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• Security -- it's not free. You've gotta check for buffer overflow, validate user input, etc. etc.
• Rapid application development. You can write software that does more, develop it faster, and sell it cheaper today than you could in the days of the TRS80, but it requires layers upon layers of libraries, and in turn more storage and CPU time.

They can expand their R&D and with no real axe to grind they can secure that new and needed standards gets approvel quicker. Their interest is the quality of the standard that they can then offer their clients as a new service.

Take a look here and you will get a good feel for the Future IBM

I was off by a bit. They're calling it the other IBM, not new.

If we're taking bets, I'm going to guess ( for no good reason, without justification ) there's nothing like a Northbridge on this thing, so PPC Linux first.

Besides, you're not breaking a software EULA to get Linux working on your Xbox, doesn't that mean anything to you people ?

Damn, I need a sarcasm key for that last line.

And no, not a 'G5'. Something like it, but likely not actually a G5. A 64-bit PowerPC chip. Not a G5. Though the difference might be slight... it could be significant. The "Cell" for the PS3 is a PowerPC chip, too, but it's quite different from the PowerPC 970.

Whereas the patent portfolio for Amazon is filled with things like "one click shopping" or whatever, IBM has always done *EXTENSIVE* research. They make chips, and have a gambit of patents associated with them. They even work on things like teleportation for crying out loud. Yes - like "beam me up, Scott" type teleportation.

No - IBM isn't Dell, a company that has never come up with anything new and does little else other than figure out the cheapest way to produce something. IBM isn't even a Microsoft, a company based entirely off taking someone else's ideas and implimenting them in proprietary ways (a compnay whose only real contribution is getting platforms and applications to work together well). Instead, IBM is very very heavily research-based. IMO, it's perfectly valid for IBM to have a vast # of patents, considering how much research it does. Dollar per research dollar, I'm willing to be it doesn't have all that many more per year than anyone else - they just put more dollars into it.

With that in mind - suggesting they're the pot calling the kettle black is a bit of a stretch. They've got a lot of patent experience sure (there's a nice soft word for it, eh?) but back to that dollar per research dollar thing...

If Cornell and Harvard got together and tried to get higher education to be more affordable for all Americans, would their intent be questioned simply because they're a couple of the more expensive schools? I pay $30k a year for my wife to go to vet school at Cornell. It's very painful. Cornell knows it, and is sympathetic to a degree...I know they would have loved to have seen Clinton's promised education costs reforms.

Same bit. IBM does a lot of research, gets a lot of patents. Simply because they have a lot of patents doesn't invalidate their opinion that there is abuse of the patent system.

Adding on this, it's not even known whether atoms are collections of point mass particles (protons, neutrons and electrons), so as the parent poster said, "seeing" in the conventional sense doesn't really mean anything. Another way to observe atoms is using scanning tunneling microscopes, as in these pictures http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/stm.html http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/gallery.html Large molecules like proteins and DNA are better seen with X-ray diffractions.

Adding on this, it's not even known whether atoms are collections of point mass particles (protons, neutrons and electrons), so as the parent poster said, "seeing" in the conventional sense doesn't really mean anything. Another way to observe atoms is using scanning tunneling microscopes, as in these pictures http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/stm.html http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/gallery.html Large molecules like proteins and DNA are better seen with X-ray diffractions.

I am not sure if I understand this completely (I read the Press Release).Blue gene does protein folding computations which requires hours of CPU time. How can you understand these molecular interactions in real-time ? Article doesn't give detail about how they implemented the time-consuming computation.

Holy crap that's hilarious! I thought that IBM's films depicting the Legends of iSeries were funny, but this is just amazing to see coming from a giant corporate entity!

similar thing, without the reboots:

Build a heterogeneous cluster with coLinux and openMosix

Here's another link:

http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex. nsf/0/2f57e13636d5c75085256bfa0067f4c7?OpenDocumen t

DC power is an option - IBM for instance has a NEBS compliant DC-powered server in its xSeries range - the xSeries 343

In fact IBM also have a blade offering which is DC powered, the BladeCenter T

These are primarily designed for the telecoms market which I understand already is big into DC-powered racks.

DC power is an option - IBM for instance has a NEBS compliant DC-powered server in its xSeries range - the xSeries 343

In fact IBM also have a blade offering which is DC powered, the BladeCenter T

These are primarily designed for the telecoms market which I understand already is big into DC-powered racks.

Perhaps you don't know what the status bar is, and that's why you seem confused about my statements. It's at the bottom of the window, is either always on or always off. The toolbar you're talking about is contextual (it appears when a popup has been blocked) and shows up in the web page rendering area. If you go to this page in both browsers you will get the informational toolbar, but also look at the bottom-right corner and notice an icon appeared. That is the status bar icon, which existed in Firefox before IE had any popup blocking.

There, we're both right! :p

To complement your nice Tyan motherboard, get one or two (XXX check for physical sizes) of them realizm 800 from 3dlabs. They are the only 16 lanes PCIexpress videocards I know of. Not sure about GPGPU, but at 3840 x 2400, solitaire is bound to look amazing... especially if you can get some nice 9.2Mpixel displays as well: High end videocard without a matching display, what would be the point? Check for instance the IBM T221).

Anandtech reviewed the Realizm 800 here.

Mhhh... If you wanted the machine to be a server of some sorts, then I just wasted 10 minutes typing all this!

Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X?

In any event, you don't usually play games on enterprise Linux distributions. So your post is rather out of place here.

I would say Linux is that OS. But it really needs support from the entertainment gaming industry to push is public support to the masses.

(And if your sarcasm detector needs some calibration, click on some of the links I gave before you post a comment based on my comment ...)

Now think about programmers. Each one is expected to have his own specialties which he brings to the job with him. There's no sending them off to be trained as the need arises. Oh, the customer has required that we develop this next application in Java. Damn, better hire some more Java people and lay off some of the C# coders.

There should be a happy medium somewhere. Learning a new language and API set is a big piece of work, and trying to learn it while working on a project you're intending to sell, or are contracted to sell, isn't a good idea if you don't have at least a few people with experience in that language to fix things to guide newbie developers when things start to go awry. If your company has done nothing but Ada development, and suddenly wants to move to Java, but nobody has any Java experience, you're going to lose a lot of time and money on mistakes. It's better to bring in at least a few people with Java experience to help everyone get up to speed than to just send your developers on a course and hope they come back experts (because the latter isn't going to happen in a short-term course).

Still, learning new language is a bit of an extreme, and there are a lot of inbetween spots where more companies should be sending their developers out for educational purposes. Technical conferences, for example, can introduce new concepts and ideas to developers, especially those which have a more scientific bent. I had the privledge of chairing a workshop at CASCON 2001, and it was a fantastic experience -- the conference was presenting a lot of academic work in a variety of areas in computer science. It should be par for the course that companies send their developers to such events, as it's an excellent way to introduce them to concepts they may not otherwise be exposed to, and get them thinking now about some of the ideas and technologies which your company may be implementing 5 years down the road.

Yaz.

of course in order to do so with similar performace you need a machine weighing at 7lbs veruses the 15" power book at 5.6

Thinkpad T42p
OK, it is 5.9 lbs instead of 5.6, but the powerbook doesn't come to its foot.

You need to carry a spare battery to last roughly the same amout of time on the battery.

I can't find the spec, but it is about 4 hours. With the extra battery (which stays in the ultradock bay (and you don't have to "carry")), the battery life is 12 hours.

And unless you are running Windows your Driver support is flaky at best.

And unless you are running OS X your Driver support is flaky at best.
By the way, check this out.

Developers: Idle Loop Optimized
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the more-efficient-use-of-clock-time dept.
seebs writes "Every so often someone makes a joke about optimizing the idle loop, but this article actually does it. " It's about time too- that process has been eating up clock cycles for to long.

Science: Positive Proof of Water on Mars
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the now-we-can-put-that-one-to-rest dept.
pauliecronopolis was one of many people that noted that the popular Astronomoy Picture of the Day page has photographic proof of water on mars. It will be a little difficult for those of you who don't have a degree on geology to spot the evidence, but with a little efort, I think you'll be able to make it out.

Apple: Monkeys Don't Like Macs
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the but-they-fling-a-helluva-poo dept.
sebFlyte writes "silicon.com is reporting on a new twist on some oft-done probability research, into the suggestion that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce a perfect script for Hamlet , given typewriters (or indeed keyboards) and enough time. The researchers claims that the monkeys used in their test preferred using systems running Windows XP to those running Mac OSX. Which begs the question -- do only monkeys use windows, or can even monkeys tell macs aren't worth bothering with?"

ePlus
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the - - dept.
anonymous writes "

"

Magic Supersecret Anagram T-Shirt
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the black-is-the-new-pink dept.
Jesus Christ Himself, No Really The One Who Died For Your Sins On a Big Wooden Cross a Couple Thousand Years Ago and is a Little Cranky that You've Only Gone To Church Twice so Far This Decade wrote in to say "Hey you guys should check out the Magic Supersecret Anagram T-Shirt. It'll really blow your mind. It's available from ThinkGeek. (TG is owned by OSTG, the parent company of Slashdot, so activate all conspiracy theories now). You can also look into the new iPod accessory iCopulate which allows intimacy between mp3 players never before fantasized. And for the suit that has everything, Executve Pong.

Think Geek Shafts O' Poo

Apple: Steve Jobs to Become Ikea CEO
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the third-times-the-charm dept.
RLewis1241 writes "According to The Register, Steve Jobs seems to be broadening his horizons: "IKEA will employ Jobs as "acting CEO", from next month. The technology icon will maintain his twin CEO roles at Apple Computer Inc. and Pixar Inc. but will also take command with a wide-ranging brief at the retail giant""

It's not just open source stupid!

And I say that with total humor.

I prefer to see more Novell in the marketshare whether it's open or closed source. Hopefully Linux users support will push them to open more technology like some companies have done, but overall Novell products are a lot better than there rivals. The eDirectory platform is better than Active Directory in many respects, including but not limited to security, cross-platform support (duh) and reliability ... scalability, database size, license cost, standards based transactions and data handling...

You get the picture.

If you were a Suse fan, stick in there. If you are a developer help out, open communication with Novell. Ignore the articles and push through the filter. Find situations where it works and implement it. I belive that eDirectory combined with what is now the Novell Linux Desktop will someday be a force to reckon with in the enterprise space.

If you've managed or designed a network you appreciate the technology Novell can offer you. I know many system administrators who would love to return to a day where the enterprise desktop isn't anything but an interface to work applications. I'd prefer a Linux desktop I could roll out with the features and security measures I want and be able to manage all the functionality at the server. It's the current Windows server sales pitch, but Novell's is better.

But then again, technology doesn't win in the board room. If it did Novell wouldn't be in a cash crunch now. But then again, I'm becoming a shill and ignoring some of the bad decisions Novell has made - either way, support them.

Taking on SCO would help their cause quite a bit as well...

I'm not sure if you're talking about equipment that has been donated to you or if you're talking about buying equipment that you are going to donate. If the later, you might consider Telco equipment designed to run on -48V DC power. It's going to be more expensive than a cheap Dell, but they're built to more demanding standards. A quick Google turned up a couple of links:

http://www.angstrom.com/products/viper.htm
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardw are/tour/briefs/telco_server.html

Or just a -48V power supply.

http://www.zantech.com.au/zantech/power-supply-atx -48v-dc/

Alternatively, you could look at products geared for automotive use. Look at what people are using for in car computers running directly off of a 12V supply. They should also be pretty robust, although I think the Telco standards are probably more demanding (though buying NEBS3 certified equipment will really cost you.)

By running off a DC battery directly you provide a buffer against the flaky AC power distribution while saving the complexity of a UPS doing AC-DC-AC.

"how often do you hear of people with Macs running linux instead of OS X now?"

Other groups working on optical interconnects: (incomplete list)

Heriot Watt

Cornell University

IBM Zurich

Delft

UIUC

Intel

Stanford

IBM is working in this area also . . .

Will be interesting to see a PowerPC with the guts of the VMX unit running at 10Ghz . . .

I think the amount of battery required to power the transmitter long enough to make a connection and transmit data from your phone would be far greater than running the phone CPU to compute that move.

Sure, you could make a chess game that only looked forward one move and this could probably run on a cell phone just fine, and be pretty fast. But if you want a game that can beat almost anybody, you'll need a lot more computing power and memory. Deep Blue did one trillion operations per second -- and this was needed, as it only had a few minutes per move to calculate it's next move -- 40 moves/2 hours in the first two hours.

In any event, chess fits the `low bandwidth used, but extreme amounts of cpu needed to compute each move' paradigm perfectly. At least for world class chess :)

Well why don't you ask IBM to open up a JVM for you

They already did.

Kaffe is probably the oldest of all open source JVM projects. It is cleanroom implementation of JVM, which means no Sun proprietary JVM source code contamination. Until recently, it did not have JIT... One open source JVM implementation from IBM is Jikes Research Virtual Machine (Jikes RVM).

GNU Classpath, Essential Libraries for Java", is a GNU project to create free core class libraries for use with virtual machines and compilers for the java programming language.

Perhaps? My understanding is that the support is coming eventually, but that right now it's basically a technology preview and not meant for real consumption... I know you can pass the compiler the flag, but have no clue what'll come out at the other end. IBM's page on XL just lists Obj-C support as a technology preview, so someone more knowledgeable will have to speak up.

Take a look at this on IBM compilers on mac os x. According to SPEC ratings int performance is 11% to 50% faster using xlc and floating point is apparantly even better. Most of the performance gains are over 50%. Apple of all people can afford a compiler to at least compile their own OS on. The free software side of me in the other hand is happy that they are choosing to improve the gnu compiler instead but it honestly doesn't make any sense to me since they can get a practicaly free huge performance gain on a relatively cheap purchase of a compiler.

-bloo

You are not waiting for a slow computer. You are instead waiting for a rather frazzled guy in Mumbai whose job it is to play the computer opponent in anywhere from 10 to 50 phone chess games at any given time

Cell phone cpus are slow, and suck up the battery while they're working. But an entire chess board layout is very simple, and it wouldn't take much bandwidth to transmit your entire chess board layout to a remote computer which could then calculate the next move and transmit it back. (And that's assuming that the remote computer keeps no state information. If it kept track of the chess board itself, the bandwidth needed per move would just be a few bytes.)

I could see a cell phone company buying Deep Blue or some similar big honking box and reprogramming it to play lots of games at once. Then release a chess application for cell phones that uses the data capability to allow you to play chess `against Deep Blue.'

Sure, Deep Blue would not be playing 1000 simultaneous world-class chess games (though for an extra fee, you could get more cpu dedicated to you giving you a better opponnent), but it could probably beat most people. (The only reason to use Deep Blue itself is for the name recognition. A number of racks of PCs would work too, but it wouldn't have the obvious marketing potential.)

This is one case where having a remote server do most of the work makes perfect sense. (Having a PC play chess with a remote server doing the work makes less sense, as a PC has much more cpu to work with, so it's not as needed.)

The IBM researcher who created this software, Martin Wattenberg, also wrote some really cool tools for visualizing and navigating Slashdot threads. He said he would be happy to let Slashdot use them for free so I made an intro but the /. guys never followed up.

1. I have no idea what the evolution of those documents was before, and even after viewing the visualizations (and knowing what they mean), I still have no idea what it means about the document.

Go here and look at the text to the right. It looks like you can 'slice' the graph (the vertical line) and see the color coded text at each point along the graph.

A quick glance through sections would be an easy way to figure out the stability and quality of any one document and who is a good editor or writer.

Thank you all, may love be with you always.

Instead of linking simply to the download page and the screenshots, give people a chance to RTFA and link to the History Flow Visualization Application's overview document.

Also, a lot of that 25 mb is shared libraries (i.e. the .Net runtime, GDI+) that are loaded once, and shared by each process that needs them, but their memory is included in each process that is using them

This page has a fairly good overview of how windows measures memory usage

Ummm... I think BlueGene (here and here) is cooler than the Earth Simulator (here).

Ummm... I think BlueGene (here and here) is cooler than the Earth Simulator (here).

I found it odd that there aren't any pics of the machine on those sites, so I looked around... Here are some pics of the prototype at top, and the finished version at bottom. It looks like it's going to be in classic "IBM black", like the 2001 monolith : )

Some more pics of the prototype.

For comparison, the Earth simulator and big mac.

Anyone know what kind of facilities blue gene will be housed at? The one for the earth simulator looks like something out of a movie, IBM better be able to compete on the 'cool factor'. : )

And does anyone else get the warm and fuzzy feelings from looking at these pics, even though there's nothing you could possibly use that much power for? Ahhh, power...

I found it odd that there aren't any pics of the machine on those sites, so I looked around... Here are some pics of the prototype at top, and the finished version at bottom. It looks like it's going to be in classic "IBM black", like the 2001 monolith : )

Some more pics of the prototype.

For comparison, the Earth simulator and big mac.

Anyone know what kind of facilities blue gene will be housed at? The one for the earth simulator looks like something out of a movie, IBM better be able to compete on the 'cool factor'. : )

And does anyone else get the warm and fuzzy feelings from looking at these pics, even though there's nothing you could possibly use that much power for? Ahhh, power...

Umm what about 3rd party applications that rely on the media player api or IE API? Lot of apps i've seen are using a browser window to do their interface stuff since it makes doing skins extremely simple(change the css file). And the only way to communicate from the Presentation layer(HTML) is through activex because you can't send posts or querystrings at a file. And before you slashbotters start bitching that using HTML with some sort of hook into an application API is crap/insecure/slow/whatever, this is the same shit KDE uses.

It looks like an IBM Thinkpad X Series laptop... And yes, they do come with Intel Extreme Graphics 2 GPUs...

They're pretty nifty, but a little too small for my taste... I know several people who have them, and I'd rather carry a slightly bigger laptop and get a full-size keyboard and a touchpad in return... YMMV of course...

continued the series started with the model 5100 from the article. Its model number was the 5150. You can find out more about this series of IBM computers at the IBM Archives..

The IBM 5110 was the second small IBM computer I worked on back in the 70's and I can remember the IBM rep pulling the 8" disk drives out of the back of his station wagon so we could use them on one occasion. If you look at the picture at IBM 5110, you will see just how portable that was.

continued the series started with the model 5100 from the article. Its model number was the 5150. You can find out more about this series of IBM computers at the IBM Archives..

The IBM 5110 was the second small IBM computer I worked on back in the 70's and I can remember the IBM rep pulling the 8" disk drives out of the back of his station wagon so we could use them on one occasion. If you look at the picture at IBM 5110, you will see just how portable that was.

Stuff like: Bayesian inference, Probability models, Web site user modeling, etc.

All of those examples are from the same author (the guy in charge of phpmath.com), but go to show that there are actually interesting things being done with PHP.

I'd love to see some books that *don't* spend 200 pages explaining how to get to fetching an array from MySQL.

Stuff like: Bayesian inference, Probability models, Web site user modeling, etc.

All of those examples are from the same author (the guy in charge of phpmath.com), but go to show that there are actually interesting things being done with PHP.

I'd love to see some books that *don't* spend 200 pages explaining how to get to fetching an array from MySQL.

Stuff like: Bayesian inference, Probability models, Web site user modeling, etc.

All of those examples are from the same author (the guy in charge of phpmath.com), but go to show that there are actually interesting things being done with PHP.

I'd love to see some books that *don't* spend 200 pages explaining how to get to fetching an array from MySQL.

...So what is the big deal?

The CNN article says "IBM is not concerned about liability, even in cases where innocent senders might be misidentified as spammers, because all the technology does is bounce back the e-mails, said Gail." The WSJ article posted by someone above says "based on a new IBM technology called FairUCE, that uses a giant database to identify computers that are sending spam. One key feature: E-mails coming from a computer on the spam list are sent directly back to the machine, not just the e-mail account, that sent them." This sounds exactly like the DNSBL FAQ at www.spamhaus.org which reads "Doing a DNSBL lookup on a message at SMTP connect time is cheap in hardware cycles and system time. Your DNS server may even have it cached from the last time the spammer tried. If your MTA already knows the incoming message is spam it can deny a spam message before having to pass it to mail-scanner (medium cost), through the virus scanner (medium to expensive), bayesian filtering (medium), spamassassin network tests: blacklists, DCC, pyzor, razor, etc. (medium - high). Mail rejected by a DNSBL does not disappear into the bit bucket. A DNSBL realtime rejection creates a delivery status notification (DSN) to the sender identifying the cause of the rejection, therebye allowing troubleshooting on the sender's end. Realtime rejection avoids the "backscatter" problem of some spam filters which accept delivery, close the connection, and then try to return the mail after it is determined to be spam. Of course, as we all know, most spam and all viruses have forged sender addresses, and so the "bounce" goes back to an innocent third party (if it is deliverable at all). Using the SBL-XBL lists together (recommended) rejects a very large amount of spam and virus mail with very low "false positive" rejections of legitimate mail. And remember, all those rejected legitimate mails are instantly reported to the sender with a DSN. "

The IBM page says "FairUCE (which stands for "Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email") is a spam filter that stops spam by verifying sender identity instead of filtering content." "Technically, FairUCE tries to find a relationship between the envelope sender's domain and the IP address of the client delivering the mail." This suggests that the receiving mail server does a DNS lookup "at SMTP connect time" verifying that the from address is related to the owner of the IP address the mail is coming from i.e. email from joe@yahoo.com originating from www.msn.com "bad" email from me@myisp.net originating from www.myisp.net "good" or something like this. If the cash is of WHOIS lookups so what? IP addresses do not change hands very often (do they?), I may have a different IP every time I log on to the internet, but that IP is always comes up on a WHOIS as being assigned to my ISP. :( And onone is going to read this...

Sorry, manipulating the headers is how you get blocked by FairUCE. Unlike many so-called spam solutions, this one does not rely on headers being correct. It is a bit more sophisticated, as it requires insertion at the MTA level (in other words, you can't just use any mail server--currently you have to install Postfix as the external server, with a bridge to whatever mail server you want on the inside).

That being said, it still currently relies on IP blacklists, so it is no panacea.

The linked news article has lousy information. IBM's overview is much better.

but what about the vast majority of spam that's sent from zombied PCs and open relays instead of from the spammer's own mail servers?

It handles those Very well. BTW, the FA is totally wrong. The author obviously doesn't know squat about this app.

No.

Read why this is different.