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The list of items you've provided is pretty big; however a lot of these are built-in to Opera. In addition, you get some very interesting capabilities like the ones I outline below, including a tight js debugger, and voiceXML support in websites.

First off, I worked for the group that partnered with Opera to create this, but the Voice plugin for Opera is also free!

Check http://www.opera.com/voice for information about the XHTML + Voice standard that is implemented here. X+V is an open standard - go read the spec for information, and Opera's voice development page for code introductions.
For those that downloaded the new 8.x build, go to the Advanced tab in your Preferences and tick the enable box for the "Voice" option. This will download a 10 megabyte add-on that allows voice interactions with Opera. In addition, you can control websites that support X+V! See some basic examples.

More information from a technical perspective can be found at IBM's Multimodal Software Group.

Also, see the WebDevToolbar for an INCREDIBLY handy toolbar for web developers debugging complicated interactive web apps. You get trace features for your javascript, the ability to inspect the DOM for a given page and many other introspection features. The handiest feature is a javascript shell for tight debugging of applications inside the browser.

~ Mike

Not WebSphere itself. IBM offers Geronimo support. The Development Tools subproject is hosted on Eclipse WebTools.

Open Source is NOT always the only answer, some people have to make a living.

- the problem with IBM's directory is that it sits on top of DB2. This abrogates one of the coolest parts about directories - that you don't need a DBA. And a mistuned IBM directory is an ugly, ugly thing.

But I take issue with this mythology...I work with IBM's Tivoli security solutions, most of which use the LDAP Directory Server under the hood (and, illustrating the beauty of *standards*, also tend to support the use of Novell, Sun, & MSAD). The underlying DB2 engine doesn't require independent tuning, maintenance, or administration in the vast majority of deployments. It isn't until you get into user populations of several hundred thousand that you start tweaking the DB2 parms...and the solution actually includes a detailed LDAP tuning guide that explains how and when you should tweak the DB2 and OS-level parms.

The notion of needing a DBA just to deploy the IBM LDAP is just silly...any tech capable of RTFM can handle a moderate implementation on his own.

Here's the kicker: Which would you prefer for performance and scalability? A directory that uses flat or proprietary file structures for data storage, or one that uses a scalable and reliable relational database engine? Seems like a big "duh!" to me.

And, as you mentioned...it's free. Go download it from IBM and try it out. If it doesn't work for you, or if you decide you can't do it without a DBA, well...you aren't out any expense. Export it all to an LDIF and bring in the next vendor.

Other Options to Consider:

Novell:
Linux Small Business Suite
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxsmallbiz/
It includes edirectory, groupwise for email, suse enterprise server,Novell ZENworks Linux Management Client

IBM (Lotus)
http://www.lotus.com/lotus/general.nsf/wdocs/nd7co ntent
You can use Domino as an ldap server.
Other IBM Software on Linux:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/linux/software/
or
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/matrix/

Other Options to Consider:

Novell:
Linux Small Business Suite
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxsmallbiz/
It includes edirectory, groupwise for email, suse enterprise server,Novell ZENworks Linux Management Client

IBM (Lotus)
http://www.lotus.com/lotus/general.nsf/wdocs/nd7co ntent
You can use Domino as an ldap server.
Other IBM Software on Linux:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/linux/software/
or
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/matrix/

So, an ISP could take a popular multiplayer game, setup some grid servers, and a couple proxy servers, and then get 100 people to join the game. This is not exactly the same as making it massively multiplayer because the world is still the same size, and I'm unsure if the client could handle all the actors being on the screen at the same time. This is more just showing off the load sharing capabilities rather than a true gaming invention.

Ideally, we want something similar to the Unreal 2 idea, where you have people getting passed from server to server to server, and the place is massive. That way, people go to the interesting places and gather. And it would have to run across the internet. This thing only runs on an intranet (see bottom question). A little disappointing.

Anyway, giving links to some of these applications just further confuses people. I have a ton of friends asking me how to do this, and without a central set of servers already setup, no one can really try it out. Which would have been ideal for IBM to show it off.

Sure it can run linux! Linux runs on much more than just x86

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-madmac1/?ca=dgr-lnxw01MadMacP1

With Cell (which I've worked on for 3.5 years until last month), its Power core supports virtualization feature (or "hypervisor" mode as IBM likes to call it) as documented in Power Architecture V2.02.

This allows companies (I won't be surprised see if all 3 game consoles will support this) to allow game programmers to create RTOS (real-time operating system) like programs so that they have very refined control over program behavior (even OS like control) while the hypervisor SW (like Xen) will prevent any critical resources of games from clobbering each other (just as hypervisor supported OS will not hurt other OS running under hypervisor). Virtualization will give more control to the game programmer (more power and more responsibility) while the game console maker would retain minimal but critical control over the resources (mainly IO and memory). Pretty exciting world ahead for game developers in my opinion....

Every single one of the server companies is out of that business with the exception of Sun, which is trading at the same price it was back in 1996.

For those of you who didn't see the job announcements take a look these news articles!


IBM and SHARE Announce a New Community for the Next Generation of Mainframe Experts.

InformationWeek
Wanted: 20,000 IBM Mainframe Experts.


Visit Mainframe and see what they have to say about wonderful world of mainframes.



I submitted these on the 24th of August. Ignored as usual.

Yeah, as a matter of fact I bleed Blue!

For those of you who didn't see the job announcements take a look these news articles!


IBM and SHARE Announce a New Community for the Next Generation of Mainframe Experts.

InformationWeek
Wanted: 20,000 IBM Mainframe Experts.


Visit Mainframe and see what they have to say about wonderful world of mainframes.



I submitted these on the 24th of August. Ignored as usual.

Yeah, as a matter of fact I bleed Blue!

For those of you who didn't see the job announcements take a look these news articles!


IBM and SHARE Announce a New Community for the Next Generation of Mainframe Experts.

InformationWeek
Wanted: 20,000 IBM Mainframe Experts.


Visit Mainframe and see what they have to say about wonderful world of mainframes.



I submitted these on the 24th of August. Ignored as usual.

Yeah, as a matter of fact I bleed Blue!

Yeah, I know I do. I hate starting Lotus up. Using NotesBuddy helps a tad. It's a Sametime client that can act as a trimmed-down front-end to your Lotus Notes, so you rarely have to open it.

OpenPKG seems like an interesting portable packaging framework. I would be interested to hear from people that have had any exeprience with this.

PkgWrite is a perl tool that builds debian and rpm packages from a single spec file. GNU/LGLP with liberal relicensing. I suppose it will not save any dependancy issues for you.

EMP is a commercial solution, offering native packages (debian, redhat, solaris, HPUX etc.) and script-based installs. It costs $99, has a stale web site and I never tried it. But for commercial software, perhaps it can help you.

STOW is a free perl-based fancy package manager that was pushed by IBM at one time.

But at the end of the day, it is not very difficult to prepare debian and rpm package specs, build chrooted building environemnts and support several distros. Users are really happy when they can apt-get install your software, even if it is binary-only and from your own server. If you don't have nasty kernel dependencies, chrooted building environment might be easier than it seems. And you will only ever be sure in the case of binary distribution if you can build and test your package yourself. And if you have users who want graphical installers, you can always trick Loki to install a standard package. Which should be its default behaivour anywyay, IMHO.

The AS/400 is hardly old, although its possible his machine is. It's still being upgraded and improved, and one AS/400 (iSeries or i5 these days) can do the job of a rack full of blade servers. And while its doing that its far more reliable and was built from the ground up to handle databases. It NEVER crashes unless something is physically broken, and even that is rare since it usually detects hardware problems before they become critical. It handles our EDI just fine, although if you go with the industry standard Harbinger/Peregrin/whatever-they-call-themselves-t hese-days EDI software, it will be expensive due to the tiered pricing scheme.

For a good read on IBM iSeries, check out http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/lege nds/index_flat.html .
--
A Slashdot "Hacker" who not only "messes" with EDI and the AS/400, but PLCs, industrial automation and RFID tags as well...

Yup their stuff still gets fixed, which makes the banks etc. happy.

You're pretty far off base on the claim that IBM doesn't make money on anything physical. Sure, it may not be anything close to "most" of IBM's revenue, but IBM's hardware revenue for a single quarter is larger than Novell's market cap. Even after the sale of the PC division, it still had $5.5 billion in hardware revenue for the 2nd quarter with higher margins than the $12 billion in services revenue. link.

still wishing for a kvm over ip

I don't know much about this, but where I currently work, we use the Netbay Virtual Console from IBM. It's a rack mount unit that offers KVM over IP for the servers in the rack.

-Jar.

Oh, and here's the complete Saturn Instrumentation and Computing Unit. Note the use of both an early digital and analog computers in tandem, the 21.7 feet that signals had to cross, and the 4,400 lbs (500 lbs just for the components) of weight!

Also note the interlink of the computers, sensors, and controls:

Correction signals, with outputs from control rate gyros and control accelerometers, went to a switch selector. The switch selector - one in the instrument unit and one in each propulsion stage - decoded the correction signals and passed them to the flight control computer. The flight control computer issued commands to steer the vehicle by gimbaling the engines.

Such instrumentation today would be all digital, thus reducing the delays imposed in switching the data and sending commands.

No, I'm referring to electronics. As in computers and circuits that operated in the 10's of Hertz range. As in electromechanical components that took time to change state. As in massive wiring harnesses and switches that made a massive (and HOT!) electronic brain. As in memory that was made of iron and weighed several pounds per kilobyte.

The microprocessor wasn't invented until 1971, four years after the first Saturn V flight. And then it was merely a way to shrink a calculator. (Though microprocessor technology did procede at an astounding rate.)

A little digging produces this. The guidance computer for the Saturn V was that 25 hertz monstrosity you see in the picture. These were not advanced machines, but they did work.

There are 2 other significant players in the FS field that Hans doesn't mention:
XFS (from SGI) and GPFS from IBM.

GPFS has a different focus, but XFS seems to be aimed at solving similar problems as ReiserFS (scalability, high performance, journaling).

It seems that our world is dominated by only one CPU: the Intel-like ones.
HP (formerly Compaq, formerly Digital) definitely buried the Alpha RISC CPU roadmap. As well as its own HP/PA (another RISC corpse).
It is not clear whether IBM's PowerPC architecture will have a future other than the one in the gaming consoles with the Cell Architecture, now that even Apple is jumping onto the x86 cart.
Sun is throwing its SPARC technology ot of the window as we can read in the above announcement.
Lack of diversity will lead to a slow down in the overall computing technology evolution.
But there is still some hope, as declared into the The Book of Mozilla, 7:15(Only availabe to selected believers).

actually... i think you might want to adjust your math to use 8.5 instead of 11.

typically these printers, for example the ibm infoprint 2000, print paper the other way to keep the speed up and reduce fuser wear. thus, 8.5x14 takes the same time to shoot through as 8.5x11 and 11x17 takes twice and long as 8.5x11.

btw, someone else was asking about feeding paper and "ink" (i think he meant toner) these machines are modular to allow you to add *many* papertrays and the toner tanks are huge. add to that programmable and automatic tray swapping allows you to add paper to the machine without it stopping...

Ok, maybe I'm missing something. This is not a 330 page per minute nor a 1440 page per minute printer as I calculate it.

As my emphasis above points out above it is printing 1440 2-up duplex pages. That means 1440/2/2 = 360 pages per minute.

Someone did post 360 ppm earlier but the errors seem to keep going.

Now I suppose if you are counting "printed pages per minute" you would say that it is capable of 1440 printed pages per minute outputed at a rate of 360 paper pages per minute. I have not read the article and it does say it handles the pagination externally so does this mean that the print job is 1440 regular pages but the printer does the 2-up and duplex pagination plus prints the job at 360 pages per minute...I suppose so.

I won't argue with the rest of your math.

Oh and here is a link to a page with all the detailed specs including pricing.

I patch PHP to set a constant in the namespace of the script whenever a 'dangerous' function is called (eg: system(), shell_exec, the backtick operator etc., others :-). The webserver also prepends (php.ini: auto_prepend_file) a PHP file that registers a shutdown-hook. Those constants can then be examined in the shutdown hook code to see if any of the dangerous functions have been called, and if so, check to see if *this* script is allowed to call them.

If the script is allowed to call the functions, all well and good, it's just logged. If not, the offending IP address is automatically firewalled. I purloined some scripts from the 'net that allow shell-level access to manipulate the firewall.

So, now I had a different problem - the webserver wasn't running anywhere near the privilege needed to alter the firewall, and I didn't want to just run it under sudo in case anyone broke in. I wrote a (java (for bounds-checking), compiled with gcj) setuid program that takes a command string to run, an MD5-like digest of the command, and a set of areas to ignore within the command when checking the digest. The number of areas is encoded into the digest to prevent extra areas being added. If the digest doesn't match, the program doesn't run. This is a bit more secure than 'sudo' because it places controls over exactly what can be in the arguments, as well as what command can be run. It's not possible to append ' | my_hack' as a shell-injection.

So, now if by some as-yet-unknown method, you can write your own scripts on my server (it has happened before, [sigh]), you're immediately firewalled after the first attempt - which typically is *not* 'rm -rf /' :-) Perl and Python are both unavailable to the webserver uid, so PHP is pretty much the obvious attack vector.

Well, PHP and SQL injection of course, but the same script is used there - if the variables being sent to the page are odd in some way (typically I look for spaces after urldecoding them as a first step - SQL tends to have spaces in it :-), then the firewall is called on again. It's all logged, and the site-owners get to see when and why the IP is blocked. Sometimes it's even highlighted problems in their HTML :-)

What would be nice would be a register within a PHP script that simply identified which functions were called. In the meantime, this works well for me...

Just thought I'd share, because it's similar to what the author is saying regarding only trusting what you know to work, and everything else gets the kick (squeaky wheel-like :-)

Simon

1) number of pages depends on both the size of the pages and the font. You can print about 4 times as many words on the same page in 6 point type than 12, for instance.

2) regardless, the summary was misleading as usual. According to the specs of the 4100 it can print "at up to 330 linear feet (100.6 m) per minute (440 2-up duplex letter impressions)... Deliver true 3-up pages with an extra-wide format: 19.5" (495 mm) paper width..."

So we see the "330 pages/min" is wrong, unless you print 19.5x12" pages. An average paperback is about 4.5x7", so the 4100 could print about 330x(19.5x12)/(4.5x7) = 2451 pages that size per minute.

Hey, remember this is IBM, not HP or Lexmark. :-)

As I posted earlier, its a 1440 ppm printer:
Print at up to 330 linear feet (100.6 m) per minute (1,440 2-up duplex letter impressions or 1,354 2-up A4 duplex impressions). - IBM

That works out to be about 4.364 pages per foot. With that in mind, the cheapest box of toner costs $437.48, according to the supplies page. That carton contains 4 cassettes, each of which is capable of 100,000 feet.
4 x 100,000 x 4.364 = 1,745,600 pages @ $437.48 in toner, or $0.00025 per page. :-)

Of course, that fails to include other consumables, all of which I imagine are important, but I'm replying to a joke poster so I'm sure you all get my point and simply don't care. ;-)

~ Mike

Hey, remember this is IBM, not HP or Lexmark. :-)

As I posted earlier, its a 1440 ppm printer:
Print at up to 330 linear feet (100.6 m) per minute (1,440 2-up duplex letter impressions or 1,354 2-up A4 duplex impressions). - IBM

That works out to be about 4.364 pages per foot. With that in mind, the cheapest box of toner costs $437.48, according to the supplies page. That carton contains 4 cassettes, each of which is capable of 100,000 feet.
4 x 100,000 x 4.364 = 1,745,600 pages @ $437.48 in toner, or $0.00025 per page. :-)

Of course, that fails to include other consumables, all of which I imagine are important, but I'm replying to a joke poster so I'm sure you all get my point and simply don't care. ;-)

~ Mike

A previous model, the IBM Infoprint 4000 has been used by a POD company, Lightning Source to print their books for a few years now. Still costs more than offset for a big run, and the quality is 600 dpi, fine for text but less so for halftones, but for short runs of plain text books it's great.

Hey everyone, the printer's not 330 pages per minute; its 330 feet per minute. Please see http://www.printers.ibm.com/internet/wwsites.nsf/v wwebpublished/4100home_ww.

Quoting IBM: Print at up to 330 linear feet (100.6 m) per minute (1,440 2-up duplex letter impressions or 1,354 2-up A4 duplex impressions).

I had a discussion with a friend that works in that division on Friday when this machine was announced. Apparently, 330 pages per minute was done about 30 years ago according to him (I have no idea what model, when it was, or anything else). Whoever wrote the initial story assumed whoever wrote the press release goofed and wrote feet when they obviously meant pages. ;-)

This model of printer is designed to print on a roll of paper which is approximately 19.5" wide. The roll is then cut and collated by other machines.

~ Mike

IBM has a history of providing high performance printing systems. For instance, the IBM 3800 printer, introduced in 1975, could already print 20,000 lines per minute.

Another poster posted this link:

printer description

There it says it can print 330 linear feet per minute - that's more than a thousand pages.

http://www.printers.ibm.com/internet/wwsites.nsf/v wwebpublished/4100home_ww
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/

as well as a picture on IBM's site.

http://www.printers.ibm.com/internet/wwsites.nsf/v wwebpublished/4100home_ww

Of course you have to call for pricing :-P

• HELIX and slashdot article on same
• INSERT
• Knoppix STD
• Local Area Security Knoppix and slashdot article on same
• Security LiveCDs article from IBM Developerworks

Cellular automata and music (in java): http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-ca music/?ca=dnt-520

Common Music (jazz in lisp): http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/doc/cm.html

There's a very nice article on data alignment on PPC here.

I agree, but the requirements for a G5 cpu are different from those in the 360, and I stressed that M$ has removed some perks. Infact, the older Xbox cpu is more efficient for the very reasons you mentioned as it uses a pentium. Your facts are correct, but they justify the pricing of XBox 360 nevertheless. As far as the PS3 is concerned, the facts are here: cell.scei.co.jp and IBM's Overview

1 million total users at 99.9% uptime as per the original request? Not exactly "child's play", but honestly, not much harder

Domino on iSeries does seem to be a reasonable option for a deployment of this size, especially given the rather generous uptime allocation that is being offered..."3 nines" being EXTREMELY generous for an iSeries shop (you'd even be able to schedule monthly downtme on purpose and still meet this uptime goal.)

I do note that IBM has benchmarked Domino on a 16-way Power5-based iseries at a 33ms response time for 175,000 concurrent users (details here: http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/domi no/scalerecord.html)...and given the limited usage pattern of POP3 (yuck!), a properly-deployed solution should be able to meet the published needs with just one server. AND provide backup. AND enable the user to restore an individual mail store, mail box, or object on-demand. If high-availability or higher performance is necessary, 2 servers could be deployed in several different configurations (mirrors, clusters, HA failover, etc.).

And if the moans of "Outlook-only users" get to be too much of a problem, IBM offers a "connector" that can offer MAPI access to Domino's mail store.

Hell yes, I'm an iSeries fanboy. Those machines have proven themselves to be reliable, capable, economical systems over the long haul. Now, while (due to price) I wouldn't suggest deploying an iSeries to be a simple file, print, web, or small-database server, true...but when you need to move freight and *lots* of it, but you don't want to spend hours every week in operating and administering the system, it's hard to beat the venerable System/38 ne AS/400 ne iSeries systems.

Mission Critical is basically saying "always on or we are screwed". Corporations pay big money for highly tuned and tested machines that are designed for this type of work. They do not just trust a run of the mill server with any operating system, be it Linux, Windows, or any UNIX variant.

See HP or IBM

Everyday more and more companies are looking at Linux as a means to lower their operational cost. Adding to your documented skills-set with a Linux certification is a very good idea. Here is a brand new series of tutorials to help you learn Linux fundamentals and prepare for system administrator certification Exam 201. These eight tutorials cover the Linux kernel, file and service sharing, system customization and automation, and more.

The choice of OS should be Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) however, as this is much faster than VM, or any other mainframe OS.

IBM have already proclaimed that a TPF system was capable of supporting at least 250,000,000 email addresses (approximately one for each US citizen) when they developed their mail server for TPF.

People that understand TPF have been saying for some time that many heavy internet sites would probably be more manageable if they used TPF, which now supports Apache as well.

For those unaware of TPF it is the software that has powered the huge airline computer systems for years.

In fact the biggest handicap TPF has is IBM's internal politics that have historically relegated it to a poor relation behind CICs/IMS, which it outperforms as a TP system comfortably.

For the curious: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/htp/tpf/

or http://www.blackbeard.com/tpf

Run Lotus Domino on this:
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/systems/systemz9/z91 09/ :-)

Um .... I think it's worth pointing out that eBay doesn't have a "core competency" in maintaining " VERY large number of users, especially in near-realtime transactions." Actually, they kinda sucked at it. Their original architecture didn't scale well. Which was part of why they hired an outside contractor to rebuild their system.

If anyone ought to get credit for that being their 'core competency,' it's IBM and Sun, who actually did the work.

(I posted the grandparent message about IBM using Notes/Domino internally)

Why would I make up something like that? If you don't believe me ask any IBM employee or read this article:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/ CS/EHON-5JRLM9?OpenDocument&Site=software

I made no comments about the quality of Lotus Notes, but having used it for almost 8 years with thousands of messages and often huge e-mail attachments, I'm pretty satisfied with it.

Sure it has its quirks, but the fact that we were unaffected when lots of companies went to their knees (including Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry) with viruses like Melissa made me appreciate Notes. I'll gladly use this instead of anything from Microsoft, thank you very much.

Contact IBM. A mainframe running z/VM is your solution here.

99.9% reliabilities is more then normal for those machines. It is modular enough to expand to what ever you may need in the future, and it has the dataprocessing horsepower to actually hand the 20k or so concurrent users at a time and have the harddrive space to match that many users as well.

Run linux or unix on top of VM and you should be fine.

Product Page for Z990:
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/z990 /

Linux does have a "comparable" feature (soon to be merged in mainline) called "kprobes", or "systemtap" (systemtap uses kprobes)

You can see a fairly detailed analisis in the 2005 Proceedings, Volume 2, page 57 of the linux symposium

Also some doc from IBM: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-kprobes.html

also there's a "linux trace toolkit". A post about LTT vs dtrace...whatever, too much flamewar for my taste.

Well... I haven't tried to take my thinkpad to anywhere exotic, so can't recommend it to you, but take a look at these "customer stories" for Thinkpads (the acting is rubbish!):

The Legends of Thinkpad

Thanks for the info... didn't Dark Avenger self-regulate or something like that? I know it had reasonably advanced polymorphism for the time. There was also one called Guru Meditation, not to mention all those Amiga and Atari ST viruses...