a number of TPM emulators already. The issue is that their endorsement key (created at manufacture) won't be able to participate in the "Direct Anonymous Attestation" because it lacks a key issued by a DAA issuer.

I have personally seen a key used which was extracted from a major brand TPM manufacturer. This was one of the 1.2 TPMs (the older ones had a "Privacy CA" you had to trust to protect your privacy). It successfully passed the IBM battery of TPM tests.

So, TPM-based copy protection is already broken. To detect this particular attack, you would have to use a watermark, and watermarks done in software are subject to removal, since they come after decryption. Even then, the best you can accomplish would be banning the "bad" TPM from online activities.

Unless they want to force every game to be online-activated with a TPM check, and a watermark for all downloaded exes, and a blacklist for compromised TPMs, it will literally add nothing to the copy protection.

How many people crack their own games? How many just grab the .torrent?

I'll see your Blue Gene suggestion and raise you actual working code.

They cool their servers from the bottom to the top. Also sideways, so kinda diagonally, but they're getting excellent results. Sounds like an efficiÃnt idea to me. http://www.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/bluegene/ And why don't they use Western Digital GreenPower drives? They have an enterprise version of those don't they?

Also check out the specification update for the X38 chipset page 8.

The GIMP is almost as good as Photoshop now.

GIMP isn't even close to Photoshop, not for a pro photographer. CinePaint, aka FilmGIMP, bridges the gap quite a bit though.

But I've never seen anything that compete with Autocad that is remotely as good.

There's CATIA, MicroStation, and Pro/ENGINEER. And if you don't need all that they offer, there's TurboCAD, as well as others.

No amount of sales receipts or serial numbers mattered. They didn't even care. Their solution every single time was to "Buy a new copy".

On top of that, upgrading almost never worked.

I don't know if it will work but next tyme you can tell Adobe you'll be upgrading to CATIA.

The third slide in the presentation clearly states that the Z6 is a sibling of the Power6

As that slide says, "Siblings, not identical twins", "Different personalities", and "Very different ISAs=> very different cores".

Further along in the presentation, slide 14 talks about the use of multiple-passes and millicode to handle CISC ops.

To be precise, it says "Multi-pass handling of special cases" and "Leverage millicode for complex operations"; that means "complex instructions trap to millicode", where "millicode" is similar to, for example, PALcode in Alpha processors - it's z/Architecture machine code plus some special millicode-mode-only instructions to, for example, manipulate internal status registers. See, for example, "Millicode in an IBM zSeries processor".

Clearly the Z6 is exquisitely optimized to execute the z/Architecture instruction efficiently. It is also clear that it is part of the Power6 family.

It's clear that, as the the third slide says, the Z6 "share[s] lots of DNA" with the Power6, i.e. it shares the fab technology, some low-level "design building blocks", large portions of some functional units, the pipeline design style, and many of the designers.

It's not at all clear, however, that it would belong to a family with "Power" in its name, given that it does not implement the Power ISA. If it's a sibling of the Power6, that makes it, in a sense, a member of a family that includes the Power6, but, given that its native instruction set is different from the Power instruction set, it makes no sense to give that family a name such as "Power6" or anything else involving "Power" - and it certainly makes no sense to assert that it's "sed on the POWER archictecture", as the person to whom I was responding asserted.

The CPU's in today's IBM Mainframes are based on the POWER archictecture.

Not according to an IBM slide presentation on the Z6 microprocessor, which is the latest processor for the z/Architecture machines (the machines that are descendants of the System/360 mainframes).

The AS/400^WiSeries^WSystem i midrange machines do use PowerPC processors, but they're different from the z/Architecture machines.

http://uniset.ca/terr/news/lat_fbibreakin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP
http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/sr=8-1/qid=1172469926/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3962904-3664448?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://code.google.com/p/torchat/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah's_Men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/iron.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Rule_Book
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeal_of_prohibition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writeprint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/pcapdiff/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/COPLINK/
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/research/coplink/authorship.htm
http://www.coplink.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/
http://packetstormsecurity.nl/filedesc/Practical_Onion_Hacking.pdf.html
http://www.williamson-labs.com/laser-mic.htm
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/privacy-sigir2006.pdf
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/topic.html#Anonymous_20communication
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html

What exactly is a "non rules-based monitoring process?" I thought I had some clue about security procedures, but I'm be hard pressed to describe what such a process might be. Even more importantly, what would it cost to implement? TFA is no help here, consisting of the usual hand-waving about the never-ending arms race between malware writers and the rest of us.

He's talking about computer immune systems. Here's a link to an IBM research paper from the top of the Google results for "virus immune system computers":

http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/Kephart/VB97/

The basic idea is that computers and viruses are so advanced, that it's time to implement immune systems. Instead of comparing one's system against a large list of fairly static virus signature rules, an immune system could evolve and build the "rule" dynamically as it encounters and interacts with the virus. The semantic ambiguity in the statement is that he's referring to a "rule" as a state-based virus signature. In a "non rules-based system", such as an immune system, there would be behavioral standards, such as "only send out traffic on one port at a time, and send it out consistently on the same port". There might also be structural standards (ie. digital signatures on executable code) or functional standards (i.e. return an application manifest upon request that can be compared to a reference site). If an application doesn't conform to the behavioral, structural, and functional standards, then the immune system has leeway to gobble it up and dispose of it. One might argue with his semantics, and claim that the behavioral, structural, and functional standards in an immune system are also 'rules'. The thinking behind computer immune systems, however, is more along the lines of activation networks and neural nets which implement behavior standards as functional evaluations of code performance, rather than lists of static state-based virus signatures (which are called 'rules' in the jargon).

Put another way, instead of having a long list of 'rules' such as "foo.exe is a virus" or "any file with signature xyz is a virus", there would be standards such as "a process should communicate consistently on the same port and not port hop" or "a file shouldn't try to access certain areas of OS memory if it doesn't have a certain type of application manifest registered to OS developers". Yes, you could call those 'rules' also. But that's not what he's referring to in the article. In the article, when he says 'rules', he's referring to state-based virus signatures. A "non rules-based monitoring process" wouldn't use state-based signatures; instead, it would monitor the behavior of code against performance standards.

(yes, a 'standard' might be considered a "rule", if you want to argue semantics. They just happen to be using the term 'rule' in a jargon-specific manner.)

IBM's DB2 has a feature that can estimate the cost of a query. DB2 Query Patroller takes advantage of this feature and allows you to define rules such that expensive queries against your database can be rejected, given lower priority, or scheduled for a later time, for example.

I know you're using Oracle, but perhaps it supports something similar?

Programming the Cell Broadband Engine: Examples and Best Practices

Of course it's for enterprise...
because you and I can't afford a $10k blade let alone the rack slot farm to put it in.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs22/index.html
(browse and buy)

The updates to it, DDR2 and better floating point, those are nice.
Now if they would make a small system, somewhere between a mini-mac and a shuttle pc in size,
DVD/RW, 2 Gb lan ports, some usb, basic video, 2 or 4 gigs ram (or empty memory slots we could fill ourselves) and a place for a SATA drive
not using it as a co-pro, but as the main CPU, with a linux install disk and the SDK,

compare my imagined specs with the PS3 crippled cell (7 out of 8 working, and 1 of them against you for system security).
If it were in the same price range, that'd be nice, maybe a way to get more people to experiment/develop for it.

the QS22 boasts an open environment, utilizing the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the primary operating system and the open development environment of Eclipse.

DITTO might pre-date IEFBR14 (I know I used DITTO first). But although I'm sure it's been updated since, it's likely an old version is in use in an old installation in a 3rd world type country. http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/ditto/about.html

Nope, they still sell intellistation power desktops. Also, you can get both the 520 and 550 servers in "deskside" style cases.

Nope, they still sell intellistation power desktops. Also, you can get both the 520 and 550 servers in "deskside" style cases.

Nope, they still sell intellistation power desktops. Also, you can get both the 520 and 550 servers in "deskside" style cases.

The PowerPC's desktop presence was pretty much killed when Apple switched.

I don't think IBM makes an workstations that use the PPC chips anymore - but they still use the related POWER architecture in their higher end servers.

So on the desktop, it's dead.

In the device and embedded market, however, it's quite popular. It has an unusual niche "above" ARM and "below" x86, so to speak.

This is because it has higher performance capabilities and better integration with commodity computing hardware than most ARM chips can provide, whilst having lower power requirements and higher per-watt performance than X86 chips.

This article from IBM's developerWorks has two sections in which PPC is compared with X86 and ARM:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-migrate/
It's not as biased as its IBM provenance might make you think, and provides a nice summary of the differences in real world usage.

As for where PPC is being used - well, you probably own a device with a PPC chip in it, and just don't know it.
They're used in vehicle management systems by Ford, they're in a wide variety of laser printers, they're used in some network/NAS devices.

Oh, and they're also used in all the current generation consoles, of course - so maybe you do own a PPC processor and knew it after all! ;-)

orly?

(PDF warning)

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z10ec/specifications.html

Because they weigh in at over 2800lbs and have a footprint of 30sqft.

OS Xs lack of keyboard support

I.e., that you can't call up menu items from the keyboard? (OS X's UI isn't completely mouse-driven; see, for example, the "Full keyboard access" item in the "Keyboard & Mouse" pane in System Preferences.)

Author doesn't realize Microsoft and IBM wrote most of the GUI and UI guidelines that OS X even uses today.

What part of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines come from the CUA Basic Interface Design Guide and other Microsoft and/or IBM guidelines without Microsoft and/or IBM having, in turn, gotten them from earlier Macintosh guidelines?

You forget something, G5 Macs. They are all pure 64bit and in fact, the entire PowerPC line was developed with 64bit in mind.

I was going crazy about this fact until I heard a really funny side effect. As that JRE is pure 64bit, making it default Java applet handler in Safari will practically disable Java since Safari is... 32 bit :)

Sun guys should leave Open Office developers alone a bit and treat Apple just like Microsoft. They should figure already that Apple doesn't like their tool, will do anything to show it as a joke to end user, will not optimise it and get XCode from Apple along with the most expensive Developer account possible, start coding Sun Java for OS X.

I don't even expect JRE 6 from Apple for PPC. It may be released without JIT Compiler etc. even (which is worse than not having it at first place).

If you insist on running PPC(64) Desktop and want the Java 6, IBM one for Linux/PPC is there:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux/download.html

People dreaming about Apple in Enterprise should take IBM as example, that is how you get respect on Enterprise.

Another option for PPC while it is tragicomic: MS Virtual PC 7/XP SP2/Win2K+Sun Java 6 . I tested, it works. Of course don't expect Azureus to play movies ;)

Yes you can download the spec for SWF, but nowhere in the spec did it discuss terms of use.

If I implement to their spec, are they going to sue me because of the patents that cover the SWF technology? They say it is available as an "open specification", but there's nothing that says if there are any restrictions on my use of the specification.

Do they have a covenant not to sue like the one that Sun has, the one that IBM has or even the one that Microsoft has?

They're pulling support for the Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC). You're supposed to be developing for Omnibus now.

They're pulling support for the Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC). You're supposed to be developing for Omnibus now.

IBM is not supporting the iPhone and has no plans to support the iPhone.

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21271899

While I'm a Blackberry bigot, I've had several folks approach me about getting their iPhone connected to Domino (Lotus Notes' server). I believe I could use IMAP, but most other IMAP handhelds (generally on ATT&T) freak out at the quantity of e-mail in my end-users mailboxes.

And I still wouldn't be able to synchronize their calendar or address books:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21296737

IBM is not supporting the iPhone and has no plans to support the iPhone.

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21271899

While I'm a Blackberry bigot, I've had several folks approach me about getting their iPhone connected to Domino (Lotus Notes' server). I believe I could use IMAP, but most other IMAP handhelds (generally on ATT&T) freak out at the quantity of e-mail in my end-users mailboxes.

And I still wouldn't be able to synchronize their calendar or address books:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21296737

Obviously you fail to understand key differences between RAII and the Java GC. The fact that you mix in try/finally only adds up to this.

RAII ensures the destructor is ran once the scope is left. The Java GC does not guarantee this. This is ok for simple memory blocks, but very bad for resources that must be freed instantly, like some locks/handles on devices. In Java, I have to use finally. In C++, RAII not only takes care of cleaning up, it also ensures exception safety.

D got it right; destructors are executed when the scope is left, but the used memory is freed up whenever the GC wants.

Additionally RAII *does* allow stuff that cannot be done with your replacements. Just try this:

mutex m;

{
    scoped_lock lock(m); ... do stuff ...
}

Exception-safe mutex locks that are automatically freed once the scope is left. Do THIS in Java.

Also, finalizers are amusing stuff: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtctips/j-jtc0319a.html

They could even introduce their own gold spammers from the Sales department, trolling for pre-sales resources. "Are you annoy with current position? Spending too much time mining gold when better use of time? Talk to ERP sales team at http://xxxintranet.thingy.ibm.com/"

Is AMD having fab problems?

There are real 3-CPU parts. The XBox 360 has one; three PowerPC CPUs share a cache. The chip layout is four quadrants, three with CPUs and one with the L2 cache.

There exists hardware where the manufacturer refuses to disclose how it operates. The only purpose for this is to prevent it from working with open systems. The cure is simple. Don't buy it. Do not reward vendors for limiting your choices. In time they'll learn to stop including toxic stuff in their box.

Read the label. In this case, read the specifications for the stuff you buy. If the ingredients aren't on your preferred list of safe ingredients then just don't buy it. These days there are plenty of vendors eager to brag about how their platform will run any software you want to run including Dell, IBM and HP. In fact if your hardware won't work with an OS so flexible it runs on x86, alpha, sparc, arm, powerpc, hppa, ia64, mips and s390 then it must be truly broken. After all, Linux supports more hardware devices out of the box than any other.

If they won't tell you what's in the box and you buy it anyway then you're stuck. Fortunately the list of toxic ingredients and their sponsors get shorter every day.

I thought IBM would be the first to market with this technology. I remember reading a report from them last century (can't find it now) but I did find this from 1999.

Look, if anyone just does a basic analysis, you'll see that there's this circular process where the heavier operating system requires new hardware, forcing people to buy both to keep up with the times, which both them and the manufacturer want.

According to this basic analysis(pdf), debian Etch is an order of magnitude larger and more complex than Vista. And yet it doesn't require this "new hardware" you're speaking of.

In fact in addition to the x86-32 and x86-64 targets Vista aims for it also runs on alpha, sparc, arm, powerpc, hppa, ia64, mips and s390. From the toys to spacecraft, from webservers to 85.2% of the world's top 500 supercomputers it'll run on almost anything. That's engineering.

This will not end until they have a solid competitor, period, and that means the linux geeks have got to get off their high horse and make an easy, packaged, "buy your box from dell with it pre-loaded" version of it your grandma can use.

You have been able to buy PCs preloaded with linux from Walmart, Dell, IBM, HP and many others for several years.

Because, personally, i'm getting a little sick of getting these operating systems from Microsoft which I swear to God have code running several extra loops just to bog it down so that only the most bleeding edge (aka money I don't want to spend) boxes can handle it reasonably.

So switch. It's time. Ballmer says Vista is a work in progress. Gates says its replacement is a year out. Let's take their word for it. This is a great window of opportunity to justify looking at alternatives.

Lenovo says it's more like 6.7%.

I know it's slick to hype the Eee PC, but it's about 6+ months late to this party...

it's too bad that the Bobby certification is no longer available for free. I people weren't already making an effort to make their pages accessible when it was free, I doubt they'll PAY for it. http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/tester/policy/accessibility/

IBM announced a 5GHZ (also available in 4.2GHZ) 595 April 8th.

IBM recently released the p575 which states "Cooling requirements Chilled inlet water supply/return required for all systems". They also have a kit to turn the rear door of a rack cabinet into a Heat Exchanger. So there is a move in that direction

p575 spec http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/575/specs.html
Rear door exchanger http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=-840&storeId=1&langId=-1&dualCurrId=73&categoryId=4611686018425028106&productId=4611686018425023461

IBM recently released the p575 which states "Cooling requirements Chilled inlet water supply/return required for all systems". They also have a kit to turn the rear door of a rack cabinet into a Heat Exchanger. So there is a move in that direction

p575 spec http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/575/specs.html
Rear door exchanger http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=-840&storeId=1&langId=-1&dualCurrId=73&categoryId=4611686018425028106&productId=4611686018425023461

Pretty much anything. Most apps run on AIX. Big ones you may know are Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Websphere, Apache.

Redhat and Suse are even supported by IBM.

And linux stuff too, you can rpm --install *rpm on AIX no problem.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/os/aix/linux/toolbox/download.html

And if you cant get it that way..

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/virtualization/editions/lx86/

Pretty much anything. Most apps run on AIX. Big ones you may know are Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Websphere, Apache.

Redhat and Suse are even supported by IBM.

And linux stuff too, you can rpm --install *rpm on AIX no problem.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/os/aix/linux/toolbox/download.html

And if you cant get it that way..

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/virtualization/editions/lx86/

The Power 6 CPU is not just fast, but according to this paper from IBM it's also already dual-core and includes an SMP switch to allow up to 64 cores (32 chips) to run coherently.

That is, IBM has really fast ticket agents, AND they can fit a lot of them at the ticket counter.