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For those that are interested, you can read IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines, specifically the section On Your Own Time, as well as IBM's Blogging Policy and Guidelines and the Virtual World Guidelines.

For those that are interested, you can read IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines, specifically the section On Your Own Time, as well as IBM's Blogging Policy and Guidelines and the Virtual World Guidelines.

IBM's Blue Gene still uses Ethernet. Eric's added Jumbo Frame support to Plan 9 From Bell Labs which boots on the cpu and I/O nodes now.

In that case the network has it's own dedicated nodes, so yes, the network is the computer!

To implement a visual search engine you need to be able to perform the following:

texture segmentation - splitting up a picture into segments of distinct objects. In a panoramic scene, you want to split the picture up into objects such as sky, ocean, waves, beach, boats, pier, wall, people, animals. As a psychological experiment, you can show someone a picture , point to a particular point and ask them what the first word that the associate with that point is. Then you will see how every scene becomes segmented by our own vision systems.

Basic image segmentation is implemented using edge detection by Fourier Transforms (FFT, IFFT, DFT). This is a very computation intensive stage that is typically implemented using DSP's, GPU's or even dedicated ASIC's. Data used by the FFT can be in any dimension 1D (audio/radar), 2D (images) and 3D (volume visualisation). But to match the resolution of a human eye, you would need a 100 Megapixel floating point framebuffer.

texture classification - having identified the silhouette of an object, now attempt to match the contents to a particular object. Simple ways include colour histograms and silhouette matching. More advanced methods attempt to simulate the first few layers of the human retina using Gabor filters, Ring filters and Wedge filters.
But just to model a single type of retinal cell requires one or more FFT operations for an entire image. And
there are at least twelve different types of such cells. For efficiency precalculated results of sample images are generated (these are referred to as feature vectors) and then compared against the results of any new image.
For a really technical explanation of how human vision works have a look at The organisation of the retina and visual system

texture retrieval - the actual design of the search engine to retrieve images through content rather than just keyword:

QBIC - Query By Image Content. IBM's image retrieval database system

All of this has to performed for a single image. For an entire movie requires the processing of hundreds of thousands of images.

The one I'm on now is a dual pentium pro, with 256 MB of RAM. Once, I had it loaded up with so many cards that the power supply to motherboard connectors burned. I fixed that, with spare ones, soldered in, from another power supply. Point is, I am constantly working on this box, and so far, am able to fix it, due to it's size, compared to a laptop. Decided to put two power supplies in it, so they split the workload, and not all of the power goes through the weak motherboard connnectors. It's a gamble, alright. Last thing I added was a 5 port USB 2.0 card, so I could plug in my USB mouse, and my Sandisk cruzer USB drives. I'm able to run my knoppix remaster from one of those drives, I have it partitioned as follows:

• A partition for the main KNOPPIX folder, this is the CD.
  
• A partition for a persistent home directory, that works like a hard drive, automatically adding stuff as you go along.
  
• A separate partition as an "Extra Partition", that you can store things you want to put there, and as a
  swap area for GIMP and K3B.
  
• A linux swap partition, this always gets mounted, unless you decide to "swapoff -v /dev/sda7" or something like that.

The other desktop is a HP Pavilion 8250, cost me $20.00, was very clean, and I maxed out the RAM for only $51.00.
I put a used 40 GB HDD in it for the main drive, and have Fedora Core there. Works very well, runs Opera 9.21 just like a more expensive machine. Naturally, I can also dual boot my remaster, run from the hard drive, or from a USB drive, take your choice. These files are how I do that, it's a loadlin/MSDOS menu setup. You will notice that there are two tarballs there, the latest one, dated 06-22-07 includes the USB drive as a choice. A big readme is included, so you can get all the details.

In summary, there are lots of desktops out there, just when I think that I have located a really clean one, for practically nothing, another one comes along. So many are Windows 98 machines.
Once, I had an IBM PS-1, 32 MB of RAM, dirt slow 25 mhz bus, and I managed to put Redhat 6.1 on it. Here's a link to an older page of mine where I show a dial-up application I made to allow Redhat 6.1 to connect to the internet if one cannot run KDE very well, with KPPP. I was able to get RHL installed on a very small hard drive, about 250 MB. I paid $5.00 for the PS-1, got it at a thrift store, someone had put it in a closet for years, then donated it, very little wear and tear, practically new. Later, I figured out that one could make a nice lilo RHL 6.1 hard drive on a faster machine, then just plug it into the cables on an old dog like the PS-1, and be up and running in a few minutes.
So easy to get into the case on a PS-1, just grab the little button under the top-front, and pull, and off comes your case! Takes two seconds!
Endless fun for us to play with older desktops, they are plentiful and cheap. And, with something like my knoppix remaster, you can run Firefox 2.0.0.5 on many of them!

Rapidweather

It's this simple, people are afraid of change, many people will not do change because it puts the testing of their reputation on the line. (many CEO's, CIO's, IT Directors, IT Managers, and the likes) Even though it is very evident the cost savings and the possibilities of re-allocating money to other projects that have never been touched because of current issues with M$ products or incompatibilities with others. These people are not comfortable with change and they do not want to put any effort or time in to making a significant change (they would rather deal with what they have been dealing with because of the possibilities of not having a job tomorrow, if they were wrong). Even if of it is evident that the benefits out weigh the eventual cost, productivity, time and effort of another product that they don't have now.

No one is willing to take risks anymore. They would rather agree with one another that it will not work out in the end. Even though I don't agree with these peoples though process, I do agree that it can be a task to get everyone to buy in to the change that would take place with the sagnificant change switching to OSS or Linux, but it is not impossible if you spend time to outline, plan and prepare for this type of rollout.

There are many success stories of people switching to OSS and Linux for their small, meduim and large size companies, who have taken the plunge to save money and troubles.

Ask the following companies - (I will kill two FUD's with one stone here - the use of OSS and Linux)

NASA - http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Projects/Columbia/co lumbia.html
- http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

DELL - http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/pow er/en/ps1q03_insights?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Walmart - http://www.wirespring.com/ (firecast runs on Linux andfirecast is and OSS)

Sony - http://www.computerpartner.nl/article.php?news=int &id=2804
- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/media_companies/sony3 .html

Google - Summer of Coders (need I say more?)
- http://code.google.com/

IBM - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource

Boeing - http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO-boeing.html
- http://www.zdnetasia.com/toolkits/0,39047352,39379 125-39094247p,00.htm

Wall Street, Merrill Lynch, ETrade, TowerGroup, Shahrawat (even as far back as 2002 - they must be Linux and OSS giants now!)
- http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/27/0327linux.html
- http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/lin ux/story/0,10801,75271,00.html
-

other to name Remax, People Soft, Byte, Cisco, Credit Suisse

For a much longer lists.. and why enjoy the following!

- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/

-

IBM is using 'By making this irrevocable patent covenant' language at http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/isplist.sht ml, which is linked from TFA. TFA contains some content from Sun about "Necessary Claims" while the IBM page provides the following definition:

IBM® Definition
Necessary Claims
"Necessary Claims" are those patent claims that can not be avoided by any commercially reasonable, compliant implementation of the Required Portions of a Covered Specification. "Required Portions" are those portions of a specification that must be implemented to comply with such specification. If the specification prescribes discretionary extensions, Required Portions include those portions of the discretionary extensions that must be implemented to comply with such discretionary extensions.

Part of Sun's comments was probably an effort to steal IBM's thunder, but Sun has definitely done some good things in this area as well. There's the OpenDocument stuff that most people here are already aware of, but also some specialized (but very cool, if you're in my business) stuff like the Sun OpenID Non-Assertion Covenant at http://www.sun.com/software/standards/persistent/o penid/nac.xml

BTW, you do know that it's madness to ask 'can they' questions about legal matters on Slashdot, right? :)

I don't know much about the inner workings of PSQL, but DB2 is highly parallel when it comes to I/O. This description of DB2's process model is pretty informative, though a bit overwhelming. In particular, you may want to look at some of the diagrams and the bit at the end about asynchronous page cleaners and I/O servers.

At a previous employer later acquired by IBM, I worked on a tool for identifying what software was installed on a given mainframe, and once installed, it would track the usage of each application each day/week/month/year, so companies could identify software they were no longer using and could suspend license/maint. fee payments. It worked by wedging itself into the OS and capturing each program load request for tracking execution, and it would scan the system for files that met certain signatures (file size, hash code, contents, etc.)...

I can see value in such a tool outside the mainframe world, even if there are no software license fee issues, and independent of any GPL-like concerns - installing many FOSS OS results in a huge collection of software being installed, and knowing exactly what is and is not on the system has a certain value...

The idea behind java is to prevent you from trying to do things like save memory by making items that are not fully portable. In C/C++ the size of short and int and ever char are not defined and the spec does not require integers to be represented by 2's compliment. For those reasons you should be using well defined sizes that are portable and not chars if you want to save the extra few bytes.

Source: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-ctypes3/index.html
I especially like the line: "Among the more interesting are 60-bit systems (CDC Cyber) which are only addressable by full words; on such a system, char is 60 bits."

If you want to be lazy and not have a full class, then in java you can just create a byte array to represent ARGB, "byte[] argb = new byte[4];" since it doesn't waste much space (I think it takes 8 bytes, 4 for the data, and 4 for the length, but that depends on the implementation).

Or, you can wrap an int (that is defined as exactly 32 bits in Java) in a class and keep all the bitwise operations that you fear hidden as implementation details and nice helper functions can be used, such as "byte getA(); void setA(byte A);" That way people don't have to worry about the inner implementation. You could even have constructors that build the ARGB object from Strings, ints, byte arrays, and other ways.

That's exactly how I feel when visiting http://ibm.com/support. Seriously!

DB2 is used as (optional) storage engine on later versions of Lotus Domino, which makes it widely used in larger enterprises, not necessarily on large irons. http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/ product4.nsf/wdocs/nsfdb2

Triviality has nothing to do with it. It took time to make, hours according to you. So someone charging $20 is not outrageous IMO.

Yes, the price is "arbitrary", as are almost ALL prices. Set the price, watch the market react, adjust accordingly, repeat. How else can anyone possibly come up with a price?

If the author sells one copy, they have lost money (as per your experience). If they sell 5, then they've broken even IF they simply ship the s/w and walk away. However, if they then have to collect the funds (chase down bad orders, give up a cut of the order to auto-pay systems), support the software (id10t problems as well as s/w bugs), market (websites don't get built for free), sell (someone has to accept the orders, ship the goods), and on top of all this come up with a new version, then there is potentially a lot of time put into individual orders, whereas there may be next-to-none put into others.

So, what price should said software sell for? What criteria do you think should be used so as not to make the initial price arbitrary?

Don't confuse F/OSS with commercial software. Though there is a fair number of F/OSS packages that are created under the ESR "bazaar" model, most of the polished packages are actually created under the commercial model. There are the packages made with "enterprise acceptible versions" that they sell (OpenOffice.org vs. StarOffice), and there are those packages that are set up to sell support and/or hardware and/or services. These softwares may be "free", but they most definitely raise monies for their authors (or at least for their major corporate backers).

Please mod parent down. DB2 is not only for mainframes. I worked at a place which used a bunch of DB2 boxes running AIX.

While DB2 does run on mainframes, it also runs on many other operating systems, including Linux.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/9/

As you can see, DB2 runs on at least Linux, Windows, and Solaris. It also runs on AIX, even though I didn't see it mentioned in a quick glance on the page. Please check your facts next time.

DB2? It's only useable on large mainframes (big iron, so to speak) from what I understand.

Can you please expand upon that statement? I've been waiting for AIX LPARs to support not only live migration like VMWare's Vmotion, but also the ability to run two or more copies of an LPAR simultaneously (so high availability design can be taken to the next level, and physical server outages automatically trigger a slaved LPAR to take over the partition), which I have yet to see claimed by any virtualization solution. So far as I can see, IBM's Advanced POWER Virtualization only has a Statement of Direction (SoD) for what they call Live Partition Mobility, claiming it will be delivered by the end of 2007. Thus, in this respect at least, VMWare ESX is still ahead of AIX LPAR capabilities.

O.K., bright boy. Build something better than S3. Open Source it, if you like. But first prove to me that your solution scales to an enterprise the size of Amazon.com. That it will be cheaper and more reliable. Then we can talk.

Here is Fred Cohen's take on the general subject:

http://all.net/resume/bio.html

http://all.net/journal/newsletter/index.html

http://all.net/Analyst/index.html

Ref.

http://all.net/

Paper:
An Undetectable Computer Virus

http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/VB 2000DC.htm

Could this be the end of the Mac - PC flamewar?

Logic:

"... we can't stop here, this is bat country."

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Hunter S. Thompson

QoS is great at the router level, where you have all the information and can pick which packets to sent over a limited pipe. But when you're at the application level, you can't be sure what else is happening on the machine, let alone the rest of the network. IBM has been pushing some technology called Adaptive Bandwidth Control. From various bits I've seen, they appear to continuously stress the network to determine the peak and then back off from that peak to avoid starving more important applications. This is important when you have a high bandwidth, low priority application, and don't want to update every part of a highly dispersed network to minimize it's impact. Think peer to peer, software deployments, retail organizations with lots of branches and limited WAN connections. The technology exists, but the implementations vary, so I was pondering the best way to implement something like this. Can you determine bandwidth available indirectly, without saturating the connection.

Are latency measurement, dropped packet counts, window size tweaking, or some other magical solution usable to get the full bandwith out of a pipe when it's not being used and yet avoid impacting other users when they need it?

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

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l- sctp/?ca=dgr-wikiaSCTP

And who cares about moldy old FTP anymore, anyway when there's HTTP, networked filesystems, and (name your favorite peer to peer file sharing program)?

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/power-ba sed.html

Please explain by what you mean as a "joke"?

If you follow the forum link you'll see two other links.
One to HP's internal support site , another to IBM's internal support site and another to DELL's internal support site, all explaining about the microcode fixes and offering BIOS updates. And are dated in April and May.

You're thinking RoadRunner, also by IBM you can find it on their website [http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20 210.wss]

Two months ago, Intel introduced microcode updates for all systems with an Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo processor. According to an HP Tech Support Document:

While the implications of the issue are difficult to quantify, any of the following symptoms can occur:

* The system may stop responding to keyboard or mouse input.
* A system operating in a Microsoft Windows environment may generate a blue screen.
* A system operating in a Linux environment may generate a kernel panic.

This was the first I had heard of this; probably a good time to check for BIOS or microcode updates."

The HP link also indicates the nature of the problem, which should not be OS specific:

This Intel microcode update addresses an improper Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) invalidation that may result in unpredictable system behavior such as system hangs or incorrect data.

The monitor is called IBM T221[1]. The screen was manufactured by IDTech[2].

[1] http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/documen t.do?lndocid=MIGR-54982
[2] http://www.idtech.co.jp/en/920LCD/index.html

There's a description of the Cell processor here http://www.research.ibm.com/cell

i beg to differ.
see http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportat ion/
i didn't care for looking for the original article that specifically stated that atom teleportation has been done bu the link above implicitly states this.

I have been on the board of the OSI for more than 5 years, and until last year it was fairly easy for us to police the term open source: once every 2-3 months we'd receive notice that some company or another was advertising that their software was "open source" when the license was not approved by the OSI board and, upon inspection, was clearly not open source. [...] Most of the time they would say "Oops! Thanks for letting us know--we'll promote our software in some other way." And they did, until last year.

But what about Scilab, which on its home page prominently claims to be The open source platform for numerical computation (and has been doing so for years)? Scilab clearly does not qualify for the (widely agreed-upon) OSI definition of "open source", because the license prohibits commercial redistribution of modified versions. And yet I've never heard of an OSI campaign to pressure Scilab to either change its license or stop calling itself "open source". As a result, there are many examples of people who have confused Scilab's license with the usual definition of "open source".

I have been on the board of the OSI for more than 5 years, and until last year it was fairly easy for us to police the term open source: once every 2-3 months we'd receive notice that some company or another was advertising that their software was "open source" when the license was not approved by the OSI board and, upon inspection, was clearly not open source. [...] Most of the time they would say "Oops! Thanks for letting us know--we'll promote our software in some other way." And they did, until last year.

But what about Scilab, which on its home page prominently claims to be The open source platform for numerical computation (and has been doing so for years)? Scilab clearly does not qualify for the (widely agreed-upon) OSI definition of "open source", because the license prohibits commercial redistribution of modified versions. And yet I've never heard of an OSI campaign to pressure Scilab to either change its license or stop calling itself "open source". As a result, there are many examples of people who have confused Scilab's license with the usual definition of "open source".

I found no study on the effect of cosmic radiations on film, but there are many about their effect on electronic components. I am going to assume that a radiation hit that is detrimental to components is detrimental to film.

IBM did a study, long ago, on the effect of background radiation and cosmic rays on electronic component reliability. They found that high-altitude places such as Denver, Co. were getting an order of magnitude more Single Event Upsets (that is, one solar/cosmic ionizing particle trickling into a CMOS circuit) than sea-level locations. They also found that the atmosphere was en efficient shield and that most of what remained at sea level was Nth-generation particles from a cascade of events triggered by the initial high-energy protons. See http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/401/ogorman .pdf.

Best practice is to shield machines in 50 cm (20 in) of concrete. They noted that 3 floors of concrete buildings offered sufficient protection.

Caveat about some materials (especially ceramics) that contain radionucleides.

Bottom line, put your films in a radon-free basement, and since they chemically decay, put them in as low a temp as they can withstand.

Well, I don't know about Lenovo, buy IBM (which still keeps its PC server business) does preload its servers with Linux:

http://www.ibm.com/systems/x/solutions/os/linux/

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/xseries/cog/ xseriesnos.html

Well, I don't know about Lenovo, buy IBM (which still keeps its PC server business) does preload its servers with Linux:

http://www.ibm.com/systems/x/solutions/os/linux/

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/xseries/cog/ xseriesnos.html

Where is my 15 year, interest free $5 million loan? I want a piece of that action.

You could try starting here: 1-800-IBM-4YOU

quoted from the write-up: "... The idea is that the conduction of sound along bone would be more secure that via radio waves, leading to the possibility of swapping data with someone by shaking their hand."
This general idea was also tackled by Thomas Zimmerman doing research for IBM. His idea did the same thing using signals carried on the skin (which didn't need the FIRM handshake to work :) Not sure how that compares to this, but both manage the same trick
Here's a link : PAN Fact Sheet

nothing else has done such a good job at integrating contacts, e-mail, and calendars.

This is no longer true. You really need to take a look at products like Zimbra. From my perspective it has everything Exchange has going for it, plus the benefits of running OSS and on my favorite platform. It even handles Blackberrys, Palms, and PDAs (via NotifyLink). In addition to Zimbra there is Open-Xchange and many more (though I'm not sure they're as solid as Zimbra).

Also have you seen GroupWise 7? I would say it has feature parity. I also hear a lot of places are fine on Lotus Notes (but I haven't used that product personally). Exchange is a nice product, but it simply isn't true that there are not Exchange alternatives.

Even IBM gives short tutorial on how to develop with Drupal.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/ implement.html

Rational Purify is probably the best tool on the market.

If you still think Java/C# are slow, especially in terms of memory management you might want to read this:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-j tp09275.html

Try Purify: http://www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/purify/

Such a thing is unfortunately impossible. In 1982 physicists Bill Wootters, Wojciech H. Zurek and Dennis Dieks introduced the No Cloning Theorem.

A decade later, IBM demonstrated that you can teleport something, but the original is destroyed. This may not violate the No Cloning Theorem, but it does teleport. Eerily, just like on Star Trek (excepting clones with additional facial hair, of course).

5-30-2007: IBM, in its infinite wisdom, asked Jeff Vogel to write an article about programming practices. The result is here. You might think his ideas are stupid, but that is all right. It doesn't matter that he was stupid. What does matter is that he was paid.

We would only know that I think if we gave it a try. IBM's octopiler project http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_proje cts.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html is probably the closest I've seen. But it's insistence on trying to use c++ is probably going to kill it in the end.

"The first order of business is to ensure that atime logging is disabled on file systems. The atime is the last access time of a file, and each time a file is accessed, the underlying file system must record this timestamp. Because atime is rarely used by systems administrators, disabling it frees up some disk time. This is accomplished by adding the noatime option in the fourth column of /etc/fstab."

Can someone share their thoughts about this tweak? Is it safe to use from a data integrity perspective?

Customer: My computer won't bla, bla, bla

Dell says: Reinstall from the restore CD and hangs up

"choose between Vista/XP or Ubuntu so they can see the $50 savings on the configuration part of the process"

They get an equivilent GUI desktop for roughly $100.00 less.

"getting the computer at home and then having the realization they just got what they paid for. They will not be happy"

The get a GUI, a browser, email client, word processor and media player.

"Dell will have to field that support call from people who are CLUELESS to what Linux or an OS is"

I would guess that they get less support calls for Ubuntu as given hardware failures Linux is more stable over the long term. It doesn't go sluggish like Windows does and you have to reinstall every six months or abouts.

"Many of those support calls will end with, "you probably want to buy Windows" and"

The should do something like the one button restore Levovo offers. Or put a base diagnostic system that can be invoked at boot time. Besides which there's only one thing more futile that working in a call center, that is working in one.

Im seeing a lot made of the price difference