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It is available on several sites for download as pdf, maybe not supposed to be.

IBM are generally very open with their manuals, e.g. go to this link for the z/OS v1.12 infomation center
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r12/index.jsp
and the first link on the front page is a PDF of the current version of PoP

I get the impression IBM isn't very bothered about old or current manuals being scattered around various web sites.

Both VMware and KVM are overkill. How many hosts have enough RAM to give each guest 1TB, much less 2TB? Wake me up when the hardware catches up to the point where those capabilities matter.

*poke*poke* It's your "hardware is ready" courtesy wake up call.

You can get some mid-range IBM blade centers, or some low end HP BladeSystem hardware, or really any of the many many systems that can easily handle that in a low end configuration.

If you need to get serious, you start loading rack cabinets with such gear, along with some SAN cards sprinkled throughout.

At that level of hardware, it would be extremely wasteful not to run something like VMware ESX. This is the target audience after all, not the geek with a lowly double digit count of CPUs in their spare bedroom.

Granted, it was extremely nice of them to release ESXi without vSphere for free for us lowly geeks who, like myself, might only have a couple 4 or 6 core home built systems, who don't need all those high end features (*drool* none the less), but when I'm at work running the "little big iron", I'm very thankful for vSphere and such solutions to manage my hardware with 36 GB ram per node and a 480 gb SAN.

It's just improvements to the I/O API. Java has the New IO API for doing I/O. java 7 has extended it, hence NIO2. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-nio2-1/?ca=drs-

The UI in Symphony is indeed based on Eclipse, but the actual editing area is based on OO code. IBM said regarding Symphony 3.0:

This version is based on the current OpenOffice.org 3 codebase

IBM still has their line of Power servers, which helped push Sun to the brink:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/

I assume HP will hold onto it's line of Itanium HP-UX servers and storage solutions, but Itanium is, shall we say, holding a bit of a niche market share.

nope, even IBM still calls it "assembler" at times

for example http://publibfp.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/download/asmr1020.pdf or http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmqv7/v7r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.mq.csqzal.doc/fg19060_.htm

you diaper wearing puppies can go off and make up your own rules if you want, but don't be surprised if we older and wiser suddenly beat you with our ear horn

nope, even IBM still calls it "assembler" at times

for example http://publibfp.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/download/asmr1020.pdf or http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmqv7/v7r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.mq.csqzal.doc/fg19060_.htm

you diaper wearing puppies can go off and make up your own rules if you want, but don't be surprised if we older and wiser suddenly beat you with our ear horn

Hasn't that always been the case? I can recount dozens of personal examples in undergraduate/graduate (high school was too distant, sorry! But nor did I really take that seriously) where outside the multiple choice or true-and-false realm, there is always that element of human favoritism and non-neutral judgement involved. Certain people would get a lower/higher grade on a paper/research project that had really close ideology, thoughts or facts, that matched the next person (all cheating trolls stay in your cave). More of the educator's time is then spent 'justifying' their grade than the time it took to grade the item to begin with at that point, IMHO.

It would be a very logical feat to have a knowledgeable, computer system be educated enough to look at styles, patterns for topic(s) 'xyz' than it would would be worth just to remove the human judgmental element factor. IBM Watson, I presume?

The only reason he's calling it a mistake is because he's a computer scientist. There's a deep desire to deliberately keep theory and practical usage separate. That's why a pure implementation of scheme, for example, has no mechanisms for input or output. It's why some languages like APL ignored the concept of using syntactical sugar, and instead required mathematical symbols and a specialty keyboard which did not actually exist when the language was created. It was never really meant to be run - only written on paper.

So, there's a deliberate difference between computer scientists and computer programmers. I recently explained it to my managers like this: Say someone needs to connect two systems with a cable, but they didn't say whether the ends were male or female. A computer scientist will figure out the number of possible combinations and bring 4 cables. A competent computer scientist will eliminate the redundancy, and bring 3. A computer programmer will bring 2 (since m-m connects to f-f to produce m-f).

( A really good computer scientist might bring one, citing that while the worst case is two trips, the average case is one - if he understands the domain. A programmer will do the same thing for the same reason, but have no logical justification.)

Don't get me wrong, living in the land of theory lets one produce great results - look at quicksort, as mentioned by the parent, but sometimes the desire to escape to pure mathematics produces practical issues.

I was actually talking about over the last 100 years, not the last 15.

US gdp from 1900-2008
Highest marginal income tax rate 1913-2011

Just looking at the numbers, from 1913-1934 there was a fairly gradual increase, but nothing amazing with one dip.

During that time period, the tax rate was increased very high for a period of 5 years (which did not significantly impact growth one way or the other), but for the most part was at either close to our level of taxes or lower. Note that the periods when it was lower, 1913-1915 and 1925-1931 also did not show significant fluctuations in growth.

In 1932 there was a sharp increase in taxes, from 25% to 63% which was raised to 79% in 1936 and yet AGAIN in 1940 to 81%, 1942 88%, and 1944 to 94% (I want to raise taxes and still, wtf?).

During this time period, there was a pretty damned sharp boost in growth. Well, except in 1944-1951. But that's probably a result of the INSANE tax rate out of nowhere. It was pushed down to as low as 82% in 1948 then raised again to 91% in 1950 through to 1964. In this period of time? Damned consistent growth that was pretty damned high.

The tax rate then dropped to the 70s from 1964-1981. In this time period growth remained consistent until a hiccup at the end there at 1981. From 1982-1986? 50% and pretty damned good growth. 1988-1991 was dropped again to the low 30s/high 20s and growth had another hiccup where the GDP went down.

Following that the tax rate stayed consistently at 40% for still quite good growth. Then from 2000-2002, continued with a slight tapering at the end...which came back from 2003-2007 until the crisis of 2008. That's right when Bush was getting out and 2003 on was part of the Bush tax cuts (Which seemed to contribute to pretty good growth until the end there.)

From what these numbers seem to say, it seems like taxing the rich a great deal means we result in far LESS of a bubble/downshift then when we have tax rates low. Further, taxing the rich doesn't seem to hurt GDP in any significant way provided it's either gradual, or shown in contrast to a stupidly high rate. Jeez, I'm not even saying we need a 70% tax rate or a 90% tax rate, I'd just like them to get back to the 40% tax rate. The longest period of CONSISTENT growth seems to have been back in the 1948-1973 70-90% tax rate though...

Doesn't seem all that great when modern versions of old technology like tape can store 4TB uncompressed and write at 650MByte/sec per drive. Actually, they will fit significantly more, as the tape drives all do inline compression in hardware. Plus, while dropping it isn't recommended, you can, and its rare to actually have data loss because of it.

Stack a few dozen drives and a few thousand tapes into a library and there isn't anything on the planet that even comes close as a backup medium in nearly any metric (TB per $, watts per TB, footprint, etc).

Can you point to a citation by a competent authority that states that consciousness is an emergent behavior?

Well... You've got me there. My masters degree in psychology doesn't make me an authority, so much as a hack, and the assertion is honestly only my opinion, based off the ideas of many others. In the absence of a better cause that doesn't involve mysticism or religion, it seems like a reasonable (and eventually testable) explanation. IMHO. Where would you posit that consciousness comes from? Mind phlogiston?

A machine that has "subjective experience; awareness; the ability to experience feelings; wakefulness; having a sense of selfhood" can be faked. A simulation of an atom bomb produces no radiation, only the simulation of radiation. You can fly your flight simulator all day without moving an inch.

Good argument, but we're not talking about an AI being able to make out with your girlfriend in meatspace, we're talking about it wooing her online. The day may soon come when a chatbot will be indistinguishable from a human operator --perhaps more interesting than most of our Facebook friends. Will it be thinking? Will it be conscious? As David Ferrucci put it when asked if Watson thinks, "Can a submarine swim?"

The Wikipedia article you pointed out on Consciousness mentions a few common conceptions: "in humans, the clearest visible indication of consciousness is the ability to use language" and "we attribute consciousness on the basis of behavior." So, if a software-based brain passed a Turing duck test, on what basis would you know it wasn't conscious? Consider that even knowing that another human being is conscious is an epistemological impossibility. Can you be certain I'm not a very good AI or some other sort of p-zombie that only seems to be a conscious mind?

Well, just with the difference that Apple apparently wants their batteries (resp. its microcontroller) to be updateable.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-75738.html http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=0&prodSeriesId=316682&prodNameId=316684&swEnvOID=1093&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=PSG_I20759-104642

CICS dates back to 1998, see the recently produced history of CICS page. CICS does POX, REST, and SOAP, in addition to MQ, so integration with the tried and true can be done and you can migrate to whatever you want on either side of the interface. Boring, I know. We are talking about banking, remember, not Facebook or Twitter.

Is it any wonder IBM sold it's hard disk drive business years ago. Although it seems to have taken them a bit longer to make their solid state drive through than they originally expected. Some interesting stuff here https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/storagevirtualization/entry/1m_iops_from_flash_actions?lang=en.

I believe IBM is one of the bigger players in this market, if not the biggest. http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/crimefighting/ To me, this is just another way that our tax dollars are being funneled into corporate bank accounts.

Some schools and businesses are pretty large. I know the first few times I was walking around the old IBM building in Boca Raton ( http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV8004.html ), it could have been useful. Some of the hallways are so long that if you step side to side and keep staring down the hall, the hall seems to bend like a snakes tail.

Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.

Sun likewise supported legacy systems. The Java language even has a deprecation capability in it that allows you time to gracefully drop obsolete code instead of being forced to do so the minute something newer and better comes out, a la Microsoft.

Sun may have been a real money-loser, but Oracle has proven really adept at trashing all the things that made Sun valuable to its users. Their continued attempts to squeeze the franchise for all it's worth may actually cost them more that if they'd simply let well enough alone.

Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.

Sun likewise supported legacy systems. The Java language even has a deprecation capability in it that allows you time to gracefully drop obsolete code instead of being forced to do so the minute something newer and better comes out, a la Microsoft.

Sun may have been a real money-loser, but Oracle has proven really adept at trashing all the things that made Sun valuable to its users. Their continued attempts to squeeze the franchise for all it's worth may actually cost them more that if they'd simply let well enough alone.

Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.

Sun likewise supported legacy systems. The Java language even has a deprecation capability in it that allows you time to gracefully drop obsolete code instead of being forced to do so the minute something newer and better comes out, a la Microsoft.

Sun may have been a real money-loser, but Oracle has proven really adept at trashing all the things that made Sun valuable to its users. Their continued attempts to squeeze the franchise for all it's worth may actually cost them more that if they'd simply let well enough alone.

Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.

Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.

Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.

From the link you provided: It was also very expensive - up to US$20,000. It was specifically designed for professional and scientific problem-solvers, not business users or hobbyists.

I wouldn't classify this as a "personal computer", and apparently, neither did IBM at the time. They called it a portable computer.

Linux IMA at LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/227937/, https://lwn.net/Articles/326747/
IBM (involved in Trusted Computing Group) link: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/sailer.ima.html

Bullet-point summary of EVM:
EVM Mailing-list announce: https://lwn.net/Articles/393673/

Also, don't forget that IBM is one of the only companies big enough to put serious money into research anymore. In my mind, that's really important. Where are all the CS, physics and EE Ph. D's going to work now that Bell Labs is gone and HP only does product research?

IBM Research is a shadow of what it once was. I happened to be up at IBM's Almaden Research Center the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was not a happy day.

lol... the Cisco subsidiary?

How about Linux or Juniper?

I've seen the articles or their equivalents. I've been around long enough to remember it all. I disagree with your assessment that MS received little benefit from Cell project. I understand MS didn't utilize all or maybe even most of the technology developed in the joint venture. However it's quite clear that what did go in was substantial.

You've also got some of your facts/assumptions messed up. The Cell and PPE are based of off a combination of POWERn/PowerPC arch. The terms seem mostly interchangeable for recent CPU's.

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/r.arch.innovation.html

And the PPE is a derivative of Cell, not an ancestor.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1647/3

And Cell was spearheaded by Sony, especially financially. I'm sure IBM could have done it on their own if they wanted, but why do it that way when Sony will foot much of the developmental funding and IBM and sell to them and MS.

but not to the extent that they would use the whole Cell architecture and give it to SCEA's direct gaming competitors (and I would have thought there would be an explicit exemption to that in the Sony-IBM contract). The wikipedia article (see below for links) is quite informative.

Yes, and the links that article is based on contains a lot more detail info including information that contradicts your exemption thought.

Not really. The lawyers already went to writing in single-atom resolution.

WAIT, WAT? When did this discussion switch over to talking about the AIX object data manager?

Let's face it. Windows doesn't have a monopoly in OSs with a non-transparent non-intuitive hard-to-access system configuration repository. AIX is one of the biggest commercial Unix variants out there, and will make any sysadmin raised in a sane SunOS/Linux environment pull out every hair in his/her head.

I think AIX is the reason that the informal motto of the system administration community is "Down, not across".

(

Any kernel, anywhere? There's already a tool that can do that. It's called Linux. And it has far more capability than GRUB. Can GRUB grab a kernel via rsync over ssh and boot it? Linux can (be set up to) do that.

See Kexec.

And without burning linux in your BIOS, how do you propose to run it on a system that lacks a hard drive? The best you can do right now is PXE, and that has a lot of limitations. At the very least you need to control the dhcp server to do it.

The parent was arguing that bootloaders should be simple, and I was arguing that complexity is fine if it suits their purpose, which is loading the kernel. I'd love to see LinuxBIOS being standard on all PCs, as it is a more versatile way of finding and loading the kernel.

Any kernel, anywhere? There's already a tool that can do that. It's called Linux. And it has far more capability than GRUB. Can GRUB grab a kernel via rsync over ssh and boot it? Linux can (be set up to) do that.

See Kexec.

I'd rather be able to just have a fixed place to put a kernel, and have that place always boot. LILO isn't good enough because it requires running its "lilo" command to build a block index. The better way to very simply boot a kernel is to sequentially write that kernel to it's own partition. Since we have GPT, now, we have plenty of partition slots to put in alternate backup kernels in case the new one won't run.

In UNIX-land, no it isn't.

Sorry, but shipping code beats standards based theory, and pretty much every *nix vendor ships dc with the OS.

Oracle (nee Sun) Solaris, IBM AIX, HP HP/UX, SGI IRIX, Apple MacOS X, SCO Openserver, SuSE Enterprise Linux (dc listed on bc page), FreeBSD, OpenBSD ...

You also appear to missed a few things about the Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7 / IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 standard - it is in essence a floor, not a ceiling - vendors can ship more tools if they care to. Also, the discussion on bc notes that some implementations of bc are built on top of dc, and that is OK, as long as the behavior of bc is correct.

It is worth noting that dc was one of the earliest programs to run in Unix, making it in while Unix was still written in assembly language. If for some reason it was to be not only omitted, but actually excluded by the standard, it would still be found in the vast majority of shipping systems for years to come until said vendor decided to migrate their Unix system to the current standard, a process that often takes years.

So yes, for the vast majority of people using Unix, an RPN calculator is often only as far away as a shell prompt.

Saying that Digital Restrictions Management is bad is not FUD, it's a simple fact.

You'll get no argument from me there, but that's not what OP said! He said that TC is not about DRM, not that DRM was not about "bad things". Linux has had TC support for years, with full blessings from Linus. The result is more like advanced tripwire than any sort of DRM. In fact, TC-based DRM, while theoretically possible, isn't likely to be too useful, because TC was never designed to protect against local attackers, and "can be vulnerable to power-analysis, RF-analysis and timing-analysis". (Source (PDF).

Meanwhile, in 1954...

The IBM 740 CRT output recorder was an electronic device attached to the IBM 701 Data Processing System. It provided output which recorded data points on the faces of a pair of television-like tubes ... the IBM 740 also could be used to display alphabetic characters ...

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_1415bx40.html

Now, the IBM 740 was a vector display device, and did not use a character generator. However, the idea of displaying text on a screen was by no means non-obvious.

here i am feeding the troll, but the best AI for backgammon is trained by regret-based reinforcement learning (it's needed since the dice rolls blow up the search space for standard perfect-information strategies): http://www.research.ibm.com/massive/tdl.html. in this case the regret-function is unknown and is stochastically approximated ("learned") by repeated play.

it's notable that unlike chess AI which is considered effective but unnatural, this backgammon AI is considered to play mostly "like a human" and its play has actually inspired new strategies for human backgammon players.

regret-based methods are typically heuristic, and i'd call them much less "autistic" than, say, infinitely-rational nash agents or game tree pruners.

You can always specify which parent class's method to invoke via the :: scope resolution operator (double-double colon, aka the "Tim Hortons" colon). No ambiguity need exist.

To refresh your memory ....

Interesting, I hadn't heard of that; but I found two explanations. The official explanation is that the choice was a matter of a licensing deal between IBM and Intel, as well as availability of components. However, it is also rumored that they couldn't make the original PC too good - it had rival other makers' machines, yet not eclipse another line of personal machines that IBM planned to introduce later; also, the 8080 made porting Z80-based software easier.

At the same time, there is no other competing technology that has anything close to the potential downside that nuclear energy has.

Eh? Tell that to the 161 people per TWh who die because of coal right now. I bet you anything that even if you roll the numbers from the fallout of whatever ends up happening at Fukushima into the deaths per TWh statistic for nuclear power, it probably won't even get near the deaths per TWh for oil, much less coal (keep in mind that these plants have been safely generating power for the last 40 years).

And those are the statistics for deaths that are happening right now, not some crazy worst case scenario that may never even happen.

But no, it's not about the instant deaths. It's the increase in cancer deaths and the billions of years of contamination of the nearby land, and the worldwide reach of the fallout that people don't like. If a wind farm gets hit by a tsunami in Massachusetts, you won't die of cancer in 20 years in Iowa.

Errr... so if it's not about the instant deaths, and it's about the increase in mortality rates - you should be all for nuclear power to replace coal power, because coal power kills people in a shitload of different ways.

I mean, just look at this visualization - the rightmost column is deaths per terrawatt/hour, and coal has everything beat by a longshot.

Because it's safer than what we do now.

http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976

We favor solutions that spew millions of tons of crap in the air that indirectly kills a lot of people all over the world, or deep underground, over solutions that very rarely spew a little crap in the air and kill a small number of people right nearby. We prefer this only because one is dramatic.

Personally, given that we need to generate TWhs of electricity, I'd rather lose 0.04 lives than 161. I have little doubt the public will continue to behave like frightened sheep. Every single person who engages in this hand-wringing over nuclear's risks while ignoring those of every other method of power generation is responsible.

IBM stopped DB2 support for Linux on Itanium with version 9, 9.5 doesn't support it....guess that leaves Websphere for HP/UX, that bloated piece of shit that is excuse for IBM to suck a client dry with consultants to attempt to make it useful

Not true, you can download DB2 Data Server 9.7 for Itanium from IBM's web site. [Opinions mine, not IBM's.]

They still sell refurbished desktops and laptops.

Its not a new laptop but at least a 5 year old laptop the ThinkPad X30 it looks like http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-44111 Really its a weird comparison and he's arguing with things like a dvd/cd burner that I've not even used on my desktop computer in over 2 years at this point.

you can write good code in any language. php is one of them. dont talk shit without knowing enough about a subject. here is an example from ibm "

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-7oohabits/

and that article was from the times in which oop wasnt well developed in php too.

It's a nice idea, but it's not going to fix every memory leak. Even garbage collected systems have memory leaks. A web browser is far, far more complicated than you're thinking. One reason your idea won't work is that many objects are not owned by a single tab.

I looked into IBM's Java SDK.

The link is here and was mentioned on slashdot 7 or 8 years ago. I played with it on Gentoo as it gave me the option to use the one from Sun or IBM. I found the IBM to use less ram than the Sun one on my system when running early versions of eclipse.

Unfortunately, it looks like it is Unix only right now unless you have an iBM server lying around that runs Windows.

Long story short, Oracle mentioned they wont go after IBM. It is safe because they have a licensing agreement with IBM from SUN protecting them from any liabilities. If you want to be oracle free and you run Linux you can run eclipse with the IBM sdk. It was free when I used it last but that was awhile back.

Is 250 patents per year really filing like mad? IBM received over 5000 patents in 2010. It took them more than 50 years to get their first 5000...

So if they got 5000, how many did they file (actually the way the USPTO works it was probably close to the same). Still, I suspect that the GP was closer to right than the parent. They both raise valid points. Certainly Google is smart to get some patents as armour. Still, I suspect their primary tactic is going to remain simply out innovating the competition so fast that the patents are meaningless. And if they can kill two birds with one stone (scrapping software patents and winning java freedom) all the better.

I don't know why all vendors haven't adopted hardware full disk encryption. This has become an absolute must in my opinion. And compared to software-based encryption, it works so well, and seamlessly - the bios asks for the passphrase at boot time, and after that it's transparent to the OS and doesn't degrade performance either.

It has some uses, but for corporate use (where the vast majority of hard drive encryption is done, this is an inadequate solution. There is no provision for backing up or escrowing encryption keys to a central corporate store. Sure the IBM drive supports a user and master password, but this simply isn't workable when you have hundreds or thousand of computers out there with encryption passwords with no central management. Does this support password policies for length, complexity, and aging? I can't say for sure, but probably not.

This is why we currently use McAfee (formerly SafeBoot) at work, and when we transition to Windows 7 this year, we'll use Microsoft Bitlocker. Integration with central directories for password and key management is an absolute requirement for a company of any size.

I don't know why all vendors haven't adopted hardware full disk encryption. This has become an absolute must in my opinion. And compared to software-based encryption, it works so well, and seamlessly - the bios asks for the passphrase at boot time, and after that it's transparent to the OS and doesn't degrade performance either. I would certainly appreciate some security researchers throwing their efforts into validating or debunking these.