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I would assume they call it broadband because the 8 SPE's can communicate to each other over a 100GB/s link (called the Element Interconnect Bus -- yes, that's 100GB not 100Gb) and also because it provides plenty of SIMD instructions.

Oh yeah. If you read their web page they also mention the Cell processor will be able to handle broadband rich media applications and streaming content:
The first-generation Cell Broadband Engine (BE) processor is a multi-core chip comprised of a 64-bit Power Architecture processor core and eight synergistic processor cores, capable of massive floating point processing, optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications.

The Cell Architecture grew from a challenge posed by Sony and Toshiba to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance processing for a wide range of applications, including the most demanding consumer appliance: game consoles. Cell - also known as the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) - is an innovative solution whose design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads in areas such as cryptography, graphics transform and lighting, physics, fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), matrix operations, and scientific workloads. As an example of innovation that ensures the clients' success, a team from IBM Research joined forces with teams from IBM Systems Technology Group, Sony and Toshiba, to lead the development of a novel architecture that represents a breakthrough in performance for consumer applications. IBM Research participated throughout the entire development of the architecture, its implementation and its software enablement, ensuring the timely and efficient application of novel ideas and technology into a product that solves real challenges; More...

But even one segment of code from an outside author, released to them under GPL, would require the release of their SW's source under the included code's GPL.

The simple solution to which is simply to remove the contributed code completely, and independently re-implement its functionality (if having that functionality is desired and/or necessary).

I had to do something similar (but for a release in the opposite direction -- from closed source to OSS) for the jSyncManager Project. The version 1.0 series was coded entirely by myself, and was only ever released as closed source software (albeit as 100% free-as-in-beer software via the web; I completed v1.0 of this project as a thesis project, and felt that getting outside help by allowing others to inspect and comment on the code might have been considered "cheating" by some). A few weeks after v1.0 was released, I was hired by IBM Canada as a software developer.

The problem then became that nasty contract provision you have to sign when you join a company like IBM: the "what's yours is ours, and what's ours is ours" agreement, which basically states that anything you develop while employed by the company, even if it is completely on your own time and uses nothing learned from your employment at the company, belongs to the company. Fortunately, I was able to list existing technologies I had developed prior to joining IBM on said contract -- they were exempt so long as I stopped working on them while employed by the company.

There was, however, significant interest in the technology within IBM, and an IBM branded version called "ManplatoSync for Java" eventually made its way to IBM's alphaWorks website. It included a significant rewrite of the GUI code, along with some new functionality, parts of which were contributed by other IBM employees. The intention was always to release the sources under the IBM Public License -- but the legal eagles who had continuing discussions (which I wasn't part of), and kept holding off on a source release (the whole discussion of which apparantly died once I was released from the company).

When I was later let go from the company, and free from their restrictions as to what I could and couldn't work on, I decided I wanted to release the jSyncManager as Open Source Software. But I couldn't just take ManplatoSync for Java and re-brand it back to the jSyncManager -- it was encumbered with IBM copyrights. I couldn't even retain functionality since jSyncManager v1.0 which I myself had written in those intervening 2.5 years, because it too was considered IBM property (nevermind the fact that I wrote it and didn't get paid one single red cent by IBM for any of it. Indeed, when I was later invited to speak on the technology at various conferences, the company forced me to use my own vacation time to do so).

At that point, I had two choices: give up and find something else to work on, or suck it up and go back to the pre-IBM sources and work from there. And that's what in the end I decided to do: I took my pre-IBM sources, made them Open Source, and then worked my ass off to re-implement all of the lost functionality (along with a lot of functionality that the IBM releases never had, like USB device support and network data synchronization), and released it all as GPL/LGPL software.

The Nessus team could very well have elected to do something similar -- just strip out any external contributions, and then work from there. The unfortunate thing about going from Openn Source to Closed Source, however, is that contributors are now forced to take the teams word for it that they stripped out any such contributions (assuming that they didn't re-assign copyright to the Nessus project when they were submitted -- something I've never asked any of my contributors to do), as you can't look at the source to see if your code is still in it (i

It works. Reliably. In my previous job, we pretty much depended on it. A single faulty tape could cost us from $50k and up. And we didn't do backups of data on it... The tape drives were used continuosly 24/7.

If you can afford it, is an entirely different question. I think it's about $30k...

Compared with the alternatives, such as IBM's entry-level system http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/C onfiguratorDisplay?storeId=1&catalogId=-840&langId =-1&site_type=public&oiId=null&currency=USD&base=1 722-6LU&x=11&y=12/, Dell http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare.a spx/das_storage?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd/ or NetApp http://www.netapp.com/, add the cost of the redundant power and cooling, and ignoring the cost of trying to maintain a Linux system alongside their OS-X, Apple's price is not bad for the storage supplied.

Sometimes, it really is time to call in professionals, and spend the money to do it right. I've built some storage solutions on my old job, to support our compute clusters. They worked from an OS point of view, but even buying what were supposed to be well-regarded components resulted in more downtime than we considered acceptable, mostly from heat. In the end, as soon as we had the money, it was entirely worth it to be able to call IBM, buy their servers for disk storage, and get the better engineering in terms of cooling, drive access, and remote management, as well as the three year warranty with onsite service.

It is highly unlikely that you can screwdriver together a system with as good of airflow as major vendors who employ real engineers. As the poster said, it's a business, therefore when your data matters is not the time to hack something together with parts from NewEgg.

> Yeah, and you could fit a pretty big battery in a powerbook with twice the thickness (equivalent to your Thinkpad).

The ThinkPad T40 is 26.6mm thick, which is 1mm thinner than the 15" PB and 1mm thicker than the 17" PB.

Here
IBM recommends you to use SQLJ they believe it's better than JDBC

You have to know if you want to control your access path, there's only way to do it is just using static sql. And if you don't use static sql, DB2 will make big miss and it won't use any index to search and it consumes huge time.
I don't care if you don't believe this.
Read some red books.

So IBM tells you not to use dynamic SQL and not to use JDBC. Because of it, the failure of DB2, they said you have to use SQLJ rather than JDBC as usual.

Many frameworks such as Hibernate, iBATIS use JDBC. If you are DB2 user, you can't use them.

Actually the pricing of DB2 is quite resonable -- especially for the express version.

The other issue is that many companies using products such as MySql have to re-implement features that are standard in other systems. Features such as robust replication, clustering, etc also are just coming on line for MySql and Postgres, but have been part of DB2 and friends for years.

Back when IBM bought Lotus, Notes was a very unique platform for document databases. I wonder if they've taken the old Notes document database concept and exapanded it to XML. IBM owns so much esoteric intellectual property; you would hope they could find some interesting overlaps.

As IBM indicates in their press release, they're making sure it integrates with PHP as well.

BTW, the register has some good coverage on the new XML integration.

Oracle's had this for years. Since v 8, I think? (corrections welcome)

Glad to oblige ;-)

Oracle basically chucks it's XML into a LOB, and you can search the lob for strings, etc.
What IBM has actually breaks down the XML, creating a tree structure behind the scenes. There may be no out-and-out benefits at the moment, but the solution is a much better implementation than Oracle. The applications will come.

Visit here and have a look at the paper "An Overview of Native XML Support in DB2". Also maybe see "Learn how IBMs new XML technology differs from other XML storage", which is a link to a Register article.

analog copying (which with good equipment is still high quality)
Hey, I just realized something: if the source is digital you can make perfect digital copies with enough analog tries (or maybe a couple of kinds of analog equipment, to cancel out this or that quirk) as long as the analog equipment is "good enough", though I'm not sure how that should be defined. At the very least it can't just discard certain information altogether. (Like a telephone line would with certain frequencies that the CD does contain...)

To make an image analogy: an old laptop with 800 x 600 x 256 bit resolution is, unless some pixel is dead, displaying 480000 bytes when it displays a steady image. Say you want to copy those, but can only look at a sharp high-resolution photograph of the monitor. Well, if on your photograph you can see each pixel clearly, and the border between it and the next pixel (and clearly means it's the equivalent of 256 x 256 in-focus pixels), and your color depth on that picture is in the millions of colors, you should be able to figure out a byte-for-byte transcript of whatever the monitor just displayed, given enough tries to cancel out the noise your image gets, e.g. from passing shadows and the like that distort your idea of their exact value; analog means that a single calibration with a known test image isn't enough to account for everything. (Second idea:....even if it's displayed by javascript in a maximized IE window! What a covert channel! No matter how locked down a computer is, you can transfer 480KB/second [net throughput of one clear snapshot per second -- though really consisting of two or three that you use to cancel out the noise, make sure the photograph is in good focus, calibrate with a test image, etc] off of it with just a few-megapixel camera, as long as you have access enough to programmatically create and display bitmaps. To all those people who thought, hey, if there's no network connection, and it's behind plexiglass, and the keyboard and mouse are bolted in place, data's not leaving it except through human eyes: neener neener.)

So anyway, now we go on to, if the analog output "systematically" distorts a certain range, you can figure it out from some "test patterns", maybe calibration over a few gos, and if it's not systematic, then sooner or later it cancels out statistically, right? (e.g. if albums had been from digital masters, it doesn't matter if by now every copy anywhere in the world has hisses and pops, if you listen to them all you can reconstruct the digital masters...)

  Uh, I guess there's some stupid formula that comes now, saying the number of tries before you can figure out if a forty-four thousandth of a hertz has value 122 or 123 [ie, the total number of times you need to analog-play a CD on commonly available equipment -- each time taking up to 72 minutes!] varies directly with the total harmonic distortion of your analog equipment over, the, uh, wavelength of a single pit on the CD-ROM times, the, uh, impedence of your microphone all over, uh, or maybe the square root of that. I have a feeling the Nobel's not for me.

Anyway, if the analog is better "resolution" than the CD, it should work, just like a scanning tunnelling microscope can figure out what a bunch of digital (raised or not-raised) atom pits are.... (They spell IBM...)

I'm so not putting my name on this.

Funny, IBM says different.

Well, there's a 720 but it isnt from Microsoft... and costs you alot more than a Xbox 360...

But i'd rather have one of these babies instead of having, lets say, 10 Xbox 360...

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/openpower/ha rdware/720.html

Hyperthreading Speeds Linux.

In a nutshell:

  - hyperthreading decreases syscall speed by a few percent
  - on single-threaded workloads, the effect is often negligible, with occasional large improvements or degradations
  - on multithreaded workloads, around 30% improvement is common
  - Linux 2.5 (which introduced HT-awareness) performs significantly better than Linux 2.4

So, from that benchmark (and others like it, just STFW) it appears that HT offers significant benefits; you need multithreading to take advantage of it, and having a HT-aware OS helps.

Oh, you want this!

Your comment, "I don't know where the autonomicthingymagingy code came from" made me laugh -- it sounds like many of the comments I've heard from our developerWorks readers. We've tried to respond to the most common questions in this New to autonomic computing article on the developerWorks autonomic computing zone. Of course, if you have other questions about things autonomic, let me know.

If I may, a couple points:

• The ability for someone who is blind to effectively be able to use a screen reader does not equate to accessibility -- although this view is understandably a common misconception; it relates to only one class of disability and only the most severe form at that. A screen reader is unlikely to be used by users with low vision (in fact, Jaws and Window-Eyes are unlikely to be used by anyone who doesn't absolutely need given how much the software costs); Opera's ability to scale up both text and images is superior to that of Firefox in production release (and this presumably isn't changing in the new version, although by now someone may have released a plug-in module that achieves the same effect via CSS or something); this makes pages easier not only to read (for those with low vision) but also easier to interact with (for users with limited motor ability). My understanding is that Firefox (current production releases) doesn't expose to MSAA either, nor does any other browser -- so that point about Opera is moot for now, which brings me to my next point:
• Firefox 1.5 is still not a production release and I -- along with most other users -- will not be installing it until it is, nor will we be testing with it for accessibility-related purposes since it is almost assured that most users with disabilities won't have already jumped on beta software, either.

Accessible DHTML of course isn't news -- it's all about how you design it -- but I agree that Firefox's new implementation (thanks to the thousands of lines of code donated to Mozilla by IBM, who -- not surprisingly -- seem to understand and explain web accessibility better than most) is very exciting and will hopefully raise the bar and give users with special needs a reason to switch from MSIE to something better. That said, building a better browser is only part of the problem with accessibility; the content itself has to be designed accessible as well.

As far as Section 508 is concerned, for example, you can't just code DHTML however you'd like and expect the browser to do the work to make it accessible for you; even if it is perfectly accessible in Firefox (but not in, say, MSIE) users should have the right to choose whatever software they like. In the end, the ramifications for accessibility here are potentially every bit as bad as Flash and MSIE -- "You want accessible Flash? Use MSIE. You want accessible DHTML? Use Firefox."

Thank you for the link, though. I am interested to read more about it after having heard the announcement some months ago about IBM donating accessibility code to Mozilla. I'll certainly be doing more reading up on the subject and looking forward to the results. Now if only IBM/Sun could do the same thing for OOo.

Maybe it got pulled for some reason or something else happened... When I clicked it routed the request to www-128.ibm.com and all of the pictures loaded cleanly for Google's cached copy, so I'm betting they have a little capacity ready to go. After a minute of looking at Google's link to the real page, the problem seems to be the "?ca=dgr-lnxw01DB2xmlPHP" at the end of the posted link. Here's a workig link for the IBM copy. Here's the google cache if you want it too.

I just thought the article in Linux Journal from a few years back was cool, relevant to a universal deployment thread, and likely hadn't gotten much popular press recently. How did newcomers and/or desktops become the foci of the thread, anyway? Some of us aren't evangelists. I couldn't care less about getting everyone to use what I use. To each their own. And as far as those newcomers go, a case could be made that more Linux newcomers are exposed to it on the server than on the desktop. That's certainly been the case at a couple of gigs I've done. Not that there's any way of proving either case, given the myriad ways Linux gets distributed. There are a lot more ways to be exposed to Linux (or the BSDs, etc.) than via the desktop. You sound like yet another one of those people who think their environment constitutes all of computing. That's ugly enough in Windows people. BTW, all this caused me to doubt the accuracy of your statement that it wasn't small enough to fit on a wristwatch. A good thing, because I just googled up http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/linu xwatch/linuxwatch.html Last entry in the timeline there is "May 2004: IBM demonstrates Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) on the watch. Sounds as if the Linux watch project may still be getting sporadic work done on it.

MySQL is the ONLY available 'shared nothing' (tm) solution available

Not quite. Check out the shared nothing architecture of DB2 Universal DB. You can get DB2 for AIX, Windows, Linux, and other platforms. UDB offers a High Availability Disaster Recovery solution.

MySQL is the ONLY available 'shared nothing' (tm) solution available

Not quite. Check out the shared nothing architecture of DB2 Universal DB. You can get DB2 for AIX, Windows, Linux, and other platforms. UDB offers a High Availability Disaster Recovery solution.

Note that I/O nodes and not "front-end" nodes. All the front-end machines (there are many) run Linux as well.

All the user-level stuff (the programming model, tools, compilers, etc) is standard Linux, too.

So, is it Linux?

[Disclaimer: I have worked on some system aspects of the beast, but this post is not sanctioned by BG/L team or IBM or LLNL. I am not disclosing anything proprietary here - all this is open info that can be found in many papers on the subject. Check out IBM Journal of R&D for a wealth of information.

Note that I/O nodes and not "front-end" nodes. All the front-end machines (there are many) run Linux as well.

All the user-level stuff (the programming model, tools, compilers, etc) is standard Linux, too.

So, is it Linux?

[Disclaimer: I have worked on some system aspects of the beast, but this post is not sanctioned by BG/L team or IBM or LLNL. I am not disclosing anything proprietary here - all this is open info that can be found in many papers on the subject. Check out IBM Journal of R&D for a wealth of information.

...the one in the top 5 that is not running Linux is ASCI Purple, and it is running AIX. In case you haven't heard of it, AIX is a version of Unix developed by IBM:

IBM AIX 5L
Wikipedia: AIX Operating System

May I suggest the following paper:

J. E. Moreira, G. Almási, C. Archer, R. Bellofatto, P. Bergner, J. R. Brunheroto, M. Brutman, J. G. Castaños, P. G. Crumley, M. Gupta, T. Inglett, D. Lieber, D. Limpert, P. McCarthy, M. Megerian, M. Mendell, M. Mundy, D. Reed, R. K. Sahoo, A. Sanomiya, R. Shok, B. Smith, and G. G. Stewart: Blue Gene/L programming and operating environment.

Summary: It's not all Linux.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/i/p-sudas.jp g

Understand the autonomic manager concept Good resource links, including the Autonomic Computing Manifesto [pdf] and Autonomic Computing Toolkit.

Understand the autonomic manager concept Good resource links, including the Autonomic Computing Manifesto [pdf] and Autonomic Computing Toolkit.

The good news is that the next Microsoft operating system, Vista, will indeed prevent the installation of this sort of rootkit.

The bad news is that Vista itself is one gigantic rootkit designed to secure your computer against you, and it is set up for Sony and everyone else to be able to use those rootkit features against you. Welcome to the wonderful world of Trusted Computing and "security" chips that are boobytrapped to selfdestruct if you try to get at your keys. Yes, IBM is advertizing the very fact that their notebooks carry this self destructing "security" chip.

-

A quantum computer gets its power by taking advantage of certain quantum properties of atoms or nuclei that allow them to work together as quantum bits, or "qubits," which serve simultaneously as the computer's processor and memory . By directing the interactions between qubits while keeping them isolated from the external environment, scientists enable a quantum computer to perform certain calculations, such as factoring, exponentially faster than conventional computers. When factoring large numbers using a conventional computer, each added digit roughly doubles the time to find the factors. In contrast, the quantum factoring time increases by only a constant increment with each additional digit.

"Power Architecture" is PowerPC.

What is Power Architecture technology?

"Power Architecture is an umbrella term for the PowerPC® and POWER4(TM) and POWER5(TM) processors produced by IBM, as well as PowerPC processors from other suppliers."

It's a Power core, not a PowerPC.

IBM CBE Architecture

The first type of processor, the PPE, is a 64-bit Power Architecture core. It is fully compliant with the 64-bit Power Architecture specification and can run 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems and applications.

In their Domino Web Access email, calendar, contacts and notes application. Demo here:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/demos/ dwa.html

If I remember correctly they won an award for best web application in a Linux conference some years ago.

Nice troll, I don't know why I'm bothering to respond, but just in case anyone else cannot find the "External Links" and "Articles" sections at the bottom of wikipedia articles, here is a sample from the Cell page:

• IBM - Cell Project
• Sony - Cell Broadband Engine
• IBM CBE Resources

Wikipedia is a good starting point to learn about a topic, but it is not definitive. That is why wikipedia qualifies (i.e. sources) its material. If you actually took some time to read wikipedia pages, you would know this. Next time, read the link before trolling.

Nice troll, I don't know why I'm bothering to respond, but just in case anyone else cannot find the "External Links" and "Articles" sections at the bottom of wikipedia articles, here is a sample from the Cell page:

• IBM - Cell Project
• Sony - Cell Broadband Engine
• IBM CBE Resources

Wikipedia is a good starting point to learn about a topic, but it is not definitive. That is why wikipedia qualifies (i.e. sources) its material. If you actually took some time to read wikipedia pages, you would know this. Next time, read the link before trolling.

The cell processors can do DMA to and from main memory while computing. As IBM puts it, "The most productive SPE memory-access model appears to be the one in which a list (such as a scatter-gather list) of DMA transfers is constructed in an SPE's local store so that the SPE's DMA controller can process the list asynchronously while the SPE operates on previously transferred data." So the cell processors basically have to be used as pipeline elements in a messaging system.

That's a tough design constraint. It's fine for low-interaction problems like cryptanalysis. It's OK for signal processing. It may or may not be good for rendering; the cell processors don't have enough memory to store a whole frame, or even a big chunk of one.

This is actually an old supercomputer design trick. In the supercomputer world, it was not too successful; look up the the nCube and the BBN Butterfly, all of which were a bunch of non-shared-memory machines tied to a control CPU. But the problem was that those machines were intended for heavy number-crunching on big problems, and those problems didn't break up well.

The closest machine architecturally to the "cell" processor is the Sony PS2. The PS2 is basically a rather slow general purpose CPU and two fast vector units. Initial programmer reaction to the PS2 was quite negative, and early games weren't very good. It took about two years before people figured out how to program the beast effectively. It was worth it because there were enough PS2s in the world to justify the programming headaches.

The small memory per cell processor is going to a big hassle for rendering. GPUs today let the pixel processors get at the frame buffer, dealing with the latency problem by having lots of pixel processors. The PS2 has a GS unit which owns the frame buffer and does the per-pixel updates. It looks like the cell architecture must do all frame buffer operations in the main CPU, which will bottleneck the graphics pipeline. For the "cell" scheme to succeed in graphics, there's going to have to be some kind of pixel-level GPU bolted on somewhere.

It's not really clear what the "cell" processors are for. They're fine for audio processing, but seem to be overkill for that alone. The memory limitations make them underpowered for rendering. And they're a pain to program for more general applications. Multicore shared-memory multiprocessors with good cacheing look like a better bet.

Read the cell architecture manual.

Each cell processor includes not only the multiple processors mentioned elsethread, but addressable memory, DMA controller, and a controller for what is essentially a proprietary network. The last is somewhat open to argument -- for example, current AMD CPUs include HyperTransport controllers, which are somewhat similar.

In any case, IBM does (e.g. here) talk about the Cell as a System on a Chip, though IMO, this is a stretch -- a PS3 system includes quite a few other chips, some of them pretty significant (e.g. the GPU). In fact, I find it somewhat difficult to contemplate a system that would make good use of a Cell without a pretty fair number of other chips. OTOH, as the Wikipedia article suggests, it does include a number of elements that are normally implemented in separate chips on a PC.

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

By the end of Q1 2006 (or thereabouts), we expect to see shipments of Mercury Computer Systems' Dual Cell-Based Blades; Toshiba's comprehensive Cell Reference Set development platform; and of course the Sony PlayStation 3.

"Instead of removing all references to gets() in existing code and keeping the faulty gets() in the standard C library, why not just improve gets() to make it secure and proprgate the new version?"

It isn't that gets() is necessarily faulty, but it provides no mechanism to limit the amount of data accepted. To do that requires passing an additional "size" parameter to the replacement gets() function, when means all calls to gets() need to be modified to include the size parameter. You couldn't simply replace gets() with better_gets().

You can see an example here

I have used OS X a bit. UNIX it ain't. When you can use tar, cpio or hell, ANY command line tool to back one up and get a usable machine back, I'll look at it again.

What makes you think you can't? That's pretty much what support does when they need to send your machine somewhere where they might reformat it. Bootloader issues still apply, but that's true of any OS.

Just like any other Unix, there are also ways to boot without the GUI. (IIRC, you can turn off the clickable username and type ">console" to get to the CLI. Another way is to modify the /etc/ttys file.) Reminds me quite a bit of a Solaris box, only the console mode isn't as pretty.

Sooo, I'm not really sure what you're argument is here.

Gimme a 'nipple mouse' with a proper complement of three buttons on a machine with the build quality of a Thinkpad for a comparable price and I'll look.

1) I hate nipple mice. A *REAL* mouse is a trackball, but they don't make those in laptops anymore. I usually carry a small optical, USB mouse in my pack for when I set up at a desk.

2) I hate thinkpads. The *#$@#$! things were always failing back when I was an administrator. The execs thought they were great, though. In my experience, the Apples tend to be MUCH tougher and withstand far more abuse. For example, I had the screen bent backwards on my iBook. It amazingly survived with only a minor warping of the case.

3) The prices of Apple Laptops *ARE* comparable to Thinkpads. I'm not certain where you get the idea that they aren't. Take this page and this page as examples. The prices line up pretty well, but in every instance the Thinkpad has a slower processor, less memory, and a smaller hard drive for the same price.

Besides, 3.8 pounds is a form factor Apple couldn't touch. A notebook computer that is actually about the size and weight of a notebook, imagine that.

You know what used to piss me off when I had to admin the IBM notebooks? The fact that IBM moved all the peripherals and power blocks outside of the case, so they could claim far lower weights than anyone else. Our execs would carry just as much weight as the field laptops (if not more) but they felt better about it because the specs *said* that the IBM was lighter. If you add the peripherals back into the machine (which can be difficult with IBMs, as many of them only allow for one item to be internal while the rest are external) they are often heavier than the competition.

One option we tried to offer our execs were the Sony Vaios. All the capabilities of the IBM Thinkpads, even stronger case, but 1/4 the weight. Sadly, the Vaios didn't look professional enough (being targetted at multimedia applications) and didn't go over with Mohagony Row.

Now for one thing an IBM Laptop will never be able to compete with: Sleep Mode. Apples are EXTREMELY nice in this area. No one ever shuts down or reboots their machines. They just close them or reopen them, and they work flawlessly every time. Windows Laptops tend to have all kinds of issues with this.

The only glitches I still have are dock related. No hot or warm docking/undocking, CD drive accesses at only 4X (on the dock) and the USB ports on the dock don't work.

That's not such a good dock. I've used several docks (which all seem to have worked better than yours) and I can't say I've been impressed. They always seem to be more trouble than their worth. Now the Mac, I have everything build in, so I don't need to worry about having access to my CD Drive or USB ports. They're right there and convenient to use. (On the side, not the back.) Instead of docking, just plug in the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and power

It never ceases to amaze me how naive people can be when it comes to Java. The truth is, the underlying VM is a different technology than the "Manage it yourself" tradition of C/C++. While garbage collection is an additional process that occurs in a VM environment such as Java or .NET, there are peformance advantages to using such a process. (And no, I am not refering to the programmer laziness argument about not having to manage memory in Java... I am talking about the efficiency of allocation and deallocation that a Java VM affords)

I do not plan on engaging in any arguments back and forth about the two types of memory management... But if you are truly interested in an article that means to show the reality of the "performance characteristics" of a Java VM, please read the article listed below. It is truly a well written article and worth the read.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library /j-jtp09275.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01JavaUrbanLegends

Gee... you think?

Just be aware that THIS water cooling isn't the "hey, look what I McGuiver'd in my dorm room with some duct tape and a styrofoam cooler" type stuff. This is professional, high quality equipment with some serious engineering behind it.

For instance:

IBM's offering (starts at around US $5k, per rack)

Knurr's offering

Here's the IBM press release (w/ pics) (check out the animation from that page)

Here's a whole page of pics (red, yellow and blue - sorry, no green)

Here's the project page from the researchers

Here's the IBM press release (w/ pics) (check out the animation from that page)

Here's a whole page of pics (red, yellow and blue - sorry, no green)

Here's the project page from the researchers

Here's the IBM press release (w/ pics) (check out the animation from that page)

Here's a whole page of pics (red, yellow and blue - sorry, no green)

Here's the project page from the researchers

Here's the IBM press release (w/ pics) (check out the animation from that page)

Here's a whole page of pics (red, yellow and blue - sorry, no green)

Here's the project page from the researchers

Add one letter to HAL, and you've got IBM. Coincidence?

Oh yeah.

It's just funny how things work sometimes. :-)

> If you have a BladeCenter,

Yes. With 8 LS 20 blades.
Well, no. The company I work for owns one. Or it's leased, I don't remember. ;-)

> Your three concern points, well, i don't know about the EVA portion but I thought HP supported Solaris.

Yes.
On SPARC.
Upto Solaris9.
Officially.
I was planning to go to Linux-world in Frankfurt, later this month and grill SUN+HP about it, but I don't know if I can make it there.

It was painfull enough to get it to boot RH4 from the SAN. The lesson learned is that unless there's a HP-driver, it's not worth booting-up the blade :-/

But thanks anyway for the information.
Oh, and before I forget: when can I do a remote-install via the "software-cdrom" on the java-console?
According to
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/documen t.do?sitestyle=ibm&lndocid=MIGR-60579
it's not supported...

Rainer
rainer at ultra-secure dot de

All IBM ThinkPads contain boobytrapped self destructing Trusted Computing chips inside. Chips designed to allow your computer to be secured AGAINST YOU. You are forbidden to know your master keys (PrivEK and RSK and certain kinds of lower keys) and denied the ability to read or alter your "secured" files except under control of the Trust chip (sealed storage), and the chip is designed to spy on and to be able to send a secure spy report (Remote Attestation) to other people over the internet revealing exactly what hardware you have and exactly what software you are running. You are forbidden to control or modify the contents of this spy report.

And in case anyone doubts this, well here's an IBM Thinkpad TV commercial advertizing the very fact that ThinkPads contain boobytrapped selfdestructing security chips. Sure protecting you against "hackers" attacking you is a good thing, but that is absolutely no justification to secure the computer AGAINST THE OWNER, no justification to deny the owner full control of his computer, no justification to deny the owner his master keys, no justification to deny the owner to use his master keys to unlock anything he wants to unlock and deny him the ability to control his security system at will.

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