are not going to happen in large organizations.
Nobody ever knows everything about the strategy or organizational structure, and the people and managers change places and responsibilities faster than any project can proceed.
And continuity, crisis and incident management are only longed for when the systems are down and eveybody is expected to work continuously until they're fixed, but never when it's time to pay for it.
"Marine Atmospheric Reflection Survey" was an early expermental kind of SONAR where Ethel Merman stuck her head underwater and sung anything by Cole Porter. They stopped when three gay whales beached themsleves in the Santa Monica pier.
The Alpha chip is no longer manufactured (IMHO: Alphacide committed by COMPAQ to help it get bought by HP), but HP is continuing to release new versions of VMS for Alpha that has most of the functionality of the Integrity release: a common 64 bit code base is used, which was substantially different from the 32 bit code for VAX. Differences between Alpha and Integrity are that some hardware and software is not availabe for VMS Alpha systems: Serial SCSI comes to mind, and Intel's Itainium port of Sun's HotSpot JVM.
Version 8.4 of OpenVMS for Integrity and Alpha is entering beta (field test) for prodution release early next year. h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/site/dspp/menuitem.863c3e4cbcdc3f3515b49c108973a801/?ciid=66a2aea9e2f73210VgnVCM100000a360ea10RCRD
To be sure, this is about a year late, and HP has laid off most of the experienced team (including some original developers from the 1970's) moving development to India (where DEC has started development teams decades ago), so it's not as if this is HP's lead investment. I've met some of the Indian developers, and they seemed intelligent, interested in promoting VMS, and willing to learn new and unique skills specific to VMS (i.e. crash dump analysis).
VAX/VMS is still at version 7.3, and will probably stay there, although patches are still being released.
There is a free licensing program for non-commercial use for any VAX, Alpha, or Integrity system, including emulators (SIMH is free and supports VAX). www.openvmshobbyist.com
Born and raised in California, earthquakes tend to be boring: Magnitude 3.x is what the news programs talk about in between the weather and highway traffic. 4.x tends to be somebody says something fell over. 5.x is when you start to notice...
Loma Prieta was 6.9 and the epicenter about 60 miles from my home, about the same distance to the houses that collapsed and burned in San Francisco. It's not the distance but the local ground conditions that made the difference: the only thing that happened at my house was an empty soda can fell over. In the Marina District, the landfill (from the 1906 earthquake) turned to jello, something like that happened in Oakland to the freeway, and my house on a natural slope was fine.
Besides, there is no "if" about a coming large quake, only "when", and to a lesser extent where: most likely the northern end on the Hayward fault. Santa Rosa would be the San Andreas fault.
"Module Colbert: higher than Rush Limbuagh has ever been"
"Module Cobert: around the world 16 times a day"
Slightly OT, Colbert to Stewart: "I actually have a part of a space station named after me, and all you have is the planet Uranus and that wasn't really on purpose now was it"
Baltar didn't keep his involvement a secret: he confessed to Pres. Roslyn. Admittedly he was wounded and on pain meds, and Roslyn then tries to kill him by removing his bandages to let him bleed to death as she watches.
Her next move is supported from BSG's story line, and from much of our own: she has a "vision" (as the Cyclon Basestar ship goes through a hyper-jump), and as a result saves Baltar.
Since Baltar is not one of the Final Five cyclons, I figure his guilt and manipulation by Caprical Six is why she keeps appearing to him. And he to her, so her "humanity" is susceptible to the same side effects.
Since NASA has pissed on Rutan for decades (because I saw them do it in the 1980s when I worked at NASA Dryden on Edwards AFB), the worst thing the USAF can do to NASA is ask for his help.
This was the filesystem that HP tried to port to HPUX and failed. They licensed Veritas instead. I figured that the multithreading that I'd always heard worked so well in AdvFS/Tru64 was hard to port to the non-multithreaded HPUX kernel.
"Microsoft hired Cutler, who immediately started work on what would become Windows NT. DEC sued because it believed Cutler had put Mica or even VMS code in NT, and Microsoft eventually paid up $150m. As part of the settlement Microsoft agreed that Windows NT and its BackOffice applications would offer support for DEC's Alpha processor, which is why DEC Alpha was the only RISC chip that supported both Digital's version of Unix and Windows NT - quite a coup for DEC."
"As a result, many design principles found in the VMS kernel ended up in Windows NT. (The number and splitting of priority levels in the scheduler, the use of demand-paged virtual memory and the layered driver model are only a few examples of many, many similarities.) The first version of VMS was released in 1977. Without trivializing the efforts of Cutler and his team (they did a lot of work on the project) one has to wonder what Microsoft really means with "New Technology". To illustrate, in a little known out-of-court settlement Microsoft paid DEC $150 million in compensation for using portions of old Digital OS code in Windows NT."
I have a theory about the missing senior managers with useful skills: My father talked about his teaching debate in high school in the mid '60 to late '70 in central California (then moving on to a community college), where he said that many of the most socially active "lets change the world for the better" students he ever taught went to Vietnam and never really came back, in one way or another. Those people would now be in their 60s, ten years older than I, and their influence would be reaching their peak. Those people are the leaders and mentors that I feel have been missing from the last third of the 20th century.
If the Alpha/VMS team used the early virtualization technology in already there, even without what DEC/Compaq called "Galaxy", they could easily say that they are using virtulization and make their boss look good, or at least better...
But on a larger scale, what I've seen is a lot of the non-technical bosses reacting a project plan where several "Boxes" become "One Box" on a floor plan, so it must be better & cheaper, right?
What is never on the floor plan is that it takes about as many people to manage 100 systems is about the same as 100 virtual systems, IF they are well managed. What I suspect is that many shops aren't managing 100 systems well, with no common practices, startups, or images, and suddenly the VM environments make that easy, or at least a lot more obvious... which is probably where they get surprised.
I worked at Pacific Bell in San Francisco when SBC took over. There was a black women who had worked there for years, and was one of the few people who understood how the business worked, who noticed that the new managers from Texas where unable to say the word "black" in front of her, nor figure out what to say instead.
She thought it was hysterically funney, and took early retirement as soon as SBC stupidy offered it.
Since SBC CEO Ed Whitaker's goal was to reitre as CEO of ATT, even as far back as the Pac Bell purchase, I'm sure Telkom was just a means to his end.
As an employee of Pacific Bell when it was purchased by SBC, I fondly remember hearing that SBC CEO Ed Whitacre wanted to retire as chairman of ATT. I figured it was good to have goals. Then I was told that my 10% bonus that I used to get from Pac Bell was being replaced by SBC stock options, which did have positive value for about a year- I actually sold some. Then I watched the stock price tumble when SBC bought Ameritech (Regional Bell Operating Company - RBOC - around the Great Lakes), and my stock options bonus where replaced with chocolate chip cookies (I couldn't' make that up). I heard that Mr. Ed (as I liked to call him) had bought Ameritech based on ego (see goal above) and not financial advantage: some of Ameritech's phone switches where still mechanical rotary, not touch tone ("Well, it's not broken."), so there where some infrastructure issues. After being outsourced and laid off a while ago, I now see that Mr. Ed has finally achieved his goal and will be retiring soon. I always hoped his cellmates nickname would be "Horse".
I've had this sevice for alomst a year now, for my Powerbook G4, at about $80/month, which is less than one hour of my billable rate.
I've yet to have a problem, but then it's really for accessing the Interenet at client sites that don't allow just anybody to connect from thier internal network to the outside (especially without IE7 and VB to run authentication...). My home connection is via cable modem (Comcast), so most of my heavy usage comes that way, though I have occasionally used the EVDO to donwload some update files of 100MB each, and an occasional audio book, without a complaint from Verizon.
The service contract, when I signed it, made it clear that the "unlimited" refered to connect time, not bandwidth, which was fine with me.
I did see the complaints about terminated service plans on the EVDO Forums ( http://www.evdoforums.com/ ), but felt that my requirements where going to be much lower. The current verion of Verizonwireless' website allows me to see my data useage by month, plus the current data usage since the last billing, so it is possible to watch what I'm doing. For the last three months, I don't have any month over 5MB, so I don't expect a 5GB/month to be a problem.
Looks like automated CYA. After woking at NASA mid '80s, being good at CYA is how people get promoted into management, who stay there unchangeable until they die. Good engineers get screwed or transfered to no-where projects that get canceled.
I'm not good at CYA...but I guess that's a personal problem.
As a former employee of Pac Bell who watched the takeover by SBC, and lived through a couple of other SBC mergers, one of the things I lerned was that acquisitions are driven primarily by CEO Ed Whitacre's ego, not the finical result. His public comments about Internet companies using "his pipes" makes clear (to me, anyway) that this is personal, not business http://www.businessweek.com/@@n34h*IUQu7KtOwgA/mag azine/content/05_45/b3958092.htm In the same article from last Nov, he was saying that ATT acquiring BellSouth want's very likely, it was then announced in March http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=ne ws&newsarticleid=22140 and now it's almost a done deal. His "business face" will never tell you what he's going to do, especially when he says stuff about "creating value": he's hidding something else that he dosen't want you to know about. As I read through the article with this in mind, I'm almost certain ATT is not telling what it's really doing, but it looks like people are starting to figure that out.
Considering that VP Cheney is far more the "brains" in the Whitehouse, woudn't it be more effective to impeach him?
Or would having to accept that Pres. Bush really isn't in control just complicating impeachment proceedings?
I realize the comical proof is to have Pres. Bush speak while VP Cheney is drinking a large glass of water,
but if one of the intents of impeachment is to create change, then removing a figurehead won't improve maters much.
Or to really Watergate this, could both of them be considered co-conspirators?
And if both were impeached and convicted, wouldn't that make Rep. Nancy Pelosi President?
Slashdot Mirror
are not going to happen in large organizations.
Nobody ever knows everything about the strategy or organizational structure, and the people and managers change places and responsibilities faster than any project can proceed.
And continuity, crisis and incident management are only longed for when the systems are down and eveybody is expected to work continuously until they're fixed, but never when it's time to pay for it.
Is the kit from American Science & Surplus (SCIPLUS.COM)?
I've been wondering how good they are...
"...not married." That's the supidest statement I've read here in a long time.
"Marine Atmospheric Reflection Survey" was an early expermental kind of SONAR where Ethel Merman stuck her head underwater and sung anything by Cole Porter. They stopped when three gay whales beached themsleves in the Santa Monica pier.
Is the popular definition of a "mainframe" now anything designed or manufactured before MS Windows was released?
The Alpha chip is no longer manufactured (IMHO: Alphacide committed by COMPAQ to help it get bought by HP), but HP is continuing to release new versions of VMS for Alpha that has most of the functionality of the Integrity release: a common 64 bit code base is used, which was substantially different from the 32 bit code for VAX. Differences between Alpha and Integrity are that some hardware and software is not availabe for VMS Alpha systems: Serial SCSI comes to mind, and Intel's Itainium port of Sun's HotSpot JVM.
Version 8.4 of OpenVMS for Integrity and Alpha is entering beta (field test) for prodution release early next year.
h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/site/dspp/menuitem.863c3e4cbcdc3f3515b49c108973a801/?ciid=66a2aea9e2f73210VgnVCM100000a360ea10RCRD
To be sure, this is about a year late, and HP has laid off most of the experienced team (including some original developers from the 1970's) moving development to India (where DEC has started development teams decades ago), so it's not as if this is HP's lead investment. I've met some of the Indian developers, and they seemed intelligent, interested in promoting VMS, and willing to learn new and unique skills specific to VMS (i.e. crash dump analysis).
VAX/VMS is still at version 7.3, and will probably stay there, although patches are still being released.
There is a free licensing program for non-commercial use for any VAX, Alpha, or Integrity system, including emulators (SIMH is free and supports VAX).
www.openvmshobbyist.com
Born and raised in California, earthquakes tend to be boring:
Magnitude 3.x is what the news programs talk about in between the weather and highway traffic.
4.x tends to be somebody says something fell over.
5.x is when you start to notice...
Loma Prieta was 6.9 and the epicenter about 60 miles from my home, about the same distance to the houses that collapsed and burned in San Francisco. It's not the distance but the local ground conditions that made the difference: the only thing that happened at my house was an empty soda can fell over. In the Marina District, the landfill (from the 1906 earthquake) turned to jello, something like that happened in Oakland to the freeway, and my house on a natural slope was fine.
Besides, there is no "if" about a coming large quake, only "when", and to a lesser extent where: most likely the northern end on the Hayward fault. Santa Rosa would be the San Andreas fault.
I would hope for public access to non-personal details, so everybody on the planet can to performance analysis on the care and outcome of treatment.
Then private (encrypted) access for when I'm in the doctors office and hospital.
The hard part is going to be tracking changes for use in malpractice cases.
Vista won't be used because it already works.
Nobody makes a lot of money from something that works...
Can we call what goes in the Colbert a zune?
"Module Colbert: higher than Rush Limbuagh has ever been"
"Module Cobert: around the world 16 times a day"
Slightly OT, Colbert to Stewart:
"I actually have a part of a space station named after me, and all you have is the planet Uranus and that wasn't really on purpose now was it"
Baltar didn't keep his involvement a secret: he confessed to Pres. Roslyn.
Admittedly he was wounded and on pain meds, and Roslyn then tries to kill him by removing his bandages to let him bleed to death as she watches.
Her next move is supported from BSG's story line, and from much of our own: she has a "vision" (as the Cyclon Basestar ship goes through a hyper-jump), and as a result saves Baltar.
Since Baltar is not one of the Final Five cyclons, I figure his guilt and manipulation by Caprical Six is why she keeps appearing to him. And he to her, so her "humanity" is susceptible to the same side effects.
Since NASA has pissed on Rutan for decades (because I saw them do it in the 1980s when I worked at NASA Dryden on Edwards AFB), the worst thing the USAF can do to NASA is ask for his help.
This was the filesystem that HP tried to port to HPUX and failed. They licensed Veritas instead.
I figured that the multithreading that I'd always heard worked so well in AdvFS/Tru64 was hard to port to the non-multithreaded HPUX kernel.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39175690,00.htm
"It had initially planned to complete the migration of the TruCluster/AdvFS feature from Tru64 Unix to HP-UX 11i v3 in the middle of 2006."
http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1214253121145+28353475&threadId=754760
"No TruCluster or AdvFS for HP-UX after all"
But DEC then sued MS:
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/blog/archives/2005/10/index.html
"Microsoft hired Cutler, who immediately started work on what would become Windows NT. DEC sued because it believed Cutler had put Mica or even VMS code in NT, and Microsoft eventually paid up $150m. As part of the settlement Microsoft agreed that Windows NT and its BackOffice applications would offer support for DEC's Alpha processor, which is why DEC Alpha was the only RISC chip that supported both Digital's version of Unix and Windows NT - quite a coup for DEC."
And
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html
"As a result, many design principles found in the VMS kernel ended up in Windows NT. (The number and splitting of priority levels in the scheduler, the use of demand-paged virtual memory and the layered driver model are only a few examples of many, many similarities.) The first version of VMS was released in 1977. Without trivializing the efforts of Cutler and his team (they did a lot of work on the project) one has to wonder what Microsoft really means with "New Technology". To illustrate, in a little known out-of-court settlement Microsoft paid DEC $150 million in compensation for using portions of old Digital OS code in Windows NT."
I have a theory about the missing senior managers with useful skills: My father talked about his teaching debate in high school in the mid '60 to late '70 in central California (then moving on to a community college), where he said that many of the most socially active "lets change the world for the better" students he ever taught went to Vietnam and never really came back, in one way or another. Those people would now be in their 60s, ten years older than I, and their influence would be reaching their peak. Those people are the leaders and mentors that I feel have been missing from the last third of the 20th century.
If the Alpha/VMS team used the early virtualization technology in already there, even without what DEC/Compaq called "Galaxy", they could easily say that they are using virtulization and make their boss look good, or at least better...
... which is probably where they get surprised.
But on a larger scale, what I've seen is a lot of the non-technical bosses reacting a project plan where several "Boxes" become "One Box" on a floor plan, so it must be better & cheaper, right?
What is never on the floor plan is that it takes about as many people to manage 100 systems is about the same as 100 virtual systems, IF they are well managed. What I suspect is that many shops aren't managing 100 systems well, with no common practices, startups, or images, and suddenly the VM environments make that easy, or at least a lot more obvious
Sean
Maybe reading replaced drives is how Apple gets new ideas?
Did I really say that out loud...
Sean
I worked at Pacific Bell in San Francisco when SBC took over.
There was a black women who had worked there for years, and was one of the few people who understood how the business worked, who noticed that the new managers from Texas where unable to say the word "black" in front of her, nor figure out what to say instead.
She thought it was hysterically funney, and took early retirement as soon as SBC stupidy offered it.
Since SBC CEO Ed Whitaker's goal was to reitre as CEO of ATT, even as far back as the Pac Bell purchase, I'm sure Telkom was just a means to his end.
As an employee of Pacific Bell when it was purchased by SBC, I fondly remember hearing that SBC CEO Ed Whitacre wanted to retire as chairman of ATT. I figured it was good to have goals. Then I was told that my 10% bonus that I used to get from Pac Bell was being replaced by SBC stock options, which did have positive value for about a year- I actually sold some. Then I watched the stock price tumble when SBC bought Ameritech (Regional Bell Operating Company - RBOC - around the Great Lakes), and my stock options bonus where replaced with chocolate chip cookies (I couldn't' make that up). I heard that Mr. Ed (as I liked to call him) had bought Ameritech based on ego (see goal above) and not financial advantage: some of Ameritech's phone switches where still mechanical rotary, not touch tone ("Well, it's not broken."), so there where some infrastructure issues. After being outsourced and laid off a while ago, I now see that Mr. Ed has finally achieved his goal and will be retiring soon. I always hoped his cellmates nickname would be "Horse".
I've had this sevice for alomst a year now, for my Powerbook G4, at about $80/month, which is less than one hour of my billable rate.
I've yet to have a problem, but then it's really for accessing the Interenet at client sites that don't allow just anybody to connect from thier internal network to the outside (especially without IE7 and VB to run authentication...). My home connection is via cable modem (Comcast), so most of my heavy usage comes that way, though I have occasionally used the EVDO to donwload some update files of 100MB each, and an occasional audio book, without a complaint from Verizon.
The service contract, when I signed it, made it clear that the "unlimited" refered to connect time, not bandwidth, which was fine with me.
I did see the complaints about terminated service plans on the EVDO Forums ( http://www.evdoforums.com/ ), but felt that my requirements where going to be much lower. The current verion of Verizonwireless' website allows me to see my data useage by month, plus the current data usage since the last billing, so it is possible to watch what I'm doing. For the last three months, I don't have any month over 5MB, so I don't expect a 5GB/month to be a problem.
Looks like automated CYA. After woking at NASA mid '80s, being good at CYA is how people get promoted into management,
who stay there unchangeable until they die. Good engineers get screwed or transfered to no-where projects that get canceled.
I'm not good at CYA...but I guess that's a personal problem.
As a former employee of Pac Bell who watched the takeover by SBC, and lived through a couple of other SBC mergers, one of the things I lerned was that acquisitions are driven primarily by CEO Ed Whitacre's ego, not the finical result. His public comments about Internet companies using "his pipes" makes clear (to me, anyway) that this is personal, not business http://www.businessweek.com/@@n34h*IUQu7KtOwgA/mag azine/content/05_45/b3958092.htm In the same article from last Nov, he was saying that ATT acquiring BellSouth want's very likely, it was then announced in March http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=ne ws&newsarticleid=22140 and now it's almost a done deal. His "business face" will never tell you what he's going to do, especially when he says stuff about "creating value": he's hidding something else that he dosen't want you to know about. As I read through the article with this in mind, I'm almost certain ATT is not telling what it's really doing, but it looks like people are starting to figure that out.
Considering that VP Cheney is far more the "brains" in the Whitehouse, woudn't it be more effective to impeach him? Or would having to accept that Pres. Bush really isn't in control just complicating impeachment proceedings? I realize the comical proof is to have Pres. Bush speak while VP Cheney is drinking a large glass of water, but if one of the intents of impeachment is to create change, then removing a figurehead won't improve maters much. Or to really Watergate this, could both of them be considered co-conspirators? And if both were impeached and convicted, wouldn't that make Rep. Nancy Pelosi President?