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IBM is doing this, at the hardware level, with X-Architecture.

http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/security/ ssp/
http://www.immunix.org/

Theres others, just cant think of the names...

What I want to know, which nobody seems to document, is how to create menus dynamically in Firefox. Instead of specifying the menus statically in XML, I want to create them at runtime -- specifically, I want to create a top-level menu item and populate its submenu at runtime based on HTTP queries or something similar. I know it's possible, but I have not figured out how.

is Intel resigned to only "respond" to AMD from now on, never to lead again?

Intel's problem isn't how fast they respond but rather something else entirely: a patent.

That patent is Silicon on Insulator. It is owned by IBM. AMD has been using it some time now and it has allowed their processors to use less power than with conventional silicon. It is rumored that Intel approached IBM in order to license this technology but that IBM wanted to trade tech instead of making a cash deal.

So Intel is playing some cat and mouse with IBM. Right now, the IBM guys are probably laughing at the power consumption of Intel's processors - they're winning. So, in the near future, when you see that Intel has licensed a pretty bit of their technology to IBM, don't be surprised. Intel needs SOI and they're going to pay dearly for it.

Somehow Transmeta will always have a warm place in my heart.

And Intel will always have a warm place in my lap.

Seriously, though.... The new IBM X40 [ibm.com] is only 2.7 lbs with approximately the same battery life. The Transmeta only looks good until one realizes that it has a tiny 10" monitor. onm

A few years ago, a fellow was running an antique steam engine at the county fair. The steam tank ruptured, and one person was killed.

This is obviously a tragic event for the person who was killed and his family, but it's also an interesting and important engineering problem. So much so, in fact, that the following year's PhD qualifier in our mechanical engineering department consisted of an analysis and redesign of the steam engine, so as to prevent such an explosion from happening again.

It's a *good* thing to study problems like these, even in an academic sense, because academia is the very first step in the production of usable goods. If people aren't learning from these mistakes, then problems like the stranding of thousands of passengers in airports or the accidental death of a poor fellow at the county fair will happen again.

because their far to expensive M$ "soloution" "melted"

In case you forgot to read the first half of the comments to this thread, it's already been revealed that ComAir's system runs on AIX, a product of IBM, and that the software was developed by a subsidiary of Boeing. When you flame Microsoft for something, at least make sure they're *involved* first.

The data annotating technology used by OmniFind (UIMA) is available for download at IBM's Alphaworks site.

In ordinary search, the text is parsed and a giant index is created. UIMA allows you to write annotators that look for additonal information, for example names of elected officials, and add those entires to the index as well.

For other Natural Language Processor being researched and/or developed by IBM, check out their NLP Research page. They have quite a few different technologies in this feild, which I wasn't aware of.
I for one, welcome our new semantic web overlords! It's really great to hear that something based on semantic technologies is finally breaking through. This could be the dawn of a new era :)
I know this is very optimistic, but how long do you think it will be before we'll have something like this combined with something like Google. The amount of knowledge readily available will be mind boggling huge. Imagine having a text service on your mobile, you text off a question to something and get an answer immediately back. All knowledge available everywhere, any time, that would be a great thing. Heck, it's even quite scary to think about it.

Well, there is another PPC machine out there worth the $5000+ and is made from a company that learned not to use secretiveness 20+ years ago in the manner Apple does. They arent cheap, but they're definitely worth the money.

What IBM's added is a simplification of this procedure in order to help out their mainframe crowd. IBM's been doing this for a long, long, long time. You see, back in the '60s IBM introduced an operating system called VM, which had this crazy notion of being able to provide virtual machines each with their own operating system environment....

PPC != Apple alone. While few Apple owners have switched from OS X to Linux, Linux is extremely popular with the other big PPC vendor: IBM. A majority of IBM's servers are PPC architecture. As it is, IBM has an entire division devoted to Linux on POWER. Also, there are quite a few other distributions that run on the PPC architecture (ie: RedHat, SuSE), and the platform seems to be gaining more and more popularity. So much for this being a "niche-within-a-niche".

Somehow Transmeta will always have a warm place in my heart.

And Intel will always have a warm place in my lap.

Seriously, though.... The new IBM X40 [ibm.com] is only 2.7 lbs with approximately the same battery life. The Transmeta only looks good until one realizes that it has a tiny 10" monitor. lc

Yes, but it's very difficult to crash the Hypervisor.
That's why LPAR is cool.

IBM are basing their future application self-healing abilities on what they call a whole branch of research they have been investing in for years called Autonomic Computing

It's not all pie in the sky either - they've already released preliminary Autonomic Computing Toolkits as part of their Emerging Technologies Toolkit. Start by looking at the Logging and Trace components, and then maybe look at the Solution Install pieces - they underpin the whole framework.

It will take a generation, or two (10-15 years) before complete IBM systems (hardware, OS, middleware, databases, applications etc) are close to autonomic - every aspect have to buy in and adapt the Autonomic Compouting framework. Given their extensive software catalog, IBM themselves will probably take 10-15 years to complete that task but they face a significantly larger hurdle convincing major 3rd party vendors (e.g. Oracle, SAP etc) to wire their products into the new autonimic services.

My guess is, in a mixed vendor (hardware/OS/application) environment, you won't see this for many, many years to come. Pure IBM shops may be able to rely on Autonomic systems within 5-10 years if they are using the latest of everything.

IBM are basing their future application self-healing abilities on what they call a whole branch of research they have been investing in for years called Autonomic Computing

It's not all pie in the sky either - they've already released preliminary Autonomic Computing Toolkits as part of their Emerging Technologies Toolkit. Start by looking at the Logging and Trace components, and then maybe look at the Solution Install pieces - they underpin the whole framework.

It will take a generation, or two (10-15 years) before complete IBM systems (hardware, OS, middleware, databases, applications etc) are close to autonomic - every aspect have to buy in and adapt the Autonomic Compouting framework. Given their extensive software catalog, IBM themselves will probably take 10-15 years to complete that task but they face a significantly larger hurdle convincing major 3rd party vendors (e.g. Oracle, SAP etc) to wire their products into the new autonimic services.

My guess is, in a mixed vendor (hardware/OS/application) environment, you won't see this for many, many years to come. Pure IBM shops may be able to rely on Autonomic systems within 5-10 years if they are using the latest of everything.

they want to make sure everyone is nice and compliant about upgrading when they decide to take httpd over to java like all the other java kool-aid they are selling --- Maven is Jonestown, lets all program in XML because its standard! Cultures breakdown when there is too little disent and questioning of authority, the apache foundtion is headed in that direction.

Lets move on, SOA and all that, most people don't need any of this mod_* crap and could use:
thttpd he has other servers there, too and http_load.
lighttpd I'm moving to this sweet little server for most apps and the home site runs ea php and ruby on rails
AOLServer like OpenACS runs on
Boa
fnord from our boy who did the (in)famous benchmarks
Cherokee I root for this one for some reason.
gatling
cthulhu
yaws in erlang, should support more simul. connections than the unlying OS can support.
dhttpd
Litespeed check out their php benchmarks
thy
roxen
mini-httpd never tried this one
xitami I have a intranet server running for 5 yrs (without upgrading xitami) on xitami Solaris, simple, small, easy to admin, never dies max uptime was 1000 days+.
eddiefor complex load bal and geographic distribution
hiawatha

And for the love of god, please at least design your sites to get their images from images.mysite.com if possible so that you can use a non-bloatware web server to server the images, reserving horsepower on your apache server for stuff that actually _requires_ some features of apache.

http://www.hcsw.org/awhttpd/ updated on 12-06-2004
http://www.norz.org/zawhttpd.html
http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html

Well this seems like where computing services are heading as IBM is doing extensive research on Self-Configuring, Self-Healing, Self-Optimizing, and Self-Protecting computing systems called 'Autonomic'

Check out: Autonomic Computing

I say we, but it was really my dad (an electronics technician) and my stepmom (a computer programmer) who did it. They took the TRS-80 parallel port output, which was a slow, simple 8 data lines and a clock, and connected it to an IBM Selectric.

The Selectric was already wired to accept electronic input, but not in ASCII. It expected tilt-and-rotate codes, which were directly transmitted to the golf ball shaped typing element. To translate the TRS-80's ASCII to tilt/rotate codes, my parents drew up a table of equivalents. Then, my dad came up with a way to logically combine the TRS-80's output with values stored in an EPROM to get the tilt/rotate codes.

I ended up using the computer for my typing class homework. Fortunately, the teacher didn't mind that I was writing BASIC programs like this:

10 A$ = "THE QUICK BROWN DOG ATE THE LAZY FOX"
20 FOR I% = 1 TO LEN(A$)
30 POKE addr, ASC(MID$(A$, I%, 1))
35 some sort of delay for the ball to get repositioned
40 NEXT

I thought I was getting away with something... but my teacher wisely realized that I was actually doing more typing by hacking around than I would have been if I'd used the actual typewriter.

It seems to me that they have taken some action besides just grandstanding. They have resurrected the x86 version and added several interesting features--containers, DTrace, and ZFS, for example--that are available today in beta versions of Solaris 10. They're actively rounding up support from developers and software companies. And they announced that the production version of Solaris 10 on x86 will be available for free. What do you think about the x86 move and the new Solaris features?

Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. (It has) very little support for any kind of strange hardware. If you thought Linux had issues with driver availability for some things, let's see you try Solaris/x86.

This attitude is perfectly fine for any Solaris release prior to 10. However, Sun has made massive strides both in performance and hardware support, especially on the AMD64 platform.

Furthermore, he completely dodged the questions about containers, DTrace, and ZFS. While these are all fancy names for things which are also available in Linux, the truth of the matter is the Linux counterparts cannot hold a candle to any of these features in Solaris. Here's a quick run down:

Containers: Solaris's new virtualization mechanism. Containers have a special kernel image which is able to communicate with the main system kernel entirely in kernel space. This is somewhat similar to the approach taken by the Xen virtual machine, except that Xen does it at a much lower level. Solaris containers may be thought of as somewhere between a Linux kernel instance running in Xen on top of another Linux kernel and BSD jails. It certainly is nothing like UML, where the UML kernel is running in process context and thus performs rather pathetically.

ZFS: This integrates all the features of a high end filesystem and high end volume manager into a single package. Unfortunately, this will only be available a few months after Solaris 10 General Availability, but once it hits expect tools like VxFS and the Veritas Volume Manager to be rendered thoroughly obsolete on the Solaris side. Linux certainly has many interesting filesystems with cool whiz-bang features, many of which aren't implemented in ZFS, but on the flip side ZFS has many features tuned towards the enterprise market which are seen in very few Linux filesystems, most notably XFS.

DTrace: While a bit obtuse for the time being, a simple demonstration of its power must be seen. The main advantage DTrace has over Linux alternatives such as KProbes, besides being massively more powerful, is that there is no performance impact on the system when they are not in use. DTrace probes are inserted into the kernel when needed and removed when not, whereas KProbes require they statically be built into the kernel.

Conclusion: There is a considerable amount of feature parity between Linux and Solaris 10, but the Solaris features all have an edge over the Linux ones. Linus should not let his hubris cloud his judgement... I expect Solaris 10 to be a major competator to Linux in the low end SMP server market.

Right now running Linux (or FreeBSD) on AMD64 has you flying by the seat of your pants a bit... it's certainly not polished and there are a number of caveats and gotchas to watch out for. Contrarily Solaris 10/AMD64, especially on Sun's own hardware, runs like a dream. I expect Solaris 10 to thoroughly decimate Linux in the Opteron server market.

There are still a number of areas where Linux is still playing catch up to Solaris as well, most notably in the realm of schedulers. While Linux 2.6 now sports a constant time scheduler like Solaris has had for a half decade, Solaris still supports modular schedulers which can be swapped in and out, can be active simultaneously, and processes can be moved between them. One of the most notable ones fo

Couple of things (as well as the very valid points already made about trying to order a non-standard ThinkPad as a one off):

1. IBM internally is challenging itself to move to Desktop Linux. I doubt it'll be on the basis of re-imaging all those ThinkPads, but will instead be in the standard refresh programme: when you get your new ThinkPad, it'll be Linux.
2. If you look at any recent (last year or two) Thinkpad, you'll note a lack of Windows key - there's no assumption there that the OS will be Windows.
3. Being able to buy (or not) a Thinkpad with Linux or no OS will very soon no longer be an indicator of any IBM thinking - like the rest of personal computing, the ThinkPad range will be owned by Lenovo as of 2Q05.

(Disclosure: I work for IBM, but in an entirely unrelated area of IGS)

I think the point is simplicity in management:
More info provided by IBM.

No wire management
No network management
No device management

It should be no more difficult to administer than a pile of Lego bricks.

I think with this design they've accomplished this.

Read up more about it. I think all your issues are addressed and moot.

Except for the glass part, you mean like these: http://www.netapps.com/products/filer/fas200_ds.ht ml? Or these http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/disk_ arrays/midrange/va7410/index.html? Or these http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds4000/d s4500/index.html? Real freakin' futuristic.

Caveat: I'm an employee of IBM's Storage Systems/Technology group, but I'm not working on that particular project. I am only discussing things that were in the previous press releases about this product so you won't get anything confidential out of this post.

The original intent, when this was previewed a year or so ago, was that dead bricks would just stay in there and not require disassembly. See http://www.almaden.ibm.com/StorageSystems/autonomi c_storage/CIB_Hardware/
for some more discussion.

The concern I have (my role in storage systems is error isolation and recovery) is that when you are running all these individual cubes, each one is trying to isolate what might have happened to its peers (or to itself) and when an error starts to propagate from one cube to the next, which it will invariably do sometime, you could end up with multiple cubes saying "IT'S THAT GUY!" and shooting him (ie, cutting him off) when in fact it was yet ANOTHER cube that started the whole thing by corrupting a message and is innocently sitting there not showing any failures.

So assuming that situation occurs, you have 1 failed and 1 not-failed cube which need to be fixed, and shutting off the failed one requires removal, which isn't part of the service model for the product. Needless to say, I'm going to be REALLY impressed when they get this working. My peers at IBM are awesome when it comes to storage, so I'm actually not being sarcastic when I say that.

No, we're talking about a Kiosk that lets you mail the package. Therefore the mechanics of mailing a 16 ouce package are perfectly valid.

Check out the Extreme Blue Co-Op program with IBM. I am sure they would have Project positions somewhere in the company for this skill set.

http://www-913.ibm.com/employment/us/extremeblue/

LOL. I wish I had the time. I'm wiring a house at the moment and will jump into plumbing, laying down hardwood floors, sheetrocking, painting, and anything else that's required as soon as the wiring is done. Another poster's comment I read seems to be on track though. One of the other repliers also pointed me to it. It's a paper called "Boot Linux Faster" by James Hunt of IBM UK. He used make to speed up his boot time. Good read if that's something you're going to do. He seems to be of a mind to just let the distro makers decide what loads in what order. I think I'd rather see an open source collaborative effort to decide what the default boot order will be. Still I'd rather see the hardcore fundamentals like network, NFS, and syslog brought up first because so many different processes depend on each of them. Beyond that I'd break it down to the individual application level. Have OpenLDAP? Load if after MySQL and/or PgSQL. Have MIMEDefang? Load it before Sendmail. Have ClamAV? Load it before MIMEDefang. Stuff like that. I think this is the most simple way to speed up the boot process. Put the CPU to work and get the box up quicker.

How about, uh, you know, actually loading multiple things at once instead of waiting for some service to take its time to start, therby holding everything else up along the way. That's what the problem seems to be - everything has to load in-line.

Perhaps you'd be interested in this IBM article which was on slashdot a while back.

• http://ostermiller.org/utils/com.Ostermiller.util Java Utilities - nice CSV tools among others
• http://protomatter.sourceforge.net/Protomatter - misc tools - object pools etc. (I know, I am lazy)
• http://jedit.org/ JEdit - lightweight, with tons of plugins highly customizable Java IDE/Editor (for those who find the great Eclipse too heavy)
• http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/ Great 100% Java Web Server / Servlet /JSP Container with JMX etc. etc.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartzEnterprise Job Scheduler
• http://mandarax.sourceforge.net/Great open source java class library for deduction rules
• http://alphaworks.ibm.com/Alphaworks as a whole are full of java goodies
• http://eclipse.org/aspectj/Did you ***** up your design ? Your project is a zombie that should be trashed and rewritten ages ago ? Aspects will save your day ;)

IBM wrote a white paper on using Make to parallelize the boot process on linux

It seems to ensure that any service that can be started is started as soon as is possible, and that any dependent services don't start until requisite services have completed starting. That was written in September of 2003.

Here some articles regarding booting Linux faster: Boot Linux faster and Reboot Linux faster using kexec Enjoy! ;)

Here some articles regarding booting Linux faster: Boot Linux faster and Reboot Linux faster using kexec Enjoy! ;)

This may be what you're thinking of:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-boot.html?ca=dgr-lnxw04BootFaster

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-boot.html?ca=dgr-lnxw82-obg-BootFast

works better..

In no particular order...

Commons Logging. Yeah, you said you wanted to avoid extra libraries, but the overhead of commons logging is so incredibly small, and the extra libraries you'll want to otherwise use are going to require it anyway. It's a measly 28KB last I checked, and well worth it.

HttpClient If you want to do any form of HTTP transfers, avoid HttpUrlConnection (built in to Java) at all costs. The HttpUrlConnection code is broken in many ways (too many to list), so you'll need another library. HttpClient does a good job of hiding the HTTP transfer behind the scenes, and has easy ways of letting you extend/change what you need.

JGoodies Looks Swing is getting better every day, but for that extra polish, you'll want to use the JGoodies Looks library. It does a great job of making Metal look just that much better, and also helps out the Windows L&F in some places.

Xerces I'm not sure if the bulk of this is included in the latter versions of Java, but Xerces is definitely a must-have for any XML parsing.

Other goodies...

For rendevous (multicast DNS) support, use jmDNS. It just works.

If you need i18n handling (normalization, etc..), IBM's icu4j does a great job.

The java game is (most likely) this. I'm also 16, and a few years ago a few people at school went to an IBM conference/activity day which used this. I agree with the points in the post above, wish they did some of them at my school.

1. The program is called RoboCode and it is still around. Really engaging and gets them up to speed quickly. My son built a little bot before he even learned any programming. He just programmed by example and cut/paste.

Let's talk real 3D, glasses and all. This would completely change everything and for the better.

Yes, let's talk about this "better" world.

Putting things in a real background,

Okay in a real 3D, there is no "background", just like how there's no "background" in real life. There's just things that are farther away. The way you put things in the "background" is either by schlepping the window 5km away from where you're working, and then then return the 5km to your primary worksite. This method is incredibly annoying and inefficent.

Or you can perfom some action that moves automatically moves the window 5km, then perform some action that automatically retrieves the window from 5km away. How this is different from a 2d interface iconifying a window to a thumbnail, I don't know.

3D video,

Well all that requires is a 3d video player, not really a 3d interface, unless of course you're talking about fully immersive virtual reality, but I'm assuming your not.

parking windows,

I'm not familiar with parking windows.

3D representations of CD cases instead of ID3 tags,

Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.

Another example is all those media player skins that resemble radios, tubas, organ grinders, and what not. These are widely considered to be very poorly designed interfaces. Whatever intuitiveness is gained by modeling the interface to superficially resemble a real world device is lost the moment the user tries to use it. You can't twist dials easily with a mouse. It's much slower to click a series of button widgets, than press physical buttons. Compare onscreen keyboards to your physical keyboards.

Let's change your idea from id3 tags to cddb files, since id3tags are per track, and cd cases are per album. Right now I click "view info" and get a window that displays the tracklisting and possibly the album cover. With your idea I would click "view info" and magically the cd case would fly into view. I would then need to rotate the case to view the track listing, and then rotate it again to view the cover art. Presumably the case would be textured in high resolution scans of the physical cd's artwork. As anyone who has viewed the back cover art can attest, it's not always easily read (i.e. screwy fonts, text that spirals around the outside edge, tracks not always listed in order, etc.).

3D website deisgn

Of course websites are mostly text, an intrinsicly 2d object. So it's unclear on how you would actually add a third dimension to this. Sure you display one page, and then display outgoing pages farther away, but if you can't read them, then what's the point. You could achieve this same thing by displaying a thumbnail of the link's destination in a traditional 2d interface.

I think the thumbnail idea is alot more plausible than that Johnny Mnemonic crap.

remote control of real world objects

I'll give you this one if the device interacts in the world in 3d. So, a robot arm? Yes. A furnace? No.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all 3d are pure crap. I'm saying use them where appropriate (CAD, geospatial, some simulation, spreadsheets), and not where it's not (text, photographs, cd players, ...)

>This is just another fantastic way to waste the CPU

So is anti-aliasing, so is even having a windowing system that isn't completely and utterly bare bones, etc.

Anti-aliasing isn't simply eyecandy. It enhances the user experience by making text easier to read. The easier it is read, the easier the user can perform his task.

Some of us buy our CPUs to use them, not coddle t

developerWorks article by Cameron Laird

And all invented by IBM ...
http://www.ibm.com/Search?q=copper+silicon&v=14&la ng=en&cc=us&Search.x=0&Search.y=0&Search=Searc h

512 nodes SSI system. Made by IBM. Running Linux. z/Series.

1. How will this work on a Linux machine?
With the security that is the hallmark of a Linux box, how do law enforcement officials expect to tap into someone's computer if they are running Linux? At best they could only monitor the user account they installed the software for.

I'll probably be modded troll for saying this, but linux OOTB is LESS secure from this sort of attack than any modern windows. At least the win2k/xp variants will check out critical system files at startup, so if one of them is replaced it will be corrected. Linux isn't even that secure - one could replace any of dozens of executable files on a linux machine - or even just edit root level scripts with a text editor in knoppix - and make the system record every keystroke from login.. and you'd likely never know it.

But more importantly, you're thinking way too high level. Every machine has a BIOS and a boot sector, and most every PC uses the same code-compatible CPU. All it would take is two variants - a mac version and a lintel version. Stick it on the boot sector while the house is unoccupied and bingo. Better still, just flash it into the BIOS or infect the NVRAM.

This is but one example of the need for the linux community to get over the allergic overeaction to TCPA enabling technologies and work toward making linux the frontrunner in this regard. Any box will always be vulnerable to physical attacks, but there's a LOT we can do to protect our systems that isn't being done now on any ootb distro.

It's strained silicon which gets it's name from stretching the silicon.

http://www.intel.com/labs/features/si12031.htm

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/press/strain edsilicon/

Peoplesoft and IBM recently penned a strategic alliance to resell and promote each others' products. So I guess this will begoing the way of the dodo. Or will it? Will the contract language leave Oracle in the embarrassing position of promoting DB2 as the preferred database platform for Peoplesoft and JD Edwards?

I'm also wondering, long-term, about support from Oracle for Peoplsoft on platforms other than Oracle. Will Oracle support Peoplesoft on Oracle, Oracle, and Oracle? My understanding that most Peoplesoft implementations were historically SQL Server with the new preferred platform being DB2. if that changes again it'd be BIG headaches for DB2 customers...

Peoplesoft and IBM recently penned a strategic alliance to resell and promote each others' products. So I guess this will begoing the way of the dodo. Or will it? Will the contract language leave Oracle in the embarrassing position of promoting DB2 as the preferred database platform for Peoplesoft and JD Edwards?

I'm also wondering, long-term, about support from Oracle for Peoplsoft on platforms other than Oracle. Will Oracle support Peoplesoft on Oracle, Oracle, and Oracle? My understanding that most Peoplesoft implementations were historically SQL Server with the new preferred platform being DB2. if that changes again it'd be BIG headaches for DB2 customers...

The only new thing in the patent is that the wave cam comes in pieces, rather than being made as one big unit.

The only new thing in the patent is that the wave cam comes in pieces, rather than being made as one big unit.

I hear all the 1337 h4x0rz are using Lotus Notes because it's teh r0x0rz.

I'm hoping more tech-savy slashdot readers can help me understand a couple things. I read cringely's article, got interested by the PowerPC servers that IBM are selling, looked at them on IBM's site, and was surprised that the cheapest one was $5000, for a 1.5 Ghz CPU, 512 memory and 36 GB SCSI HD.

Can someone explain to me how this is competitive? I understand that mhz isn't everything, and PPC is 64 bit, but for that much money I can buy Five Rackmount Dell 2.4 Ghz Xeon pizza boxes with similar specs, or a single Dual Xeon Tower with 6x73 GB SCSI in Raid 5 config, 2 GB Ram, & Tape backup. Perhaps the best comparison is an AMD Opteron 1U with 1 GB memory, only I can buy 3 Opteron servers.

I'm no fan of Dell, but I would choose them (or HP, etc) over an IBM PPC box for $5k. If you are someone who would chose the IBM PPC, I'd like to know your thoughts and what you see as advantages, given the price. Thanks

donch u worry, those dragon people would be shouting all sort of perl insults at /. right about now. but isnt it lunch hour their?? i mean, even the webadmins got to sleep. i gotta thought tho: can /. take down http://www.ibm.com/ or the likes of http://www.microsoft.com/

Except, of course, for all of those x86 based machines in their server line.