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sounds like Rational (now IBM) Clearcase :
http://www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/clearcase/

IBM's great adventure in architecture for programmers was IBM Santa Teresa, opened in 1977. They really tried to build a building optimized for programming work. The first priority was "a private, personal work area that permits intense concentration, screens distractions, and discourages interruptions, with connections for a computer terminal and adequate space to lay out and store large quantities of paper goods".

Sounds like MIT's architect blew it there.

I would think that something like this would float apples boat,Just take a finger and "draw" your word. I have tried it and with a tablet it is at best OK, because of the way tablet pens work. However with a *real* touch screen I think that if implemented right, so it zooms up in size so you can use it easier, I bet it would rock after getting used to it. Meh, just my 2c.

SEra

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot-faster/index.html

• Up to 96 DIMM slots, for a maximum capacity of 256 GB at 533 Mhz or 512 GB at 400 Mhz
• 8 36 meg L3 caches
• 24 internal disk bays
• 24 hot-pluggable PCI-X slots
• 4 pairs of fully-redundant power supplies - one per "building block"
• and so on...

Yes it does -- http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/

As a general rule, if you're building a business computer and want to save as much as electricity as possible, the most highly virtualized (and virtualizable) platform wins. So attributes like massive caches and screaming I/O help enormously. (I think there was a Stanford study recently that figured this out.) Thus it's no surprise a modern mainframe is more energy efficient than anything else.

But in the Computerworld article referenced in the original story, IBM says the carbon program will also be available for its System p servers at some point in the future. My prediction is that you'll typically get fewer certificates if you move to System p versus System z, but it's likely businesses will do some of both depending on what sort of applications they're rehosting. There are some types of applications that will do better on System p, and there is some software that runs on AIX that doesn't run on z/OS or Linux.

Regarding SPARC it's impossible to say since Sun hasn't entered into any carbon credit auditing system yet. The IBM-Neuwing program is a first. However, my prediction is that you'll get even fewer certificates if you consolidate to SPARC. I say that simply because I assume IBM is acting in its own self-interest, and I'm sure they think the energy efficiency fight is one they can win against other vendors. In this case self-interest and environmentalism coincide. For any of these platforms, though, businesses will figure out whether the certificates favor certain platforms over others, and they'll do that application by application (or application function by application function). And many other factors will go into the decision as well, although most of those factors pull in the same direction as energy efficiency, such as software charges. One could even imagine that before long server vendors lagging in the energy efficiency department will start bundling carbon certificates with their servers in order to compete. Thus IBM adopting this program is a smart way to respond to an untapped market need and to raise the effective price of competing servers compared to IBM's. Very smart move.

By the way, the world has totally flipped on its head, and it would be extremely misleading to say an IBM mainframe is "proprietary" and X86 (for example) isn't. What does proprietary mean? You can run pure 100% GPL Linux on an IBM mainframe -- Debian, Slackware, CentOS, etc. -- and you don't even need a closed source driver as you usually need for X86 servers. IBM publishes extreme instruction-level detail in a free book called Principles of Operation, and it's so detailed and thorough that the open source community created an implementation of the instruction set called Hercules that actually works compared to still imperfect efforts like Bochs and QEMU. (Although IBM may assert patent claims on its processor architecture.) One company is porting OpenSolaris to System z, and they didn't even have to ring up IBM. In comparison, Intel and AMD also may assert patent claims, and AMD is suing Intel for alleged monopolistic behavior. Neither Intel nor AMD publish PoO-type documents (to that level of detail). Then there's Microsoft Windows, and it's hard to think of any more proprietary OS than that.

Also, IBM changed the way it charges for z/OS software about 7 years ago. Now almost everything is charged by the amount you actually use, something IBM calls Variable Workload License Charge (VWLC). If you run a little bit of DB2 in one LPAR (partition) but a lot of IMS in another, then you pay a little for DB2 and more for IMS. You also control exactly what you consume using something called softcaps, and you can set those either per-LPAR or for a group of LPARs. One interesting little twist to mainframe subcapacity licensing is that, if you need a little bit of WebSphere (and a lot of other IBM products), the lowest entry price (smallest license you can order) is for z/OS. You can order as little as 1 "Value Uni

I hear the summons will be written in xenon atoms on nickel.

I recently tried to do something similar with Lenovo and a Thinkpad T61. Lenovo told me that if I wanted a refund for Windows then I had to return the entire laptop, and pay a restock fee since the box had been opened. Their reason is that they do not offer refunds for preinstalled software, and of course, Windows was preinstalled. The first person I talked to actually mocked me for even trying, which almost made me return the entire laptop, but I didn't want to pay return shipping an a restock fee. I had the guy transfer me to another department where another person was much more reasonable to talk to and calmly explained their policy regarding preinstalled software.

I told both of the people I talked to that I would have avoided the entire situation if they offered other OS choices. Lenovo apparently does sell a T61p with Linux on it, but you cannot find info for it anywhere. And the only way I could find info on the old T60p with Linux was from a link on an external website.

for those contemplating buying Thinkpads, I did find a Linux Certified list. And I did consider buying one of the Dell's with Ubuntu preinstalled, but I didn't like the hardware options.

That is one advantage the For Profit Companies have, Management can get good developers to work on Code they don't think is 7337 or fun or interesting but needed to get the job done.

Odds are, with a $10 usb 2.5" drive caddy, he could have removed all of the data that he needed from the unencrypted hard drive. Or he could have booted into one of those nifty live cds with cracking tools installed.

I see you have never been asked to recover an IBM laptop with hard drive encryption turned on.

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/security/securecomm.html

Some agencies who have had high profile data leaks of consumer data now require it. It is effective. A live CD will simply show the entire hard drive is really encrypted. It is handled in hardware. The fix for a lost password is to toss the drive and replace it or spend lots of time on the chance you might brute force it. With a secure key, your chances are slim.

FYI the new version of Ubuntu supports full hard drive encryption! Use the alternative installer. You too can protect your laptop from data disclosure in a theft.

You'd need to take the Cell processor and then put it in something a little more accessible so you could run arbitrary code on it, just like a regular server! Hey, I'm gonna go tell IBM to get on it right now!

Oh... wait...

http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03004c/press/us/en/pressrelease/22258.wss/

Article is shithouse - light on detail beyond belief. Check out IBM's 60GHz page.

What you want to know: Practical limitation is 10M, useless through walls.

#1 - Impress. Get the established software vendors to recognize the work done by those who are behind open source.

#2 - Infiltrate. Once the value of open source is seen, have people who are dedicated to it, and who have contributed to it be seen as valuable. Get them into influential positions.

#3 - Once in positions of influence, start flexing that muscle!

Double precision floating point is emulated in software on the PS3 as well.

As a professional programmer working in the games industry (on both XBOX 360 and PS3), I can tell you that's completely untrue. You can verify this easily with information available to the general public on the CELL microprocessor.

The CELL supports Double Precision in hardware. However, the SPU vector instructions only run on Single Precision which allows for up to 8 SP ops (4 X Multiply+Add's) per cycle. Double Precision is scalar (non-vectored) and also not pipelined so the throughput is much slower since DP operations can cause stalls until they complete (there are rumors that IBM is working on a CELL that pipelines DP which will help immensely). Properly pipelined and vectorized Single Precision work can be 30-50 times faster than the scalar non-pipelined DP but the CELL still has true DP hardware which is much faster than emulation by orders of magnitude.

If you're looking to have more memory, but use the cell processor, IBM makes blade servers with up to 2GB of RAM. You could actually make a -real- supercomputer out of these!

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/cell-based.html

They already do, but it is a bit more expensive than 8 PS3s: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/cell-based.html

The simple solution is to use the "real" thing from IBM. All the power and performance of the 2 Cell processors instead of Sony's 1 on the PS3 and 2GB of RAM (1GB per core) in a high density blade format. Subsequently you are not wasting a core on the PS3's OS running underneath and you get a real NIC.

You mean like this?

IBM Lotus Notes with Lotus Domino server?
"The Notes client is mainly used as an email client, but also acts as an instant messaging client (for Lotus Sametime), browser, notebook, and calendar/resource reservation client, as well as a platform for interacting with collaborative applications. People who support the Notes client regard the easy interoperability of all of these roles as a major advantage in multiple-application business environments."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_notes

http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/notes

IBM demostration of Lotus Notes 8:
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/nd8/demo/shell_popup.html

User demo of Lotus Notes 8 on Linux desktop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-qK34CzKjM

IBM Lotus Notes with Lotus Domino server?
"The Notes client is mainly used as an email client, but also acts as an instant messaging client (for Lotus Sametime), browser, notebook, and calendar/resource reservation client, as well as a platform for interacting with collaborative applications. People who support the Notes client regard the easy interoperability of all of these roles as a major advantage in multiple-application business environments."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_notes

http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/notes

IBM demostration of Lotus Notes 8:
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/nd8/demo/shell_popup.html

User demo of Lotus Notes 8 on Linux desktop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-qK34CzKjM

Because nobody can find any documentation on upstart?

As sad in previous posts this Article is about init, which is about to be obsoleted by upstart (at least in ubuntu and debian, but i think others will follow). Upstart can work as a drop-in replacement for init, and has done so in Ubuntu 6.10. Here is an old but nice Article about Linux Booting, that includes init and upstart.

I know they're not perfect, but the big three server makers (Dell, HP, IBM) all provide power calculators that give you a better picture of utilization than just base configs. You can add/subtract memory, disks, processors and PCI devices from the servers and still get a fairly accurate picture of utilization.

Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pedge/topics/en/config_calculator?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
HP: http://h30099.www3.hp.com/configurator/powercalcs.asp
IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/powerconfig/

"The plan includes new products and services for IBM and its clients to sharply reduce data center energy consumption, transforming the world's business and public technology infrastructures into "green" data centers.

The savings are substantial -- for an average 25,000 square foot data center, clients should be able to achieve 42 percent energy savings. Based on the energy mix in the US, this savings equates to 7,439 tons of carbon emissions saved per year."

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21524.wss (emphasis mine :)

I think otherwise.

CC.

Like you said, "I don't know Approach...". You should find a way to look at it from who the TARGET audience is. Home users of a database don't want nor NEED to become developers. Lotus Approach took me about 2 weeks to get really comfortable. Access, never, for me. Filemaker, ehh. It was too developer-aimed, IMO.

Lotus Approach IS used by some serious development types of work, mainly as a front end to Oracle, MySQL, mssql, and some 10 or 15 other db back ends. The data and forms are separate, and have always been, unlike what, Access, which took YEARS for ms to "get it".

Approach is WYSIWYG, so right from the word GO no one NEED be a developer.

NO ONE should be using spreadsheets to do non-statistical storage of data. This happened because for years either the tools didn't exist to appease the desk-side data analyst-- they had to rely on IT. The other part is some developers were lazy or territorial, and LOTS of companies and IT staff are mixed on hoard the data (not just from protection of data, but for IT job security), or share the data (so IT can concentrate on OTHER more important tasks than to risk backlash of "THAT'S not the report I ASKED FOR...".

The other problem is that ms popularized excel, and businesses did, too. LOTS of bad habits grew up around the kludge excel is. It is an abominable excuse for a database wannabe.

Approach lets people GET WORK DONE. People who need databases and never before saw one get sample database tables and applications in Approach. They can reverse engineer these and customize them.

The biggest drawbacks of Approach:

-- no runtime executable (royalty free, or otherwise)
-- not a big enough widget set (compared to FMP, Access, et al...
-- poor or non-existent ERD
-- only runs on windoze
-- not separable from Lotus SmartSuite (except the Japanese version IS separate...)
-- only in maintenance/patch mode, since IBM is SITTING on Lotus SmartSuite, letting it die a slow, worthless death, as if even IBM's OWN want it to die, despite their "10 million S/S users..."
-- not built-in way to record and reuse queries; but users created this and sell solutions

Pluses:

- I use it as a front end to my Linux & win98-based MySQL engine
- I am writing a screenplay dialog and script tracking database
- I can build in minutes or hours what would take me and MOST non-developers days or WEEKS to do in access
- It's GREAT for an ad hoc WYSIWYG prototyping tool

You admit you don't know Approach, yet you could almost single-handedly dissuade most readers here from even considering it. Approach -- if IBM opened up its code-- could almost single-handedly kill Rekall, Kexi, and a slew of others that still retain the giant framework, geek-appeal that most END USERS will run from. Approach is good enough that user- and developer-based solutions are sold all the time.

C'mon man, check out Approach.

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

http://xpertss.com/

http://orderdeskxpert.3dcartstores.com/Order-Center_c_1.html

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Office_Productivity/Office_Suites/Lotus_SmartSuite/Lotus_Approach/Q_22816555.html

http://jabrown.customer.netspace.net.au/approach/index.htm

http://wapedia.mobi/en/Lotus_Approach

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/smartsuite/approachfeatures.html

What COULD happen but isn't is that IBM could:

-- partner with Sun/OpenOffice.org
-- open the code to Kexi, t

Exactly. From their account of the story:

Stuart Parkin and two groups of colleagues at IBM's Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif, quickly recognized its potential, both as an important new scientific discovery in magnetic materials and one that might be used in sensors even more sensitive than MR heads.

Wikipedia explains GMR but if you are keen to know about the effects of GMR on storage devices, you can refer to an article by IBM Research. There's even an animation on MR and GMR in action in storage devices.

Wikipedia explains GMR but if you are keen to know about the effects of GMR on storage devices, you can refer to an article by IBM Research. There's even an animation on MR and GMR in action in storage devices.

I'm being very kind to IBM when I say steer clear of Symphony.

Your personal information is fair game for whatever IBM sees fit to do with it.
"Such information will be processed and used in connection with our business relationship, and may be provided to contractors, Business Partners, and assignees of IBM for uses consistent with their collective business activities, including communicating with You"

The software is not Free.
* Read all about the "Proof of Entitlement" in the license.
* You may not redistribute.
* Authorization for Use on Home/Portable Computer: The Program may be stored on the primary machine and another machine, provided that the Program is not in active use on both machines at the same time

There are other terms that I found personally distasteful.

Read it yourself: http://www14.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/weblap/lap.pl?la_formnum=&li_formnum=L-DBTS-76CJJR&title=IBM+Lotus+Symphony+Beta&l=en

There's the old story about DES, and how the NSA improved the cipher, but refused to say exactly why the new version was better...

Yes, the NSA weakened Lucifer by reducing the key size. No argument there. But they changed two other aspects of the algorithm -- the complete redoing of the values of the S boxes, of course, and they also added the staggering of the permutation step. Both changes were made without public explanation, and were the fuel for the paranoia surrounding DES.

But as you say, that's a pretty old story, and it long ago was given an ending. After the civilian cryptography community discovered two "new" attacks, in 1994 an IBMer by the name of Don Coppersmith revealed the actual reasons for keeping the changes secret.

It wasn't until Biham and Shamir discovered differential cryptanalysis in the late '80s that the value of the S box and permutation schedule became apparent -- the values provided maximum uncertainty increasing the amount of chosen plaintext required to successfully attack a key. Later, Mitsuru Matsui discovered an more powerful variant of differential analysis called linear analysis, but careful selection of the S box values minimized the amount of information revealed by this attack, too.

After the public announcement of the discovery of differential and linear analysis, Coppersmith released a paper detailing the strength of DES against these exact attacks. In it, he says "After discussions with NSA, it was decided that disclosure of the design considerations would reveal the technique of differential cryptanalysis, a powerful technique that could be used against many ciphers. This in turn would weaken the competitive advantage the United States enjoyed over other countries in the field of cryptography." So the secrecy was not that DES was weakened, but to hide the reasons why it was strengthened!

As Schneier once pointed out, the NSA's biggest mistake was allowing DES to be made public. It taught civilians (and therefore potential enemies) a great deal about strong cryptography. Coppersmith's paper confirmed his assumption. Without DES, who knows what cryptography would look like today? We might all still be thinking Enigma machines are secure.

Most people think of Python as procedural or object-oriented, but it actually has all of the tools required to do functional programming. And, being Python, the syntax is logical and easy to read.

Check out this series of articles for more info: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-prog.html

While many of these technologies overlap, I think that each serves a niche that is important. I think it would be very difficult to design a language that is easy to use which combines the whole superset of what all of them cover. IBM is attempting to try and create a langugae that covers a lot of it with its experimental X10 languagehttp://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/x10.index.html. While it works, it can be very painful to program in. In the case of parallel and concurrent programming, I think choice is good.

An example Virtual Machine Monitor without a Hypervisor is VMware Workstation: a small VMM is loaded to run the guest OS, but it is not complete enough to run the system - it has no task switcher, no memory manager, etc. The host OS acts as the hypervisor here - it is the source of highly-privileged operations unavailable to the guest. Another no-hypervisor VMM is KVM: KVM just runs a virtual machine, but depends on the rest of Linux to run more-privileged operations (and Linux itself becomes the hypervisor).

An example Hypervisor without a Virtual Machine Monitor is the partitioning software on high-end IBM, Sun, etc. machines, which allows you to physically partition the processors of the system into several actual machines - partitioned machiens with zero run-time interdependencies. Literally, a "hypervisor" is something which runs at a privilege level higher than the "supervisor" (the OS).

Hypervisors and virtual machine monitors have existed since the 1960s. Nobody confused the terms then. IBM started the confusion with a whitepaper"inventing" the type 1 / type 2 taxonomy to distinguish between 1960s-modern IBM mainframe architectures (low-end = hypervisor only, high-end = combination hypervisor/vmm) and the VMware Workstation architecture (host OS loads vmm; host OS acts as hypervisor). Note that VMware never claimed Workstation was a hypervisor! Certain communities (Wikipedia, the press) have accepted IBM's whitepaper as gospel truth, thus the prolifieration of "type 1" and "type 2" terms the past several years. (The same community has chosen to ignore academic research in the 1960s and 1996-2005 which used VMM and Hypervisor correctly.)

With apologies to many individuals who are legitimately using correct terminology, some poorly-informed folks are propagating the "type 2 hypervisor" meme to attempt to equate the abilities of a hypervisor/VMM with a VMM. This is not correct: a combination hypervisor/vmm ALWAYS can achieve better performance than separating the hypervisor and VMM - at the cost of creating a more complex hypervisor (ESX requires custom drivers; Xen requires a customized dom0). The fault for this confusion really rests with Intel: their VT extensions (and AMD's SVM response) have made it so easy to create a VMM that some folks are creating a VMM, then marketing it as a hypervisor in a misguided attempt to compete with existing hypervisors (ESX, Xen) instead of competing with other VMMs (VMware Workstation/Fusion, KVM, Parallels Desktop)

To understand what a VMM is, read this ACM article by Mendel Rosenblum. Academic research generally looks at VMMs (ways to run a virtual machine), not hypervisors (ways to run something with less privileges than the hypervisor). A rough gage of the quality of academic work is whether they manage say Hypervisor when they mean Virtual Machine Monitor. Anyone who thinks the two are the same is ignorant of the past ten years of academic research - and anyone ignorant of ten years of research is doing very poor-quality work. (Alas, Wikipedia chose to use the IBM whitepaper for defining terms instead of many years of published, peer-reviewed papers. Great "neutrality", folks!)

I don't know about the feel, but it certainly looks like a Mac application. And then again, even Apple itself is not a master in getting its applications all have the same look and feel, using the aqua/brushed steel/whatever they use now theme all mixed up. Can someone actually explain me why the look of an apple program is built in the binary instead of determined by the window manager/OS?

Maybe you missed this announcement from IBM this week about its new, free Lotus Symphony product:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/1155252

The beta is available for download here: https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/swerplotus/LotusSymphonyPick.html

You'll need to register to get a copy, however.

I do recall someone telling me that no CPU would ever run at more than 2GHz, as it would then start emitting microwave radiation...

I remember having / making a similar claim myself way back when -- with the 486/33 and 486/66 being the hot system in the day. I predicted they'd have a hard time getting above ~80Mhz because of FM radio interference / shielding problems. Boy was I wrong.... :*)

Today I predict "Moore's Law" to hold pretty true -- even in 10 or 15 years. IBM has been playing with using atoms as the gate / switch which will make today's CPU's look like Model T's.

In the 90's they had http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1003.html
Not too long ago they've done http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20040909_samm.html
And recently it has been http://www.physorg.com/news107703707.html

This will both be a boom for storage and the chips themselves IMHO (not to mention my stock :).

I do recall someone telling me that no CPU would ever run at more than 2GHz, as it would then start emitting microwave radiation...

I remember having / making a similar claim myself way back when -- with the 486/33 and 486/66 being the hot system in the day. I predicted they'd have a hard time getting above ~80Mhz because of FM radio interference / shielding problems. Boy was I wrong.... :*)

Today I predict "Moore's Law" to hold pretty true -- even in 10 or 15 years. IBM has been playing with using atoms as the gate / switch which will make today's CPU's look like Model T's.

In the 90's they had http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1003.html
Not too long ago they've done http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20040909_samm.html
And recently it has been http://www.physorg.com/news107703707.html

This will both be a boom for storage and the chips themselves IMHO (not to mention my stock :).

At least they went from these with just a couple billion bytes storage (Gig);
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_PH3380A.html
to something like these with a little more room;
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822144701

That should save a little on the light bill.

The beta site does not include an Apple Mac OS X version.
https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/swerplotus/LotusSymphonyPick.html

Close, but not quite. How about integrating OpenOffice into Lotus Notes?

No, I'm not kidding...

http://www.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/productivitytools

I'm not sure if these will work for everyone or not, but worth a try.

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Windows XP
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJQvRVpuvAMRGZICElHB1rt-9Co/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064446/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.8uUTWVE8JKR2RCvoT1Mv2y093nI/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Linux
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJTrHj5PZ1gYO1AuRVoYsLft_Ng/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064448/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.454SxXBIifOb60VOxPqOEJlyS5g/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin

I'm not sure if these will work for everyone or not, but worth a try.

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Windows XP
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJQvRVpuvAMRGZICElHB1rt-9Co/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064446/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.8uUTWVE8JKR2RCvoT1Mv2y093nI/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Linux
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJTrHj5PZ1gYO1AuRVoYsLft_Ng/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064448/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.454SxXBIifOb60VOxPqOEJlyS5g/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin

This is nonsense, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html it wasn't per se forbidden, but the 'problem' evolved during the years. >the Linux stack was written from scratch. Even most developers of Linux do know better. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-networking-stack/?S_TACT=105AGX59&S_CMP=GR&ca=dgr-lnxw07LinuxNetStack But apart from that, Free/Net/OpenBSD are opensource derivatives of original UNIX. Even then if there isn't any code from original UNIX in it anymore. http://www.lemis.com/bsdpaper.html Urband legends spread by Linux community to gain somewhat an independency from other project, because they have a huge problem paying someone the respect.

You are describing a problem of "processor affinity". This developerWorks article should be useful to you. In summary, since you are planing to launch one thread/process per cpu, you can directly tie each thread to a unique cpu. You don't need to depend on the scheduler's ability to balance them.

Many VPs, Directors, CXOs, do not understand why social computing is so 'in' thing may be (they are old) but the youngsters do understand it.

In the US especially, with the huge number of experienced people retiring in the next 5 years and some young blood joining the ranks, it is important in two aspects to implement social software in the enterprises too.

The knowledge of the old will be lost if not captured. But any amount of documentation is not going to capture knowledge as effectively as the informal atmosphere of blogs/wikis allows a person to do so. Organizational story telling is very important in this aspect. Not many people are keen to prepare formal documents confirming to templates, standards, etc. in a huge enterprise. But many are willing to try their hand in writing stories of their experiences at work.

Thus social networking & computing is going to act as big contributor for institutionalizing the old knowledge which will be not available the next few years.

The younger generation which will join in the next five years OTOH, will already be very well accustomed to the whole concept of social computing & networking, mostly without even being aware of them. Having a social network with the enterprise is going to allow these bunch of people to mingle better & easily in addition to learning form the system.

BTW, the young blood will anyway try to bring in the social networking concept into the enterprise in spite of all the regulations against them (they are currently viewed as time wasters in the enterprise environment). So it would be prudent & proactive of the CSO (Chief Security Officer) to allow enterprise social software with the organization in everybody's interest.

Also, the growing trend these days is to telecommute, work from home. In such an environment, social networking at work does make a lot of sense. Also, this is going to be helpful in enterprises which are spread out geographically too, to bind the various dispersed diaspora & workgroups.

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We (my group at my employers place) are involved in preparing a (work in progress) modular vendor agnostic framework which would ideally involve marrying web 2.0, social networking (social computing in general) with traditional CRM systems. Our initial offerings would presumably be using a cacophony of open source solutions already available.

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In due course of our R&D we found that IBM is already into the social software arena & has launched an enterprise version called Lotus Connections.

We are now partnering with them to figure out what it is, what are its capabilities and how can it fit into our framework.

IBM has already been in touch with many big fortune 500 enterprises and are talking about multi million dollar deals!

The stuff doesn't look very techie if you are already aware of what wikis, blogs, social networking, etc. are. But it does provide that enterprise touch to the whole thing of social networking & related stuffs.

"A visit to Mr. Parkin's crowded office reveals him to be a 51-year-old British-American scientist for whom the term hyperactive is a modest understatement at best. During interviews he is constantly in motion. When he speaks publicly at scientific gatherings, his longtime technology assistant, Kevin Roche, is careful to see that Mr. Parkin empties the change from his pockets, lest he distract his audience with the constant jingling of coins and keys."

This is so true. In June I was down in Cali for the SpinAPS conference and, well, Parkin is like some crazy methed-up autistic genius. Emphasis on the genius, though.

Racetrack memory looks really fantastic. I love this diagram (I think Kevin made it?):
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/spinaps/research/sd/racetrack_anim.gif

The major problem that they're facing is domain wall drift and annihilation. They have to keep the bits a certain length in the channel, as they will randomly shorten and disappear. You could start out with a pattern 101, and if the '0' bit shortens too much (domain walls get too close together), the domain walls will be attracted to each other and cancel out, leaving a bit pattern of 111.

I think one strategy I saw for getting around this was introducing deliberate imperfections in the racetrack. These imperfections can 'trap' domain walls in place so that they will click into certain positions. When the current is applied, the domain walls shift over and click in again. Of course, now the problem is getting them to all start shifting at the same time, every time.

This is massively complicated, and if successful it will be a feat of precision nanoengineering.

Stuart S. P. Parkin is a foreigner stealing American jobs.

See his biography here: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/bio.parkin.html

Here's the concept, with a nice animated gif: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/spinaps/research/sd/?racetrack

The genius of the design is that the bits can be moved along the nanowires, allowing tens to hundreds of bits or maybe more to be accessed by only one reader. The readers can be fabricated in an array on a chip, and the wires can be hung from above, storing the data vertically. AFAIK they haven't yet gotten to the point of figuring out fabrication issues for the nanowire parts, like making a vertically oriented array and aligning them to readers. So far they have been working on getting the racetrack part working. That is, they have been working on using an electric current to shift magnetic domains longitudinally along a nanowire, and reading/writing the domains. And actually, the article seems to suggest that they are ignoring the 3-dimensional nanowire fabrication issues for now, and are going to make prototypes with the wires fabricated traditionally, 2-dimensionally, on a chip surface, which may still be competitive with Flash.

As for heat issues, Hopefully the amount of current necessary will be small and thus the wires themselves will generate little heat. I would imagine that this design would have fewer transistors than, say, a DRAM, since the transistors will not be storing the data themselves. The transistors remain 2-dimensional, only on the chip surface. The wires are the only 3-dimensional part.

The story: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18102/Plan-9-Running-on-Blue-GeneL
Reason why: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/hare.index.htmlReason
One of developers: http://www.graverobber.org/