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The freedom of the language has nothing to do with its syntactic cleanliness. I don't know what makes you say Python dictates how you express yourself.

What about Perl Poetry? Or JAPH's? Here's a really good JAPH example: Latent JAPH. Obviously Python's forced tabs do indeed restrict expression.

Yeah, me too, I loved the 6502, 68000, then ARM. I really need to have a go on the PowerPC. It looks cool too.

Oooh, and there's one right in this Mac!! ;-)

IBM's Vancouver Pacific Development Centre is hiring.
http://www-03.ibm.com/services/ca/en/innovation/va ncouver/index.html

Interesting to see this idea actually working now. I think I first saw this five years ago on IBM's Alphaworks site. Ah yes, here it is.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part2/p icard.html

How about you install key-logger and wait for the fireworks? Any kind of physical security that can be trusted upon is hard to obtain. The IBM 4758 PCI Cryptographic Coprocessor is used in environments where it is important to prevent tampering. It has been said many times before, that the only way to have a "secure" environment is to guard all access points with armed marines. This, naturally, is not feasible and physical security will always be an easy point of attack. Thus, the grand-parents post is valid.

If Google and CLEVER (Google's theoretical forerunner -- check out Kleinberg's paper for an early near-prototype of PageRank) have taught us anything, it's that algorithms that use the linking relation as a metric for ranking web pages relative to a keyword is completely natural. Such algorithms use the linking relation to measure what amounts to popularity or agregate usage.

In effect, they conflate authority with popularity. This is a great hack, since it uses the web's inherent graph structure to generate meaningful results in line with people's preferences. And this graph structure is a direct result of people choosing to link to (presumably) useful or interesting pages. But there are two problems:

1. PageRank can be easily manipulated. Popularity is not the same as authority, so SEO people can abuse PageRank to appear authoritative.
2. They put new web pages at a disadvantage. Frankly, when I'm searching for information, I don't care how popular a web page is. I just want an authoritative source. While this is a disadvantage for strictly informational searches, it is in the end a good thing for 'recreational' searches.

In effect, PageRank and the like have been cracked because their designers assumed that people would act in good faith when linking. Google constantly updates the algorithm to We require a new, dare I say, paradigm for generating search results with a metric that correlates strongly with authoritativeness and cannot be abused. I have some ideas, but the patent office, and maybe some journals, will hear about them well before any of you do.

One more followup:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/multimod al/
shows binaries for Windows on ipaq/pocketpc, and Linux/Zaurus. The former is unhelpful, the latter I'll take a look at tonight.

So what are they licensing? Pixie dust?

I think this is part of sony's move to muzzle in on microsofts market. Only fair isn't it? Ah the two evil empire's battling it out. Joy! Remember the cold war, it gave us the intenet and free PORN!!! Eh I mean the internet and a way to communicate easily with our fellow man ABOUT FREE PORN!!!

Oh yeah I would buy one. The first non-handheld console I would own but a legit 300 dollar multi-core linux machine would be too sweet. No need to fear rootkits either, I don't remember any articles were sony was found not to be 100% compliant with the GPL so they could hardly rootkit the kernel. (Would a hacked kernel still be considered a rootkit?)

300 bucks for a genuine IBM grid machine.

Tell your "friend" (if he is real) to visit this intranet URL (https://lifeboat.ibm.com/lifeboat/stats/lifeboat/ stathome.php) for the latest statistics on Linux (6792 since April 2004) and Windows (867 since April 2004) installations inside the company. Keep in mind that this site only counts installs of the "official" IBM client images (both of which are installed via a custom made Debian boot cd, btw). Before April 2004, there were many thousands more installs of the older Linux image. And all this was before the availability of a Linux native version of Notes (which has just come out internally, non-IBMers wont be seeing it for a few more months though) and sametime! For Windows, most people use the IBM client image that was installed when they got their machine. And for Linux, many people (like me, for example) replace Windows with a free version of Linux like Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. If you friends inside IBM have never seen a Linux box inside IBM, then they are either lying or are blind.

One thing that is not advertised as heavily as our gradual migration to Linux is our much quicker migration to Firefox. It is the IBM standard browser and most of the people I work with day to day use only Firefox, whether they use Linux, Windows or even OS X. There is (last I checked) only a single intranet site that still requires IE, and according to their notes, they will be supporting Firefox by the end of the year.

thank you IBM - its a fantastic resource and reference.

Some info on Linux and Trusted Computing.

If by my ass you mean Giga or Gartner, then yes... my ass.

Obsessed with laptop keyboards? First the upscale site
http://www-604.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/C ategoryDisplay?storeId=10000036&catalogId=-36&lang Id=36&categoryId=13865533

The one that ends in 9490 looks like it was almost ripped out of a Thinkpad.

But even the local PC stores are a good source for HappyHacker wannabe small compact form USB keyboards. I also check out eBay just to see what the others are selling.

When will IBM be pimping these out in blade format? They already have JS20's, which are dual PPC 970 based systems running at 2.2GHz. These new chips are running 3 3.2GHZ cores on the same CPU. That means that with the JS20 form factor, you could get 6 cores altogether (assuming you don't melt the thing first). A rack of 14 of these would mean that you would have a 84 CPU cluster in single Chassis, and IBM puts 6 chassis on a rack, so that would be 504 CPUs on a single rack.
It makes their current PPC blade option look kind of weak...

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what's possible on the Web.

Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

As others have noted, a shorthand term comprised of the intials of a series of words, and is itself pronounable as a word, is an acronym. Revisionist hostory not withstanding.

The XML part is typically ignored in AJAX discussions, either because people find XML all scary and complex (and so use html/tag-soup), or because they do not understand the inplications for character encoding and internationalization.

The hypervisor built into the CPU may effectively prohibit that.

I have a workpad z50 http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/documen t.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=BMOE-46XPTL That I use while travelling, to work on word documents. I type a lot of articles for various publications, and for work, and find this item has great uses:

*lightweight (2.6 lbs)
*instant on
*16 hour battery life

Which makes it perfect for strolling around demo floors, walking and typing, etc.

Yes, I could do all this with a laptop, and have other features, but I paid $80 on ebay for it last year, with the extended battery, a 300mb micro drive, 2 regular batteries, the original box, paperwork, software all included. I would never get the instant on or 16 hour battery life I get with this little device. It only has an 8" screen and a resolution of 640x480, but works perfectly for what I need it for.

Let's think of competitor links that Microsoft should include..

I'll start off..

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/warp/
Beware.. sales stop at December 23, 2005. So hurry! :)

25? How about one server, and with several more applications tossed in for good measure? Yup, runs Linux reeeaaaalllly well. :)

What happened to a computer language that is intuitive and very easy, that anybody can learn?

You can download from IBM a personal version of UniVerse, which is an extended relational database environment that uses a version of BASIC as the primary programming language.

They may not talk about it much, but it's still available.

Interestingly, they still have pages on SmartSuite for OS/2, but the "Buy now" link returns a 404.

They may not talk about it much, but it's still available.

Interestingly, they still have pages on SmartSuite for OS/2, but the "Buy now" link returns a 404.

One error in the report is that it's a Web-based implementation. It's actually an Eclipse-based implementation. The container for the ODF-compliant editors is IBM Workplace Managed Client. The container itself is a very interesting thing because it lets you build applications of just about any type, which are then deployed with the client over the network (or added to existing deployed clients as the case may be.) It also runs unmodified across Windows and Linux, because the Eclipse/Workplace layer does all the interaction with the OS windows, file system etc.

The point about the ODF support is that, like all standards, it takes interoperability out of the equation and lets vendors compete on the implementations. OpenOffice is essentially a MS Office competitor, using the same desktop-centric deployment and support model, except with open source and cross-OS capabilities. This is good for folks who like the MS Office "way" but want choice. IBM is approaching the problem of desktop productivity tools a little differently, as a locally installed but network managed app. Again, innovating in the implementation because the standard lets you do that.

Currently, the Intels, AMDs, ATIs & Nvidias ship with 90nm chips.

At least the last time I noticed, nVidia was still using 110 nm. ATI's latest X1 series (R520-based) use 90 nm fabrication, but I'm not aware of these being available as real products yet. The previous generation (e.g. X800) were 110 nm, unless memory serves me poorly.

TI and IBM also produce 90 nm chips. IBM (same page as above) claims to have a 65 nm ASIC production capability on line as well, though I don't know whether they have any real customers for it.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Not to mention - there's still a need for machines with 8 or 12 procs, and not to many companies selling them. Certainly none with the reputation for reliability sun has.

Oh really?

I think they got confused by the commercials for these. Or maybe these.

We had 2 qubits in 1998, 3 in 1999, and 5 in 2000 according to IBM.

So, if you plot these, it looks like we've gone through an s-shaped growth curve where we'll never get much past 9 qubits. Here's the plot.

RSA is safe now...

Which means there should be a 16 qbit machine by 2025, the 32 qbit machine by 2045... hmm. How unhelpful.

When you combine these features, don't you essentially get the same functionality as e-mail? This leads me to believe that we might benefit from a system that supports both synchronous (such as instant messaging) and asynchronous (such as e-mail) communication. Do we really need two different applications for these two methods of communication?

Consider the main information that is transferred via an e-mail:
- Timestamp
- Sender
- Recipient(s)
- Subject
- Body (including text, images, other media formats, arbitrary files)

Now compare this with the main information that is transferred via an instant message:
- Timestamp
- Sender
- Recipient; however, on certain instant messaging systems, multiple recipients are permitted (for example, AIM allows you to create a chat room, and MSN messenger allows you to add additional contacts to an existing chat)
- Body; while this is usually just text, I don't see any reason why users should not be permitted to offer to send arbitrary files ("attachments") in-line (such as in MSN messenger) or images in-line (such as using when using direct connect in AIM)

To me, it seems like these lists of information are so similar that there doesn't really seem to be any reason why one application should not be able to deal with both types. There is actually an application created within IBM called NotesBuddy that claims to integrate e-mail and instant messaging (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/notesbuddy/ [ibm.com]), but in reality, the integration isn't entirely seamless. The application also faces several usability problems (in my opinion).

I think part of the problem with the implementation of NotesBuddy may be that it tries to merge two existing services instead of providing a solution that is designed from the ground up. ICQ's implementation is perhaps more usable because the integration of synchronous and asynchronous communication is more transparent. However, I find its content limitations (just text) to be restrictive.

"Do they really mean just e-mail, or do they mean a replacement for Outlook?"
Something like... like... like Lotus Notes / Lotus Domino ?
Lotus Domino exist for several server platforms (incl, Linux) and Lotus Notes is available for Windows and OS X.
I can't btw. understand why there are no Linux client... could someone from IBM pls. respond ?

Try NotesBuddy from IBM's AlphaWorks site (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/notesbuddy).

It works with SameTime and Lotus Notes and has many of the features you mentioned and some that aren't available anywhere else (to my knowledge). For example, it comes with speach synthesis so that your computer can announce the IMs. It also does this for new mail in Lotus Notes.

It even integrates the two functions so that an e-mail sender's IM status appears in along with the e-mail message and you can IM them directly from the e-mail. My favorite feature is that it automatically saves IM conversations.

Have you tried NotesBuddy from IBM's alphaWorks? (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/notesbuddy). It's all I've used at work, I've never tried the Lotus client as it looked a bit basic.

NotesBuddy integrates well with Notes, it has emoticons, URLs are clickable, but it's handiest feature is a little selection tool that allows you to send an image of any part of the screen to other users. It looked a bit ugly at first, but now I find it better to use than MSN or Google Talk (my only other 2 options!).

If you're company uses IBM Sametime internally you'd do well to checkout NotesBuddy. Easy download:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/notesbuddy

It is by far the best IM client I've used. Useful chat history retention, group chats, palettes for animated gifs you can drop in a conversation. I use gTalk, AIM (used to use gAIM), and used to use ICQ, SameTime v3, Trillian. NotesBuddy is still my favorite client.

Sun

HP

IBM

Dell

The first 3 I know are for real. I don't know much about Dell, but much more prominenet like that you can't have it.

And altough other manufacturers (shame on them) are less helpful (Toshiba...) they may be weaking up to the reality of the marketplace that Linux is becoming. You would need to hack far less since many hardware manufacturers are realising Linux is here to stay. You did not have a resource like Toshiba's a few years ago.

The old pitiful excuse not to use Linux argueing there is no hardware officially certified to run it, should be soundly ignored.

I hate to dump on any company that's selling Linux, but those laptops are outrageously expensive.

Linux:
IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T42: 1.7GHz, 14" display, 512MB RAM, 40GB disk, CD-RW; $2175.00

Windows:
IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T42: 1.8GHz, 14" display, 512MB RAM, 60GB disk, CD-RW; $1499.00

Quite possibly it's not Emperor's fault, I have a feeling that IBM/Lenovo may not sell ANY ThinkPads without Windows (especially sad considering that IBM ought to be the one place you could get a Linux machine, if anywhere) and thus you're really paying for a copy of Windows plus Emperor's overhead and whatever it costs them for the support contract (which might be worth something to some people, but not $600!). But at the end of the day, that's a hell of a premium.

The way Microsoft has the hardware market twisted around their finger right now, it's basically impossible to get a quality, name-brand laptop without buying Windows. (I know there are some white-box machines available out there, but put one of them down next to a ThinkPad and there's really no comparison.)

I would like to think that one day wine will actually be better at running Windows software than Windows itself is.

Nah, I remember what happened to the last OS that did that.

You are assuming a static program and data in the local store. But Cell was designed for streaming applications. Specifically, if the program fits in the local store and you use the DMA properly to stream in/out the data, you do not have an LS bottleneck. The DMA is, in a sense, async load/store and therefore not only relieves the LS bottleneck, but also can relieve the SPU of a lot of code to move the data around. There's already some discussion of this in the IBM discussion forum for Cell: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/dw_th read.jsp?forum=739&thread=97698&cat=46

With the new, incompatible architecture, porting existing projects to the 360 will likely take quite a bit more effort. I understand your concerns, however IBM has opened the source to some Cell libraries. IBM has also a site devoted to the cell processor that includes kernel patches for the cell processor. We also don't know enough about the security on the 360--it may be that mods will have to be specific to each unit, making said mods more costly and possibly more dangerous (easier to screw up the installation). We also didn't know about the security of the original xbox, however look how far we were able to get with that. :)

Try Googling for:
"memory leak" java

Or as an example of the problem and one approach to fixing it see this article on IBM developerWorks.

No one (including the compiler) dynamically allocates objects in C/C++ when they can place them on the stack instead.

Are you certain of that? Here:

void foo()
{
//...
auto_ptr<Foo> f(new Foo);
//...
};

What would the compiler do? What *could* it do, if it were smarter? And have you really never seen any code that does this? Or written it?

Lots of C and C++ programs dynamically allocate many objects that could be heap allocated. In particular, many C++ objects that are placed on the stack immediately allocate storage on the heap. Think std::string. Many programmers do make an attempt to allocate as much on the stack as possible, but I think most don't really consider it. And keep in mind when I say this that I've been writing C and C++ (mostly C++) professionally for nearly 15 years -- I've seen more than a little code.

Garbage collected languages like Java, on the other hand, require practically everything to be managed on the heap.

Interestingly, Java does *not* require that at all... it's just the most obvious way to implement it. In fact, I read a while back that the next generation of Java compilers will perform escape analysis, looking for objects whose lifetime is associated with a stack frame. Here's a link. When they find such an object, it will be allocated on the stack. If such an object creates other objects, as long as the analysis can prove that their lifetimes are also frame-associated, they will also be allocate on the stack.

The same analysis will often allow Java objects and their sub-objects to be allocated as a single block. Since the compiler can see that the constructor of class Foo always allocates objects of Bar and Baz, all of fixed size, it can allocate a single block, just like a C++ compiler would be able to for a class like:

class Foo
{
// ...
Bar bar;
Baz baz;
};

The same sort of analysis should also allow your other point to be addressed: An array of objects can be allocated as a single block. The compiler can recognize code like:

Foo[] f = new Foo[n];
for (int i; i < n; ++i)
f[i] = new Foo;

And allocate a single block that is n*(sizeof(Foo)+sizeof(Bar)+sizeof(Baz)) in size, and if 'f' has a stack-associated lifetime, allocate the whole pile on the stack.

All of the above is still theoretical, of course, but it's coming quickly.

That might be acceptable, but the worst part is random application pauses of arbitrary duration for garbage collection. Unless that problem can be resolved, garbage collected languages will be always be a poor match for latency sensitive applications, even where the net throughput is otherwise adequate.

As I pointed out in my previous post, whether or not that problem exists depends on the GC implementation. Incremental GCs keep the pauses small, and there are GCs designed for real-time usage that further guarantee maximum latencies. It's worth pointing out also that normal malloc() and free() implementations don't provide any run-time guarantees. Real-time code that uses a heap uses special versions that do provide guaranteed latencies, at the expense of worse average performance.

Ah yes, the story of Mel.

Differently-impressive is the Tree VLIW IBM has come up with. Here's a blurb from the site:

In our VLIW architecture, a program consists of a sequence of tree-instructions, or simply trees, each of which corresponds to an unlimited multiway branch with multiple branch targets and an unlimited set of primitive operations. All operations and branches are independent and executable in parallel. The multiway branch is associated with the internal nodes of the tree, whereas the operations are associated with the arcs.

In other words, each VLIW instruction word isn't just a branch, it's a multiway branch. One tree-VLIW prototype could execute up to 8 branches a cycle.

I wonder if Mel had anything to do with that architecture...

Ah yes, the story of Mel.

Differently-impressive is the Tree VLIW IBM has come up with. Here's a blurb from the site:

In our VLIW architecture, a program consists of a sequence of tree-instructions, or simply trees, each of which corresponds to an unlimited multiway branch with multiple branch targets and an unlimited set of primitive operations. All operations and branches are independent and executable in parallel. The multiway branch is associated with the internal nodes of the tree, whereas the operations are associated with the arcs.

In other words, each VLIW instruction word isn't just a branch, it's a multiway branch. One tree-VLIW prototype could execute up to 8 branches a cycle.

I wonder if Mel had anything to do with that architecture...

Startup time should not be an issue any more with properly written programs using JDK 1.5 and up thanks to technologies such as Class Data Sharing. Thanks to Apple for pioneering this technology. There are many, many other examples and documentation on Sun's website explaining how to properly code Java programs to optimize their startup execution, but CDS is a technology aimed directly at assisting startup times of Java programs.

Class Data Sharing

Sun

IBM

Apple

here are the Linux distros which are validated (including Ubuntu x86) and also those "validated and reccommended"

One good reason to use DB2 is that neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL can scale to the same size of database as DB2. Using DB2's "Distributed Partitioning Facility", or DPF, with DB2 Enterprise Server Edition you can partition data over hundreds of machines using a shared-nothing approach. This means you can create a data warehouse of a hundred terabytes that 1) appears to your applications as just a single database 2) retrieves query results blazing fast (this is the "shared nothing" part; each machine knows what data it is responsible for, so a query that comes in to the database is automatically distributed to the responsble machines, which go off and do their work, then return the results to a single co-ordinator that pipes them back to the application -- it's like RAID-0 for databases).

It's certainly possible to create a multi-terabyte database using MySQL or PostgreSQL -- but you're going to be waiting way the hell longer to get a result back from your queries.

Reason 2: You get support from IBM. IBM lives and dies by its enterprise level support -- 24x7 customer service around the world. Sure, you can purchase support from MySQL AB or from some PostgreSQL shop, but it's not going to approach the level of service that you'll get from IBM. In fact, to get a level of support comparable to what IBM offers for DB2 Express at $4874 for the first year and $1218/year for support after the first year, you would need to buy MySQL Network Gold for $2995/year. So after two years, going with DB2 Express will actually cost you less than half of what MySQL support will cost!

One good reason to use DB2 is that neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL can scale to the same size of database as DB2. Using DB2's "Distributed Partitioning Facility", or DPF, with DB2 Enterprise Server Edition you can partition data over hundreds of machines using a shared-nothing approach. This means you can create a data warehouse of a hundred terabytes that 1) appears to your applications as just a single database 2) retrieves query results blazing fast (this is the "shared nothing" part; each machine knows what data it is responsible for, so a query that comes in to the database is automatically distributed to the responsble machines, which go off and do their work, then return the results to a single co-ordinator that pipes them back to the application -- it's like RAID-0 for databases).

It's certainly possible to create a multi-terabyte database using MySQL or PostgreSQL -- but you're going to be waiting way the hell longer to get a result back from your queries.

Reason 2: You get support from IBM. IBM lives and dies by its enterprise level support -- 24x7 customer service around the world. Sure, you can purchase support from MySQL AB or from some PostgreSQL shop, but it's not going to approach the level of service that you'll get from IBM. In fact, to get a level of support comparable to what IBM offers for DB2 Express at $4874 for the first year and $1218/year for support after the first year, you would need to buy MySQL Network Gold for $2995/year. So after two years, going with DB2 Express will actually cost you less than half of what MySQL support will cost!

The original post is very misleading in linking to the sHype page.

sHype is not a hypervisor per say, but rather a hypervisor security architecture (sHype is to hypervisors as SELinux is to Linux). sHype is a research project (and a rather neat one actually) that currently is implemented in two hypervisors, rHype and Xen. Both of these hypervisors are GPL.

I'm not sure where the original poster determined that the XBox had a hypervisor. I have never seen anything that would suggest that. Perhaps it's being confused with the PS3?

At any rate, it's very easy to write a hypervisor (relatively speaking) especially for the Power platform. If the XBox360 does have a hypervisor (which seems unlikely to me honestly) than I would expect it to have come from Microsoft.

Of course, why would Microsoft have a hypervisor? My understanding was that the games ran within a special version of Windows (descended from the version that ran in the original XBox).

Note to moderators: the user "5, Troll" likes to cut and paste posts from other sites to gain karma. This one was found on the DeveloperWorks site with a quick google search.

Written in C, a significant part of the Full-System Simulator's simulation capability is directly attributed to its simulation multitasking framework component. Developed as a robust, high-performance alternative to conventional process and thread programming, the multitasking framework is a lightweight, multitasking scheduling framework that provides a complete set of facilities for creating and scheduling threads, manipulating time delays, and applying a variety of interthread communication policies and mechanisms to simulation events.