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It would have been cheaper for Amazon to just license the patents.

It would have been cheaper for Amazon to just license the patents.

It would have been cheaper for Amazon to just license the patents.

or this: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/printer/v 1r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.printers.ipmwin/com.i bm.printers.ipmwings/iprggmst38.htm

So, yeah, still not sure what was on the card. And I am curious... no doubt IBM went though a period of believing that the mainframe was dead and offering all sorts of zany stuff, so I am really curious.

If they want their own OS, they're probably going to want something that'll support clustering and a fast file system. Currently GPFS is the top dog in that area, and it's only available (currently) for AIX and Linux. It'd probably make more sense to put effort into improving this than porting it to Solaris.

Agreed that Solaris would provide more enterprise-grade (<—marketing term) features than Linux, although zones are becoming less compelling given the rise of virtualization, and I hear that ZFS doesn't provide the performance boost on SANs that it does on JBODs.

"refresh too many times and lock up 99% of the cpu." what is this, in X11?

Sounds like you need virtual machines, run the old crap under a VM so it still works.

What could possibly those old systems do that you cannot replicate or recode on new systems, or at least have it recompiled with
wrapper apis, or is it that horendously badly coded.

i5 specs look good though - http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/hardware/

The IBM JCOP card is one such smart card.

You can also google on "Mifare" for cheap contactless memory cards from Philips. They aren't as programable but for many applications you don't need programability.

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/z-seri es/index.html The Z61p model there is probably the best laptop that suits your need at a reasonable price.

assuming that one could teleport the (admittedly enormous) collection of states in a living being, would the matter "receiving" the information then live, or remain inert?

Are you familiar with biophysics enough to know the state of our knowledge on this question? I am not, so I'm asking you.

One informal opinion (see at the end of the article) is that quantum teleportation might be not needed to recreate a person. "Classical" measurements might suffice. It is also pointed out that NMR and ESR tomography machines in hospitals disturb some quantum states inside the patient, yet this does not change a person.

Particularly devastating was their carriage return invention three years later. In between, the IBM Selectric introduced the "golf ball" electric type. The writer was taken out of the process by making things too easy!

So in just four short years that shook the literary world, the unfortunate Class of '61 saw the demise of pushing down manual keys, that pushed manual bars up, with a manual level you pushed to advanced lines.

The bulk of cobol runs on big iron machines in large data processing capacities. The reason it is still around and still doing its job is that the environment it runs in is perfect for the language and the language is perfect for the environment it runs in. Not certain which came first, but the two are very tightly linked.

I previously had responsibilities for all development architecture at a DOW 30 company. That included mainframe cobol architecture (yes there is architecture in cobol), Unix C & 4GL (Informix based), Java and .NET. We tried some of the various 'new' technologies on the mainframe, but nothing beat cobol for sheer data processing as it was intimately aware of it's platform and worked well with it.

Y2K had nothing to do with cobol the language, it was the applications that were written to save a couple of bytes by not saving century indicators. There was just as much code written in C that did the same thing.

What this all means is use the best tool for both the job and its environment. Many people forget to include the environment they are running in when they think about tools, but it needs to be part of the calculation. And don't just discount a technology because its older than you. If it works, it works. Afterall, how many of you still drive a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine that was designed in the 1800's?

And before you say yes but the car engine has gone through major upgrades I'd like to point out that the current version of Z/OS cobol also has an OO flavor. That's right folks, you can write object oriented cobol (classes and the like) if you choose.

Ok, stop laughing now, I'm serious. No really I am. If you don't believe me look at this link.

"For years, most operating systems have been designed for 2-4 processors, with some handling more [redhat.com],...".

I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon with the Unix guru.

"Here's a nickel kid, get yourself a better computer."

No offense, kid, but I was on an 8 processor computer back in '89. You are too busy being all smart and shit and talking like you have a clue to actually find anything out.

Thanks to the story here yesterday on the IBM/Lenovo battery recall, I went to the website and checked my battery on my T43. Whaddya know, it's one that's part of the recall. I called and they transferred me to a call center in Atlanta and I was on hold for about 10 minutes. I should have my replacement within 4 weeks. Of course they said not to use it anymore - i.e. just use AC power (that's alternating current, not anonymous coward power!) and I know they have to say that but I'm going to keep using the battery. It's never gotten hot and I can't go 4 weeks with no battery. It's an extra capacity battery that keeps my machine going almost 6 hours. Gotta love that.

I am wondering why it took IBM so long to decide to recall the batteries, and I wonder when the flaming Thinkpad battery incident described on the CPSC website actually happened.

The great thing is, I've gotten to use this battery for a year and a half, and now I get a fresh one for free! I hope it has the same capacity or I will be unhappy.

the funny thing is, my battery:
model number: 92P1141

However, I live in Japan, and the japanese Lenovo website wants you type in the serialnumber, they even have a windows exe that checks it for you:
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbb s/mobiles/lenovobatteryprogram.exe

It claims that this battery is OK, even although it's on the previously mentioned list of affected models.

Could it be that the Lenovo USA is a bit overly careful and that not all these batteries are affected? Or did Lenovo JP make a mistake....

Who needs luck when you have documentation?

Their announcement here.

This involves systems sold between February 2005 and September 2006, including:

ThinkPad R Series (R51e, R52, R60, R60e)
ThinkPad T Series (T43, T43p, T60)
ThinkPad X Series (X60, X60s)

Yes, my one month old T60 too is on the list. Though I will wait out till the initial rush dies out.

Theres already CPUs around with ALOT more than 1M per core. For example... IBM's p595 has over 100MB per. And these are 8 core chips. Yummy. Standard configurations Microprocessors 16 POWER5 1.65 or 1.9 GHz processors or POWER5+ 2.1 or 2.3 GHz processors (two 8-core MCMs) L2 cache 7.6MB / MCM L3 cache 144MB / MCM http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/highend/5 95/specs.html

I can't really find anything to verify or debunk your claim. But for arguments sake, let's say IBM did invent software patent. I think this announcement is definitely a step in the right direction around software patents specifically: According to this press release from IBM, we've been awarded the most number of patents for 13 years running.

Considering that IBM is asserting " that so-called business methods alone -- broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics -- should not be patentable."

It would be interesting to know how many of the patents IBM received over the past 5 years would have fallen into this bucket. And maybe take it one step further and announce that these patents won't be enforced. Now that's something that would make it a whole lot easier for IBMers to weigh in on the software patent discussion without worrying about our own backyard! ;-)

Savio

IBM has published a report on the subject. It's availale here:

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/www_innovate.n sf/pages/world.gio.ip.html

Among other things, the report proposes an annual Patent Property Tax that, to me, looks like it could go a long way to eliminate speculation in worthless patents if the tax rate was set high enough.

1. Patent holders would be required to provide a self-assessed value for their patents. An annual Patent Property Tax would be paid based on that value.

2. A marketplace for patent selling and buying would be established.

3. Upon paying an 'earnest money' fee, a patent buyer could challenge the selfassessed value, quoting a higher value for the patent.

4. If the challenge value is accepted by the patent holder, then the patent holder would pay the Patent Property Tax on the new value.

5. If the challenge value is rejected by the patent holder, then the buyer is obligated to purchase the patent for the challenge value.

6. The patent buyer would also have to pay the PPT for the year in which it was purchased.

'The new policy is the result of a development process that included external as well as internal input, and is based upon a Wiki that gathered the comments and contributions of "over 50 patent and policy experts from the United States, Europe, Japan and China," offered during May and June of this year. That document can be accessed at this page at the IBM site.'

Via the ConsortiumInfo Standards Blog

Who doesn't use bash?

Red Flag Linux is actualy a distribution of Asianux2.0. Red Flag (Chinese), Miracle Linux (Japanese) & Haansoft (Korean) are all built on Asianux2.0 and targeted for the specific countries listed above. AFAIK, Asianux2.0 is a RHEL clone, so that helps with testing (vs. having to test a completely new distro).

I can't speak for "IBM", but back when I was product manger for WAS Community Edition (WASCE), I know that we decided to support Red Flag Data Center (RFDC) with WASCE right from v1.0 because our Asian customers were asking for RFDC (in addition to RHEL).

Savio

I don't think you need a dead man switch. (I work with dead man's switches all the time in industrial robotics). What you could probably get away with is a vigilance control switch. From Wikipedia:

Vigilance control, also called an alerter, is similar to a dead man's switch, the difference being that a vigilance control system requires that the operator press a button at specified regular intervals. If the operator fails to operate the vigilance control, a warning sounds, and should the driver still not operate the vigilance control the machinery will stop.

I have one of these motorola pagers that my company gave me to carry around. It may only be available in Canada, but I'm sure you can find something similar in your area.

At any rate, you can send a page to it with an email, and then you have the option to reply to the email with a canned response like "OK" or "Will call back soon", etc. I was thinking that you could write a script on a server that would kick off an email to your pager every 30 minutes and if it didn't see a response within 15 minutes, activate some kind of emergency routine like contacting a relative. The timing could be varied to your needs.

It would be easier if you had something that hung around your neck, or a wristwatch that beeped every 15 minutes and required you to push a button to silence the alarm. Not silencing the alarm would somehow trigger your emergency routine. Using a windows mobile device or a blackberry (the API is available for free) you could write a program for one of these devices to do this task and send an email if you failed to respond.

Of course, this only works during waking hours. I don't know if you hire someone to watch your child during the night while you're asleep or not.

I ran across this article. I wonder if it has gone any further than that.

Good luck with the search.

The Thinkpad 600 was and still is a great machine but the battery has known issues. It was the best selling Thinkpad ever and deserved to be. The size, shape and weight are just about perfect and that lent to both it's usability and exceptional durability. The screen is beautifully bright and the keybord feels great. I have newer, faster and lighter Thinkpads but still enjoy the 600.

The only problem is the battery and I'd gladly trade it for NiMH or even NiCd. I got my laptop used, so the battery was dead. I replaced it with a new IBM battery, hoping in vain that the issues had been addressed. The battery was good for between two and four hours but it could only do it four or five times! Each time you used the battery, you suffered a noticable loss of battery life. In less than a year of careful and conservative use, that pack was down to a 10 minute life. No other Thinkpad I've owned ever acted like that. There are several websites dedicated to explaining this particular battery failing. NiMH or NiCd would be better at this point and in the future. When the cells that come with such a battery die, it's easy enough to cut open the pack and replace them yourself. If you put in standard sized holders with springs, you will never have to worry about not finding batteries again. The trade off of battery life, in this case, is worth it. Anything would be better than the five or ten minutes the explosion risk Li batteries are giving me now.

I bought my battery in 2004, so I think I'm in the clear for explosions but I'm going to check again.

--

.nosig

There were at least three different displays for the A21p. Try this page; "Large, brilliant 15-in (1600 x 1200) active matrix TFT display with vibrant colors"

I forget my machine/type code (sometimes I remember them, sometimes not) but my system came with 128MB RAM, 20GB disk, and the 1600x1200 display. I THINK it was a -H1U but I'm not sure.

Stop that BS... and start where MS tells us to start: Before you begin, read the HCL!
How to install SuSE 9.x on IBM ThinkPad A31p: Insert CD and reboot! You may need an extra reboot to get sound working... and a A31p do have a somehow "different" display (1600x1200).
--
New IBM TinkPad T60p wich supports 4Gb RAM, SuSE 10 and got the cool 1600x1200 display

On a serious note - surely you can't be serious? Please, tell me you're having a bit of fun with all of these highly accomplished, * science masters with honors, more experience in their little toenail than your whole body, chip fab designin' before breakfast, rocket scientist, not in mum's basement anymore slashdot folks? Let alone the dumbass ones like me... If not, I hope you enjoy reality when it bites.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-cellsecurity/

2 hours?
it took me 20 seconds to google for and find a complete web server in under 200 lines of code
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/libr ary/es-nweb.html

What exactly is a blade server?

it is a server with blades.

and here's a link to the IBM press release because it looks like linking to the source has gone out of style.

What exactly is a blade server?

it is a server with blades.

and here's a link to the IBM press release because it looks like linking to the source has gone out of style.

Maybe Microsoft just hadn't gotten around to optimizing the idle loop like IBM did for PPC and darwin: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-unrollav3/

That would be because most governments internationally recognize WCAG as their standard for accessibility, and many laws have been drafted using WCAG as a starting point. The US government is bound by Section 508, and many state governments have something similar. What this lawsuit was about was getting private entities to realize that the ADA does not just apply to their physical locations, but also to the services they provide such as websites. My understanding is that Target was given many opportunities to settle by simply fixing their site, but refused to.

Most of this lawsuit is simply because they don't use the img alt attribute the way it was specified to be used, and making a website usable without a mouse. It's not hard to make a website accessible, and how to do so is well documented. For example, from IBM.

And for a little more info, from one of the witnesses in the case - see the NFB vs. Target heading.

These '16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 "cell" processors' are Opteron processors. ..and it will run Linux.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/202 10.wss

Don't know anything about Cell, do you?
Here's the original press release.
And here's the ISSCC "opening the kimono" press release.
Funny, lots of talk about "supercomputer on a chip", no mention of PS3.
This application is EXACTLY what IBM has been talking about for this chip all along. And they did all the work.

Don't know anything about Cell, do you?
Here's the original press release.
And here's the ISSCC "opening the kimono" press release.
Funny, lots of talk about "supercomputer on a chip", no mention of PS3.
This application is EXACTLY what IBM has been talking about for this chip all along. And they did all the work.

"IBM says it will start shipping the new supercomputer later this year."

You can preorder at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/clusters/ :)

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

The toolchain and a simulator are freely available and run on Fedora Core 5 systems. Take a look for yourself.

Reading between the lines of the press release from IBM, the Cell portion of the machine is not part of the initial installation happening later this year. (Notice that final acceptance isn't till 2008!) The current generation of Cell processor doesn't do double-precision floating point arithmetic, and that's functionality that's almost certainly needed by LANL's big simulation codes.

The BlueGene/P at Lawrence Livermore is supposed to be delivered some time next year, which will likely be before the Cell portion of Roadrunner is delivered to Los Alamos.

Yeah, because there are no backup solutions available for the Mac...

Take your FUD elsewhere.

Ah - I see what you are getting at - you are saying that a ray tracer can find each pixel on the screen by the sort alone. I was giving worst case scenario estimates (big-Oh), which favor the rasterizer with z-buffering because it doesn't require a sort, but average case scenario estimates may well indeed favor ray tracing. Going back to the original topic, it seems to me ray tracing had a better big Oh than the old raster standard the painter's algorithm (like nlogn vs n^2) and had better average case analysis as n approached infinity. In school zbuffering was really a future thing, and I don't recall doing any analysis on it (I think it was even new in the book we used - Computer Graphics: Principals and Practices [2nd edition?] that year). For that matter, I was still writing code in PHIGS and GL, at that time, not even OpenGL, though I picked up some OGL by my second graphics class the next spring.

    There are occlusion sort algorithms on the polygon side that may give it a good run for its money, like cPLP (since standard PLP is lossy) or hierarchal z-buffers, though there isn't really a "one shoe fits all feet" algorithm like you're talking about.

Figuring out what people on the net says about your products is the "new" thing apparantly. IBM has their own engine for the task too. Kind of makes you wonder how much power the net community will in fact have in day-to-day decision making in the corp head quarters' marketing strategy depts.

Umm... something having a bug isn't an incredible claim. Sure, it's not a good thing but it happens to everyone. It's nothing to be ashamed about. Just get the bastard fixed and stop dicking about.

This isn't about a perpetual motion machine or an entropy reducing device, or even P vs. NP or Riemann's Hypothesis. This is code. This isn't world changing. Bugs happen, then they get fixed. If they want to stay silent to dodge liability let them. If there is a bug it'll be patched, if there isn't they'll fade into obscurity.

Yeah, like an X60 version of the X-series Tablet, which would have the same specs as the X60 (non-tablet) in the article. Except, wait -- it doesn't exist yet! They've had the normal X60 for forever now, and yet the tablet is still an X41, stuck with a damn Pentium M!

AAARRRGGHHH!!!!!

(I've been waiting on it to come out so that I can replace my iBook (I want to be able to draw diagrams in my lecture notes). Can you tell I'm getting frustrated?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/attic2/ images/182.jpg
I'm not sure if this is twine... anyways charles babbage is saied to be the inventor of the computer (lady ada byron was his assistant, she programmed his machine. the programming language "ada" is named after her) I'm not sure if his machine was turing-complete though

his machine of course didn't play tic-tac-toe on a real board, but the fact that his machine computed the solution is still very impressive, since not even electricity was really invented...

From the artice: Rather than having a trackpad the X60s uses a one of IBM's signature red pointing sticks. This choice may be a bit disappointing to some people, but I have to say that I very much prefer it to a trackpad.

I have used many different pointing devices on laptops over the years and I love the TrackPoint. Sadly the de facto standard is the touch pad due to sloppy TrackPoint implementations from companies like Toshiba and things like the UltraNav which sacrificed usability for a better sales feature.

The TrackPoint will remain a niche market until it finally fades away and most people won't even care. On the plus side, at least there have been new things like "two finger scrolling" that are making touch pads nicer to use... just make sure you turn off "tap to click".

They've already confirmed that OpenBSD is dying... looks like NetBSD is next.

i call bullshit. here's an article discussing NetBSD over at IBM developerWorks (that i submitted, but got rejected of course; i guess only BSD is dying news gets in nowadays -- "grousing"? what the fuck does that even mean.)

looks to me that the author of this email is just another jaded old coder that got his commit privs revoked. maybe something good will come out of this -- look at what Theo did.

NetBSD is a pretty mature OS. maybe he could just fix the threading issues and whatever else irks him, and just stop stirring shit up.

just my two 0.02RON

I should have stuck a similar disclaimer out there. I work for IBM, used to Work for Sun and know a lot of people around the industry.

The e32* were .... not so good. The 3455 is much much better.

x3455

...and the IBM website at the end of the clips.