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Hmmph. I'd bet it's got a really long pipeline to reach that clock speed.

Wow it's huge, almost twice the size of a Core 2 Duo.

I think IBM is doing taking the NetBurst approach - a long pipeline to get to high frequencies. Plus it's a server chip only used in their servers so they can design for a much higher TDP than Intel or AMD and rely on water cooling.

Hmmph. I'd bet it's got a really long pipeline to reach that clock speed.

Wow it's huge, almost twice the size of a Core 2 Duo.

I think IBM is doing taking the NetBurst approach - a long pipeline to get to high frequencies. Plus it's a server chip only used in their servers so they can design for a much higher TDP than Intel or AMD and rely on water cooling.

Yeah, DFP is not exactly mainstream. AFAIK it exists because certain banking calculations must be performed in decimal to avoid binary rounding. I think in COBOL numbers are decimal by default, in Java you'd use the BigDecimal class, and in C you use some typedefs.

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

Actually, ever wonder why IBM uses their distinctive blue and gray? They spent millions on research to find out what colours give what messages to people. Blue and gray are very soothing, but serious conservative business colours. Google ibm blue gray color studies for more. Sample found here:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/353/sectiond/jacobson.html

I couldn't figure out how to post a new comment, so I thought I'd tag this on to yours as it is a sign that open source has been embraced my much of the corporate world for years AND a certain hold out is scrambling to play catch-up (reminiscent of the browser wars, only this time there are 1,000s of 'Netscapes' who are already very well established and profitable, in place). Only a few of the numerous examples available: Google http://code.google.com/opensource/ Adobe http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home IBM http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/ Yahoo! (MSFT is threatening to go to stockholders directly they want 'in' so bad) http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ (all of these and more large, commercial, entities have open-source research and development projects and sponsor other open-source projects and programs) And, the 'icing on the cake' http://port25.technet.com/ Microsoft's recently launched Open Source site And, then there's the whole 'server' thing and Vista fiasco (those MSFT memos were a laugh riot).

Yeah, these guys don't have cash flow, serious projects or research.

ARMONK, N.Y. - 04 Apr 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to terminate the temporary suspension order barring IBM from participating in new Federal government business.

Effective immediately, IBM will resume participating in new business with all federal agencies -- ending a suspension that began March 27, 2008.

IBM will continue to cooperate with the EPA's ongoing investigation of possible violations of the Procurement Integrity provisions of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy Act regarding a bid for business with the EPA, and with a related investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

link: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23814.wss

I've found the results tend not to be as great as they were before in Google. Now days I am using social based bookmarking. Like Dogear http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/dogear.index.html and Stumbleupon http://www.stumbleupon.com/ .

The results are so much better.

Cite? I've been working on smart card applications for 10 years, including lots of credit and debit cards, in multiple countries and I have never seen any that were active. All are passive, whether contact or contactless. There is a project in the works in the US that is considering using active tags, but the technology limitations are pretty severe. The battery has to be very small, thin and flexible, yet have enough life to make it unnecessary to recharge frequently. The reason they want a battery is not because they can't implement good security without it, but because they want to embed a fingerprint scanner, keypad and display and make the card usable for simple purposes even when not in the field of a reader.

ALL major contactless smart cards on the market are passive, and many of them support RSA, AES, El Gamal, ECC, etc., on-card and have for years. Using on-chip hardware crypto accelerators they can even perform very intensive operations like on-card private key encryption/signing (much more expensive than public key operations) and on-card public key pair generation -- though the latter takes a few seconds.

I know the guys who designed the IBM JCOP card operating system for the Philips SmartX chips (among others), which was purchased by NXP a couple years ago and is their current high-security offering. It definitely offers strong cryptography in both contact and contactless modes and includes various technologies to minimize the effectiveness of side-channel attacks and to make disassembly attacks difficult. It's good security -- and it is definitely passive.

You did get the frequency right, ISO 14443-compliant cards do communicate in 13.56 MHz.

While I'm posting I should point out that this crack of the MIFARE classic proprietary encryption didn't surprise anyone in the industry. We've known for years that it sucked, and I have always steered my clients away from it. The only surprising thing is that it took this long.

It is definitely NOT a hoax or a joke. Here's the press release from IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23785.wss

No, its not an April Fool's Day joke, unless they moved AF to March 31st. Here is the dated official release from IBM on the matter:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23785.wss

>It introduces a sort of concurrency into otherwise sequential programs, leading to timing jitter (at least), stalls (maybe), and nonrepeatable bugs.

Not at all. IBM even has a real time Java (hard real time).

That's WebSphere Real Time Java, a research effort from IBM. You can order it (with mandatory and expensive technical support), but it's more of a semi-custom product. They had to make some drastic compromises to get that to work. Arrays are split into "arraylets", so that no one chunk is so big that it can't be moved during the garbage collection freeze. This allows them to get the freeze time down below a millisecond. There are still freezes, but they're shorter.

>Garbage collection and destructors do not play well together. See "Managed C++".

No, that's not true either. C++ has RAII, so the point is not valid.

That's the problem. Resource Allocation as Initialization and garbage collection do not play well together. Do you want to wait until the next GC before a window closes?

> Concurrent garbage collection requires some support from the memory management unit and operating system, so the hardware can detect "dirty pages"

No, it does not. All that's required is CAS operations.

If you want to avoid freezes during garbage collection, you need more than that. IBM's concurrent collector for Java still has brief freezes for the "mark" phase. Microsoft's patented approach (U.S. Patent #6,502,111) has a freeze: "The application is paused after the marking act is complete. Next, a second marking act of marking all reachable memory objects...". Boehm's collector is "mostly concurrent", and requires "the write protect facilities that are now widely available". The general idea is to write protect pages while the program is running, then run the marking phase of garbage collection on them. If the running program writes to a write-protected page, the page is unlocked and the write performed, but the garbage collector has to do that page again.

Page level write protection/dirty page bit hardware, or periodic freezes. Pick one.

> Calling destructors from another thread in the garbage collector can introduce race conditions or deadlocks.

It depends on what your destructor is doing.

And that's the problem. There are some subtle no-nos in destructors called from garbage collectors. C++ doesn't prevent them. Errors here result in very intermittent bugs that are very hard to find. Garbage collection is fine for programs at a somewhat higher level, like Java, but you probably don't want it inside your operating system kernel or media player. You mix two totally unrelated domains. A OS kernel can have GC, but usually it is too low level to have one. On the other hand, a media player can have GC, since a media player does not constantly allocate and deallocate memory blocks. In Java, programmers worry about garbage collection and finalizers.

Don't underestimate the power of cycles! cycles can be introduced indirectly, through inheritance, and then it's very very difficult to track them...trust me, I've been hunting a memory leak introduced by a subclass which obtained a shared ptr from a factory interface, only to discover that the the base class was already already referenced somewhere from the object returned by the factory; the cycle was not obvious, until the program accumulated lots of craft after a long operation.

I'm arguing for a debug mode in which cycles are detected at the moment of creation. Cycles are typically a design time problem; if a program generates cycles, it will probably generate cycles on every execution. This tells you when you need weak pointers.

If your data structure is anything like a tree, the cycle problem can usually be fixed

With Java I can at least know that they will not deplete resources.

On the other hand, Microsoft has never ACTUALLY sued anyone over patents. IBM has.

And not just hardware patents. They've sued over software patents.

Assuming that IBM is just automatically going to be nice, and so letting them get away with a patent license you think is bogus, does not strike me as wise.

The NYT is wrong. There are no low-cost processors in the mainframes. The "CPUs" are multi-chip assemblies of 16 to 20 chips, each devoted to a specific function. While the processing units in these assemblies might share some technical background with Power processors found in UNIX servers, the similarities are only skin-deep and the processors are anything but off-the-shelf low-cost chips.

There is a nice set of slides here.

A method in a metacomputing, distributed network of utilizing remote client resources in the network, comprising:
a server that implements tasks by utilizing idle resources in multiple clients;

individual communication channels between each client and the server;
a second, dedicated IP port between each client and server, through which the server distributes the tasks to the each client downstream and through which each of the clients sends the results of the task upstream to the server.

Apparently SQL queries can also be done through FTP. http://forums.java.net/jive/message.jspa?messageID=246926#246932/

If their innovation is having my web browser run executables unrelated to the web site I am visiting, then I am just not interested.

"Last I checked, IBM makes its money from two things: hardware and support. Note that software is not one of them; the software is (to them) merely what enables them to sell their bread and butter. It's also costing them money to develop and maintain software that drives sales." Check your facts. 20% of IBM's income is from software and growing. Annual reports are good things to read if you are an investor: http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/

IBM has its own (real) enterprise-level database that does everything and all way before Oracle ever exists.

Putting 10m into PostgreSQL's vendors could be an marketing strategy. If you ask an IBM sales executive the same questions, he'd introduce their own line of DB2 for your needs - depends on how deep your pocket, that is. ^^

Disclaimer: I were programming with DB2 during my time in IBM, therefore I may not be too objective in comparing DB2 and PostgreSQL. Please bear with me. ^^

The software division of IBM accounts for 20% of their revenue, and 40% of their profit.

See http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2007/md_4rco.shtml

Key applications are WebSphere, "Information Management" (db2?), Lotus, Tivoli, Rational, and operating systems.

Some of this is probably tied to the success of their hardware and service departments, I doubt many people buy IBM operating systems (2% of their total revenue, 12% of their software revenue) without IBM hardware.

But the non-disclosed revenue from Rational is probably pretty much standalone.

Yes, they use called (silicon nano-) photonic chips for that purpose. The same technique will be used to communicated between different cores in chips. (check the press release of IBM)

I've been looking for an explinatory video from IBM I believe, explaining laser-computing and how they solved certain problems in their designs, but I've failed to locate the particular movie.

Use a perl (or some other language that handles everything manually*) script to receive the upload submission and write it to disk in a known location with a known name*. A second script can then compare the file size as it's uploading. Somewhat ugly

* PHP won't work since file uploading is handled behind the scenes.

PHP 5.2 and up allows you to track file uploading using much the same approach as perl (two scripts).
See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-v525/index.html

I'm using a Gateway 2000 P6301:

http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Godzilla/1014776R/1014776Rsp2.shtml

It has only VGA out (yep, no HDMI or DVI or other connectors). I have a separate LCD at home that I'd like to "span" or expand my desktop to, but I don't want a "single" screen simply duplicated to the LCD. I want to put on the external LCD any virtual desktop or app of my choosing.

A year or 2 ago, I thought I read in LXF about 2 or more Xserver options to edit by hand to achieve this. There were/are commercial implementations, too. But, I misplaced those mags and can't find the archives online.

My laptop currently is running PCLinux OS 2008, KDE 3.5.8.

Video controller information:

Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
Up to 384 MB of Dynamic Video Memory

The external LCD is recognized only if connected during boot up. After booting, if the LCD had not been connected, it simply is not recognized, doesn't light up, and I have to connect it and then power cycle if I want to use the external LCD

Currently, I'm looking at:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/os-mltihed/index.html

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2007/9/2/153902

Can you offer me any xorg or advice?

Thanks!

This technology is essentially what is used in atomic force microscopes, and was being investigated by IBM for data storage under the name "Millipede". It basically involves a huge array of cantilevers that have very sharp tips on them (typical tip size is 20 nm but smaller is possible). The tips are used to read and write dots on the surface.

So yes, this system has moving parts. The tips have to scan across the surface, and the cantilevers are basically springs that bend up and down as the tips move over the surface. This definitely has some wear issues to consider, but it's nothing like the large-scale and high-speed movements of a hard drive (where a >2" disk is rotating at >7,000 rpm). Instead, the tips are moving laterally by micrometers at most (the huge array is what allows a large surface to be probed), and the cantilevers are springing up-and-down by only nanometers. The movement in an AFM is controlled using piezoelectric deformation of quartz actuators. This small-scale movement is very robust and reproducible. Quartz oscillators can vibrate/move thousands of times a second continuously for years without much problem (think of oscillators used for clocks, etc.). Moreover this technology has been used in commercial AFMs for years, so it's well-understood.

The thousands of tips are probably all actuated together by a single piezo-motor. They move in unison which would actually allow for high-speed reading/writing (since thousands of bits are read/written at once). You're right that each tip is in principle a point of failure. However, with the right error-correction algorithm, the device could be built so that even if a few tips break, no data is lost.

I agree that the access time isn't going to be as fast as modern RAM, but it could very well be faster than modern hard-drives. I think this is intended as permanent storage, not volatile memory.

From the page... 8GB to 1TB of DDR2 SDRAM running at 533 MHz or up to 2TB of DDR2 memory running at 400 MHz

I used to work on Linux at IBM, where we did have machines capable of running with a maximum configuration of 2 terabytes of RAM.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/highend/595/specs.html

Typically, those machines would be partitioned into smaller logical partitions (LPARs), and I never saw any machine that had a maximum configuration anyway. But supposedly someone does have a 2 terabyte machine running Linux.

So this isn't as far-fetched as one might think.

IBM's just-announced z10 mainframe, with 1.5 TB memory.

IBM p595 can have 1TB of RAM too. And yes, they run Linux.

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

Besides, how energy efficient is this design? The next gen supercomputers will likely not just be measured in flops but, flops/watt.

Specifically the IBM Interoperability Specifications Pledgehttp://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/isplist.shtml is also only listing the versions it applies for (currently listing ODF v1.0 and ODF v1.1). Strangely the SFLC does not name this about the IBM licensing when making an analysis on ODF licensing but does name the version issue when reviewing Micrsofts OSP.

Also on their ODF license analysis the SLFC specifically mentions that OASIS rules on IP rights require participants in the standardization to RAND license those. However on the other hand the SLFC does not mention that Ecma International of which Office Open XML is an official standard requires all participant in their technical commitees AND ALSO all members that vote to approve a standard to RAND license their patents.

So on major issues the SFLC determines to ingnore information that are actually applies to both standards making their analysis on both OOXML but also their previous analysis on ODF very shaky and unreliable.

Apperantly a legal analysis by the SFLC is now no longer a legal analysis but a politics document and the opinion of the SFLC as a source of legal information will be a lot poorer after they make such biased choices on what to include and what not to include in their legal analysis based on what they want the outcome to be.

Or mayby even on how much money IBM is paying them to state this at this particular moment in time...

Have you see IBM's new z6 processor? Quad core 4.4GHz, 2 I/O interfaces running 17GB ps each, 2 interface for SMP function at 48GB ps each, and 4 memory interface at 13 GB ps each. Each core has a decimal math accelerator, each pair of cores share a compression/decompression accelerator and a encryption/decryption accelerator.

Their new z10 mainframe can have up to 20 of these (80 cores) of which 64 of the cores can be configured for the customer to use. The other 16 cores are used for spares and special processing.

The z6 (or z10 CPU) is very closely related to IBM's Power6.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z6

http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/IBM-z6-mainframe-microprocessor-Webb.pdf

The original Winchester drive had two 30MB spindles, 30-30.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3340.html

Some observers have noted that the 3340 was known as "Winchester" because its development engineers called it a "30-30" (its two spindles each had a disk capacity of 30 megabytes), the common name of a rifle manufactured by the Winchester Company. Kenneth E. Haughton, who led the 3340 development effort, is reported to have said: "If it's a 30-30, then it must be a Winchester."

No need to think about that any more. In the fine print:

IBM prefers the terms "notebook" or "portable computer" rather than "laptop." Users are reminded not leave your computer, AC adapter, or accessories in contact with your lap or any part of your body for an extended period when the products are functioning or when the battery is charging.

Now your problem is to parallelize the linear system solver. Normally this task takes up to 90% of total execution time so it's a good candidate for running on SPEs. For the other 10%, leave it on the PPE. And don't forget : adding "fun" stuff increases the code size, which means less space for data on SPE.

Resources are available on IBM's developerWorks site (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/docs_articles.html, see also the forums some interesting issues are discussed) and on Barcelona supercomputing center (http://www.bsc.es/plantillaH.php?cat_id=326).

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/humancapital/01282008/images/Adaptable%20Workforce_2008.pdf This is a study done by IBM, and probably biased in some ways, but it does highlight a couple of good key points: -New graduates have different expectations. Reputation of a company isn't sufficient to hire anymore. -Leadership pipeline is quickly dwindling. Companies are not investing enough for next-gen leaders. -Expertise within a company is difficult to locate, and even more difficult to capture (and pass on). I think that overall key is companies will need to begin investing (yes, investing!) more into their hiring process if they want to locate and recruit top candidates. Companies say they've been doing that for years, but I'd sincerely like to see them put their money where their mouths are. Too many are focused on short-term cost savings rather than long-term strategic planning. Think it's bad now? Wait 5-10 years, where there are no graduates to fill those holes ... even the poorly qualified ones.

" Mr. ISSA. Okay. So here we have a situation where the Clinton Administration is on a platform that has to be phased out. Simply, they lost the war of who is going to supply emails. A period of time goes on in which Yes, we are dealing, to Dr. Weinstein's concern, with getting good archives, but we are also dealing with the fact that I can't play my Betamax tapes any more, either, and I can't seem to find anybody who has a Betamax player any more."

Maybe Mr Issa should look here. And Republicans are the ones who lose wars these days.

Meanwhile, the General Services Administration just saved a million bucks of taxpayers money with Notes.

That is utter bullshit. Basically all the components you list are compatible through the whole T4x range, just check out the Hardware Maintenance Manual. Yeah, the memory was upgraded from PC2100 to PC2700 in the T41(p), but that's all (and you can use PC2700 instead of PC2100, though mixing them may not work). And the T42 and T42p DO have compatible components.

• YouTube video of the Interactive Ray-Tracer in action
• IBM's page for the IRT

I'd seriously consider spending $5k for a spiffy IBM cell box running AIX or Linux as long as it could run a PCIe OpenGL card. Heck, I'd take it if it came with OS/2 even!

I'd seriously consider spending $5k for a spiffy IBM cell box running AIX or Linux as long as it could run a PCIe OpenGL card. Heck, I'd take it if it came with OS/2 even!

IBM has a great checklist for Accessability of different UI implementations (web, app, lotus notes).

http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/software/accesssoftware.html

Understanding Accessibility

If you are new to accessibility, review "Understanding accessibility" before completing the checklist or contacting the Human Ability and Accessibility Center for help.
IBM software accessibility checklist

Use this checklist for:

        * general software products and applications that have a user interface
        * software tools, this applies to both the user interface as well as the output of the tool
        * Java 1.1.x applications that use standard AWT components and are designed to run only on Windows platforms
        * software used by system administrators to control and monitor servers or other remote equipment
        * Eclipse applications written with Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) controls. Note: SWT controls do not use the Java Access Bridge.
        * software with a command line interface

Last updated May 28, 2003. Techniques pages, accessed via the link in each checkpoint, may contain more recent updates. Be sure to review the techniques pages for the latest accessibility guidance.

IBM is still the single largest patent holding entity in the US. The article is a bit old, but its still valid today. While I can sympathize with your concern as I believe the US patent system is in SEVERE need of a rethinking, IBM has, in relatively un-recent history, been a fairly benevolent patent holder. Much more so than most other large patent holding companies anyways.

Wouldn't that surface be made of, ummmm, atoms?

GREAT article - it is interesting for a non-programmer to read this type of technical detail, presented in an understandable way. For me, right at the edge of my theoretical-only knowledge. A detailed summary, I guess. (oxymoron)

Similar article on NetBSD: Waving the flag: NetBSD developers speak about version 4.0 (1/30/2008)

Linux focused links:

Current discussion:
LWN: Kernel
KernelTrap
KernelNewbies: Summary of Linux Changes
---
The Wonderful World of Linux series are excellent history - in-depth for outsiders:
WWOL 2.2
WWOL 2.4
WWOL 2.6
---
Towards Linux 2.6 - A look into the workings of the next new kernel(2003)
Kernel Comparison: Linux (2.6.22) versus Windows (Vista)(2007)

Here is a link to IBM's 2006 annual report, showing where their revenues come from(I didn't find 2007 in my brief search; it doesn't seem to be released/published, but it is likely that it is quite similar to 2005 and 2006):

http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2006/md_4segment.shtml

Anyway, they make more than 2/3 of their revenue providing software and services, and a little less than 1/3 of their revenue on hardware. Much of their software and services is built for their hardware, but they will work with other vendor's equipment.

I'm not claiming that Silicon Valley is more about software than it is about hardware(So I don't need to back up that claim). I'm claiming that pointing to a short list of companies that mostly make hardware doesn't actually establish that hardware sales dominate, it simply demonstrates that they exist. My point was that the existence of *any* software company, or really, any software revenues, means that the only way to figure out the answer to the question of which is greater is by exhaustive enumeration(Or an enumeration that at least includes some software companies, rather than none).

Personally, I find it much more interesting to look at profits rather than market capitalization or revenues, as it provides a little bit more information about how much value creation is going on. Apple has huge revenues, but they also have a high cost of revenue(because they actually make shit), whereas Microsoft has huge revenues but relatively low cost of revenue(because they mostly sell licenses).

So even though it is obvious that you need hardware to have software, if the hardware is mostly a necessary commodity and there is a great deal of value creation in software...the way I choose to look at is that the business is software and the hardware is something you have to deal with to run the business. But to each their own, I am not concerned if you choose to look at that same way I do or not.