He may be a clever guy with a good idea but he totaly misunderstands how democracy 2.0 works in hte U.S.
Voters are largly irrelevant in Dem 2.0, The suckers vote for whoever has the best TV adds.
Therefore what really matters are the campaign contributors so you can by better and more TV adds than your rivals.
The best contibutors are big businesses and the people who own big businesses. So if you get elected you need to keep these people happy and ensure the funds keep coming your way. MS, Oracle etc. are all big campaign contributors -- it would be electoral suicide for a government to fund a open source initiative which ate into there revenues.
Computing, Data Processing, IT whatever you call it has been deployed extensivly by corporate America since 1965.
After 42 years of continuous development and employment all the easy stuff has been done! There are no "deploy this system and become 50% more efficient" opertunities any more.
Worse niave IT people have consitantly overstated the benefits of IT and underestimated the costs so if you propose a 5% saveing through a new software any sensible business manager would think "I'll get 1% if Im lucky and it will probably be cancelled anyway so why take a risk!".
The major (rational) reason for upgrading systems has been increases in volume and throughput which cannot be handled by the old system in a shrinking economy this isnt such an issue.
Sandwiches -- circa 1750 lord Sandwich popularised the concept of a slice of meat between two slices of bread so he could eat while playing cards without getting the cards greasy.
General Motors -- was an amalgamation of existing companies, significantly it still trades through the original brand names Chevrolet, Chrysler Cadillac etc.
In hard times companies dont axe thier IT departments they just kill new projects and purchasing. Given the abysmally slow software development cycle for most business projects this actually makes sense -- "I save $100,000 dollars now on something that might work in 2011.".
Its pretty much the same in the consumer market - if you might lose your job next month that cluncky old Dell suddenly looks "good enough" and no new hardware - no new software.
Your probably right about the games industry though!
And it not just a case of unemployment shooting up to 10%, many of those in jobs will be earning less money -- low bonuses, low sales commisions, people lost a job but found another at a lower salary etc.
Those people who did manage to earn as much or more than last year are reluctant to spend it and are preparing for the time when thier luck runs out.
Another poster commented on how "business could save millions if they revisited thier old systems". Sorry but the running costs of an existing system will rarely be more than the software devlopment costs of "improvements". This is call "Business Process Re-engineering" in Bullshit and thier have been too many high profile failures in this area for this to be taken seriously by Business management.
If developers had delivered more on time/on budget/fullfills requirments software during the good years these arguments might have some credibility -- but for the most part corporate america would rahter stick with the abd smell thay have gotten used to rather spend money on solething that could be worse.
Only Sweden of all the other EU countries has attempted this and the various privicy groups have protested effectivly and loudly so it will probably be blown out of the water.
This is a classic UK civil service tactic -- introduce unpopular legislation that suits thier purposes and say the EU made them do it.
To any suckers who are still living in the Old Country -- if you dont like it stop moaning and vote the b****s out.
It is currently illegal to sell any knife to a minor in the UK. So all the hardware shops have there knives in a locked cabinet which means you need to find a sales dork to open the cabinet so you can get hold of a potato peeler. Since most of the sales staff at the weekends are about fifteen years old it means you are asking a minor to open a cabinet whose purpose is to prevent minors accessing the contents.
The "no pointy knives" was a serious (and seriously reported) suggestion by some semi-official and officious group of medics.
Sorry but I cant think of a single company/brand/product that had its origins in the Great Depression.
Up till 2002 the software industry was counter-cyclic with the rest of the economy. When times got tough companies spent more on computers and associated software to save costs or gain competetive edge.
But the low hanging fruit is gone and IT departments are just another big budget item that needs cutting. Particularly in the current cluster f***ed economy -- can you think of any software that would get you easier, indeed any, credit from the bank, or, software that would help you sell your latest high tech gizmo to someone who just lost thier job and is having thier mortgage foreclosed?
Spending on sex, gambling and drugs goes up in hard times, but, the first two are a done deal as far a software is concerned and the third is in a market so free that the competition will kill you.
The defacto standard in this area is Webshere MQ from IBM.
It has something like 90% of the business relaible messaging market. All the other commercial products (MSMQ, Oracle, Tibco etc.) are niche players.
MA is actually pretty cheap for a "Websphere" branded product starting from free for a try this at home folks windows installation, through a few $,000 dollars for a sizeable unix shop license to tens of thousands for a mainframe setup (This IS considered cheap for mainframe software!)
If you can persuade your boss not to pay for software (always desparately hard in a business environment!) then ActiveMQ is the defacto standard for open source implementations. AFIK its just as good as IBMs product as long as you stay in the Java world.
This all looks like an attempt to cause confusion and muddy the waters with yet another unstandard standard.
If you live anywhere on continental Europe "\" is not an easy character to type.
On French, German, Swiss, Belgian keyboard the little b*st*d is an "alt gr" key.
Not too much of a problem until you have someone on the phone. Just try holding down the "Alt Gr" and the "" key at the same time as holding a telephone receiver!
Jeez. If politians are going to get involved in defining the IP protocols and traffic management algorithms. Maybe they should talk to the inventor of the "Information Superhighway" as Al Gore would know all the technical details.
Put it simply "net neutrality" is an idealogical battle between engineers, who would like to define a workable scheme for traffic management, and idealogs, who think the internet is a wonderful tool for freedom but have no idea how it works.
There is a fundimental mistake in hte articles thinking (though no I suspect in the original paper).
In sexually procreated species most evolultion comes from selection of already existing traits from the gene pool.
Genetic mutation i.e. random changes in DNA which result in a new "expression" are usually fatal to the resulting organism hence benevolent mutations are rare and get much rarer the more complex the organism.
Mixing and matching from a pre-existing set of traits (as in sexual breeding) to produce an offspring which best "fits" a new environment happens surprisingly fast. e.g. English hedgehogs now run like hell when confronted with bright lights and noise rather than roll up into a ball, this change took place in about forty generations after motor car (automobile) ownership in England became common in the 1950s.
FLAMEBAIT -- get a life! Anyone who has experience of both J2EE and.NET will tell you that.NET is better thought out, has a more consistant design, has cleaner easier to use APIs, scales better, performs better and is altogether a much nicer environment to work in.
I am sorry if this upsets the Slashdot worldview but its the truth. Microsfot are better at software than Sun.
Some of your points would be valid if the government were proposing a universal id card for all citizens.
But they are not proposing this because they know there is large scale opposition to this ( as in civil disobedience, refusal to pay, court challenges, and, quite possibly riots).
Instead they are trying to sneak in a small scale implemetation for spurious reasons in hte hope that onece the infastructure is in place they can push the boundries until is does become a universal id card.
As for the fingerprint issue. The fingerprint data is stored electronicly on a chip within the card, therefore special equipment (which must have the the RSA key to decrypt the data) is required to check the fingerprint.
Either only heavily restricted government agencies are allowed this equipment or the RSA key becomes public knowledge. Given a public key to test, known plaintext and a large number of samples the time required to crack the private key is much less than expected lifetime of the average card so the technical implementation is deeply flawed. I.E. The UK public is being forced to pay over $100 US for something that is no more secure or reliable than a 90 cent plastic photo id.
Aside from the technical implmentations, the matter of principal for the average Brit is that while they live in a deeply flawed democracy and in theory they have less rights than the citizens of many other countries they have (or imagine they have ) much more personal freedom/privicy than the citizens most other countries.
While this has been deeply eroded over the last century these freedoms are still cherished and the any attempt to interfere with this will be strongly opposed.
Actually in all of post-Napoleonic Europe ID cards are required.
This is pretty much the whole EU apart from the pieces us Brits were sitting on when Bonaparte made his first attempt at European union -- UK, Ireland and Malta ( The Ottoman family were administering Greece at the time but I think they got ID cards in the 1930s).
Mostly these are bits of cardboard with a picture on backed up by a central register. Though some counties like Belgium have high tech plastic cards with digital signature capabilities so you can fill in your tax forms online.
As far as I know nobody has bothered with biometrics etc. because they are pretty pointless. All important data is held on central registers/ data abses and the main verification process is done through the mind-numingly tedious, old-fashioned but thourough process of registering at the town hall whenever you change address.
1. It wont stop illegal working.
Anyone who is supposed to have such a card but doesnt can just pretend to be on of the 99.9%
of the population that is not required to have the card.
2. Whats the point of the frigging fingerprint?
Who has got the both tha equipemnt and the right to check it?
3. The variously elected and appointed idiots are in thrall to various "consultants".
To paraphrase Warren Buffets immortal words "Never ask a consultant if you need an overpriced solution".
4. Lastly but most importantly -- there is no "problem".
Various candidates for the problem to which id cards are the solution have been proposed and they have
all been found wanting.
First it was terrorism -- but it was pointed out that all known serious terroist attacks in hte UK
were carried out by terrorists using thier real names, and, that at no point in the leadup to any attack
were they required to identify themselves.
Second it was illegal immigration -- but some 350 million EU citizens have the right to work in the UK
anyway, the much villified asylum seekers are attempting to immigrate legally, plus nobody is going
to check the documents of thier Russian nanny or Morrocan cleaner.
Thirdly it was "identity theft" -- but if the banks give money/credit to unverified strangers it is
thier problem. For this to be effective lenders would need to have; the equipment to read the card,
the right to ask for a fingerprint and access to the central database to verify the validity of the
card.
Currently Jaqi Smith cannot come up with any reasonable justification for this system at all but is
still pressing ahead with a system that will dump billions into the coffers of the "usual suspects"
Accenture, EDS (now HP), CAP and IBM.
Well at least the labour party will be more or less extinct in a years time, but the civil servants who are pushing this idea will still be there, and the Conservatives look even more prone to SnakeOil salesman that the incumbent idiots.
Your head office has just been flooded and your trying to get the DR system up and running over a remote line.
Now where did I put that number for the Veritas? Its in an e-mail -- but the f***g email system is what Im trying to restart.
many phone calls later:-
"Hello I need some temp licences urgently". "Am pleasing to help you, customer number please". "Our office is flooded I dont have the customer number". "Am sorry to hear of your problems but system needs you cutomer number otherwise cannot be helping you".................
I get this screen when my old Dell expiron overheats.
Poor old thing can't manage a virus scan and a Web Page at the same time.
Given the ROCs forgiven and humanetarian nature I wonder which Sysadmin will be donating his internal organs to the Bill and Melissa marketing foundation?
Actually its quite a common policy in MegaCorps to reject software that require machine specific or expiring license keys for use in "Mission Critical" applications.
The backup server not having the correct licenses is one of the biggest risks in a Disaster Recovery.
Migration to newer better hardware also becomes a nightmare where license keys are involved -- what do you mean the new server doesnt have centronics port for the dongle?
Its also screws up the companys virtualisation strategy as you have no idea whether a given license scheme will work in inside a VM or not.
Do like the Fortune 500 and just say no to runtime licenses.
Me too. Lifes generally pretty good in the land of 1000 beers.
They do have a bit of silliness about which bags you put thiings in but at least the rubbish is collected five times a week where I live.
The poor old folks back in blighty are stuck with a once every two week "real" rubbish collection. Having fish for dinner requires careful timing in the summer.
As for saving leftovers for compost compost -- I had a couple of niegbours in Switzerland who religiously did this -- it stinks!
Copyright conditions usually have a "reproduced without modification" clause so someone who's website is copyrighted and contains ads could thoereticaly sue the ISP for modifing thier page.
My bet is that if they once replace a google ad with one of thier own they will drown in subpeonas.
Mod parent down!! He answered the OPs question. He answered it sensibly. He did not recommend any Freeware, Payware or Painware. He did not even critique the operating system used.
We cannot condone such postings. What if everybody came to expect Slashdot posting to be relevent, even credible.
Common instruction set accross range : - 1960s. Multiprocessing with memory protection : - 1960s Offload IO and network to specialised processors : - 1960s Parallel pipelining of Fetch, Execute, Store:- 1960s Databases (hoerarchical): 1970s Virtual Storage : 1970s SMP up to 16 processors : 1970s 99.99% uptimes : 1980s Virtual Machines (OSes running inside another OS): 1980s Databases (Relational) : 1980s Clustering: 1990s Clustering over wide area : 2000s 99.9999% availability : 2000s
Its just that they are recent in most other enviroments.
Give or take some historical wierdnesses like JCL they are very nice machines to work with and depending on how you juggle the figures the Total Cost of Ownership is usually less than for the equivalent room full of UNIX servers -- and -- almost always less than trying to do the same job with a room full of Windows servers.
The sheer processing power and IO bandwidth, coupled, with an OS that is quite happy to run at 100% cpu all day plus the tools to balance a mixed workload sensibly means they get through phenominal amounts of work.
Well for one thing real database systems are massively parrallel -- thats why they need locking mechanisms. Supporting 5,000 connections while executing hundreds of parrallel requests is "normal" in the DB2 Oracle world.
Most of my current programming is done in a J2EE/WEB type enviroment where the containers take care of the most of the parrallelism issues for you. And in my current job parallelism means getting the processes to spread out over several machines rather than several processors so threads of any kind are really are not the answer.
As for POSIX threads being scary, you have to RTFM, but they are the tool of choice if you must multithread. Not some OO threads wrapper, not proprietary threading that comes with the OS and not Java threads if you can in any way avoid them.
Slashdot Mirror
He may be a clever guy with a good idea but he totaly misunderstands how democracy 2.0 works in hte U.S.
Voters are largly irrelevant in Dem 2.0, The suckers vote for whoever has the best TV adds.
Therefore what really matters are the campaign contributors so you can by better and more TV adds than your rivals.
The best contibutors are big businesses and the people who own big businesses. So if you get elected you need to keep these people happy and ensure the funds keep coming your way. MS, Oracle etc. are all big campaign contributors -- it would be electoral suicide for a government to fund a open source initiative which ate into there revenues.
Sorry founded in 1908 by Susan Hoover the inventors cousin.
Computing, Data Processing, IT whatever you call it has been deployed extensivly by corporate America since 1965.
After 42 years of continuous development and employment all the easy stuff has been done! There are no "deploy this system and become 50% more efficient" opertunities any more.
Worse niave IT people have consitantly overstated the benefits of IT and underestimated the costs so if you propose a 5% saveing through a new software any sensible business manager would think "I'll get 1% if Im lucky and it will probably be cancelled anyway so why take a risk!".
The major (rational) reason for upgrading systems has been increases in volume and throughput which cannot be handled by the old system in a shrinking economy this isnt such an issue.
Sandwiches -- circa 1750 lord Sandwich popularised the concept of a slice of meat between two slices of bread so he could eat while playing cards without getting the cards greasy.
General Motors -- was an amalgamation of existing companies, significantly it still trades through the original brand names Chevrolet, Chrysler Cadillac etc.
In hard times companies dont axe thier IT departments they just kill new projects and purchasing. Given the abysmally slow software development cycle for most business projects this actually makes sense -- "I save $100,000 dollars now on something that might work in 2011.".
Its pretty much the same in the consumer market - if you might lose your job next month that cluncky old Dell suddenly looks "good enough" and no new hardware - no new software.
Your probably right about the games industry though!
And it not just a case of unemployment shooting up to 10%, many of those in jobs will be earning less money -- low bonuses, low sales commisions, people lost a job but found another at a lower salary etc.
Those people who did manage to earn as much or more than last year are reluctant to spend it and are preparing for the time when thier luck runs out.
Another poster commented on how "business could save millions if they revisited thier old systems". Sorry but the running costs of an existing system will rarely be more than the software devlopment costs of "improvements". This is call "Business Process Re-engineering" in Bullshit and thier have been too many high profile failures in this area for this to be taken seriously by Business management.
If developers had delivered more on time/on budget/fullfills requirments software during the good years these arguments might have some credibility -- but for the most part corporate america would rahter stick with the abd smell thay have gotten used to rather spend money on solething that could be worse.
Only Sweden of all the other EU countries has attempted this and the various privicy groups have protested effectivly and loudly so it will probably be blown out of the water.
This is a classic UK civil service tactic -- introduce unpopular legislation that suits thier purposes and say the EU made them do it.
To any suckers who are still living in the Old Country -- if you dont like it stop moaning and vote the b****s out.
It is currently illegal to sell any knife to a minor in the UK. So all the hardware shops have there knives in a locked cabinet which means you need to find a sales dork to open the cabinet so you can get hold of a potato peeler. Since most of the sales staff at the weekends are about fifteen years old it means you are asking a minor to open a cabinet whose purpose is to prevent minors accessing the contents.
The "no pointy knives" was a serious (and seriously reported) suggestion by some semi-official and officious group of medics.
Sorry but I cant think of a single company/brand/product that had its origins in the Great Depression.
Up till 2002 the software industry was counter-cyclic with the rest of the economy. When times got tough companies spent more on computers and associated software to save costs or gain competetive edge.
But the low hanging fruit is gone and IT departments are just another big budget item that needs cutting. Particularly in the current cluster f***ed economy -- can you think of any software that would get you easier, indeed any, credit from the bank, or, software that would help you sell your latest high tech gizmo to someone who just lost thier job and is having thier mortgage foreclosed?
Spending on sex, gambling and drugs goes up in hard times, but, the first two are a done deal as far a software is concerned and the third is in a market so free that the competition will kill you.
The defacto standard in this area is Webshere MQ from IBM.
It has something like 90% of the business relaible messaging market.
All the other commercial products (MSMQ, Oracle, Tibco etc.) are niche players.
MA is actually pretty cheap for a "Websphere" branded product starting from free for a
try this at home folks windows installation, through a few $,000 dollars for a sizeable unix
shop license to tens of thousands for a mainframe setup (This IS considered cheap for mainframe software!)
If you can persuade your boss not to pay for software (always desparately hard in a business environment!) then ActiveMQ is the defacto standard for open source implementations. AFIK its just as good as IBMs product as long as you stay in the Java world.
This all looks like an attempt to cause confusion and muddy the waters with yet another unstandard standard.
If you live anywhere on continental Europe "\" is not an easy character to type.
On French, German, Swiss, Belgian keyboard the little b*st*d is an "alt gr" key.
Not too much of a problem until you have someone on the phone. Just try holding down the "Alt Gr" and
the "" key at the same time as holding a telephone receiver!
Curse you insensative anglo saxons!
Jeez. If politians are going to get involved in defining the IP protocols and traffic management algorithms. Maybe they should talk to the inventor of the "Information Superhighway" as Al Gore would know all the technical details.
Put it simply "net neutrality" is an idealogical battle between engineers, who would like to define a workable scheme for traffic management, and idealogs, who think the internet is a wonderful tool for freedom but have no idea how it works.
There is a fundimental mistake in hte articles thinking (though no I suspect in the original paper).
In sexually procreated species most evolultion comes from selection of already existing traits from the gene pool.
Genetic mutation i.e. random changes in DNA which result in a new "expression" are usually fatal to the resulting organism hence benevolent mutations are rare and get much rarer the more complex the organism.
Mixing and matching from a pre-existing set of traits (as in sexual breeding) to produce an offspring which best "fits" a new environment happens surprisingly fast. e.g. English hedgehogs now run like hell when confronted with bright lights and noise rather than roll up into a ball, this change took place in about forty generations after motor car (automobile) ownership in England became common in the 1950s.
FLAMEBAIT -- get a life! .NET will tell you that .NET is better thought out, has a more consistant design,
Anyone who has experience of both J2EE and
has cleaner easier to use APIs, scales better, performs better
and is altogether a much nicer environment to work in.
I am sorry if this upsets the Slashdot worldview but its the truth.
Microsfot are better at software than Sun.
Except C# is much better than Java and .NET is much better than J2EE.
Some of your points would be valid if the government were proposing a universal id card for all citizens.
But they are not proposing this because they know there is large scale opposition to this ( as in civil disobedience, refusal to pay, court challenges, and, quite possibly riots).
Instead they are trying to sneak in a small scale implemetation for spurious reasons in hte hope that onece the infastructure is in place they can push the boundries until is does become a universal id card.
As for the fingerprint issue. The fingerprint data is stored electronicly on a chip within the card, therefore special equipment (which must have the the RSA key to decrypt the data) is required to check the fingerprint.
Either only heavily restricted government agencies are allowed this equipment or the RSA key becomes public knowledge. Given a public key to test, known plaintext and a large number of samples the time required to crack the private key is much less than expected lifetime of the average card so the technical implementation is deeply flawed. I.E. The UK public is being forced to pay over $100 US for something that is no more secure or reliable than a 90 cent plastic photo id.
Aside from the technical implmentations, the matter of principal for the average Brit is that while they live in a deeply flawed democracy and in theory they have less rights than the citizens of many other countries they have (or imagine they have ) much more personal freedom/privicy than the citizens most other countries.
While this has been deeply eroded over the last century these freedoms are still cherished and the any attempt to interfere with this will be strongly opposed.
Actually in all of post-Napoleonic Europe ID cards are required.
This is pretty much the whole EU apart from the pieces us Brits were sitting
on when Bonaparte made his first attempt at European union
-- UK, Ireland and Malta ( The Ottoman family were administering Greece at the
time but I think they got ID cards in the 1930s).
Mostly these are bits of cardboard with a picture on backed up by a central register.
Though some counties like Belgium have high tech plastic cards with digital signature
capabilities so you can fill in your tax forms online.
As far as I know nobody has bothered with biometrics etc. because they are pretty
pointless. All important data is held on central registers/ data abses and the
main verification process is done through the mind-numingly tedious, old-fashioned
but thourough process of registering at the town hall whenever you change address.
1. It wont stop illegal working.
Anyone who is supposed to have such a card but doesnt can just pretend to be on of the 99.9%
of the population that is not required to have the card.
2. Whats the point of the frigging fingerprint?
Who has got the both tha equipemnt and the right to check it?
3. The variously elected and appointed idiots are in thrall to various "consultants".
To paraphrase Warren Buffets immortal words "Never ask a consultant if you need an overpriced solution".
4. Lastly but most importantly -- there is no "problem".
Various candidates for the problem to which id cards are the solution have been proposed and they have
all been found wanting.
First it was terrorism -- but it was pointed out that all known serious terroist attacks in hte UK
were carried out by terrorists using thier real names, and, that at no point in the leadup to any attack
were they required to identify themselves.
Second it was illegal immigration -- but some 350 million EU citizens have the right to work in the UK
anyway, the much villified asylum seekers are attempting to immigrate legally, plus nobody is going
to check the documents of thier Russian nanny or Morrocan cleaner.
Thirdly it was "identity theft" -- but if the banks give money/credit to unverified strangers it is
thier problem. For this to be effective lenders would need to have; the equipment to read the card,
the right to ask for a fingerprint and access to the central database to verify the validity of the
card.
Currently Jaqi Smith cannot come up with any reasonable justification for this system at all but is
still pressing ahead with a system that will dump billions into the coffers of the "usual suspects"
Accenture, EDS (now HP), CAP and IBM.
Well at least the labour party will be more or less extinct in a years time, but the civil servants who
are pushing this idea will still be there, and the Conservatives look even more prone to SnakeOil salesman that the incumbent idiots.
Right let me see now.
Your head office has just been flooded and your trying to get the DR system up and running over a remote line.
Now where did I put that number for the Veritas?
Its in an e-mail -- but the f***g email system is what Im trying to restart.
many phone calls later:-
"Hello I need some temp licences urgently". ................
"Am pleasing to help you, customer number please".
"Our office is flooded I dont have the customer number".
"Am sorry to hear of your problems but system needs you cutomer number otherwise cannot be helping you".
I get this screen when my old Dell expiron overheats.
Poor old thing can't manage a virus scan and a Web Page at the same time.
Given the ROCs forgiven and humanetarian nature I wonder which Sysadmin will be donating his internal organs to the Bill and Melissa marketing foundation?
Actually its quite a common policy in MegaCorps to reject software that require machine specific or expiring license keys for use in "Mission Critical" applications.
The backup server not having the correct licenses is one of the biggest risks in a Disaster Recovery.
Migration to newer better hardware also becomes a nightmare where license keys are involved -- what do you mean the new server doesnt have centronics port for the dongle?
Its also screws up the companys virtualisation strategy as you have no idea whether a given license scheme will work in inside a VM or not.
Do like the Fortune 500 and just say no to runtime licenses.
Me too. Lifes generally pretty good in the land of 1000 beers.
They do have a bit of silliness about which bags you put thiings in
but at least the rubbish is collected five times a week where I live.
The poor old folks back in blighty are stuck with a once every
two week "real" rubbish collection. Having fish for dinner requires
careful timing in the summer.
As for saving leftovers for compost compost -- I had a couple of niegbours in
Switzerland who religiously did this -- it stinks!
Copyright conditions usually have a "reproduced without modification" clause so someone who's website is copyrighted and contains ads could thoereticaly sue the ISP for modifing thier page.
My bet is that if they once replace a google ad with one of thier own they will drown in subpeonas.
Mod parent down!!
He answered the OPs question.
He answered it sensibly.
He did not recommend any Freeware, Payware or Painware.
He did not even critique the operating system used.
We cannot condone such postings. What if everybody came to expect Slashdot posting to be relevent, even credible.
Well yes most of the concepts are very old:-
:- 1960s
Common instruction set accross range : - 1960s.
Multiprocessing with memory protection : - 1960s
Offload IO and network to specialised processors : - 1960s
Parallel pipelining of Fetch, Execute, Store
Databases (hoerarchical): 1970s
Virtual Storage : 1970s
SMP up to 16 processors : 1970s
99.99% uptimes : 1980s
Virtual Machines (OSes running inside another OS): 1980s
Databases (Relational) : 1980s
Clustering: 1990s
Clustering over wide area : 2000s
99.9999% availability : 2000s
Its just that they are recent in most other enviroments.
Give or take some historical wierdnesses like JCL they are very nice
machines to work with and depending on how you juggle the figures
the Total Cost of Ownership is usually less than for the equivalent
room full of UNIX servers -- and -- almost always less than trying
to do the same job with a room full of Windows servers.
The sheer processing power and IO bandwidth, coupled, with an OS
that is quite happy to run at 100% cpu all day plus the tools to
balance a mixed workload sensibly means they get through phenominal
amounts of work.
Well for one thing real database systems are massively parrallel -- thats why they need locking mechanisms.
Supporting 5,000 connections while executing hundreds of parrallel requests is "normal" in the DB2 Oracle world.
Most of my current programming is done in a J2EE/WEB type enviroment where the containers take care of the most of the parrallelism issues for you. And in my current job parallelism means getting the processes to spread out over several machines rather than several processors so threads of any kind are really are not the answer.
As for POSIX threads being scary, you have to RTFM, but they are the tool of choice if you must multithread. Not some OO threads wrapper, not proprietary threading that comes with the OS and not Java threads if you can in any way avoid them.