Slashdot Mirror

I agree that fortresses guarded by secretaries are the opposite end of the spectrum and no good either. The English are still pretty good (or bad) at that. If you look at some of the big guys who dig deep into this like IBM or Microsoft, they end up with a small cluster of offices spanning a central meeting area. See for example:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/171/ibmsj1701C.pdf
Or even:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

Anyway - what about debugging/validation tools for script languages like Python? (FindBugs(TM) exists for Java) From what I have seen of Python (not too much anyway) is that it is a bit more like Basic (or Fortran if you like) of the 80's. In a few years we will get "programmers with Python-syndrome". Not that Python doesn't have some good parts too - I don't deny that.

I'm a bit worried about the 'Python programmers smarter than Java programmers' statement. It may be true - but then - when they have moved on and maintenance has started - it's not the smart guys that are there anymore it's the average code dumpster divers that sits and tries to figure out what's happening...

There is a difference with a compiling language (like Java) is that when done right with declarations and dependency definitions you can end up getting a system that can be re-compiled and any mismatches can be resolved. In a scripting language you run the risk of not encountering such problems until runtime - where the cost of rectifying them will be much higher.

I think that the paradox is that the "smart" guys are always looking for new things to use - and they may use them well. This isn't really a paradox since the persons that are most prone to change assimilates new knowledge better than the others that are left with the old well-known parts. In a while today's Python-coders will move on to a new pasture unless they degrade and got stuck in Python.

Of course - this seems to end up in a conflict of "compiling" and "non-compiling" languages, same as the "soft" and "hard" type-checking conflict. These issues has been around since the 80's and even earlier.

In the end - it all comes down to how a language does not only in a small system but in a large integration where it is essential that you don't get runtime errors just because a function is called with a different number of parameters (that should have been detected at compile-time).

Personally I advocate for a language with strong data type checks together with the use of tools that allows the programmer to verify the code to not only look good, but also being safe and efficient. If you have a larger project you may want to use tools like PurifyPlus to verify not only the integrity of your code but also detect and allow you to resolve bottlenecks. (And any code regardless of programming language benefits from code optimization)

Another issue is to avoid intermixing of languages in the same code. This is often the case when it comes to web design where you often see a single JSP, PHP, ASP (or possibly other techniques too) file with HTML, Java (or corresponding Microsoft data), Javascript, XML Tag libraries and even VBScript (BARF!!!). Such code is often extremely hard to read. An editor with color-coding may prove helpful - but it's still a real pain.

So - essentially - there is no paradox at all - it's just that either you are a quick learner and race on to new challenges or you stick with the well-known (maybe because you HAVE to - not that you WANT to).

So far the only way to get a Cell processor is PS3.

Not true

If this Cell inclusion could become a trend, it could lead to a lot of interesting applications.

Yeah. Interesting applications indeed.

"Cell Broadband Engine Support for Privacy Security and Digital Rights Management"

Note that that is an official IBM published technical paper on the Cell and that that is IBM's own title.

And even with that link, someone ALWAYS manages to come along and call it a tinfoil hat fantasia when I state that the Cell CPU has explicitly designed with DRM support in the hardware. Every cell chip has one or more DRM enforcement crypto keys locked in the chip. I would gladly go into technical detail on this DRM system (I am a bit of an expert on the TPM technical specs), but apparently the only way to OBTAIN the full details on the cell system is by first signing a legal Non Disclosure contract before they'll let you see the full specs. That is the reason I had to say "one or more DRM enforcement crypto keys locked in the chip", the publicly available technical papers do explicitly state there is such a key locked in the ship and give some of the info on how it is used, but many important details are lacking. The Cell hardware is explicitly designed for some sort of Trusted Computing architecture, but too many details are missing to state exactly how the Cell system parallels or differs from the Trusted Computing Group's from of Trusted Computing.

P.S.
If anyone is aware of any available good detailed technical specifications on the Cell "security" hardware design, I would much appreciate any links you can offer to such a specification. I've seen this and other similar information, but I'm looking for something more technical and more resembling this TPM specification.

P.P.S.
If anyone has detailed knowledge on this design, please write something up on it in Cell_microprocessor. I raised this issue MORE THAN A YEAR AGO on the talk page, with the usual replies about "fantasia" and how hardware designed for DRM enforcement "is not Digital Rights Management, per se" and that "Using the term, DRM, would probably be unnecessarily inflammatory" (that last one is particularly amusing considering that it was IBM itself is the one being "unnecessarily inflammatory" in describing it's own product!).
I haven't actually written anything into the Wikipedia article on the Cell yet because I still only have a half-assed technical understanding on the design, and maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist but I don't want write something wildly vague and I don't want to write something that may be explicitly or implicitly inaccurate on the technical design and capabilities of the system.

-

Being able to run an OS is hardly a feat. Processors have been doing that for decades. :)

There's numerous documents detailing the design behind the Cell, though. As IBM puts it "the key design goals of the PPE are to maximize the performance/power ratio as well as the performance/area ratio." In other words the PPE wasn't optimized for raw performance, which is pretty obvious from the specs - only two execution units, no branch prediction, small caches.

> So far the only uses for Cell chips have been research stuff and the PS3. Umm. Then what do you call this? http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/splash/qs20/ Unless that's "research".

...at the time it was about what you could expect from keyboards in general.

The 2" height for the keyboard actually was ergonomic for the time, as it was in line with the habits of typists. Back then, mechanical typewriters were still quite common. The amount of pressure required to punch any given key was quite high, so you are supposed to type with your wrists off the desk in order to get enough leverage. Electric typewriters were built that also followed suit, even though there was no need to develop so much leverage. The good 'ol C64 was simply following the crowd.

Today you can get by with typing with the pads of your fingers instead of needing to punch down with your fingertips. The result has been a trend in "low profile" keyboards that are easier to use.

Then: IBM Archives - Typing Posture
Now: Proper Posture & Ergonomic Tips

FWIW, the C128 featured a more low profile design than it's predecessor, reflecting how computer keyboards changed how we typed in the 1980's.

As for the extra symbols and keys - You needed those. The C64 was aimed at programmers as much as end-users hence the design decisions, but finding one for the unfamiliar could be quite a chore (e.g. where the F--- is "WHT"). Plus some games put "Run Stop/Restore" to good use.

However, the cursor keys were an abomination. An inverted "T" on that keyboard would have been very nice indeed. Even the #1 worst pick from this list (The PC Jr.) had for distinct cursor keys.

For me, at least;

The IBM DisplayWriter http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV9006.htmlkeyboard; excellent click, long travel, just about the best ever. Too bad you could only run MS-DOS 2.1 from 8" floppies on it... And the keyboard was repairable, though I think the key modules were like $8 each in 1989. And you can still gethttp://cgi.ebay.com/Digital-2683239-IBM-Displaywriter-Keyboard-630X-91-XX24_W0QQitemZ190174698129QQcmdZViewItem one!

I like my Deck 82http://www.deckkeyboards.com/boards.php a lot. Nice keys, no click, but the lighting is superb. Save that skull-and-crossbones keycap!

And of course the IBM Model M Space Saverhttp://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/categories.main/parentcat/9242, which I carried with me from one site to another for 8 years or so, changing cables, and saving space in those damned rack-mount keyboard shelves with no room for anything else but an M and a trackball. grrr... I gave mine away, and I miss it...

More? I didn't name all the best did I?

harrr. My captcha is 'entered'. cute.

"I don't think the concept is easier or harder in any particular language, but Scheme and LISP have a bit nicer syntax for recursive functions"

More importantly, scheme is tail-recursive, which means you can write loops recursively and not suffer stack overflows.

For more on recursive programming, see here

The following was sent to Charles Babcock at Information week in reply to an article entitled:

Open Source Code Contains Security Holes

As a developer and administrator of the Firebird Project I completely reject the statement you made in the above article.

"The somewhat moribund Firebird project, for example, is listed with 195 identified defects, of which it has verified zero and fixed zero. The active Firefox browser project, on the other hand,
has fixed 370 bugs, verified 56 and faces another 246 to verify and fix."

The Firebird project is in fact incredibly active - perhaps a look at this chart on our bug tracker might give you a clue.

http://tinyurl.com/yt5pgl

Firstly the Firebird project reviewed the Coverity results almost immediately they were published and found that the report isn't actually related to the Firebird engine. This URL shows our appropriate comments from the 7th March 2006:
http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=180

Also more comments from Claudio on the 26th March 2006:
http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=243

Secondly in a more detailed reply to the actual "PR" issue raised by David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity. If you had asked about this before printing the article you could have put some facts straight.

Nearly all of the 195 identified defects are in fact actually within an external piece of code we use for character sets and collation sequences ICU

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/index.jsp

"The International Component for Unicode (ICU) is a mature, portable set of C/C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization (I18N) and globalization (G11N),
giving applications the same results on all platforms."

A open source project maintained by IBM. I will admit that we are using an older version of ICU (3.0) than is currently available and we will be upgrading to a newer version in the near future.
But this is not something that is a trivial exercise, as it means that any database using a different version of ICU would be incompatible with the version we ship. We plan to upgrade ICU
in Firebird version 2.5

Other defects reported are one in
usr/include/c++/4.0.2/i386-redhat-linux/bits/gthr-default.h
Not our problem either....

And there are four defects in firebird2/src/gpre/pretty.cpp a piece of old code used with a pre-compiler (gpre) to make BLR look good. BLR (Binary Language Representation),
Firebird's internal compiled language. This doesn't affect the Firebird server at all.

I would like you to print a correction or at least acknowledge the innacuracy of the article as regards Firebird.

Regards
Paul Beach

Some guidelines I wrote (for an assignment for an HCI course I just took) for color selection are:

1. Do use dark backgrounds, and light text.
2. Don't use adjacent colors of similar lightness.
3. Don't use Blue as a background or for fine detail.
4. Do use shades of Purple, Violet, Red for background. AND Do use shades of Green, Yellow, Orange for foregrounds
5. Do make sure black-and-white and monochrome versions are legible.
6. Don't rely on color alone.
7. Do give high-priority data high contrast.
8. Do use tools to check your contrast.
9. Do check colorblind compatibility

Some resources to look into from my bibliography:

"Luminance Contrast Color Guidelines." Arend, L. Logan, A. Havin, G. Color Usage Research Lab. Nasa Ames Research Centre. 7 Oct 2007 http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/guidelines_lum_cont.php
"Color & Contrast: Web Checkpoint 12" IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Centre. 1 Jun 2007. IBM. 7 Oct 2007. http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/web/webcolor.html
"Effective Color Contrast" Dr. Artidi, A. Lighthouse International. 2007. Lighthouse International. 7 Oct 2007. http://www.lighthouse.org/accessibility/effective-color-contrast/
"Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0." World Wide Web Consortium. 5 May 1999. W3C. 7 Oct 2007 http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT

And how do you interpret the KB article differently? As I understand it:

1. You share the file or create the file on a Windows server
2. You use a Windows XP client to access the file.
3. You use a program with the specific behaviour to edit/create the file for example "Microsoft linker"
See: http://ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21180484

https://www6.software.ibm.com/developerworks/education/l-sugarpy/l-sugarpy-pdf.pdf

IBM Thinkcentre A50 8148-26U with the aforementioned specs. The only thing that's different from the specs mentioned in the link is that that I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 AGP video card instead of the on board video. I know it's a bit out-dated compared to yours. This might explain our differences in idle usage.

• We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
  
• Real-time speech translation -- once a vision only in science fiction -- will become the norm
  
• There will be a 3-D Internet
  
• Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environment importance
  
• Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds
  

Yay for the editors linking to a blog ...that links to IBM's actual site.

IBM Reveals Five Innovations that Will Change Our Lives Over the Next Five Years
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22683.wss

Maybe they're going with something like a DAT tape system.

Probably.

http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20060516_magnetic.html
"6.67 billion bits per square inch lays foundation for future tape storage improvements"

http://www.fujifilmusa.com/JSP/fuji/epartners/TDSNanocubic.jsp
"Imagine one data cartridge, small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, being able to store the equivalent of 200 two-hour movies, 50,000 trees made into paper, 100,000,000 web pages or all the X-ray films in a large hospital! NANOCUBIC technology makes this possible."*

*I know they are not talking 'master-copy', but still

CC. CC.

You think you're a hardware snob...I won't buy any computer unless I can obtain the full service manual necessary to take everything apart in the case of a failure and the parts to do such a repair are easily available. This means the two laptops around here are a Thinkpad T23 and Lenovo T60 here. For desktops, I build everything myself, not because it's cheaper (you can't beat Dell on raw price) but because I can fix them with completely standard parts at any time.

You think you're a hardware snob...I won't buy any computer unless I can obtain the full service manual necessary to take everything apart in the case of a failure and the parts to do such a repair are easily available. This means the two laptops around here are a Thinkpad T23 and Lenovo T60 here. For desktops, I build everything myself, not because it's cheaper (you can't beat Dell on raw price) but because I can fix them with completely standard parts at any time.

Kodak will have the last laugh.

AAD (Analog Analog Digital), ADD (Analog Digital Digital), DDD (Digital Digital Digital), DDA (Digital Digital Analog)

The sad thing is you can't find Infrared film anymore (other than 35mm, and that may be in danger also) , because "everyone" is going digital.
It's a double edged sword for me, as I'm snapping up all these Hasselblads:

http://www.hasselbladusa.com/products/v-system.aspx

- that everyone is discarding, $22,000. systems, tossed like yesterday's salad.
(But, please don't listen to me - they ARE worthless, those lenses too, TRASH, I tell you! You need the latest:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/522927-REG/Hasselblad_70380530_H3DII_39_SLR_Digital_Camera.html

There are experiments with holographic data storage systems:

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/443/ashley.html

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/443/ashle20.jpg

-as long term storage.

A generation of family / baby pictures will go down the tubes because no one thought about it.

We shoot products on digital (no loss) - but, that's it, the rest, 220 Velvia, 35mm slides and a cool dark place, - yeah, and I LIKE it like that.

Kodak will have the last laugh.

AAD (Analog Analog Digital), ADD (Analog Digital Digital), DDD (Digital Digital Digital), DDA (Digital Digital Analog)

The sad thing is you can't find Infrared film anymore (other than 35mm, and that may be in danger also) , because "everyone" is going digital.
It's a double edged sword for me, as I'm snapping up all these Hasselblads:

http://www.hasselbladusa.com/products/v-system.aspx

- that everyone is discarding, $22,000. systems, tossed like yesterday's salad.
(But, please don't listen to me - they ARE worthless, those lenses too, TRASH, I tell you! You need the latest:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/522927-REG/Hasselblad_70380530_H3DII_39_SLR_Digital_Camera.html

There are experiments with holographic data storage systems:

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/443/ashley.html

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/443/ashle20.jpg

-as long term storage.

A generation of family / baby pictures will go down the tubes because no one thought about it.

We shoot products on digital (no loss) - but, that's it, the rest, 220 Velvia, 35mm slides and a cool dark place, - yeah, and I LIKE it like that.

Macs have a large corporation backing them. With the partial exception of Red Hat, any given flavor of *nix doesn't.

Bringing in talent from outside your industry has worked quite well in the past..

Lest you forget what IBM did in 1993, by bringing in a former CEO of AMEX and RJR Nabisco.. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/biography/10153.wss I wouldn't mind seeing RedHat duplicating IBM's turnaround, and becoming a $150B company.

Agreed. I used to work at IBM for a short while, and whatever their faults otherwise, the research they do in so many technology areas is absolutely amazing (and I only saw a little bit, the tip of the iceberg). Microsoft does software mostly, and hardware sometimes and usually badly. IBM research is a vast international brain-trust looking across a broad array of the technology spectrum. According to http://www.research.ibm.com/ these areas are:

* Chemistry
* Computer Science & Engineering
* Electrical Engineering
* Materials Science
* Mathematical Sciences
* Physics
* Services Science, Management, & Engineering
* Systems

http://www.research.ibm.com/areas.shtml

http://research.microsoft.com/research/default.aspx

There's no real contest though. If they were course listings, one reads like MIT and the other like a community college.

Ahh, so what you mean is that massive numbers of native stacks are evil. Well duh. :)

and locks are used internally for queues even for languages with message passing primitives such as Erlang)

As an aside, why is this the case when there is so much good research on practical lock-free algorithms? What's with the Erlang guys?

The rules of the performance game are way different when you are dealing with massive parallelism. This is the reason why many concepts from functional languages, such as immutable data structures, are making a comeback.

If you're talking about massive scalability, then not having the option of changing a field in a data structure without allocating and initializing a separate copy first sounds like an expensive proposition. It's bad for memory locality (cache performance), it's bad for heap fragmentation, and it's bad for overall memory footprint. There's a time and a place for immutable data structures, but programming in languages where that's the only option is pretty limiting.

Vista Business x86 has run fairly decently for me (once I got the fscking issues with driver incompatibility and chipset hell handled). It does what I tell it to do. I shut off UAC (cancel or allow?), left Aero on, and run with 2GB of RAM and a X2 5200+. As it stands, it hasn't pissed me off enough to warrant going through the pain+aggravation of reinstalling (still looking for a decent, free, VM server for Linuxy things and to use as a home for a XP install, just in case). The one thing I did like about it was that they finally used sensible names for the user's home folder. I actually hosed my laptop's XP install a couple times trying to get the folders like that.

My Thinkpad T42 runs WinXP, and (other than copy times), I've not honestly seen much difference between the two, responsiveness-wise (again, I didn't see much of a responsiveness difference when both were running XP).

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/advantages/index.html/ are definately better service and support although more expensive. And, yes, it runs Linux.

Wrong. The W3C restructured the original HTML working group. Here is [mit.edu] Tim Berners-Lee's initial message about the refocusing of the efforts for evolving HTML, and here are the details [w3.org] for the two new working groups - the HMTL working group and the XHTML2 working group.

The IBM document is wrong then. Here's what it says:

" Some prominent HTML specialists outside the W3C--browser vendors, Web developers, authors, and other stakeholders--disagreed with the direction of XHTML V2. In 2004, they started an independent work group to propose an alternative direction for the next version of HTML. Under the flag of WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), the group put together proposals for HTML V5 and Web Forms V2."

It goes on to say the W3C later, in April 2007, voted to adopt html 5.

Sorry..should have hit preview...the link above for the 20% of budget was left out.

I was wondering, why this article picked-out 'mainframes' as the bad guy. Z/OS has an integrated systems services (UNIX) implemented with the traditional MVS interface. The Z-system machine can run several types of Linux and Unix (including Solaris and AIX). It can run several operating systems at once. They are working on implementing the PS3's cell processor into its bank of supported processors for the purpose of handeling medical imaging. Sure the hardware costs more upfront, but there are several studies showing that the efficiencies in electrical costs, cooling costs, maintenance costs for keeping OS patches on a distributed network, and floor space more than make up the cost. There was an IBM case study with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/JSTS-6K9UAT?OpenDocument&Site=eserverzseries&cty=en_us In it is says that by using various consolidation practices, UPMC was able to add bed-space by decreasing the space of the server room. I agree with some of the other commentators, the McKesson article seems to be a Public Relations peice.

If you want "pictures" of atoms, images from scanning tunneling microscopes should suffice. IBM's Almaden Research Center has a nice gallery of micrographs- this one is probably my favorite.

If you want "pictures" of atoms, images from scanning tunneling microscopes should suffice. IBM's Almaden Research Center has a nice gallery of micrographs- this one is probably my favorite.

But then once Windows actually boots, I have to wait a half-age for the IT installed update software and the anti-virus software and the firewall software and the IT policy checker to finish loading before I can actually use the machine. And once that's done, it's time for even more loading to start up the email client and IDE so I can actually, you know, work.

Ok, point me to a place where I can pick up all the knowledge I need to use it, I've got a free afternoon.

Here are few options using my choice for a JavaScript library:

• Simplify Ajax development with jQuery
• API/Ajax - jQuery JavaScript Library
• Tutorials - jQuery JavaScript Library - Ajax

What good is freedom of expression if you can't be sure your expression is your own?

Problem solved, circa 1994. It's called "SSL", and it's amazing technology that provides very strong protection against spoofing, stream-slicing, man-in-the-middle attacks, and a host of other problems.

Using SSL means it's far more likely that the computers at either end of the connection will be compromised than the stream of data itself. Read up on it... it's pretty special!

There is a Ramac in the lobby of the IBM Almaden Research Center south of San Jose in California. If for any reason you get to go inside the lab, there is also one of the early experimental engineering testbeds in a hallway, with seek mechanisms, platters, etc. This thing was used to determine whether the technology would work. According to a card sitting next to the testbed, the early experimental coating was the same paint that was being used at the time on the Golden Gate Bridge (apparently contains iron oxide), filtered through women's nylon stockings onto the spinning platter! I wonder who filed the expense accounting for the stockings.

I also notice that the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center claims to be restoring a Ramac and has made progress getting one running.

...they still have a product page for it: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_PH0305.html

What? They're not still selling it?

IBM pSeries makes Sun look cheap.

Plllleeeeeeaaaassssseeeeee. HW's a commodity, and what's cheaper today is more expensive next week. When are people going to quit just spouting this crap and actually do a bit of research?

Now, I admit that I don't know all the details of either of these, so maybe I'm not comparing apples to apples. Having said that, they seem pretty comparable based on other stuff on the respective sites, and they're all touted as "Enterprise class"...

From Sun's web site: 4-way M4000 with 16GB of memory. Has 5 card slots, 2 internal disk bays, 2 built-in GigE ports. Takes up 6U of rack space. $79K

From IBM's web site: 8-way 560Q with 16GB of memory. Has 6 card slots, 6 internal disk bays, 2 built-in GigE ports. 4U rack space. $34.8K

I didn't even bother to price a 4-way HP rx7640. At 17U, it can't possibly be worth the space.

Lenovo actually make it rather easy to address. They have a piece of software known as base system administrator http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/TVAN-ADMIN.html#TBSA which when run puts a config file in the recovery partition saying what packages you actually want. You then do a recovery install and you'll have exactly what you wanted.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/VSTA-DWNGRD.html

The only downgrade from Vista to XP is the price.. .and hassles besides. Why does everyone insist XP is inferior compared to Vista? As far as the user eXPerience is concerned XP is way ahead of Vista, so it is an Upgrade.

then I would be inclined to agree with Mr. Ranum's points. But the fact is that there are lots of people out there working on Real Security. Let's see, there's OpenBSD's work to integrate cryptography as a system service, there's Neils Provos' work on systrace, there's GCC's ProPolice stack-smashing protection, there's OpenBSD's write XOR execute protection (which, BTW, Windows now has to some small extent), there are phishing mitigation features in Firefox, there are Free implementations of good authentication systems (e.g., MIT Kerberos, Heimdal), lots of programs now ship with sane defaults (ala Postfix and qmail), there are safe-string libraries of all license stripes, and on and on and on! The fact that Microsoft apparently does not use their own safe-string implementation is indicative of the problem here. Microsoft writes crap. If you want systems where security is a real concern, it's easy to find it. That's not to say that those systems are "secure"-- security is always a work in progress-- but to say that "our responses to those problems also remain the same" is disingenuous. Projects like OpenBSD (among many others mentioned above) have attempted to identify entire classes of problems, and solve them on the big-picture level instead of doing the patch-a-week thing.

I'm not familiar enough with Exchange or the others to comment on features. Have you looked an Lotus Notes from IBM? Notes is the client peice, Domino would be the server backend.

Resource scheduling is built in. One example is the Resource Reservation database. This can be items as mundane as "who has what projector" to tracking which VP can book what conference room. As for calendaring, Notes has supported the iCal standard since 6.5.6 (?) so you can make a meeting entry in your calendar, send it to your business contacts who are using Outlook 2k3.

If you have to use the Outlook client, Domino can talk to it as well. It's called DAMO (can't remember what that stands for) and costs one extra client license.

I agree it's not open-source. Domino does run on Linux, Windows, AIX, and others. IBM has made a fair commitment to the open-source community by it's business decisions. As for the cost, I think it'd be worth the effort for you to get a quote as it may not be as expensive as you think. Stated differently, the quality of the support is worth the cost.

Try the second or third link down in the middle of the page. The second link is for version 8. The third link is for version 7. You have to register to create the webmail account information. Software Demo Link: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/demos/

Full Disclosure: I do NOT work for IBM or any of it's partners. I do make my living as a Notes admin so there's my bias.

Linux is not a great alternative to Windows.

Poor documentation

still command line focus

hardware compatibility issues

outdated GUI

hostile user community

server-centric makes for a crappy average home user experience

Oh, and lots of choice is not a good thing if 99% of what one can choose from is crap.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux
http://www.novell.com/company/affiliations/

Or as I believe they are called now, iSeries eServer machines. OS/400 is what's called an SLS architecture. There are no devices in the system nor are there file systems. It's simply one huge 64bit address space. The hardware and software abstraction layers intercept the call from an application or a hardware interface and pipe it to the SLS which just does one reach into the address table. An SSD would be ideal for that architecture. It would be essentially one huge non volatile RAM address space at bus speeds.

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/enable/site/porting/iseries/overview/overview.html

That's what deterministic garbage collectors like IBM's Metronome are for. Real-time programmers really should start reading... it seems none of the embedded people I've talked to have any idea what kind of research is being done in their own field. Though I guess the same could be said of all programmers, really. It's kind of sad.

You would think that in the years that have gone by, they would have developed something better.

If you want to see photos of atoms taken by an STM, there's a great gallery here:

STM Image Gallery
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/gallery.html

Apple is worth more than IBM...

No. No it isn't. Apple does have a larger Market capitalisation than IBM, which is the share price times the number of outstanding shares:

IBM: ~$159B
Apple: ~$162B

However in terms of revenue, profit, earnings per share and assets, IBM is way ahead of Apple:

IBM: $91.4B / $9.42B / $6.06 / $103B
Apple: $19.1B / $1.99B / $2.27 / $17.2B

The Market cap is so high due basically to investor speculation, which can be seen from the Price/Earnings ratio (P/E) (Google and MS added for comparison):

IBM: 17.1
MS: 21.8
Apple: 47.6
Google: 52.9

Figures taken from here and here(PDF)