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Download the 'Identification Utility for Deskstar hard disk drives'. This will tell you the firmware revision of your Deskstar.

Based on the firmware revision of your drive, match it to one of the following patterns:
If "xxxIxxxx" (or your system is on this list), download this firmware update.
If "xxxOxxxx", download this firmware update.

Disclaimer: Read the directions. Having a backup of your disk drive before proceeding is encouraged.

Download the 'Identification Utility for Deskstar hard disk drives'. This will tell you the firmware revision of your Deskstar.

Based on the firmware revision of your drive, match it to one of the following patterns:
If "xxxIxxxx" (or your system is on this list), download this firmware update.
If "xxxOxxxx", download this firmware update.

Disclaimer: Read the directions. Having a backup of your disk drive before proceeding is encouraged.

Download the 'Identification Utility for Deskstar hard disk drives'. This will tell you the firmware revision of your Deskstar.

Based on the firmware revision of your drive, match it to one of the following patterns:
If "xxxIxxxx" (or your system is on this list), download this firmware update.
If "xxxOxxxx", download this firmware update.

Disclaimer: Read the directions. Having a backup of your disk drive before proceeding is encouraged.

While it's true that the Cray-1 supported 64-bit integers in 1976, it only had 24-bit addresses (though they were addresses of 64-bit words, so it supported 2^27 bytes of memory). The IBM 360 started out with 24-bit byte addresses, later extended to 31 bits, and extended again to 64 bits only in 2000 (with the ""z/Architecture").

The bottom line is that 4GB of memory was not affordable by anyone until fairly recently in computing history (particularly on Crays, where main memory was typically SRAM!), so 32-bit addresses were not a huge limitation.

I don't know of any machine that had 64-bit addresses before the R4000. Specifically, an architecture where a single user process could address a flat 2^64-byte memory space (or even more than 2^32 bytes). I'm sure if I'm wrong someone will point that out!

I agree with your general lament, but I think you're misapplying it here.

For whatever reason, the world still tends to ignore anything but Intel and friends' processors. Intel and AMD working on negotiating a 64-bit desktop standard does not represent the beginning of 64-bit on the desktop. IBM and Apple make a pretty nice 64-bit desktop machine thats been out for months.

d00d!@ Rexx is the coolest thing ever! Write all your code in big REXX like you were a CONSULTANT at a BANK in 1988!!!

Man, I can't believe someone's still kicking poor old REXX around. REXX, the crazy computer lingo that won't die -- a deadly scripting language in the horrible tradition of DOS batch programs and JCL. Gar! It's REXX!

Back in the day, when OS/2 fanatics would get all uppity-puppity about how great OS/2 was, their SECOND most deadly comeback (after "You can format two diskettes at once! One in drive a:, and one in drive b:! Try THAT on a Mac/DOS/Windows/Whatever!!!") was that OS/2 had REXX. It was the ne plus ultra of PC-level scripting languages. It would stop a conversation cold.

I think the Amiga also had REXX, which, like, that's the kinda thing that Amiga folks still get all teary-eyed over. "I miss the Amiga! It had great VIDEO! and it had REXX!! Waaaaaah!"

Hey, so, can you still buy a computer with TWO floppy drives? I wonder. That'd be kind of cool to find one. It's kinda sad to think of all the computing manpower in the late 80s that went into making it possible to format two diskettes at once, and now nobody even HAS two floppies. Like, as if Project Apollo had been achieved, and then the moon fell out of the sky or something. Who cares! Why bother?

Oh, yeah, but anyhow: back to REXX. IBM has this great REXX site, chock full of links to other REXX sites and REXX programs. There were wack developer tools in the early 90s, like Watcom's VX-REXX, a VISUAL REXX. Of course, there's a link from this site. And IBM has, of course, a couple of crazy-ass updated versions of REXX, like for example Object-REXX (no shit!). The coolest one I can see is the new NetREXX, which compiles REXX to Java, which can be, in turn, compiled into Java bytecode for running in a browser.

Yay for REXX! REXX everywhere! REXX REXX REXX!

Depending on the make of disk, try running the manufacturer's diagnostic utilities - they may give a better idea of any problems.

IBM http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.ht m
Fujitsu http://www.fujitsu.com/au/support/hdd/warranty/
Maxtor http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/index.h tm
Seagate http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/index.html
Western Digital http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
Samsung http://www.samsung.com/Support/ProductSupport/inde x.htm

There are many tools which come with today's GNU/Linux distributions that can be used to test hardware. Knoppix and LiveCD distros are useful for their portability. Full-blown distros can be even more useful due to the sheer breadth of tools that they contain. GNU/Linux drivers and tools can usually be made to output large volumes of information on what they're doing and what they've found. Being open source, they can be more fully understood. Tools can be combined to perform all sorts of tasks and tests.

I have used The Linux Hardware Stability Guide at IBM DeveloperWorks (Part 1 | Part 2) to test and tweak a number of systems. I have found the best stress testers to be a looped kernel compilation, cpuburn and Memtest86. Mprime is good as well.

There are many tools which come with today's GNU/Linux distributions that can be used to test hardware. Knoppix and LiveCD distros are useful for their portability. Full-blown distros can be even more useful due to the sheer breadth of tools that they contain. GNU/Linux drivers and tools can usually be made to output large volumes of information on what they're doing and what they've found. Being open source, they can be more fully understood. Tools can be combined to perform all sorts of tasks and tests.

I have used The Linux Hardware Stability Guide at IBM DeveloperWorks (Part 1 | Part 2) to test and tweak a number of systems. I have found the best stress testers to be a looped kernel compilation, cpuburn and Memtest86. Mprime is good as well.

save for the IBM Bertha display

Over at IBM's Alphaworks site they've got a project called Business Integration for Games that seems to be oriented along these lines.

Yeah, and IBM owns Informix too, which runs on Linux.

IBM has gone so far as to build a number of GCCisms into their native compilers, just to deal with this sort of thing on AIX. It's actually really nice -- most everything Open Source builds on AIX 5.2 now.

I meant desktop/workstation class machines, it'd probly be perverse to use this as a coding/web/email machine.

IBM should make some g5 PPC systems aimed specifically at linux. If they're cheap enough I'd buy one.

Is this why IBM have never had anything to do with Java?

Nothing what so ever.

Is this why IBM have never had anything to do with Java?

Nothing what so ever.

1. Good DVD player & CD-RW that just work, without mesing around. If this software is not part of the distro, simple instructions on how to get/install it (one click?).

CD-RW burner software now comes with nearly all distributions. From the command line there's cdrecord and mkiso, for the GUI there's xcdroast and k3b. DVD playing of most DVDs, due to the encoding being illegal to distribute without royalties and NDAs, is difficult to get for Linux without knowing what to look for - but that's an effect of the American legal system rather than Linux's fault.

2. Friends who are familiar with the OS/Distro, for the network effects and piece of mind in case something goes drastically wrong. This is where having a "critical mass" (fuzzy value) comes in - this is already happening, but the more, the better.

Make friends at your local LUG (Linux User's group), and of course there's plenty of mailing lists, news groups, and IRC channels to go to.

5. Use easier "language" - eventually (in 1-2 years) e.g., non-cryptic commands, or a *standardized* set of aliases that work on all distros. [And continue to evolve the GUI so the user doesn't HAVE TO use the CLI.]

"ls" isn't much less cryptic than "dir", and is much more powerful. Togeather the Unix toolset is one of the most useful and powerful set of tools available, in spite of it's slightly greater crypticness than the DOS shell. Windows users are used to a shell environment that has very few features, so they tend to think that if Unix stresses the CLI it's stressing a less useful environment than the typical GUI. I reccomend you get a book, such as O'Reilly's "UNIX Power Tools", and learn the power of the force. ;-)

6. Better Grub/Lilo/equivalent that is less intimidating for new users that want multi-boot. Preferably with a easy to use GUI that detects all HDDs & partitions and tells you what's on them (with as much relevant information as possible).

Red Hat has an easy to use GUI for configuring GRUB now. grub is really not hard to configure though, it's menu file is pretty clear and easier and less fragile than lilo. Check out the grub tutorial on IBM Developerworks

7. Some packaging system with less dependency problems. [Yes, there are a few that show very good promise, with only occasional issues surfacing.]

Kiddies with their emerge, their apt-get, and their urpmi... installpkg 0wnz j00.

(Sorry, I'm a Slackware user - and I find talk of dependency problems amusing; our solution to that problem is not to have brain-dead dependency checking in the first place. It actually works smoothly most of the time.)

8. The equivalent of a "tray" where one can see the status of the firewall, proxy server, network connection, ..., similar to a few other OSs. The lack of such status is hard to get used to, for a new/non-expert user.

KDE has a network connection icon I think, kinternet, though I think it only works for dialup. For the firewall all you need is the command line and "iptables -L". For overall status you might want to check out gkrellm, it's a pretty-looking graphical display of CPU usage, memory, disk activity, network activity, and more if you get additional plugins for it. Maybe that would interest you...

9. Few, well chosen default applications on the distro (not "give them four of everything"). [Lot of progress has already happened in this area in a few distros.]

I find a full Slackware install to be a happy medium between bloat and bare-bones install. Of course, you probably wouldn't like Slackware because it has no additional GUI tools. Probably SuSE, Mandrake, or Red Hat/Fedora would be more your speed; or maybe Xandros or Lycoris if those are too hard. (I don't reccomend Lindows to anyone.)

They will look like this.

Good old IBM to the rescue. Ibm T41p, may have a smaller screen and be ugly, but at least I don't have to go to the chiropractor after lugging it five feet.

And I agree with Davidson. Sure it's cool, in a geek sort of way - if I had the time - just to see if it's possible, but seriously, why add fuel to the fire? I think its very naive to assume MSFT will play fair about this, those that buy into this apparently have either very short memories or haven't been around in the IT industry for very long. Check the history books to see how MSFT has demolished rival after rival. You can be assured they will not let .gnu or MONO every be anything other than a toy.

Much better is the strategy followed by Linus and Sun (with Java) - embrace(Linux is Unix-like, Java is C++ like) and extend(Linux *will* supercede Unix, and Java is a huge improvement over C++), rather than mimic a few pieces here and there. That ain't gonna cut it.

These people http://www.ibm.com/linux/ can help. Worldwide, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Look at http://www.openafs.org/ , http://www.opendx.org/ , http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/2003111 4_bluegene.shtml if you want to be convinced they know what they are talking about; both on the 'giving' and 'receiving' sides of the coin.

These people http://www.ibm.com/linux/ can help. Worldwide, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Look at http://www.openafs.org/ , http://www.opendx.org/ , http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/2003111 4_bluegene.shtml if you want to be convinced they know what they are talking about; both on the 'giving' and 'receiving' sides of the coin.

<Open-Source Software is more secure because there are more people reviewing it.

Pretty bad argument for business. "So our security, and my job, relies on what people do in their spare time?"

No... your security, and your job, relies on what people do on their jobs. People who work for:

IBM

Sun

HP

RedHat

Mandrake

SuSE

Sendmail, Inc.

...and many more companies that support OSS. There was a point in time where OSS was largely written and maintained by people in their spare time; these days, there are people who have jobs that revolve around developing, maintaining and improving OSS.

There's still crud out there, of course. Remember Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud. This goes for both commercial and open source software. You should evaluate OSS the same way you evaluate commercial software: who wrote it, what's their reputation, does it have the features we need, how stable is it, etc.

You wouldn't judge Microsoft's capabilities based on the kind of software that Sun produced, would you? Then why would derive your opinion of Apache, Sendmail, Bind, Linux, XFree86, BSD, KDevelop, Gnome and the like based on the fact that some other, completely seperate OSS project isn't worth dreck?

The statement that either company might be able to buy SCO with a months revenue is dubious, but in any case, Microsoft would actually be in a better position to buy them than IBM. I say this because I just went and compared the financial reports of the two companies (1, 2). Notice that while IBM has more assets than Microsoft (96B vs. 79B), Microsoft has an astounding 50 Billion dollars in cash reserves. Seeing as this is a full order of magnitude larger than IBM's 5B in cash I think Microsoft would be in a better position to make a surprise hostile takeover bid on SCO.

"The Emulator software does not include ROM images. It is like a computer without an operating system. Also note that the emulator emulates 68K devices and thus runs ROM images through OS 4.x. For testing on OS 5 based devices see the Palm OS 5 Simulator page."

For OS5 development purely in Linux, I have to synch my code into my own Zire71 and pray every time... thank heavens for programs like backupbuddyVFS

Mostly, I keep another box on my local network running win2k so I can load my code straight into the OS5 simulator. That situation really bugs me... and I hope that the OS6 simulator gets released in a Linux version.

It would probably pay me to get into java on the Palm as that would widen my market to include other devices that support the IBM J2Micro Environment.

Apple is bringing the supercomputer title back to the USA

No. IBM is.

SCO UNIX(R) is a Proven, Stable and Reliable Platform

That's about as generic as it gets, funny that they never state how they came up with that. I can claim the same about linux using their method of spewing meaningless unsubstantiated numbers.

SCO UNIX(R) is backed by a single, experienced vendor

Because There aren't any experienced linux companies, and we all know how one monolithic company is better.

SCO UNIX(R) has a Committed, Well-Defined Roadmap

Straight down the crapper requires a ROAD MAP?

SCO UNIX(R) is Secure

My OS is secure too, no one has cracked into it yet. It doesn't boot yet, but it's secure as hell.

SCO UNIX(R) is Legally Unencumbered

Yes, because No One is trying to get SCO into court.

Yeah, in a few years maybe she can start dating the Linux boy.

Sometimes the best solution is the least technical. When I walk into the local CompUSA, all I see is Microsft marketing everywhere.

Perhaps if the average Joe saw Tux and cute Linux posters everywhere, you'd see more acceptance.

I think IBM has the right idea with their new Linux TV ads.

IBM's Developer Works has a number of Tutorials covering Linux. A number of these are designed to get you prepared for the LPI Certifications.

They're written by Daniel Robbins of Gentoo fame and are quite good.

Finally, you'll have to register, sign away first born...

Today's microprocessors have yet to catch up with the reliability, availability and maintenance features of IBM's large systems.

That is, to some degree, an apples-to-oranges comparison, as you're comparing microprocessors to complete computer systems.

I can think of one microprocessor that, by definition, is used in systems "with the reliability, availability, and maintenance features of IBM's large systems", as it's the microprocessor used in the CPUs of those systems.

Now, it might be that the z900 microprocessor has RAS features not present in commodity microprocessors; for example, the article on RAS design for the z900 says that

The on-chip Level 1 (L1) cache can survive an array failure by purging and deleting the cache line or compartment. The L1 cache "fuse" relocation technology allows the defective cache line to be relocated (L1 cache-line sparing) at the next FPOR.

I don't know offhand whether any other microprocessors support anything such as that - a Google search for "cache-line sparing" found a few hits, but they're all about System/390 or System/3100^Wz/Architecture. If somebody feels ambitious, they could look at recent server x86/SPARC/IA-64/Power-family/PA-RISC/etc. chips and see if they have anything like that.

Today's microprocessors have yet to catch up with the reliability, availability and maintenance features of IBM's large systems.

That is, to some degree, an apples-to-oranges comparison, as you're comparing microprocessors to complete computer systems.

I can think of one microprocessor that, by definition, is used in systems "with the reliability, availability, and maintenance features of IBM's large systems", as it's the microprocessor used in the CPUs of those systems.

Now, it might be that the z900 microprocessor has RAS features not present in commodity microprocessors; for example, the article on RAS design for the z900 says that

The on-chip Level 1 (L1) cache can survive an array failure by purging and deleting the cache line or compartment. The L1 cache "fuse" relocation technology allows the defective cache line to be relocated (L1 cache-line sparing) at the next FPOR.

I don't know offhand whether any other microprocessors support anything such as that - a Google search for "cache-line sparing" found a few hits, but they're all about System/390 or System/3100^Wz/Architecture. If somebody feels ambitious, they could look at recent server x86/SPARC/IA-64/Power-family/PA-RISC/etc. chips and see if they have anything like that.

Junior implies younger, and less mature, neither of which are good connotations for a webbrowser really

It is only at version 0.8 right? I had a friend who uses Windows download it last night. He definately paused when he noticed the tag 'Version 0.7'. Maybe used to hearing AOL 19.0, Windows XP, and so on.

Maybe Fire* could use their youth to their advantage. Similiar to what IBM is doing with Linux.

Quote from the link:

Question:
What is an IBM 486BL2 or 486BL3 (Blue Lightning) processor?

Answer:
It is an IBM-developed derivative of the Intel 486SX chip that comes in two "flavors": the clock-doubling 486BL2 and clock-tripling 486BL3.

This is a significant development because Newtek brought to the desktop level what used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment only broadcast stations could afford. It was an Amiga 2000 based box, which is why a reference exists to the Amiga in the first place. The original price was around $5000, and that didn't include the price of time-base correctors, frame-by-frame editing decks, cameras, etc.. But any professional videographer or low-end filmmaker suddenly had the most amazing set of tools to create what was in the hands of only the big players or the well funded. Their original promo video, called "Revolution," was an amazing demo. If you can find a copy, I suggest you view it and see that in 1991 terms this was a truly revolutionary concept.

Beyond that, Amigas with Newtek's Lightwave software were used in the production of series like Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV. Huge render farms with 10^3 computers were generating graphics for major television series. You had better believe that it's significant from a historical perspective.

Today, Newtek's online editing setups are pretty interesting but vastly different. It's no skin off their backs to release the source because it's not really commercially valuable. That's because in the last couple of years editing come to the point where it is really accessible by the average person. I do technical consultation for video editors, and know for certain that the seed for desktop editing today was planted by Newtek's Video Toaster over 12 years ago.

One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable. Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.

IBM has a goodly chunk of linux info on their site.

For example, try this:
Linux for IBM personal systems

No, JFS2 was a backport to AIX from a different version written for OS/2. Scroll down.

• Q1.
• What is the history of the source based use for the port of JFS for Linux.
  
  A1. IBM introduced its UNIX file system as the Journaled File System (JFS) with the initial release of AIX Version 3.1. This file system, now called JFS1 on AIX, has been the premier file system for AIX over the last 10 years and has been installed in millions of customer's AIX systems. In 1995, work began to enhance the file system to be more scalable and to support machines that had more than one processor. Another goal was to have a more portable file system, capable of running on multiple operating systems.
  
  Historically, the JFS1 file system is very closely tied to the memory manager of AIX. This design is typical of a closed-source operating system, or a file system supporting only one operating system.
  
  The new Journaled File System, on which the Linux port was based, was first shipped in OS/2 Warp Server for eBusiness in April, 1999, after several years of designing, coding, and testing. It also shipped with OS/2 Warp Client in October, 2000. In parallel to this effort, some of the JFS development team returned to the AIX Operating System Development Group in 1997 and started to move this new JFS source base to the AIX operating system. In May, 2001, a second journaled file system, Enhanced Journaled File System (JFS2), was made available for AIX 5L. In December of 1999, a snapshot of the original OS/2 JFS source was taken and work was begun to port JFS to Linux.

Don't even think about looking for this code in linux-2.4.x. Not a single line of any of the mentionened patches has been merged into linux-2.4.
You can find the code in these patches provided by IBM:

EVMS evms_aix.h
JFS ref/jfs_inode.h
RCU-2.4.1-01

Something remotely similar to the rcu patch was eventually merged into 2.5.43 and into United Linux. The EVMS header is used by the compatibility module for AIX partitions and is also in United Linux but nowhere in an official linux. The jfs inode header is not used anywhere, because it is the OS/2 file and was provided only for reference.

IBM does a similar thing in New York. This is another interesting link.

IBM does a similar thing in New York. This is another interesting link.

Your best bet would be to try IBM's

'Cuz you sure aren't talking about the IBM I know. IBM giving an asset away isn't poetic. I'd call it heart-stoppingly unimaginable.

Start imagining. IBM wouldn't be in this mess if it hadn't started giving away (well, GPLing at least) some of it's assets.

Some of the entries on those lists are a lot more advanced than SCO's code (compare IBM's NUMA contributions to the malloc version SCO was whining about under NDA, for example), too. At least a few prominent divisions of IBM see that open source isn't necessarily "IBM giving away an asset", but can often be "IBM adding value to their services and hardware". In the case of giving away Unix, it would be "IBM removing a perceived risk of their services and hardware".

You're right that this isn't the way IBM used to behave, and it's probably not the way every IBM executive would like to behave now. But is a way that they've started to behave, and it isn't implausible to hope that they'll continue. If you want implausible, you could consider that IBM's changes today give us hope for a changed Microsoft sometime in the future. ;-)

'Cuz you sure aren't talking about the IBM I know. IBM giving an asset away isn't poetic. I'd call it heart-stoppingly unimaginable.

Start imagining. IBM wouldn't be in this mess if it hadn't started giving away (well, GPLing at least) some of it's assets.

Some of the entries on those lists are a lot more advanced than SCO's code (compare IBM's NUMA contributions to the malloc version SCO was whining about under NDA, for example), too. At least a few prominent divisions of IBM see that open source isn't necessarily "IBM giving away an asset", but can often be "IBM adding value to their services and hardware". In the case of giving away Unix, it would be "IBM removing a perceived risk of their services and hardware".

You're right that this isn't the way IBM used to behave, and it's probably not the way every IBM executive would like to behave now. But is a way that they've started to behave, and it isn't implausible to hope that they'll continue. If you want implausible, you could consider that IBM's changes today give us hope for a changed Microsoft sometime in the future. ;-)

IBM Dev Pages had an interesting view on this. Althougt it is more for desktop setups (system boots faster - who needs that?). But still it is IMO interesting: Boot Linux Faster.

Mac OS X does what I have long wanted to see in a UNIX system, parallell/dependent startup. For instance, "vtun" depends on "tunnel.kext" and "networking", but both "tunnel.kext" and "networking" can be started simultaneously. Also, the "StartupParameters.plist" meta-information file has some parameters related to order preference ("early", "late", and so on).

An article describing a similar concept for Linux can be seen at IBM DeveloperWorks.

Sounds like that may be what Gentoo does?

For example, here is a recent paper that includes a comparison of Java and C/C++ for XML processing tasks. The conclusion is that Java based implementations are not yet competitive with the C/C++ implementations.

Don't get me wrong, I *love* Java, but when I do highly performance critical stuff, it's just not the right tool for the job.

The benefits would be that porting the OS and all programs running on it to a new platform would consist of porting the virtual machine only.

Also, all code would be bounds-checked and stack-overflow protected, so a lot of today's security holes wouldn't be possible to create. With garbage collection, memory leaks would be a minor problem as well.

To get a lot for free, you could base it on IBM's JRVM, a virtual machine for Java, written in Java.

The drawback of not allowing C code to run natively is that there's a lot of software out there that'll be hard to support. This may be solvable, but I haven't given any thought to it so I don't know.

...what is next, Linux running on a Timex watch?

Been done. (Well, just about.)

Schwab