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My arse the "standard" is "the original Windows" keys.

There are a whole pile of user interfaces that predate the existance of Microsoft and all their regularly changing applications.

"CUA92" is a string of 5 characters, if you'd stopped at that I'd have just ignored you, but take a moment to look for it on the web and you wanna know how many hits you get at google? 5. Yes, FIVE. Only one of which is even remotely related, it happens to be a German paper about Object Oriented Design, and it refers to what CUA92 really is, the IBM Common User Access guidelines, circa 1992. This is about as close as you can find outside of the IBM Archives.

Shareaza code is based on MFC, so I wonder, whether it could be ported to wxWindows (which has similar interface).

Some of the terms he used were bad choices, but look at the target he's talking to. He's said it's not for corporate IT shops but it is for IT specialists and hobbyists (bad choice of words). Meaning the datacenter is going to be going to a different model soon and the OS that is run, the computers that are run on etc will be likely irrelevant for many purposes. It will be the middleware that is what the corporate customers should be concerned with.

This goes to the whole feeling of turning the datacenter into a utility type service just like gas, electricity, etc. You pay for computing power to run apps, not for servers. IBM and HP appear to be going in the same direction.

McNealy should really get a speech writer.

Erm, when I refer to Linux, I mean the kernel. That's what Linux is, that nifty binary image that sits on your hardware and makes your SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTION work. Ok, let's set this semantics argument aside.

Here's your link, asshat.

We're arguing about degrees, which is pretty silly and definately pointless. I think the important theme to take away from this is that IBM is a fine example of why OSS kicks ass. I don't have the resources to get the stuff done that IBM gets done. Luckily, IBM does have the resources! It works out for everyone. If they did pull support, linux wouldn't break, but development would surely slow down.

According to C-Net Asia, Sun plans to make Solaris open source soon.

Yep, just like they'll open source Java soon.

This is just another half-assed attempt of SUN trying to compete with IBM. Move along, nothing to see here...

-B

• Harvard Mark 1 (1939 - 1944) - semi-programmable electromechanical computing machine.
• Zuse Z3 (1938-1941) - small general purpose relay computer. Good architecture, but limited by relay speeds to a 5Hz (yes, Hz) clock. First floating point unit. No jump instruction, due to a low budget. The later Z4 (1945-1949) had jumps and conditional branches.
• Atanasoff-Berry (1937-1942) Programmable, electronic arithmetic, binary, but memory was a rotating drum of capacitors.
• Colossus (1944?) Special-purpose key-testing machine.
• ENIAC (1943-1946) - plugboard-programmed tube machine. No general purpose memory, just registers. Tube ALU.
• IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier (1946) - first commercial electronic computing product. Punched card I/O, not truly programmable, but electronic multiplication and division.

Most of these machines had electronic arithmetic units. The big problem was memory. There were no good memory technologies yet, and none of those machines had much memory. They all basically had a few registers, like a calculator. Each bit of memory required a relay, a tube, or a discrite capacitor and switchgear.

Finally, the memory problem was solved. EDVAC, (1947-1952), had 1K of mercury-tank delay line memory. This was a lousy main memory technology (you had to wait for the word you wanted to come around, like a disk), but allowed reasonable memory sizes. It was clunky, but at last, there was memory.

With the memory problem partially solved, various groups started building machines. Pilot ACE, ACE, and IAS date from this period.

The UNIVAC I (1948-1951) had it all - memory (1K words, in mercury tanks), console, tape drives, console typewriter, programmability, electronic arithmetic, a reasonable instruction set, and self-checking. It was built, sold, and used. UNIVAC I was the first of these machines that a modern programmer would consider usable.

Robocode

Robocode

Sounds familiar.

RoboCode involves much the same in Java with the added fun of a game. Okay, so the turtles have guns... ;)

We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment.

Well, either he is saying that 64bit Linux on the Opteron is not a top-to-bottom solution, or that it is a toy environment. I frankly don't care whether it is "top-to-bottom" or "side-to-side", but 64bit Linux on the Opteron seems to work well. I mean, IBM is using 64bit Linux as the basis of their eServer 325, a machine with 2116 Opterons in it.

Also, what PPC hardware am I supposed to run this on? If I buy Apple hardware, Apple is just going to use those sales to claim more OS X installations and to try to use that as a marketing weapon against Linux. And IBM PPC hardware is pretty expensive.

I don't quite understand why IBM doesn't want to create something like a G5, only "more serious". I'm sure the pSeries machines are excellent, but if they could just lower the price a bit by dropping some of the enterprise features that drive the price up, they could sell quite a lot of them.

Well, what you're talking about is essentially a consumer version of the PPC. Unfortunately, the consumer market is a business IBM has made it clear they don't want to be in, the enterprise is where they've chosen to compete.

On the bright side, they have been encouraging 3rd party vendors, most notably Genesi, to build consumer products based on PPC. I think there are probably some other 3rd party boards available, but I haven't really kept up with them.

I expect commoditized PPC systems will eventually become an option, but unless the 3rd partys establish it as a lucrative market first, I doubt IBM will jump into the frey.

IBM tends to avoid competing in the consumer market directly, but they're more than happy to sell parts and license technology to companies who want to play there.

For servers there's the JS20. If you're talking about an IBM Linux PPC workstation, give up already; that market's even smaller than Apple's.

Riiiight. Commercial product off of OSS.

May I direct you to a few companies/products that seem to be doing well in this regard:

• MySQL
• Trolltech (Qt)
• Apple's MacOS X
• Nokia's IPSO platform (based on FreeBSD)

I'm sure other slashdot readers can provide further examples. The trick with GPL-based OSS and generating revenue, is to provide value-add (which may be through commercial closed-source tools). Alternatively, the tried and true position is through services, which IBM and HP seem to have figured out.

Because any machine without e-i-e-i/o just isn't going to make the cut at old macdonalds farm.

They're PowerPC-based, so of course they have EIEIO (Enforce In-Order Execution of I/O) - see PowerPC(TM) Microprocessor Family - The Programming Environment for 32-Bit Microprocessors.

It's MUCH more likely PowerPC 970 (aka G5). The Power5 is for really high-end servers.

First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.

Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website

Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!

If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet,
and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.isprime.com as one of the EFNet servers.

If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here

check out this: PAN or Personal Area Network. using this stuff (like build into a watch or something) you could do what you want with no wires. cool stuff.

to business cards! So, if I am at a conference and I talk to someone doing interesting stuff, we can just have the business cards touch and exchange all necessary contact information. Now that would be really easy. If there were a way to wire this thing to your fingertips, you could exchange the information by shaking hands :)

That's been around for ages.

Phillip.

You picked a good time to ask -- I just spent the last few hours putting out a new alpha release of the jSyncManager (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) up on our project site at SourceForge (http://sf.jsyncmanager.org).

(The jSyncManager is a pure-Java data synchronization solution for PalmOS based handhelds that is completely platform-neutral, with an open API, easy extensibility, and its own jConduit plug-in architecture).

I started this project back in 1997, writing the jSerial API, and latest the jSyncManager itself. It saw its first release (free, but under a closed-source license) in May 1999. It's gone through several iterations (including an IBM released version called ManplatoSync for Java), finally being released under an Open Source license in September 2002.

I not only work on it daily still, but I'm in the process of setting up a software service/integration/development company around it.

My biggest challenges include trying to involve other developers in the project -- we have a small core, and users do occassionally submit patches, but attracting Open Source developers that actually make any contributions can be a real hassle. If your experience turns out to be like mine, you'll have lots of good intentioned people offer to help out, but will have a very difficult time finding people who will actually do any work, or make contributions without prodding. It can take a while to find developers who are real gems (although when you do, you'll invariably find yourself making some good friends and contacts -- your core developers are your biggest asset).

Some suggestions:

• Don't skimp on documentation. Good user and developer documentation can make or break your project. Complex projects that other developers can't easily get into because of poor API and developer documentation can slow development and developer acceptance of your project. Likewise, poor end-user documentation can likewise stymie uptake.
• Setup a discussion mailing list/online forum and post into it whenever you make an updatee or new release. When starting a new project, users are often leery of empty forums devoid of activity. So be sure when you start your project to generate your own activity until you attract users. Some users base their perceptions of the activity of a project on its public user community, so list/forum traffic is good.
• Release early, release often. Plan your "final" releases, then release various alpha/beta releases whenever you add something new. In this way, your project will be percieved as active by potential users. Daily updates to your CVS repository won't really matter if your last file release was three years ago -- not every user wants to get code from CVS.

As for licensing, I chose to release the API under the LGPL to allow developers to choose their own licensing for any plug-ins they develop that use the API, and the GPL for our applications and the core plug-ins that we've developed. In this way we can ensure that our applications and plug-ins can't be integrated into a closed-source project, and can't be modified and released as closed source by third parties, but they can develop closed-source applications that call our library (although any changes to the library sources must be released as Open Source). So far users appear to be very happy with this arrangement.

Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Projet Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.

Giving away CPU cycles so that a multi-million dollar company can improve its product is a wholly different thing.

This sounds vaguely sounds familiar...

I think there'd be plenty of people who'd be up for this. Just ask any OSS developer!

It's the iSeries, and OS/400 seems to be called i5/OS nowadays...

Reminds me of some companies effort to replace their aging AS/400 with NT systems around y2k:

Dr. Frank Soltis, the IBM engineer who has been called "the AS/400's Elvis," recently shared a success story during a keynote speech at a user conference in Florida. This particular company was in the software distribution business and at one point had 23 AS/400s located around the world. The company was a very good customer, went from CISC to RISC, and was always one of the first to upgrade to new technology, he said.

Then came the Year 2000 problem, and despite five years of dedicated service during a period of great revenue growth, the company decided that it was time to move off the AS/400. So in June of 1999, the company unplugged its AS/400s and powered up the 1,200 NT servers it needed to replace them. But things didn't quite go as planned. "They found they couldn't make it work," Soltis told the crowd. "Today, one year after unplugging their AS/400s, they're back on the AS/400."

That company is Microsoft. "They viewed that as a point of embarrassment," Soltis said. "We thought it was kind of fun....Can you think of a company with greater incentive to move to NT, and they couldn't do it?"

But it appears that Microsoft was not quite so amused, and denied the whole thing.

cheers- raga

Ahem. One of the filesystems for OS/2 is GPL.

Perhaps they are working on it.....

Linux For IBM FAQ

The system is basically an accelerometer which monitor the movements of the laptop, and spins down the HD when there is a risk of impact. I would like to write a Linux driver for it, but I refuse to reverse engineer the windows driver. More info here

"IBM's Linux pitch is either stupid or insincere. I think it's a little bit of both. It's not a sensible strategy for IBM in the long run," Zachmann says."

I am not so sure about that. In 2001 Thomas Schenk's article compared Linux with AIX and found it wanting in terms of enterprise support. Clearly Linux has come a long way since then.

In 2003, Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's Software Group said Linux is the logical successor to AIX

For the customers, it sure would be nice not to have to pay AIX licensing fees.

--
Evan

They don't make money off of selling linux but they do make money off of linux. Just look at thier linux offerings

All in favor of overturning evil software monopoly and rooting for evil hardware and software monopoly say "Yes!"

eBay's webservers are IIS/Windows, but their applications run on Websphere, under xSeries Hardware. Their is a little PR blurb on eBay, and another one on IBM's site

The real question is, whose technology will Dell copy if Apple and HP fall apart?

That's easy... the technology that Apple and HP copy from: IBM

Sun has open sourced a lot of products. JFS is good but I don't know of many people using it and can't think of any distributions that use it as their default filesystem. What else has IBM open sourced?

Personally, I don't believe much of the negative things said about Sun that come out of any OSDN site or site closely affiliated with Linux. Since Solaris had such a large portion of the of the Unix market, linux enthusiasts with the short sighted view of taking over Solaris will be good for Linux tend to bash the company to aid in Linux's acceptance over Solaris.

I don't understand the argument that people don't like McNealy for bashing linux considering the people at Sun haven't said anything about linux worse than IBM when they were comparing Linux to AIX. Yet IBM is the hero and Sun the vilain. My guess is IBM is behind it, using the linux community to weaken it's rival, a much smaller company that has beat it in the unix market and has been eating into it's mainframe market. I can't be the only one that feels this way? I mean, it's very good to have people like IBM and other big companies supportling linux, but at what point did we all decide to stop rooting for the little guy?

I don't know why Sun is using Suse 9.1. Maybe it's because Novell now own's Suse and won't license new versions the way Suse did when it was on it's own? With 50 million IBM dollars going to Novell which helped it buy Suse, the company Sun was working with on JDS, you really have to wonder.

A nice little image that indicates that linux.com is sponsored by Novell doesn't lead me to assume an unbiased review either.

JDS is primarily meant for corporate desktop use. None of the systems the reviewer used would be what you would typically see in a typical cubicle.

I'm not sure that the Unix robots was the first such game. Wasn't there an Apple II commercial game that sparked it all off? After that, there were variants everywhere. (There was even an HP3000 version that used a RPN Forth-like language.)

Which one was that? I liked them. I don't think they were condescending at all.

K42 link

I can imagine Darl McBride runs it day and night to make and release a "music compilation CD" that consists of 100,000,000 different music patterns and develops a patern comparison program to sue some upcoming musician.

Seriously, heard it, and it sounds better than monkey punching keyboard as it has some rhythm and cycle, but still, calling it "music" is wild use of the word. What's the point of "Using Java"?

Yes, servers can benefit from dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (aka Cool'n'quiet). My colleagues wrote several papers on this topic.

I found this bit really interesting (and insightful, actually, more on that below):

Actually in my spare time I had an idea of one revolutionary and ambitious project I can build on top of the trusted computing capable hardware (that project has nothing to do with linux by the way, but for it to run on linux too, linux would need to provide some basic trusted computing support), that's something I wanted to build for a long time but it has never been feasible until they added the trusted computing to the hardware and they filled the gap to make my idea possible, so I'm quite happy about these new hardware features (despite clearly they can be misused for some annoying things too).

I bring it up because this is so contrary to the common opinion on /., which is that TCPA is unabashedly evil and has no utility. Andrea is obviously one very smart guy, and a person who feels the need to have complete control over his machine, but who likes TCPA in spite of the risk of misuse. Contradiction?

The fact is that TCPA *is* an extremely useful and valuable technology for systems that require a high degree of security. It's not clear to me that the average home PC benefits from it, but it's very valuable for cheap, high-performance key management systems and cryptographic accelerators, systems that contain valuable data (like many businessmen's laptops), and systems at critical points in network infrastructure. I'm sure there are other valuable, and non rights-eroding, applications as well.

In my work as a designer and developer of high-security systems, I'm extremely excited about the fact that we can now buy low-end computing equipment that has TCP hardware. It enables so much. The next step is TCP hardware that is tamper-resistant, or even tamper-reactive, but still cheap. For now, really high-security systems still require something better, but TCPA can fill the niche between systems that require serious security and those that can get by with purely software-based security (or no security, which is fine for the majority of desktops and laptops).

To be clear, DRM is a bad idea, in general. The business applications (self-destructing documents, confidential documents that cannot be printed) do have potential utility, but I doubt they're worth the complexity they'll create. And Palladium aka NGSCB aka whatever-it's-called-today is an unquestionably evil notion, focused on removing the ability of people to control their own hardware, in an effort to allow a couple of declining business models to prop one another up.

IMO, what geek activists need to focus on is not killing the development of tools like TCPA, but rather on legal and social means of ensuring our rights.

Tools are not evil. Only users are evil.

If only there were some large organisations who'd stand up for Linux when this kind of crap came out. That's the trouble with having no shareholders - no-one to start litigation.

Anyone know if there's a paper on this? This news came up on another site a couple of days ago, but they didn't even mention the researchers name, only implied it was presented at EuroCrypt'2004 in Switzerland. I looked though the list of accepted papers, but nothing stood out.

A search on IACR will give a single hit on the author, but it isn't this report/paper/work.

> ...why else would anyone by a DOS in 1996 except to use it to sue? I think the world had moved on by that point.

IBM is still selling PC-DOS for $67.

...so typical, it almost seems like a troll. I believe this is what the grandparent poster was looking for.

but if Apple doesn't patent this some other company might. Given Apple's involment in the open source community with Darwin, http://www.opensource.apple.com/ , I would rather see them with a patent for this than some company based on patents only.

This is the usual Apple apology. Apple is the "good" company, and otherwise "bad" behavior is OK for them to pursue, since an evil company might patent it first, and we all know that Apple never does anything evil. Oh, and they're involved in open source, too, which makes them even more of a "good" company, unlike some other evil companies who aren't involved in supporting open source at all.

It's all fairly typical of the excuse making by Apple followers who otherwise masquerade as FOSS zealots in other threads.

We're supposed to believe you live and work in Canada, and not East Fishkill NY?

TZ

The Fujitsu 5020D has similar specs - 10.27" x 7.80" x 1.55" (though only certain models have 512 megs ram), and the IBM X series is also thin and light, though a little wider. Unfortunately, the lousy computer stores near me have none of these three - just massive 10kg desktop replacements that produce levels of heat and noise comparable to a blowdryer.

will it run Linux?

I could see it being a good choice but I can't find any mention on what OS it'll run. I wonder if it'll work as a Linux desktop for things other than "content creation"? I did find this press release at IBM though:

Cell-based workstations to be readied for entertainment applications

Don't be silly, Apple is a very small fish in a very big pond compared to real supercomputer companies like SGI.

What the big companies do is let you login to their machines free of charge, over the internet, and take their machines for a spin. See e.g. http://www.testdrive.compaq.com

On top of that, what the companies with a *serious interest* in high performance computing (like SGI and Cray) do is let you email your program to them: they will spend days or weeks (up to you) tuning it, telling you how it works on their hardware, and even telling you that you're better off with the competition, if that ends up being the case. What these companies understand very well, that Apple doesn't, is that people who spend $10M+ on computing equipment, typically with public money, need to show due diligence in their choice of hardware. This means THOROUGH evaluation: benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks - and not _standard_ benchmarks, but the benchmarks that matter: the user's own software.

Take a look here to see a real-life snapshot of this kind of process.

Any company that tried to "fudge the numbers" would be caught out, and that looks VERY bad. So the companies instead do all they can to help with the evaluation process, and hope that they get chosen. If not, there's always the next sale. A big supercomputer is sold somewhere every day or two, after all.

Virginia Tech's "X" doesn't come into this category: for example, no actual scientific work has been performed on the machine so far apart from benchmarks/system development, etc. Dr Varadarajan is probably going to get a pretty nasty grilling in a couple of years, when the University asks "so, what did we get for our money?" Some P.R., and not a whole lot more it would seem. I wish them luck...

Apple is not really a supercomputer company: and really, who cares? Apple has been, is, and will probably remain a great computer company for a good long while yet. But don't expect Apple to help you out a great deal if you pop them an email going "say, how does the G5 run on the ASCI Purple benchmarks?". That's just not what Apple are about. (example: they are happy to sell you a box with a 64-bit CPU, but they could care less that they don't have a 64-bit OS to go with it..)

Why can't you read yourself?

Some relevant parts:

When the Program is made available in source code form:

a) it must be made available under this Agreement; and
b) a copy of this Agreement must be included with each copy of the Program.

Contributors may not remove or alter any copyright notices contained within the Program.

Each Contributor must identify itself as the originator of its Contribution, if any, in a manner that reasonably allows subsequent Recipients to identify the originator of the Contribution.

The license expressly grants any patent licenses as well. It also allows for closed source binary-only distribution.

Sorry - neater use of URL via link: AMOS