Slashdot Mirror

Yes, there is, but it's expensive

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Just Works (after a rather complicated setup process), does its job in the background on whatever schedule you choose, does it without complaint, maintains excruciatingly detailed logs, maintains multiple back-revisions of files, works over a network, SAN, or shared-media, and talks to tape drives and optical drives and pools of cheap disk. If you want, backups can be mirrored across multiple TSM serves, and you can always fire up the (simple, ugly, but effective) GUI to check up on things, initiate immediate backups, or start restores.

I don't think the "System Backup and Recovery" option is avaiable for PC Unix-alikes, but on AIX it lets you boot the system (across the network) to a known-good state and restore your backup deltas from there.

It's difficult to impress me, and TSM impresses me. For most OSes, IBM even includes tape-device drivers that are specifically tuned to the tape device you're using (provided it's on the supported device list) and is much faster than the OS's built-in device driver (even on AIX) because it's optimized for the read/write/caching patterns that make sense for TSM.

If your OS can execute a program to let you do your finances, it can execute a program to then send that data somewhere.

Why should your os allow access to financial files to a program that it allows it to send anything anywhere but your bank as identified and certified by a trusted third party?

So how do you write software which is usable by humans, but not usable by worms?

Thats what people asked themselfs when working on openvms and multics, its what they wondered about after the morris worm. The people who found answers where not obducted by aliens after they did! They where just ignored for a decade, which may be even worse... well for the rest of the world anyway.

Most of the answers are right in the orange book. Another answer is not to use a language/platform that allows for buffer overflows when doing something mundane.

I am not saying these ideas are perfect, I am saying they are almost thirty years old but not advertised at compusa! They are currently being "reinvented" very very slowly. AMD offers memory that is hard to run instructions from, microsoft started adding bufferoverflow fighting tricks to its compiler and from time to time compiles some of its producs with it. Unix alikes have trouble deciding their aproach but there is progress. Also the linux kernel has room for setting files to something more subtle then 666. Java has a somewhat complete reference monitor... but ofcourse noone uses it becouse an application taking a little more time to start up takes more time then cleaning out an internet explorer abusing piece of malware... Microsoft for the first time ever sacrifices backwards compatability for security in servicepack 2 and what do people do? They whine about it..

people should start trying to make secure systems useable again instead of just making them insecure. The first step? explaining everyone that current insecurity is the couse of much lost time and will cost much more money then a bit of DDoS here, mixed with ID theft and the occasional bank heist using a keylogger.

You could use a language like Java ,Python or Ada.

Or some good programming practices.

Namely these fine machines.
Not cheap, but at this level you have quality hardware.

Namely these fine machines.
Not cheap, but at this level you have quality hardware.

Something i've been waiting for for years.

Too bad you don't use KDE then, or you'd have been enjoying this feature for the past 5 years.

MSFT stock options no longer have the same pull they did in the '90's? Finding it hard to bring in the employees when the new kid is the one that can promise its employees that their options will make them overnight millionares? Feeling the pressure to compete with the upstart operating systems but finding that the company just can't maintain a technological erection the way it could a decade ago? Is the problem that Microsoft just isn't really getting laid the way it used to? Maybe Ballmer wasn't really the infusion of corporate viagra that your company needed. Maybe you should go back to the old mistress for some advice on what to do when your company gets older and its ass gets flabby. Maybe that's the real problem here...

The dudes at Rice invented 3 of the 4 current methods for producing buckytubes. Their current research involves the use of catalysts applied to the end of existing tubes which results in "cloning" the tube, allowing for unprecedented control of the tubes characteristics. Here are some of Smalley's comments on buckytubes...

"These single walled carbon nanotubes are uniquely specified by two small integers, n and m. The diameter is roughly proportional to the sum, n+m. The electronic properties, however, are determined by the difference, n-m. If n and m are the same, then n-m=0 and the tube conducts electrons like a perfect metal. In the trade it is called and "arm-chair" tube. Electrons move down this tube as a coherent quantum particle, traveling down the tube much like a photon of light travels down a single mode optic fiber. Individual armchair tubes can conduct as much as 20 microamps of current. This doesn't sound like much until you realize that his little molecular wire is only 1 nanometer in diameter. A half inch thick cable made of these tubes aligned parallel to each other along the cable, would have over 100 trillion conductors packed side-by-side like pipes in a hardware store. If each of these tubes carried only one microamp, only 2 percent of its capacity, the half inch thick cable would be carrying one hundred millions amps of current. Fabricating such a cable - we call it the "armchair quantum wire" - is a prime objective of our work."

Buckytubes exceed the strength of carbon fiber (30 to 100 times that of steel), the thermal transfer ability of diamonds, and are the best electrical conductor of any molecule known. They promise great advances not only for the transmission of energy, but also for energy storage (including hydrogen), composite fabrics, and even solar power. The world's leading producer of buckytubes is Carbon Nanotechnologies Incorporated, a Houston based spin-off from Rice. In the computer category, IBM has already announced the successful manufacture of buckytube transistors. It may not be all that long until we start to see some real world applications that begin to fulfill the exalted "gee whiz" promise of nanotechnology. And I'm not talking about facial creams.

billy - no...they are NOT calling the transistor 'little blue'

An IBM researcher has a sample implementation of a dependency system for standard SysV init scripts. It uses 'make' to provides deps instead of the crude, standard ordering system. Search the article for the word "dependencies" and start reading there toward the bottom if you already know how SysV init works.

The term hacker was both used and misused long before anyone came up with the term cracker to be someone who breaks into computer systems. It was essentially an attempt to deflect the popular press away from the word hacker, and allow it to regain the former meaning of respect.

It didn't work. The popular press hasn't let go of the word hacker to mean computer criminal. They haven't picked up on the term Cracker. Instead of trying to explain what hacker means, we need to what hacker and cracker meanand what differentiates them. Meanwhile, we are also trying to explain that we are speaking the same language, despite having different definitions for just about everything.

The word cracker already has an entirely different (although no less positive) meaning. We can't just play you stole our word, so we'll steal one of yours. The term cracker is evidence that jargon can't be forced, it has to spring up naturally.

Yes. Trusted computing is a very good thing. This is some of the things you can expect:

When you compile or install a software, you can sign it. The computer will not execute anything that is not signed. This stops many viruses and trojan horses, so you can trust that you authorized everything the computer executes. It is just a security layer just like the no execution bit.

The important thing here is that the user is in full control of the system. The user gets to sign the packages or he can choose to use a distro that signs them for him. He chooses what the computer runs and what not. There is no third party that limits what the user can/cannot execute.

Besides signing software, TCPA (the chip that is going to be supported by the kernel) does encryption on hardware. So you can have hardware accelerated encryption/decryption, and your CPU will be free to do other things. This is not much different from hardware accelerated 2d & 3d graphics. Again, this is a very good thing.

Many people opose trusted computer because they confuse this with DRM (Digital rights management). DRM is technology that limits the right to open media. Trusted computer does not limit your rights at all. The confusion arises from the fact that microsoft plans to use TCPA (Trusted computer) to implement DRM.

TCPA support will totally be optional. You can enable/disable it when compiling the kernel. You normally want it enabled to take advantage of hw accelerated encryption, but if you are still paranoid (read misinformed) and think there is some evil corporation that is going to use TCPA to limit your rights, you can just turn it off.

There is a nice article from ibm that clarifies the issue

Does this mean everyone is gonna have to go to UTF-8?

i-DNS uses Punycode to encode the names.

And while UTF-8 could be used to encode Chinese documents, "GB" encoding standards are the preferred way to go. The GB encodings were designed by Chinese people for the purpose of encoding Chinese text efficiently.

GB18030 is the latest revision that I've seen, and it is a beast. A couple of years ago we spent a bunch of time updating our code to ensure support for GB18030 because PRC requires you to support it if you want to sell your software there.

I highly recommend this tutorial on character encoding if you want to learn more about encoding in general. (That tutorial does not focus on CJK encoding specifically, but it is a great primer on encoding in general.)

Also, if you are trying to find good access to localized Chinese information, I strongly recommend learning the language. Any information written in English that you may come across was obviously not intended for a Chinese audience.

http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/announcement.html

Actually, OS/2 IS owned by IBM - they just licensed the code to Serenity Systems International, who is responsible for the development and distribution of eComStation.
http://www.ecomstation.com/

IBM's OS/2 web site is:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/warp/

Hope that clears up any confusion.

... the most data-intensive physics instrument on the planet. Today eight major computing centers successfully completed a challenge to sustain a continuous data flow of 600 megabytes per second ...

Similarly, for ... business applications, enterprise servers ... you won't go wrong with Windows.

Similarly, for ... business applications, enterprise servers ... you won't go wrong with Windows.

Similarly, for ... business applications, enterprise servers ... you won't go wrong with Windows.

Similarly, for ... business applications, enterprise servers ... you won't go wrong with Windows.

With that said, anything from red books to technical documentation would be useful.

Oh, you mean these redbooks?

SirWired

The source for git is available online at:

I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around what git is and how much functionality it provides that is needed to do SCM. My take on this is that git can be thought of as a low level SCM repository kernel that can implement a particule file structure (optimized for directory content management) that leads to easy replication, distributed file system with no worries about file corruption (unless you are really worried about SHA1 collisions). Git is not yet a SCM but a work in progress of the repository layer.

Anyone familiar with ClearCase (a proprietary SCM now owned by IBM) is aware (possibly painfully so if they were invloved with administrating it) that it uses its own proprietary file system (which it calls VOBs). ClearCase has replication capabilities so there may be some degree of overlap in the basic concepts between ClearCase's lower level VOB layer and git.

There's more to do on top of git to make it part of a polished SCM system. I expect just as Linux has multiple Desktops (KDE/Gnome/xfce) there will be multiple git front-end clients to use the git utilities (API) to manipulate the contents of a git repository using your favourite language (Perl/PHP/Java/...) along with utilities to provide gateways to/from other SCM repositories such as CVS.

ugh... this meme particularly irks me because it's so wrong.

Dashboard / Konfabulator are not copies of Desk Accessories. They're copies of SASH from IBM, which got cloned in the Linux world as SASHXB.

The common theme with all of these programs, and NOT Desk Accessories, is that they are small applications (or "applets") which are written by end-users in Javascript.

http://sash.alphaworks.ibm.com/
http://developer.gnome.org/feature/archive/sashxb/

You're on crack. AOP is not specific to Java -- I've seen it done with Python -- see this article for example. AOP can be used for great evil, but it can also be used for great good. When I first read up on it, my first reaction was "wow! This must be how God programs!" :)

IBM 760XD

IBM A31p

IBM 760XD

IBM A31p

What's it like to have a new release of your server operating system that isn't slower?

Standard in the Unix world.

BTW, IBM's SAN File System appears to do more or less everything that ZFS does, and it's available for Linux.

How about POWER5 support instead:

Linux on POWER;

Enjoy,

http://www-306.ibm.com/employment/us/diverse/award s.shtml

I went downstairs to my GF's Powerbook

Typo...the correct link is http://www.ibm.com/pvc/multimodal/

This technology is also useful for mobile field/sales forces, technicians that need ready access to schematics, really anywhere you need handsfree access to information (think a police officer running your plate before pulling you over for speeding :-P).

Besides, once you are cooped up inside one of those natty suits that you have to wear in modern chip fabrication environments, believe me when I say that the lighting is *not* a major concern...

I was under the impression that modern chip fabrication environments were all automated and didn't require the full garb since all the wafers are enclosed and pushed around on air. As is explained in the 3rd paragraph of that article. Of course, I'll let you know in a few weeks, since we're taking a field trip there.

A similar preliminary study on this topic was presented at last year's Internet Measurement Conference:

On the Responsiveness of DNS based Network Control

They used access logs from Akamai's servers and some webservers at IBM to show that quite a few caching DNS servers don't respect TTLs, sometimes by days or more. In particular, the paper argues that because of this problem, DNS can't be relied on for things like Akamai's load balancing, since it requires using TTLs of only 10s of seconds (IIRC, Akamai DNS TTL's are about 20 seconds).

The study had a fairly large coverage of caching DNS servers (several 100k). Though it would be interesting to reproduce the results.

LTO has been doing 400gb tape (40MB/sec) for some time now.

This product seems to be about 5 years too late to market.

I tend to use the 4+1 View Model, originally introduced in 1995 by Philippe Kruchten at Rational Software. It uses a set of different views, in order to clearly communicate a system's design (or architecture).

The 4 views are: Logical, Process, Physical, and Development. The +1 is the Use Case view, which describes the specific requirements that influenced the design.

I sometimes add a Data view and/or Security view. In any case, I use the 4+1 approach as a starting point and tailor it to the system at hand.

For more info: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/wireless/lib rary/wi-arch11/?ca=dnt-65/

I've had excellent success with model-driven development.

The basic process is : create a model that encapsulates the three bigs:

1) Analysis (i.e. requirements, actors, and use cases)
2) Components (object models, system models)
3) Interactions (interfaces and sequencing)

Once your model contains a good description of these three domains, expressing a design document from the model is straightfoward (indeed, many of good modellers will provide excellent document generators). XDE works fine, but my particular favorite is Enterprise Architect

The beauty of treating the design document as an expression of the model is that by changing the model, you change the document.

In a situation where you're doing large scale code-generation from the model, you're living high on the hog - one repository for your solution information, and any number of expressions of that information into the formats you need (requirements docs, design artifacts, codebase, etc...). By actually including the analysis elements of the solution (the requirements, particularly), you can link those requirements to system components that fulfill the requirements. As the requirements change (and, of course, they will), you can evaluate the impact of those changes quickly by tracing the associations.

Decent article on MDD

I was agreeing with you until I saw I do like dell workstations and home PCs and laptops

Dell laptops are the worst brand of laptops you can buy. They break constantly. I go to school with 200 people who own a Dell laptop. Without fail, everyone I know with a Dell laptop has had very big problems.

If you're not buying a Mac, you're much better off with an IBM or Panasonic or a lesser-known brand

I can't see any obvious reason for sticking to amd or intel here? Unix hardware has been doing this for years, and the open power servers from ibm are pretty cheap, and extremely reliable.

IBM open power 710

Do you even know what Cell is? It's multiple processing cores on a single chip. Here is a picture together with a single chip quote from IBM itself.

If you don't mind switching platforms, IBM sells their "OpenPower" systems that can hold up to 64GB ram. They run Linux on POWER5 CPU's (can you say twice as fast as the Apple G5?) and do come in desktop style cases. You can even get them bare, so you can throw Debian on it if you feel like it. :)

Strangely, 16 GB memory is only available in a dual-CPU configuration. DIMMs 5-8 can only be used if another CPU is installed.

But since the extra Opteron CPU costs about the same as a 2 GB memory module, that shouldn't be much of a concern. Price is in the vicinity of $15K with 2 x Opteron 248 and 16 GB RAM.

IBM xSeries 445. We have around 50 of these IBM servers at work and they support up to 64 GB of RAM. Any reason why you are trying to build a server out of cheap commodity parts? Save yourself the trouble and buy one of these.

Lets not forget that IBM owns all rights to probably the most complete SCM tool on the market. They could do more than just help a little if they were so inclined.

1. The next Xbox is, according to all the experts, going to be called the Xbox 360 and based upon IBM's PowerPC.

2. IBM used SLT to manufacture the System/360. (I never said the Xbox 360, I just said the 360.)

3. There's a lot of speculation about the new Xbox being smaller and more portable, etc, than the old one.

This is exactly the opposite of, say, the story about Linus Torvalds where a flamebait quote was made up and attributed to him on the front page.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my submission has resulted in a flood of job offers from various sources: the marketing departments of AT&T and MCI, the sales teams of various car dealerships, and the Mail In Rebate R&D lab at Office Depot Corporation.

The great news is, if Microsoft does use SLT to build the new XBox, it'll be the size of two football fields, making it 37% smaller than the current console...

IBM's big enough to deal with both and it seems that IBM and Opera still have a healthy relationship.
Their co-operation on xhtml+voice stuff seems interesting. The voice control in the latest Opera beta for Windows is pretty cool. It might not replace the good old mouse and keys for most of us anytime soon but I'm sure there are circumstances where it can be a real boon.

Yes, I agree that testing is a 'maximum bang for buck' engineering discipline.

I suggested the webcam for the physical blinking lights stuff the poster mentioned - this should be possible even today with open-source surveillance software I mentioned in passing (set zone, and the software continually analyse for image differences). For the GUI, screen capture would be more efficient.

True, creating a testing tool that did screen capture would be a hassle. However, IBM already Also, most informed people also suggest what you did about the GUI testing (which the poster may know about already).

However, IBM already has a product that does OCR on screen captures of mainframe applications.

Genographic project site, rather than BBC reporting of it. Like I put in my submission of this story, earlier than this one. Winge moan. And this one should have an IBM tag.

How to Participate

seriously, does no one else but me remember SASH? (which spawned SASH-XB)

http://sash.alphaworks.ibm.com/
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37969, 00.html
http://www.sashxb.org/

people playing pity violins for konfabulator can go fuck themselves.

-z

Apparently you have never heard of the book "IBM and the Holocaust"

So the totalitarian regime in power in Germany from 1933 to 1945 used IBM equipment. They also used products from lots of other companies that exist today, does that make them all evil accomplices? From IBM's statement about this book,

http://www-1.ibm.com/press/PressServletForm.wss?Me nuChoice=pressreleases&TemplateName=ShowPressRelea seTemplate&SelectString=t1.docunid=1388&TableName= DataheadApplicationClass&SESSIONKEY=any&WindowTitl e=Press+Release

"It has been known for decades that the Nazis used Hollerith equipment and that IBM's German subsidiary during the 1930s -- Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag) -- supplied Hollerith equipment. As with hundreds of foreign-owned companies that did business in Germany at that time, Dehomag came under the control of Nazi authorities prior to and during World War II. It is also widely known that Thomas J. Watson, Sr., received and subsequently repudiated and returned a medal presented to him by the German government for his role in global economic relations."

and a follow-up statement from 2002, a year later:

http://www-1.ibm.com/press/PressServletForm.wss?Me nuChoice=all&TemplateName=ShowToPrint&SelectString =t1.docunid=828&TableName=DataheadApplicationClass &SESSIONKEY=any&WindowTitle=Press+Release&STATUS=p ublish&ShowContacts=$ShowContacts$

Now let me ask you this: would you buy a vehicle from Volkswagen or Mercedes-Benz? Both were used extensively by the Third Reich. Does that mean we should all hate and boycott these companies 60+ years later?

After all, the original Volkswagen was designed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche for use in the Sahara Desert by the German Africakorp. Hitler's army didn't just buy the vehicles off the shelf. Dr. Porsche was specifically instructed by them to design an air-cooled vehicle for the military.

Times change, people learn. Don't try to make everyone guilty by association, especially when it's so tenuous.

And for the record I'm proud to work for IBM.

Apparently you have never heard of the book "IBM and the Holocaust"

So the totalitarian regime in power in Germany from 1933 to 1945 used IBM equipment. They also used products from lots of other companies that exist today, does that make them all evil accomplices? From IBM's statement about this book,

http://www-1.ibm.com/press/PressServletForm.wss?Me nuChoice=pressreleases&TemplateName=ShowPressRelea seTemplate&SelectString=t1.docunid=1388&TableName= DataheadApplicationClass&SESSIONKEY=any&WindowTitl e=Press+Release

"It has been known for decades that the Nazis used Hollerith equipment and that IBM's German subsidiary during the 1930s -- Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag) -- supplied Hollerith equipment. As with hundreds of foreign-owned companies that did business in Germany at that time, Dehomag came under the control of Nazi authorities prior to and during World War II. It is also widely known that Thomas J. Watson, Sr., received and subsequently repudiated and returned a medal presented to him by the German government for his role in global economic relations."

and a follow-up statement from 2002, a year later:

http://www-1.ibm.com/press/PressServletForm.wss?Me nuChoice=all&TemplateName=ShowToPrint&SelectString =t1.docunid=828&TableName=DataheadApplicationClass &SESSIONKEY=any&WindowTitle=Press+Release&STATUS=p ublish&ShowContacts=$ShowContacts$

Now let me ask you this: would you buy a vehicle from Volkswagen or Mercedes-Benz? Both were used extensively by the Third Reich. Does that mean we should all hate and boycott these companies 60+ years later?

After all, the original Volkswagen was designed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche for use in the Sahara Desert by the German Africakorp. Hitler's army didn't just buy the vehicles off the shelf. Dr. Porsche was specifically instructed by them to design an air-cooled vehicle for the military.

Times change, people learn. Don't try to make everyone guilty by association, especially when it's so tenuous.

And for the record I'm proud to work for IBM.