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From Mechanical Metallurgy by George E. Deiter 3rd Ed.

The hardness of a material is a poorly defined term which has many meanings depending upon the experience of the person involved. In general, hardness usually implies a resistance to deformation, and for metals the property is a measure of their resistance to permanent or plastic deformation. To a person concerned with the mechanics of material testing, hardness is most likely to mean the resistance to indentation, and to the design engineer it often means an easily measured and specified quantity which indicated something about the strength and heat treatment of the metal.

After that the chapter briefly discusses how the different tests work, and some light derivation including a special case of finding the tensile strength. (Incidently, this conversation is why I provided a link to Powell's collection of Mechanics of Materials texts; I wanted to avoid it.) A link to convert hardnesses for steel into tensile strength. I might remark that given strength is simply a load over an area for a certain event, and any hardness test also uses a load over a slightly more complicated area (with some other considerations) one might readily and correctly assume they can be related. I might further add, that MY contention that strength and hardness are related is not even addressed in any of your definitions. I feel little need to offer anything in the way of proof, but since you seem to require it, this web site might be illuminating. Also any materials, and most mechanical, engineering departments will have a similar poster in their hardness testing labs.

Don't think me cruel, as I don't intend it in this fashion, but I had noticed the ASM site had a section called "Ask ASM" where you can pose questions, and thought it clearly marked. I suppose you could also write your local physics, mechanical, civil, or materials engineering departments as they almost certainly answer all sorts of questions. They are typically given to grad students to answer in math and physics departments.

I'm sorry you didn't see the value in links that I hoped you would find useful. I tried my best to keep everything simple and accurate, I hoped others would find it interesting. But it would seem you have little if any interest in finding answers, which is fine. But if you're not going to seek illumination beyond that of a poor dictionary, for the life of me I can't see why you quibble with mine. The fact is they created a new phase of steel (I took this as an obvious point from the press release, clearly I was in error). If you still believe they did not, you MUST also believe glass and quartz are the same. Which is your perogative. A new phase is better than simply a new alloy, as their figure of 16 GPa certainly shows. As a final token, here is a Iron-Carbon (Steel) phase diagram, note the lack of an amorphous phase (I realize it is quite busy, but it at least shows what steel fundementally is). In closing, you see what everyone else does, what you want to. Maybe this is what I get for picking nits.

First, Let me say that I have an agenda: I've had a war on, since 1998, with the authors of a crappy little program for Linux called linuxcad. This is a several hundred dollar (yes it _does_ cost more than $99 to get all the stuff, trust me) piece of junk that, in addition to not being worth anything like the price (can you say "rip-off"), they are constant newsgroup spammers.

Now it amazes me that, for as long as I can remember visiting linuxapps, this program has been in the #6 "Most popular today" position. I notice that kind of thing. Now a quick search around and you'll only find this program at one other site, SAL, which may not know any better. I've written to linuxapps.com suggesting they remove it to keep Linuxers from getting ripped off (I've got a number of emails to back that), but it's still there. It sure is suspicious to me.

Ok, maybe the list isn't updated, but then again, I have seen it change. So it seems to me, that they're playing a similar game here (the game of deception) to make you think lcad is a popular program, probably for pay from the lcad authors (I emphasize probably), and get you ripped-off, too.

"Picture 1980. Ted Nelson is running around with his Xanadu guys: Roger Gregory, H. Keith Henson (now waging war against the Scientologists) and K. Eric Drexler, later to build the Foresight Institute. They dream of creating what is to become the World Wide Web. Nowadays guys at hacker cons might dress like vampires. In 1980 they wear identical black baseball caps with silver wings and the slogan: 'Xanadu: wings of the mind.'"

1994-current. Work continues on the second XOC fine-grain hyper-sharin transpublishing server, under Roger Gregory and Keith Henson.

o In 1992, the Church of Scientology had become the first religious organization in Canada to be convicted of criminal conduct. Specifically, stealing documents from law firms, public associations and government entities -- and breach of trust. In addition, in the Casey Hill litigation, Scientology was ordered to pay millions of dollars to Canadian lawyer, Casey Hill, for slandering his reputation.

Mainstream news companies don't need to try very hard, now do they?

Alumni associations are not new, a certain, extremely litigious northern New Jersey Sales Force Automation Company, whose stock ticker symbol rhymes with DIRTY (apropo, really), has had such an Alumni for many years. It's a pity the employers pay more attention to these informal groups than the investors - why would a bunch of strangers put so much energy into shouting about the abuses at a company if there were nothing to shout about?

Our Alumni links, just two of several.

Legal news
Other info on our former employer

Tomura: Hey Kanada, whadda want to do tonight while backups are running?

Kanada: I dunno, why don't we see if we can run off pi to 536,870,898 places

Tomura: Works for me.

Looking at that chart I can't help but wonder if this was all these guys ever did. And now Tamura, replaced by Takahashi, is on a street corner holding up a sign "Will calculate Pi to 1,073,740,800 places for food."


--

From '49 to '83, the calculated length gained an order of magnitude roughly every 10 years.

From '83 to '97, one order of magnitude roughly every 5 years.

From '97 on, an order of magnitude every 2 years.
--

Anyone who appreciates such gestures should voice their support. Send mail thanking Ian Bell, and check out his web site. Do the same for Jeff Minter by following the links above. And hunt down these guys' circa-1980-hot-shot-game-programmer peers, show some love and relive the old days of 8-bit.


If you're not wasted, the day is.

The Red Hat statement needs more context. The Red Hat 7.0 Getting Started Guide mentions the 1991 start of Linux. The 6.0 Guide recognized there were 100,000 Linux users in 1994 when Red Hat started. This Linux timeline refers to 100,000 Linux users in December 1993 -- with a link to a missing Red Hat page. Note that Slackware started in 1993. Is there a Linux timeline?

Um, I have a PGP gun.

PGP Owners Group

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/potc.html

Sherwin Gooch's Account of John Bardeen's Lecture (Score:1)
by Baldrson (jabowery@netcom.com) on Tuesday December 28, @08:58AM EST
(User Info) http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery

In any case, I'll check with Sherwin Gooch to see if he has any more direct evidence from Bardeen himself to support the controversial account of the hide-away experimental stand.

I did, and here is Sherwin's response:

Jim,

Thank you for alerting me to your discussion.

To provide a more solid foundation, one should be aware that I heard this story from the horse's mouth.

John Bardeen himself gave a talk one evening at Altgeld Hall on the University of Illinois campus, circa 1978, in which he related various experiences surrounding his inventing the transistor. At the time, people suspected that the scheduling of this presentation may have been related to Bardeen's health.

Professor Bardeen showed us the B&W 16mm film BB&S had made at Bell Labs immediately after they got the first transistor to work (and, presumably, before Bardeen's boss got to work the next morning...) I have seen individual frames and out-takes of this film since, but I don't know if the entire film still exists. The "rolly-cart" with their experimental set-up is plainly in evidence on the film.

It was John Bardeen himself, at Altgeld Hall, who related that his boss had said that the "solid-state amplifying device" which they wanted to develop was "not feasible," and that, "even if it were possible, it would have no practical application." Dr. Bardeen related that sometimes, when his boss stayed at work past 5 p.m., the three of them would become very impatient waiting for him to leave so they could roll their setup out of the coat-closet, and get busy on what they, apparently, thought was the greatest "cool hack" of the day.

I wonder who Bardeen's boss was. His boss should be immortalized in history next to the NASA manager who advised the last engineer withholding approval of the Challenger launch to "put on your management hat!"

One of the anecdotes John Bardeen related was how he had left his set of photographic slides in the taxi which took him to the ceremony to collect his Nobel prize, and all the trouble to which he and the Swedish government had gone in trying to recover them. But their efforts were unsuccessful; the slides were never recovered. Professor Bardeen was extremely apologetic that he didn't have them to use in his presentation, and so we would just have to make-do with his relating the incidents to us.

With my background in computer music, I found one of the pieces of supporting paraphernalia that Dr. Bardeen didn't lose in Sweden quite interesting. He brought along a transparent plexiglas box, approximately the shape of a 6" cube, with randomly distributed 3/4" or so holes (apparently for cooling?) in the sides. On the top were a number (6 or so) of black SPST N.O. push buttons. A small loudspeaker was mounted inside. (There must have also been a battery of some kind, but I don't recall it.) The box contained a collection of electronic components, their leads soldered to one-another ("tacked together"), and hanging in "free space." (He hadn't bothered to use a prototyping board or connecting strip.) There were resistors, capacitors, possibly some coils, and these ~1" long bar things (which were the transistors), of which there were 3. Dr. Bardeen explained that he had had chosen to build this device because it embodied what he considered to be the fundamental 3 types of circuit: an amplifier, an oscillator, and a filter. He remarked that he thought that pretty much covered everything you could do with electronics. Each of these had been implemented as a single-transistor circuit. Dr. Bardeen then demonstrated the device (which still worked!) by playing "a drinking song of the time, which some of you may recognize" by pressing the few buttons on top of the box in the proper sequence. He apologized because it had gone so badly out of tune (which it had). He apologetically related that he had never re-tuned it. (I'm afraid I didn't recognize the song, nor did anyone sitting around me. I believe he said he had chosen it, in part, because the chorus could be played using a minimal number of different notes. I got the impression that he was somewhat embarrassed by the song, and that's the reason he didn't tell us it's name. I wish I knew what it was.) Even though this makeshift musical instrument was out of tune, I believe the monotonicity of pitches, as one traveled from one end to the other of the row of buttons, still held. The pitches were also all still of a central musical frequency.

Professor Bardeen then passed this device around the audience for everyone to examine, which amazed me at the time, and still does. I wish I had a picture of it. I think this first all solid-state device -- an electronic organ -- should be in the Smithsonian. After all, it contained 3 of the first transistors ever made, AND THEY WERE STILL WORKING!

But I wax nostalgic. Jim, if your point was that Bell Labs did not support Bardeen's research into solid state amplifying devices, you are in good company; John Bardeen, himself, was certainly in agreement. If there were teams being supported to research that area, perhaps he just wasn't lucky enough to be on one of them. I have no idea. All I know is what he told us.

Please feel free to copy this e-mail (less my e-mail address) into any discussions in which you were involved. I find it particularly upsetting when people or organizations fraudulently assume credit.

While it is true that many research facilities can be viewed as "sand boxes" which, independent of management, enable invention, and that many great breakthroughs could not have been accomplished without the collections of tools and talent amassed therein, in reality the role played by management in R&D is much closer to what Scott Adams has chronicled in "Dilbert" than it is to any accepted management text or theory.

Sherwin Gooch
991227

Nor are you advised to allow anything like this to shape your dreamwork:

http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInqu iry.asp?isbn=0471048852#customerReviews

Jim Bowery (jim_bowery@hotmail.com), 46-year old network architect., August 18, 2000,
The Rise and Fall of Midwest Computing Sans PLATO
This is a great book, conveying much of the flavor of what it was like to be in the midwest's computing culture in its heyday of the 60's through the 70's. What it failed to do was tell the real story of the midwest's demise as computing leader of the world -- which isn't the story of Seymour's obsession with packaging over on-chip integration, as implied by this book. Rather it is the story of the failure to deploy the network revolution, now embodied in the Internet, to the mass market 20 years early on Seymour's matured hardware via the PLATO networking project at Control Data Corporation. PLATO was a $1 billion 'bet the company' investment by Bill Norris, the farmer/CEO of CDC who put a windmill pump from his Nebraska farm in front of CDC's corporate towers to remind people where they came from. That is the story of epic proportions only grazed on by this book. PLATO was ready to go to mass market, but Wall Street combined with classic middle mismanagement killed the mass market version of PLATO before it could even be test marketed -- for which it was ready. Had it gone otherwise, Seymour probably would never have left the midwest, and his supercomputer architecture would have focused more on the directions now being taken by Sun and Hewlett Packard -- except with Seymour's inimitable qualities.

I personally worked with the PLATO project and tested a version of it that would have leased a network computer with Macintosh-like interface, including network service, for a flat rate of $40/month with capital payback in 3 years. It had everything -- email, conferencing, user-programmable electronic commerce, multiuser realtime graphics games not to mention thousands of hours of computer based education courseware for which the PLATO system was originally designed. We could get this performance because the culture surrounding the land grant colleges of the midwest, such as the University of Illinois where PLATO originated, combined with Seymour's astounding performance levels created the right tradeoffs between hardware/software. Some of us were looking forward to incorporating Seymour's newly marketed Cray-1 as the foundation for the next generation of mass-market PLATO system -- and initial benchmarks looked to provide an outstanding bang for the buck as an information utility hub -- even without some of the more obvious architectural optimizations that would help in this new kind of application of his systems. This would have shielded Seymour from the vargaries of the government-dominated supercomputer market and driven his architectures into higher levels of silicon integration faster -- possibly providing the kind of capital in the kind of organization that could have delivered on gallium arsenide's potential, unlike the disaster that occured when Seymour left his farm and went cheek-to-cheek with the military in Colorado Springs, CO.

If you look at your Internet Explorer Help menu and select About Internet Explorer, you'll notice it is based on the NCSA Mosaic web browser and that it was developed at the University of Illinois -- right across the street from where PLATO was invented. This was no fluke. PLATO had a profound impact on the culture of the University of Illinois particularly its young students who wanted to push the envelope in networking. The NCSA also gave rise the most widely used web server, Apache, and the the founders of Netscape. The loss of possibly 20 years of 'new economy' is incalculable, but suffice to say, comparable losses have been suffered as the result of open war.

There are a lot of anecdotes this book doesn't tell that will probably die with the people who lived the tale. Just one, to capture a bit of what will be lost to history:

People looking for Cray Research's facility in the fields of Wisconsin could drive up to a farm house and ask where 'Cray Reserach' was located and friendly neighbor would say, 'Oh, you mean Seymour's place...' and then give directions to an area surrounded by an almost invisible network of intelligence agency surveillance equipment -- protecting what was seen as a national treasure from potential espionage. In a speech to one of these agencies, Seymour told them they could come out and protect his folks but only if they never got in the way, and that meant not even letting anyone know they were around. Well, you could tell they were around, but at least they didn't get in the way!

--------
Good luck -- and when they ask you to please consider castration -- tell them that went out with the pharaoh's eunichs (which has nothing to do with UNIX as obvious as such an association may be to them).

I don't know what all this stylized presentation garbage is all about

You mean like in Win 98 where they put a pretty sky-with-clouds scene in your window? What a bunch of crap!

Anyway, I've always hated the way Win treats each disk and partition as a separate entity. It is much more flexible to use the directory mount point model, like UNIX uses. When I saw the full screen Nautilus shot, I see they're putting a CDROM disk as a separate entity, rather than seeing it as a directory. Not my favorite

I also noticed Nautilus copies the ugly, lame way of presenting the title bar, with the underlined key letter nonsense File Edit, etc. I think it sucks, and points to the folly of having to force the user to do two keyboard equivalent strokes to perform one menu selection. The ancient Macintosh method always uses one keystroke to perform one menu selection. And it has always been a faster because of this.

On the same image, it shows a 'view as icons' drop down. This should be put up, out of the way in the regular menus. Clutter sucks in interface design. Same thing with the 'view magnification' entity. Put it in the menus, and have it pop up with an alt-RightClick combination for those Advanced Users who have had more than a 1/2 hour's experience with Nautilis.

I still think NeXTStep (GnuStep) is the cleanest, most productive interface design.

blessings,

• All telephone modems over 9600 baud
  
• Hard disk read channel on modern hard disks
  
• All digital cellular phones
  
• Digital satellite TV receivers
  
• Microwave line-of-sight links (between phone exchanges)
  
• GPS receivers
  
• ADSL modems
  
• Cable modems
  
• and much more
  

An introduction to the Viterbi Algorithm

Technically speaking, it is an efficient implementation of the Maximum Likelyhood Sequence (MLS) detector, just like the FFT is an efficient implementation of the discrete fourier transform.

----

Are you using a 2.0 kernel for the ip masq box? Back when I was in the Asheron's Call beta, I had problems connecting through ip masq. There _is_ a problem on 2.0 kernels for some UDP situations. You can use the Loose-UDP patch to fix it or (what I did) upgrade to a 2.2 kernel. After that, things worked great.

Also, running a SOCKS proxy is different than running IP masq. (it's a userspace tool for one) There are a few implementations for linux at freshmeat, but I've never used that stuff.

WAY off topic about speech, but on target for grammar:

http://pw1.netcom.com/~rlederer/index.htm

There's an interesting rant about language in his "Looking at Language" section.

-=Bob

I do that too. But I don't have a Klein bottle. Just a bowl...and an empty Classico jar for when the bowl gets full. When they get full, I roll them and take them to the bank.

And, as an added bonus, sometimes you can find interesting coins in that spare change. Some of the ones I've found are here.

SAS's announcement is really great news for Linux, and it's something that users had been requesting for years, going back to a request by Christa Keil in 1993. There is no single solution providing the depth and breadth of data analysis and processing capabilities as SAS. I spent seven years as a SAS developer for clients in healthcare, banking, policy research, finance, biotech, and pharmaceutical sectors.

Two years ago I launched the SAS4Linux website and mailing list to focus the campaign. While it did generate interest from users, and responses from SAS Institute, I tend to think SI arrived at its own conclusions in deciding to market the port.

As others have noted, there is a bit of "too little, too late" from a number of folks as well. I now count myself as a former (recovering?) SAS programmer. I've been sufficiently infected with free software concepts to feel that there are several things about SAS which could be improved. In fact, many of them have been, though they are approached in a number of different, and distinct, open source projects.

The obvious next step is to provide some duct tape and wrapping around these tools to provide similar functionality (though not run-alike compatibility) to SAS. Stay tuned ;-)

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

They are. But don't take it from me, mind you - take it from the (in)famous Mr Henry Baker, in this incredible letter (*) to the Communications of the ACM, which is guaranteed to put a smile in the face of everyone who's ever thought there must be a better way.

(*) Note that Netcom, which hosts Mr Baker's archive, is under a large load, and may take a few attempts to be accessed.

They are. But don't take it from me, mind you - take it from the (in)famous Mr Henry Baker, in this incredible letter (*) to the Communications of the ACM, which is guaranteed to put a smile in the face of everyone who's ever thought there must be a better way.

(*) Note that Netcom, which hosts Mr Baker's archive, is under a large load, and may take a few attempts to be accessed.

A trademark is a way to identify the source of products and services. It is meant to protect consumers more than the business holding the trademark. The question of trademark violation comes down to one simple question, "will consumers be confused into thinking a product or service they are purchasing is actually the product or service of a company other than the one they are purchasing it from?"

A very large majority of people shown an eOne computer will look at it and think, "hey, that's an iMac!" This is a very clear case of consumer confusion and it is all that Apple needs to prove in order to win a trademark violation case.

This is entirely different from a copyright. Apple can copyright photos of their computers or the manuals for their computers, or even the software on the computer, but the computer itself is not subject to copyright laws.

Patent laws, while similar to trademark laws, also serve a completely different function... specifically that of function. You may patent a device or process. You can't patent a 'look'.

Here is a good site with links to all sorts of Patent and Trademark information. Recommended reading for most of the people posting here since there seems to be a lot of confusion over what this case is really about.

sometimes, though, it is nice to disconnect. if your trip is a vacation of sorts, you may wish to consider that alternative.

--thi

Can you comment on possibilities for developments relating to transaction processing and database management systems?

"For instances" to make this clearer include:

• RHAT has apparently been putting work into the availability of raw partitions that the major DBMS vendors prefer to the use of native filesystems.

  Ala SCT-RAW , raw i/o patches

• TP monitors such as BEA Tuxedo as well as message queueing systems such as IBM MQSeries.

  There's one "libre" option, Isect

Hey, Henry Baker said it, and he's, like, famous, or at least prolific, so he must be right!

So Uncle Sam now getting behind Linux. Do they realize the same trick won't work a second time? Do they underestimate the skill of Chinese programmers? Or ... I can't bear to contemplate the third possibility....
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

Hey, Henry Baker said it, and he's, like, famous, or at least prolific, so he must be right!

So Uncle Sam now getting behind Linux. Do they realize the same trick won't work a second time? Do they underestimate the skill of Chinese programmers? Or ... I can't bear to contemplate the third possibility....
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

• It'll not be scalable enough.

  For instance, there will need to be a "compression extension" because XML is verbose, thus making messages large.

• It'll not be robust enough.

  Thus requiring an extension so that messaging can be managed by MTS and/or MSMQ, or WTCTNY (Whatever They Call Them Next Year).

• It'll not integrate well enough with whatever tools they're using next year.

None of the technologies are inherently a problem:

• SOAP doesn't seem to be massively worse than XML-RPC although it's probably not as good as Casbah's LDO system.
• MTS is probably not as good as Encina or Tuxedo, but is doubtless better than the nonexistent TP monitors not being deployed in departmental/workgroup systems
• MSMQ may not be as good as Tuxedo, or as open as Isect, and is merely derivative of IBM MQSeries, but doesn't seem to be too bad, again being better than the asynchronous messaging systems nonexistent in non-big-iron systems

The implementations may be run-of-the-mill and derivative, but they're based on pretty good ideas, which is why it's been pretty easy for MSFT to market them.

What is a massive problem is that what gets deployed next year is liable to be massively incompatible with what is available this year.

In a sense, the only hope for developers that use the stuff is if there is some sort of "mass disconnect" where MSFT gets split into MSFT-1, MSFT-2, MSFT-3, ... and this results in the tools deployed having an extra year to stay vaguely stable...

Unfortunately, when they're Anonymous Cowards, it gets a bit harder to tell if you've got:

1. Someone that is being honest, that has known biases
2. Someone that is being dishonest, with well-known biases
3. Someone that is being honest, but where you can only infer indirectly what their biases are, or
4. Someone that is being downright dishonest, and perhaps trying to hide their biases.

Unfortunately, as you head down this list, there is a tendancy for honesty to diminish, as well as the usefulness of the information.

The issue isn't new; it was pretty evident in some reviews of LinuxCAD, that there were "reviewers" that may not have been at arms length from the "producers." Another review notes, about the "testimonials," that:

Strangely, these testimonials used the same poor english expression as whoever wrote the LinuxCAD advertisement.

It was quite entertaining when Linux Gazette published an Official Reaction of Software Forge Inc. to "LinuxCAD Review"; I expressed in LG issue 42 that I appreciated their restraint in not using a spell-checker...

No, I haven't much use for Anonymous Cowards...

If there are a lot of Access-based tools that are being used to "massage" the data internally, that is arguably not wonderful; what is crucial is that this not be used for the online copy.

You probably should consider using something like MySQL for handling the online data access for the web server; it would be entirely appropriate to build a process that synchronizes the online data with what's in your "back office" systems. This synchronization can add substantially to the overall robustness of your systems, as this can allow you to detect both:

• Discrepancies that might happen on the "Web Server" side, and
• Discrepancies that might happen on the "Back Office" side.

It might be useful to build some abstractions behind the scenes like message queues like IBM's MQSeries, on which Microsoft's MSMQ is based); a free tool that is commercially used that does this sort of thing is Isect .

What may be helpful, on the other hand, is to make sure there are ways of splitting applications into modular pieces so that you can have pieces on hosts here and there, and thereby keep the graphical pieces fairly thin.

To that end, I would commend the consideration of message-oriented middleware systems; there are expensive ones like Tuxedo or MQSeries, and "libre" ones like Isect.

Keep in mind that you can't keep the client thin unless you have already split the application cleanly into pieces that allow the client to stay thin...

The purported reason for SOAP to be a "good thing" is that it's a way of layering a messaging model atop HTTP; of course, if this was truly their interest, honesty would require admission that it is possible to layer IIOP/GIOP atop HTTP, with ILU as the most obvious manifestation of an implementation of this.

The problem with SOAP is that it pushes you back towards defining messages, rather than protocol, as IDL provides.

My suspicion is that the real purpose is to get people to build messaging systems using XML. That is not, in and of itself, a bad thing; I'd much rather see people building asynchronous messaging systems where messages are represented in XML rather than in some less-well-known format. (And, plug, plug, use Isect as the transport mechanism...)

If you're wanting to build a reliable system using that "SOAPed" XML, Wouldn't it be better to transport that XML around using MSMQ with reliability guaranteed using a TP Monitor like MTS?

How much would you want to bet that reliability of the MSFT tools would be deliberately limited so as to encourage widespread use of MSMQ/MTS?

Does this mean that all of SAS is to be ported to linux?

Don't hold your breath. I know a thing or two on the topic [1].

The news that I've heard is that a code port has been done. Some problems were encountered, but they were resolved with the help of RedHat. The question is whether or not Linux fits with SAS Institute's (SI) traditional customer base and business model. SAS is a mature product, with about 30,000 installed sites, roughly 2% base growth per year, and 16% revenue growth in 1998. 52% of revenues are still related to mainframe platforms (with 27% PC and 17% Unix). In short: a market that's not exactly bleeding edge, with more blood being squeezed from the same old turnips.

SAS programmers have been known to rant about several other shortcomings....

My feeling is that SAS will come around to supporting Linux eventually. They might even surprise me and make an announcement in the next few weeks -- it's regional user group conference time, a favorite time of year to announce new products (their latest release, v7, has been featured for the last four years running <g>....). But I'd put the probability at about 25%. A leaked internal discussion indicates that there are serious internal conflicts over marketing, and until Jim Goodnight says "SAS will run on Linux", it's not going to happen. I tend to get good information both directly and through the mailing list I maintain, and I've heard nothing. Might try shaking the bushes a bit....

However the open source movement has gathered momentum to the point that SAS is simply going to miss out. Flexible tools, source, server-based and distributed applications, are the new wave. SAS has got itself a neat little niche, but it's got an uphill grade -- getting steeper -- if it wants to catch up with the new wave.

[1] Yeah, I know the site's stale. The sad news is that it's current -- there's simply nothing to report. The mailing list carries more current information, but it's also tooooo quite....

• The situation with Solid displays nicely that the use of non-free software provides exposure to the risk that a vendor will decide to "Change their Business Strategy."

  If Solid decides to move from selling licenses at $300 targeted at web servers to selling $10000 licenses targetted at use in embedded systems (speaking loosely of "embedded," of course), there is little that the customer can do.

  If IBM decides not to provide an upgrade next year for Linux, and push users over to running DB/2 on Monterrey, there may be little that the customer can do.

• On the other hand, there are some tasks such as writing documentation and building test suites to verify compliance with standards that aren't "sexy" tasks and which thus have a tendancy to suffer on "free" DB platforms.

I suppose the given is that there are some significant risks regardless of the approach you take.

The observation that code should be written to be, as much as possible, independent of the DB engine, is certainly true. This diminishes the extent to which you're locked in.

This is valuable whether we're talking about Oracle or MySQL.

Related to this, it seems to me that people should be looking into using transactioning/messaging "proxies" like BEA Tuxedo (proprietary) or less proprietary things like the Isect message queuing system.

Strange coincidence re: Steaming Heap of Quickies.

The Atari Video Game History is produced by Howard Scott Warsaw, programmer behind "Yars Revenge" and "E.T." for 2600. On his website he takes joking credit for the collapse of the video game industry, saying "Rarely is one given the opportunity to topple a billion dollar industry single handedly. Yet according to the May '95 issue of New Media magazine (p. 27) this was my shot."

In my Demotivators 2000 calendar, Despair, Inc. includes the November 1982 date that Howard Scott Warsaw's "E.T" was released, saying in full "E.T." game release for Atari 2600; hastens collapse of the videogame industry. Over 1 million copies end up buried in a New Mexico landfill.

Freak coincidence, or is Rob listening to too many old Police albums?

Smirkleton

If you really knew who I am, you would understand that "IT'S A JOKE" I am using the ANTI-IPO HOW-TO.

Come-on people get a life and realize when someon is pulling your leg.

Take a look at this and SEE.

- greg

It looks like the developers of this distribution are not aware of SAS.

There even is an effort to get SAS ported to Linux.

-- Jochen

I guess we'll all know who's a MacBigot now...

Quoting from my copy of "The Mac Bathroom Reader" (now renamed "Apple Confidential" by Owen Linzmayer:

"I was on a plane going to a user group club in Fort Lauderdale to promote the Mac, along with some other members of the Mac team," recalls Wozniak. "Andy Hertzfield had just read Zap, a book about Atari which said that Steve Jobs designed Breakout. I explained to him that we both worked on it and got paid $700. Andy corrected me, 'No, it says here it was $5,000.' When I read in the book how Nolan Bushnell actually paid Steve $5,000, I just cried."

I don't doubt this story for an instant, but still, it's apocryphal at best. The fact that it has been butchered so many times in so many ways says a lot. It's like all of those quotes that have been attributed to Bill Gates ( e.g. "No one will ever need more than 640k" ).

What kind of authority is Zap! anyway?

I got websites:
Hexapods 3D FAQ's
This has good source of animation info.

Flipcode features
Go down to the "Building A 3D Portal Engine" section, which will take you from the ground up, even if you don't remember matrix's. CrystalSpace already has matrix operations though.