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I don't know of many machines in the 15k's class. The big Itanium and Power5 machines I've seen have all been one-off machines or clusters. I'm not going to argue about the merits of large single machine vs cluster, but they are clearly not the same thing.

Obviously you haven't been looking. The eServer 595 is a 64 way Power 5 based system that is a standard configuration on IBM's website. And the HP Integrity Superdome is a 128 way IA64 based system this is a standard configuration on HP's website. Neither of those are one offs or clusters and I would say that both of them are in the 15k's class.

No. Its more complicated than that.

A patent only grants the right to exclude others from practicing the invention and does not affirmatively grant the right to practice the invention, a patent is not considered a monopoly right.
IBM, for instance recently opened 500 pantents for OS developers.
Read their pledge. They agree not to assert any of their patents.

It is true though, that a lot of open source advocates are fervently against patents. And Michael G. Kaplan might after all, decide to charge for this ISACS thing. But, I repeat, just because its patented doesn't mean it cannot be open sourced.

> If Sun didn't plan to do anything in the face of Linux,
> they would not have promoted their grant as one to all
> Open Source developers.

Personally, while I find the press release to leave plenty of questions unanswered and to be phrased for reading outside the developer community, I didn't come to the same conclusion you did when I read it and can't see why you do. It's just clueless PR-speak, not grand conspiracy by an evil genius.

On the subject of OpenOffice.org, what has copyright aggregation to do with patents? It's pretty common practice (Apache demands it for example) and is about the governance of the community, not the defence of patent suits. I agree that the Microsoft settlement left a bad taste but I don't think it was part of grand conspiracy, just a deep desire to end a crippling lawsuit. If it's Microsoft contracts and money that influence your judgement of the F/OSS motives of a company then surely this site should have you looking at some other gift-horses too?

Don't misunderstand this post: I think it is an excellent trend that Linux is taking a larger share in the business world. Hopefully vendors will even start to pick up on other open-source solutions (BSD, etc) too. After all, open-source is all about choice and freedom.

However, I question whether companies such as IBM are truly choosing Linux based on technological reasons, or if they are just marketing "Linux" as a buzzword to upper-management types who may have heard something about it.

After all, a quick look at IBM's portal site for Linux, http://www.ibm.com/linux/, does not show a page detailing the technological benefits of Linux. Heck, it barely mentions financial benefits. What I do see is a bunch of snazzy logos, and some rather devoid-of-meaning slogans such as, "Business and Linux in an On Demand World."

Am I being too harsh on IBM, or are they really just playing the marketing game?

For each of the past 12 years (1993-2004), IBM has been granted more U.S. patents than any other company. During that period IBM has received 29,021 US patents. In 2004, IBM received 3,248 U.S. patents.
...IBM's current active portfolio of about 25,000 patents in the United States and over 40,000 patents worldwide for inventions in areas of primary technology focus for all IBM customers...

IBM's patent pledge gets considerable praise from RMS here; several times he notes that IBM has undertaken a real step and he says that IBM's step is a substantive one--you are gaining increased access to 500 more patents than you had access to before. I agree that it is a step in the right direction. However, one should consider the terms of the deal before relying on IBM's promise not to sue regarding the listed 500 patents. One of the finer points of the IBM promise gets no mention.

In the last page of the IBM patent promise, you'll find the revocation clause: (all punctuation, and lack of ending punctuation, is theirs)

Subject to the exception provided below, and with the intent that developers, users and distributors of Open Source Software rely on our promise, IBM hereby commits not to assert any of the 500 U.S. patents listed above, as well as all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software. In order to foster innovation and avoid the possibility that a party will take advantage of this pledge and then assert patents or other intellectual property rights of its own against Open Source Software, thereby limiting the freedom of IBM or any other Open Source Software developer to create innovative software programs, or the freedom of others to distribute and use Open Source Software, the commitment not to assert any of these 500 U.S. patents and all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries is irrevocable except that IBM reserves the right to terminate this patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party who files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights against Open Source Software

Note what you have to give up in order to enjoy IBM's promise not to sue you--if (someone involved with, I gather) "Open Source Software" infringes upon your copyright (one of the many so-called "intellectual property" rights) by, say, distributing copies of essays on your blog without permission, or distributing derivatives based on programs you hold the copyright to without complying with your license, you are put in a serious conundrum: you have to choose between enforcing your rights under law and continuing to enjoy IBM's non-aggression promise. I think this is an exchange one should consider very carefully, particularly considering how different and numerous so-called "intellectual property" laws are (another essay worth reading which RMS points to in his essay on Sun's "no-op announcement"; an essay one should read with IBM's patent promise as well). The number of laws under that overgeneralized catch-all phrase might catch you off guard, thus making you more vulnerable to patent infringement regarding these 500 patents than you thought you were.

i think all of them at least have that nubby thing if you turn the touchpad off, but this x series seem to not have the touchpad at all.

http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/C ategoryDisplay?catalogId=-840&storeId=1&langId=-1& dualCurrId=73&categoryId=2072542
hope that link isn't cookie dependant.

This sounds like a cool feature, can anyone confirm from personal experience that it really works?

We have a few of the IBM X40 notebooks and they have this little tool that displays the laptops orientation with respect to "level", and a directional accelleration indicator. You can shake the laptop and the on-screen tool shows you what's happening to it... It definitely tracks gravity realtime, so if gravity suddenly drops to zero, it will park the drive. We haven't had the need to drop a $2000 laptop to test it, but it sure does look like it will work.

Try this. If you use the trackpoint your hand barely moves from the typing position. At the same time it gives you the option of a trackpad if you find that easier. Oh, it has a total of five buttons.

So then you don't trust my agregation of facts because i got paid $75 for the article I wrote?

Spender didn't write PaX, he just built the code around it to add many additional useful protections to produce a complete security solution.

It's good to deploy stack smash protection as well. This protects stack based overflows in general, very high quality :)

I don't feel like going into details right now, as it's 2am.

OK, the EULA is probably not permitting it to be used for mission critical solutions either, but in my opinion it's one of the better commercially available OS:es. (There's even a hobbyist license available). (anybody knowing of an OS that has an EULA that actually claims that the OS is intended for mission critical use?)

I think it's about time to require that software companies are responsible for their code. There are too many simple bugs passed through every day that would have been caught if a thorough software testing was done. One tool for doing it is Purify Plus, and another is Splint.

Splint is available to the public, unfortunately it's only checking C and not C++. (anyone in the mood for implementing a C++ version?)

And not even NASA and ESA software are always bug-free, but their software is as close as you can come to mission critical applications. I wouldn't like to have a computer running Windows on a mission to Mars, it isn't stable enough.

I want a dual POWER5 IBM OpenPower 710! Not as portable as a PowerBook, but damn is that one sweet box.

HAhaha, I laugh at your tiny 18-buttons mouse.

My mouse is a trackpoint, and has 87 buttons on it.

The greatest service you can do to them is make sure all web pages you make are HTML 4.01 compliant though. Alt tags for pictures are of course important (even if it just saying "logo"), and screen reader programs are not as forgiving as IE/Mozilla/Firefox et al when it comes to confusing tags.

I can't ignore that one since I do a lot of work with some of the accessibility researchers, including one who is blind. Meaningless ALT tags are more of a nuisance than a help. HTML compliance is not a bad thing per se, but the biggest problem is actually visual complexity, especially when it results in pages that take several minutes of screen reading to get to the actual content. Another hassle is tables that look great, but run in completely different directions when a screen reader tries to deal with them (especially true for embedded tables). Structuring the page well and including a jump-to-main-content link are the kinds of things that they really like. Remember that listening is basically slower than looking.

If you're seriously interested in this area, aDesigner is worth a bit of your time. A big chunk of the idea is to give sighted designers some experience of what it's like when you can't see well or at all. Sorry if it seems like a plug, but I do think it's an impressive tool... And no, I'm not directly involved.

Sametime is not an issue for Linux users. We have several Sametime compliant solutions to choose from. The one most Linux users and many Windows users use is IBM Community Tools (http://community.ngi.ibm.com/). It provides many more features and is much more powerful than basic Sametime. Our internal version is a few steps ahead of the external version listed on the above website. I've been using it everyday for over 2 years now on my Linux system at work.

My opinions are my own until beaten out of me.

Finally and embedable database for robocode robot. I will finally have and easy way all the data on all my oponents movements... !! !!

And still get wiped out..

See http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/lin ux/tested.html for a list of supported distros and architectures for the IBM JDKs. You'll see that IBM supports Linux on PPC both 32 and 64 bit.

sorry, but you misunderstand my question. I am asking where the clear, legally binding statement is that defines which patents I can use under what conditions. IBM released this document when they Open Sourced their patents to the extent they did. That is a legally binding contract. Sun just issues a press release that gives me nothing, when push comes to shove. Show me the clear, legally binding agreement, and I'll be first in line to cheer Sun for their bold move. But until I see anything other then Scott's usual grandstanding, I'll withold judgement.

IBM plans to replace the current VPN solution (ATT Net Client) with its own WebSphere Everyplace Connection Manager product over the next 12-18 months. WECM has clients for Linux, PalmOS, Symbian, WinCE, and Win32.

You're right... no alternative. None whatsoever. Maybe one form some three lettered fly-by-night shaky little software services company.

For me this is the barrier to ditching MS Windows completely.

IBM: Please can you make versions of these binaries which run under Linux. Also how about releasing the skunkworks 'Watson Works' and 'E' editor which we all grew to love in the O/S2 olden days?

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246380.htm l

1. Why has Sun open sourced this of all things?

I can't answer this, except to say that it's been Suns' stated intention to open Solaris up and this is simply the first opening of code as the whole of Solaris is opened up.

2. It seems very similar to gdb in role. Is this assumption correct? Does it compare favorably?

It's orthogonal to gdb. gdb is a debugger, to debug code. DTrace is a kernel instrumentation framework, allowing dynamic instrumentation of a fully running kernel (including interaction with userspace programmes).

3. Is a Linux/BSD/whatever port of this desirable/attainable? Or does it rely to much on the guts of SunOS? Do we have better tools already on those OS's?

A Linux/BSD "port" would be desireable in so far as DTrace is desireable (which would be "lots" imho). The guts of it is in-kernel though and kernel-specific, so it'd be mostly new work, but you could reuse the tools interface (the awk-like syntax). Linux has something vaguely similar called "kprobes", which I dont know that much about, except that it requires one to write kernel modules to make effective use of it - it doesnt have a nice, safe, userspace scripting language to specify how you want to collect data from the kernel instrumentation "probes", AFAICT.

Here sweety, have some of this malaria drug which was developed on a Linux cluster.

Personal Systems Group made $162 million off turnover of nearly $13 billion, that's a 1.2% margin. Software group made $4.5 billion from a $15 billion turnover. Hell, WebSphere MQ Series made several times the profit of the whole PC business, and that's a team of maybe 200 people. CICS made even more. From IBM's point of view, Personal Systems Group isn't worth the effort or the risk.

*http://www.ibm.com/investor/financials/quarterly/ 4q04earnings.phtml

Qwerty and dvorak are nice, bu do not forget the French tried to be difficult again and chose AZERTY. Works actually better, because of many accents used. Example: éèà
And then I probably forget other advantages for french speaking persons.

Here in Belgium the layout is also AZERTY, mostly because in the beginning of the existance of Belgium the french speaking part was more powerful and occupied the high spots in society and the government. The dutch speaking part now also uses the AZERTY layout. But in the Netherlands they use QWERTY again.

And even Germany seems to use QWERTZ, the Y and Z are switched. http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topi cs/keyboards/qwerty.jsp/

Long live standardisation!

PS. Doing computer sciences at the university of Antwerp, for programming most keyboard here are QWERTY, and a lot of important signs are placed ideally for prgramming...

Why do they still call x86 PC's "IBM compatible", like in this article?

Because the term has meaning, specifically, "this software runs on the x86 instruction set".

Macs use IBM processors, not Wintel computers!

Why do you call them "Wintel" computers, despite the existance of x86 computers running non-Windows? Because that phrase also has meaning.

IBM no longer even MAKES PC's!

Sure they do

I think DTrace is available on Linux. It's called DProbes, and was invented by IBM. I have only read the Sun DTrace technical manual the once, but I think there are strong similarities. IBM's DProbes have been around for ages, too - since 2000, according to the ChangeLog, but I didn't hear about it until Richard Moore did a presentation at the UKUUG conference in Manchester in 2001.

I think DTrace is available on Linux. It's called DProbes, and was invented by IBM. I have only read the Sun DTrace technical manual the once, but I think there are strong similarities. IBM's DProbes have been around for ages, too - since 2000, according to the ChangeLog, but I didn't hear about it until Richard Moore did a presentation at the UKUUG conference in Manchester in 2001.

I actually ran Eclipse using JikesRVM a few months ago. You're wrong on that point.

Check out the OpenPower stuff they recently announced. It's all Linux all the time. You an even choose to configure it without an operating system!

Check out the OpenPower stuff they recently announced. It's all Linux all the time. You an even choose to configure it without an operating system!

Richard Moore of IBM's Linux Technology Center has already provided a dynamic probe and trace capability that was developed by IBM. Several papers and presentations are here

The initial Jikes RVM infrastructure was independently developed as part of the Jalapeño research project at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Hey, you might want to meet HP VMS or IBM zOS before drinking the koolaid.

DB 2
Tivoli
Lotus
WebSphere

Read all about it, and dispell your doubts.

IBM announced a MacOS X version of their XL C/C++ v6.0 compiler (with supposedly more/better G5 optimization than gcc v3.3) about a year ago. The announcement letter is here.

If IBM were to start turning out PowerPC based Risc Boxes running Linux,

Where have you been?! IBM has been touting LINUX along with AIX5L (thats what the "L" stands for!) for over two years.

P.S.- we played around with Sun's app server... it blows. Chunks.

All JSON does is make it easier to have your JavaScript call in to your application and parse the results. If you're just interested in presentation, just have your JS call up, get some HTML, and replace the affected HTML. This decreases the amount of JS and increases your re-use (since you don't need to build your UI twice: once is (PHP|Java|.Net|Ruby|.*), and once in JS). You just call your (\1) code on the server from the JS and have it generate the HTML.

I understand that sometimes there are advantages to the programmatic approach that JSON (and XML-RPC, which the browsers support) extoll, but I don't think many developers even realize the UI-based alternative.

The IBM linux ads with the boy "assimilating" knowledge were great, unfortunately, it is kind of pointless if you don't know what linux is. Sorry, couldn't find any copies of the video, but it was amazing.

Where are you getting your information, because this article seems to contradict much of what you talk about in the PPC 970 architecture.

A very important thing people seem to be missing in this whole thing is that the Cell processor is a next generation Blue Gene (PPC 440) processor. It's not a 970 class processor, it's a further specialized (i.e., souped up) version of a 440 that includes enhancements from Sony and Toshiba.

Frankly, everyone who was written about the Cell processor (except for IBM, Sony, and Toshiba) has been "way off the mark" including you.

And yes, desktop applications of this processor are not unthinkable, but impractical at this time. Operating systems, applications, and hardware drivers would have to be completely rewritten for this architecture. The Blue Gene architecture will take at least a decade to migrate to the desktop in its current form. I am not discounting a major breakthrough between now and then, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There's too much inertia in the Windows market to tear it down in less than a decade.

The difference here is a)This article is not a claim, its a poor distillation of a patent app and b) This other company is involved. This list seems to indicate they might know something about fast processors. And possibly more than the average slashdot poster.

Last time I saw a post about this on Slashdot Vision was boasting they would be able to win the World Cup in 2050... I felt the need to call bullshit on that boast, but for the wrong reason.

The reason I called bullshit originally is because I remember seeing an amazing achievement in robot dexterity in 1998. The Honda prototype, Asimo, slowly, precisely and precariously walk up a few steps without toppling. After seeing that robot hobble up some stairs, my response to a humanoid robot with soccer player dexterity within 45 years was a predictable... Bullshit.

If you were thinking the same thing... Take a look at these pics and vids. They are impressive. They just might have soccer player dexterity by 2050. Without having to worry about getting tired or even slowing down they could pose a major threat (in soccer, put your tinfoil hat back on).

However, I'm still going to call bullshit. Mainly because soccer, unlike chess, deals with full freedom of motion in a 3D field. Computers only recently were able to master chess on a world competition level with intense processing. Chess is played on an 8x8 field, with significant, but limited, branching. The 3D nature of soccer (or even the 2D nature of novice soccer) presents branching that could be arguably higher than that of Go. Combine that with the fact that soccer players aren't going to wait a turn for the computer to "think". This is my new reason for calling bullshit on a Robot 2050 World Cup Champion.

But, damn if those robot control systems aren't impressive. I wouldn't mind eating these words. Robots are cool.

--David

You'll have a hard time convincing anyone in-the-know to run Linux on anything that isn't x86.

That is complete crap. I'll give you a couple of people who use Linux on non ia32. SGI, IBM, plenty of ARM products, Alphas used to be (not sure if they are still sold).

So I assume you'll say you know better than all these people because you have some ancient SGI MIPS machine that nobody cares about and Linux doesn't work on it, right?

How about you show a few examples of people in-the-know who run NetBSD. Yourself doesn't count.

Its strategy towards porting is "convince the rest of the kernel it's an i386 and work like that", which fails on a lot of systems which are fundamentally different from i386, even if they have some things in common (ISA isn't the same everywhere, for instance).

Sorry, Linux is ported to more CPU architectures than NetBSD, including architectures without MMUs and PPC64 (which doesn't have pagetables), neither of which NetBSD can handle.

So give me a single example of something that is i386 specific (or even i386 centric for that matter) in generic kernel code, and I'll eat my hat. If not, you are just a clueless troll.

The same clean code and clean design that allow this kind of abstraction lead to a generally clean and stable system. NetBSD's worst stability problems occur only in device quirks which haven't yet been fully understood (you'll notice Linux has the same quirks but the hacks around them are usually done earlier, since Linux contributors don't care if something is a hack or not).

I don't think you are in a position to say that Linux kernel developers don't care if something is a hack or not. You're nowhere near in their league. But give me some examples of these so called "hacks" (clue: a workaround isn't a hack by definition).

Where the hardware is non-quirky, the system simply does not encounter problems. Simple as that. You could say the same for Linux to some extent, but for Linux, achieving stability is all about quirks for everything, even where it's not needed [see the first mention of i386 'emulation' above].

I'm sorry, but you are simply wrong about this.

That's why the Linux kernel is an order of magnitude larger than NetBSD's but does not have the functionality to justify it.

The Linux kernel has an order of magnitude more device drivers, supports more CPU architectures, has orders of magnitude more filesystems (including proper journalling filesystems), can be configured to run in 2MB of RAM, or scale up to 512 CPUs and terrabytes of RAM, thousands of disks, hundreds of PCI busses...

On-chip hardware in support of security system for intellectual property protection.

they are phasing out AIX in the next 12 months

Says who? Got a link?

Their Super Computing cluster??? Only runs Linux.

Which super computing cluster? This one?

...when you buy crappy kit. Next time do it right.

My puzzlement: Windows NT == VMS? Really? Are you serious?

More of a stab at M$FT - I think the gentleman's agreement they reached was that DEC wouldn't sue them over theft of proprietary trade secrets [i.e. theft of "Intellectual Property"] if M$FT agreed to port NT to Alpha hardware.

But as to the underlying question of the NT kernel: Folks, it ain't all that bad. In just about every test anyone ever throws at it, the NT kernel bitch slaps the competition.

Compare e.g.:

RunTime: Context switching, Part 1
High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows

RunTime: Context switching, Part 2
High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows

COMPARISON BETWEEN QNX RTOS V6.1, VXWORKS AE 1.1 AND WINDOWS CE .NET
PDF DOCUMENT

My puzzlement: Windows NT == VMS? Really? Are you serious?

More of a stab at M$FT - I think the gentleman's agreement they reached was that DEC wouldn't sue them over theft of proprietary trade secrets [i.e. theft of "Intellectual Property"] if M$FT agreed to port NT to Alpha hardware.

But as to the underlying question of the NT kernel: Folks, it ain't all that bad. In just about every test anyone ever throws at it, the NT kernel bitch slaps the competition.

Compare e.g.:

RunTime: Context switching, Part 1
High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows

RunTime: Context switching, Part 2
High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows

COMPARISON BETWEEN QNX RTOS V6.1, VXWORKS AE 1.1 AND WINDOWS CE .NET
PDF DOCUMENT

First of all, Windows does not have very efficient threads. OK, compared to Linux they might be good

Linux is no where close to scaling its threads up to 64 processors.

Unlike other implementations of Posix threads for Linux, LinuxThreads provides kernel-level threads: threads are created with the new clone() system call and all scheduling is done in the kernel.

The main strength of this approach is that it can take full advantage of multiprocessors. It also results in a simpler, more robust thread library, especially w.r.t. blocking system calls.

Oh, and if you think the latest implementation of Linux thread are slower, especially slower then MS Windows, you are an idiot. Here is are some test from IBM. Current Linux threads were spawning at more then 10,000 PER SECOND while MS Windows was spawning barely 6,000. Linux Thread performance, scroll down to the "pretty" graphs. Oh, and these numbers are higher then Solaris. Linux threads and Linux processes spawn _MUCH_ faster then the best MS has to offer and faster then Solaris.