Nearly every European city too small or cheap to have a subway system has an extensive "tram" or streetcar system. Zurich has possibly the most efficient system. Amsterdam the most extensive. Milan the cutest. Strasbourg the most slick/modern.
Most of these cities also suppliment the streetcars with a modern trolly-bus fleet. Some cities like Luasanne and Montreux have a trolly bus only transport system.
As well as being quick and reliable most of these systems compete effectivlely against cars because there is simply no b*****d place to park in older cities.
AboveNet bought the hardware, lease the lines, pay a substantial number of people to operate thier infastructure. If they choose not to use these resources which they own and operate to distribute 10,000 "Become Virile and attractive to supermodels for only 1$" mails they have every right to. And most e-mail users are thankfull that they don't.
The SPAM problem arises because e-mail works on an honour system. Basicaly everybody running sendmail or equvalent has agreed "I will forward your mail if you forward mine". This is great because it costs almost nothing to administer such a system.
The downside is SPAM. If media3 choose to ignore compliants from other ISPs and choose to host known spammers, and, choose to ignore any advice and warnings from. Well stuff them.
I fell sorry for peacefire.org etc. But really they ought to find a more responsable ISP.
The big benefit is presumably you can use the host PC to administer and set up the card.
You cannot really contemplate administering a firewall device over the network by default.
So they make it a "parasite" of a PC and viola you have a direct connection, screen, keyboard & mouse, plus a CPU to run your configuration programs, and, a disk to store your configuration and backup your software.
The guy did point out that he specially selected the database intensive pages for the tests, so, this would not represent the typical usage of real people sufrfing the site.
This seems fair enough as he wants to thrash the database rahter than the web server.
Completely off topic now. If we put togther a system for a TPC/C benchmark using donated hardware and free software could we get a "transactions per second per $" of infinity??
This is basically what I do to protect code written in my spare time becoming the property of my employers.
Even quite trivial programs benefit from the inclusion if "getline", "OPT", "pcgrep" etc. I find it benefits the finished program greatly to use as much GPLed code as you possibly can.
For more complex programs binding your code "GTK", "plot", or some suitibly useful GPL package also helps imensely.
While this doesn't prevent your employer claiming ownership of the bits of code you actualy wrote, its like trying to claim ownership of the engine + backseats of a car. You could walk of with them but they wouldn't be much use to anyone.
Just to muddy the waters further I also use code fragments and subroutines which were written while I was employed by other comapanies.
IBM bought Transarc about 5 or 6 years ago when all the pundits and industry gurus though DCE was going to be the next big thing.
There product line was the file server, a transaction monitor (ENCINA) and some extras like transactional file and queue systems. The best selling product was a UNIX version of the mainframe transaction monitor CICS, which was remarkted by IBM as CICS/6000.
DCE never really happended, ENCINA never really took off, and, CICS sales slowed down. So it wasn't a brilliant buy.
The Andrew File System though is pretty good apert from the fact that it depends on DCE, it is certainly much better than NFS in all respects.
I think as far as IBM is concerned its a case of we can't sell it so lets give it away.
A company which has been activlely building a brand name and image for over 100 years, and spent billions in the process, chooses to defend a brand name that they OWN!
Besides, nowhere in the article does anyone say what pissed the guy off. I can think of afew possibilties:--
1. (and most likely) the beer isn't to his taste. Well DRINK ANOTHER BRAND! I dislike B*dwisser intensely but would never interfere with your rigth to drink thier urine like fizz.
2. The guy had a bad hangover. Now I have experienced hangovers after a nights of heroic Guiness drinking, which, are way above and beyond the normal suffering endured by dipsomaniacs, so I do have some sympathy here. But then again it is largly a matter of degree, and, although it doesn't carry a health warning the stuff is black and you cannot actually see through it which probably consitutes a warning in itself!
3. Various members of the family that used to own the company. The Arthur Guiness has many descendents, and, as in all large families, some of these turn out to be unpleasent and/or completely insane (sorry they are rich I mean forthright and eccentric!). These people have nothing to do with the dark nectur that is Guiness.
The only option for storing data with reasonable reliability is to put it onto a central server.
The server must be in a locked air conditioned room.
The server must be profesionally (or at least skillfully) administered. With mirrored disks, incremental and full backups, plus, offsite storage of at least the full backups.
If you do this you will have a storage system that is almost as reliable as dead trees!
Whatever the hype from Sun and HP no unix server can currently compete with even a middle of the road OS/390 machine for heavy server/transaction/database type workloads.
The OS/390 was architedted by Gene Amhdal in the late 60s. The main problem was to get through the very large workloads required for NASA etc. using quite slow electronics. This was done by using the now well established tecniques of pipeline and parallel processing. What they also did (which is not common) is unload all the IO processing to seperate processors. On a modern OS/390 the IO is handled by up to 1024 of these processers called "channels".
You can ask a channel for thing like "read all the blocks in cylendars 12,14 and 24 into the this list of buffers" and then go do something else, when the buffers have been filled, an interupt will be posted.
As for innovative software. Nearly everything relating to transactions was done forst on an OS/390, databases in general, relational databases, messageing and queueing software, & etc. are all areas where the intial and continuing innovation took place on OS/390s (with an honorable mention for VAX VMS). For all the hype about UN*X very little innivation has taken place on these machines, (great exception being web servers).
In fact the most hyped recent advances, in the areas of clustering and high availability, have been around on OS/390 (in wierd and wonderful ways) and VMS (perfectly formed and complete in the first release of VMS) for well over 10 years.
I personally see no resemblance between Python and Visual Basic.
In fact there is a stronger resemblence between Perl and VB. Both started out as simple "basic" languages, with simple sysntax, for doing simple things. Over the years various extras have been bolted on, stick with on chewing gum, or, tied on with string, which has created an unholey mess.
I admit that Larry Wall et al,are fighting a valient rear guard action and trying to clean up the mess, but once you release a feature its very hard to withdraw it.
Python on the other hand was designed from the begining to be an OO scripting language. It was designed from the begining to perform comlex tasks. Guido Van Rossum took a long hard look at the shortcomings of Perl, TCL, VB & etc. and took great pains to avoid repeating these mistakes.
On the downside, the runtime is massive, and, there it is a massive amount of coding to produce a fully fledged python object in C.
He has spent five years in congress yet doesn't recognise a non-existent congress man, even, more basic, Sentate bills are numbered S-nnnn,
congress bills HR-nnnn. No piece of valid legislation would ever be numbered nnnn-SP.
I have always found JAVA code to be portable, between varuous servers. (NT, Win95, Solaris, AIX, Linux, OS/390, VMS -- I can all vouch for).
I have also got java to run quite nively on my Palm with WABA, even though the code is not portable.
The biggest pain I have found with java is classpath files. Vendors just will not aggree on a common directory for Java classes. On my NT box I have nearly 20 directories and Jar files in my CLASSPATH.
JAR files are particulary annoying as most JVMs will only recognise a JAR file if it specifically included in the CLASSPATH, so what should have been a neat idea for packaging sets of classes, becomes a configuration nightmare.
Why can't we just have one root directory and have the JVM search everything (including jar files).
HP is one of the better unixes to administer, with SAM et all helping out with the standard admin stuff.
However the champion system for ease of administration is IBMs AIX. The with the "smitty" tool, you can add in a few new disks, and set up some a couple of mirrored file systems (optimized for database IO performance) in about 10 minutes.
Compared with about 45 minutes on HP, and, days of manual reading on Solaris.
Sorry, but I think you are violating my patents for "a linear yarn restriant device" and "a method for fastening a linear yarn device using topologial folding".
Until the industry recognises that it requires a certain amount of unteachable skills to become a skilled programmer, then, the education system will always be flawed.
No one could teach me to play the violin because I am tone deaf.
I am too cack handed to ever be a sculptor.
Most people do not have the basic pattern recognition and logic skills to become any good at programming.
When I started there was very little formal CS education. Instead you were given a set of aptitude tests, if you passed you got the job.
My old boss used to say "Not everybody who passed the apptitude test became a good programmer, but, nobody who failed the test was ever any good!".
So.
Identify the people with the potential to be skilled programmers and designers, then, concentrate on training them. Point the rest at law school where a lack of logical though procesess is a positive advantage.
Well however you judge culture, the French seem to have very little of it.
Apart from some isolated pockets in Brittany and Provence there is a uniform blandness about France which is to a large extent enforced by an over-centralised government. I mean every school in France is running the same timetable!
And as for "ridiculously low prices" Levis, Nikes, Budwiesser, Coke etc. sell at premium prices in Europe. Three times the US price is quite usual, but, people are prepared to pay more for "american" (made by children in asia) branded goods.
France has no Rock and Roll.
The French have no humor. (They like!! Jerry Lewis).
The only unique cultural expresion they have is an astonishing rudeness towards strangers.
The Italians have better food.
The Germans have a better life.
The Brits make better music.
The Californians make better wine.
Everyone makes better beer.
The Belgians have better everything!!! ('cept wine).
DUH? your fed up with America, so you want to move to a city with over 200 McDondalds outlets, where Budwieser is a bestselling beer and the average suburban steet is almost indistinguishable from the same in Boston.
If it wasn't for the Nazi skinheads and football thugs you wouldn't know you had left the Evil Empire.:-)
They had some about 150 years ago, but now they have zilch.
When was the last time a French author was on the best seller list of any country other than France. (( and its not about parochialism; Chzeks, Russians, Argentinians, Mexicans, Celyonise, Trididadians and Egyptians have all appeared on British best seller lists in recent years)).
When was the last time you listened to French music from the last 80 years.
Name a living French painter.
The French are an insular, small minded society who fear anything which is not "francais". The result of this close minded attitude to anything foriegn has ironically backfired. French teenagers have an obsession with American (USA!) culture because to then it looks fresh and interesting compared to the officially preserved static near death culture in which they live.
This seems like the most sensable approach for this particular case.
First copyright everything! Especially the header files for your APIs. Its enormously difficult to make a workalike product if you have to create new header files which are different enough from the old header files so as not to violate copyright.
If you really need to work on a 99.999% availability environment then I wouldn't worry too much about low quality clones. They will need to fight your (well earned!) reputation for reliability.
Charge a lot! Large corparations like to spend shareholders money and are absurdly suspicious of cheap software.
Sell a package which includes source code, installation, support, maintenance, upgrades, user group membership and anything else you can think of. A cheappo clone would not be able to compete with this level of service.
A low risk (low reward!) alternative would be to sell out to an established software vendor. Most large software copanies are desperate for some new product lines!
Kerebos was developed by one of those cumbersome collaberations supported by UNIX vendors which were so popular in the late '80s.
Kerebros is almost unique among these groups in coming up with a succesful and usable product. Other examples are the ubiqutious but plodding Motif toolkit and KDEs commercial ancestor CDE. Most of these comercial collaborations however produced real turkeys like DCE.
This may seem off-topic -- BUT -- the whole reason that M$ has been able to hi-jack kerebros software is that they don't have a GPL type licence. I always though the GPL seemed like paranoid overkill, but, it turns out that RMS was right and everybody is trying to kill us;-).
Go into your web browsers "preferences" , "options" or whatever menu and TRUN OFF the JVM.
Then go surfing.
I personally have my JVM turned off. About once every three or four weeks I get a "cannot run Java applet" message.In most cases this happens when browsing a really cr*ppy looking web site.
For many valid reasons, time to load, inconsitences in JVMs , piss poor performance, profesionals avaid java applets like the plague.
Interestingly, while there is a lot of hype about Java servlets, and, they are not inherently evel like applets, a quick survey of top websites will reveal a pretty unanimous consensus.
Slashdot Mirror
Steetcars didn't die all over the world!
Nearly every European city too small or cheap to have a subway system has an extensive "tram" or streetcar system. Zurich has possibly the most efficient system. Amsterdam the most extensive. Milan the cutest. Strasbourg the most slick/modern.
Most of these cities also suppliment the streetcars with a modern trolly-bus fleet. Some cities like Luasanne and Montreux have a trolly bus only transport system.
As well as being quick and reliable most of these systems compete effectivlely against cars because there is simply no b*****d place to park in older cities.
The key phrase here is "major backbone PROVIDER".
AboveNet bought the hardware, lease the lines, pay a substantial number of people to operate thier infastructure. If they choose not to use these resources which they own and operate to distribute 10,000 "Become Virile and attractive to supermodels for only 1$" mails they have every right to. And most e-mail users are thankfull that they don't.
The SPAM problem arises because e-mail works on an honour system. Basicaly everybody running sendmail or equvalent has agreed "I will forward your mail if you forward mine". This is great because it costs almost nothing to administer such a system.
The downside is SPAM. If media3 choose to ignore compliants from other ISPs and choose to host known spammers, and, choose to ignore any advice and warnings from. Well stuff them.
I fell sorry for peacefire.org etc. But really they ought to find a more responsable ISP.
See http://neuroscience.about.com/science/neuroscience /library/weekly/aa000619Zombie.htm
And you thought they were just processes without parents!.
The big benefit is presumably you can use the host PC to administer and set up the card.
You cannot really contemplate administering a firewall device over the network by default. So they make it a "parasite" of a PC and viola you have a direct connection, screen, keyboard & mouse, plus a CPU to run your configuration programs, and, a disk to store your configuration and backup your software.
Makes a lot of sense really!
This seems fair enough as he wants to thrash the database rahter than the web server.
Completely off topic now. If we put togther a system for a TPC/C benchmark using donated hardware and free software could we get a "transactions per second per $" of infinity??
This is basically what I do to protect code written in my spare time becoming the property of my employers.
Even quite trivial programs benefit from the inclusion if "getline", "OPT", "pcgrep" etc. I find it benefits the finished program greatly to use as much GPLed code as you possibly can.
For more complex programs binding your code "GTK", "plot", or some suitibly useful GPL package also helps imensely.
While this doesn't prevent your employer claiming ownership of the bits of code you actualy wrote, its like trying to claim ownership of the engine + backseats of a car. You could walk of with them but they wouldn't be much use to anyone.
Just to muddy the waters further I also use code fragments and subroutines which were written while I was employed by other comapanies.
IBM bought Transarc about 5 or 6 years ago when all the pundits and industry gurus though DCE was going to be the next big thing.
There product line was the file server, a transaction monitor (ENCINA) and some extras like transactional file and queue systems. The best selling product was a UNIX version of the mainframe transaction monitor CICS, which was remarkted by IBM as CICS/6000.
DCE never really happended, ENCINA never really took off, and, CICS sales slowed down. So it wasn't a brilliant buy.
The Andrew File System though is pretty good apert from the fact that it depends on DCE, it is certainly much better than NFS in all respects.
I think as far as IBM is concerned its a case of we can't sell it so lets give it away.
A company which has been activlely building a brand name and image for over 100 years, and spent billions in the process, chooses to defend a brand name that they OWN!
Besides, nowhere in the article does anyone say what pissed the guy off. I can think of afew possibilties:--
1. (and most likely) the beer isn't to his taste. Well DRINK ANOTHER BRAND! I dislike B*dwisser intensely but would never interfere with your rigth to drink thier urine like fizz.
2. The guy had a bad hangover. Now I have experienced hangovers after a nights of heroic Guiness drinking, which, are way above and beyond the normal suffering endured by dipsomaniacs, so I do have some sympathy here. But then again it is largly a matter of degree, and, although it doesn't carry a health warning the stuff is black and you cannot actually see through it which probably consitutes a warning in itself!
3. Various members of the family that used to own the company. The Arthur Guiness has many descendents, and, as in all large families, some of these turn out to be unpleasent and/or completely insane (sorry they are rich I mean forthright and eccentric!). These people have nothing to do with the dark nectur that is Guiness.
YES.
The only option for storing data with reasonable reliability is to put it onto a central server.
The server must be in a locked air conditioned room.
The server must be profesionally (or at least skillfully) administered. With mirrored disks, incremental and full backups, plus, offsite storage of at least the full backups.
If you do this you will have a storage system that is almost as reliable as dead trees!
Whatever the hype from Sun and HP no unix server can currently compete with even a middle of the road OS/390 machine for heavy server/transaction/database type workloads.
The OS/390 was architedted by Gene Amhdal in the late 60s. The main problem was to get through the very large workloads required for NASA etc. using quite slow electronics. This was done by using the now well established tecniques of pipeline and parallel processing. What they also did (which is not common) is unload all the IO processing to seperate processors. On a modern OS/390 the IO is handled by up to 1024 of these processers called "channels".
You can ask a channel for thing like "read all the blocks in cylendars 12,14 and 24 into the this list of buffers" and then go do something else, when the buffers have been filled, an interupt will be posted.
As for innovative software. Nearly everything relating to transactions was done forst on an OS/390, databases in general, relational databases, messageing and queueing software, & etc. are all areas where the intial and continuing innovation took place on OS/390s (with an honorable mention for VAX VMS). For all the hype about UN*X very little innivation has taken place on these machines, (great exception being web servers).
In fact the most hyped recent advances, in the areas of clustering and high availability, have been around on OS/390 (in wierd and wonderful ways) and VMS (perfectly formed and complete in the first release of VMS) for well over 10 years.
I personally see no resemblance between Python and Visual Basic.
In fact there is a stronger resemblence between Perl and VB. Both started out as simple "basic" languages, with simple sysntax, for doing simple things. Over the years various extras have been bolted on, stick with on chewing gum, or, tied on with string, which has created an unholey mess.
I admit that Larry Wall et al,are fighting a valient rear guard action and trying to clean up the mess, but once you release a feature its very hard to withdraw it.
Python on the other hand was designed from the begining to be an OO scripting language. It was designed from the begining to perform comlex tasks. Guido Van Rossum took a long hard look at the shortcomings of Perl, TCL, VB & etc. and took great pains to avoid repeating these mistakes.
On the downside, the runtime is massive, and, there it is a massive amount of coding to produce a fully fledged python object in C.
Well Lazio has got to be pretty dumb.
He has spent five years in congress yet doesn't recognise a non-existent congress man, even, more basic, Sentate bills are numbered S-nnnn, congress bills HR-nnnn. No piece of valid legislation would ever be numbered nnnn-SP.
I have also got java to run quite nively on my Palm with WABA, even though the code is not portable.
The biggest pain I have found with java is classpath files. Vendors just will not aggree on a common directory for Java classes. On my NT box I have nearly 20 directories and Jar files in my CLASSPATH.
JAR files are particulary annoying as most JVMs will only recognise a JAR file if it specifically included in the CLASSPATH, so what should have been a neat idea for packaging sets of classes, becomes a configuration nightmare.
Why can't we just have one root directory and have the JVM search everything (including jar files).
However the champion system for ease of administration is IBMs AIX. The with the "smitty" tool, you can add in a few new disks, and set up some a couple of mirrored file systems (optimized for database IO performance) in about 10 minutes. Compared with about 45 minutes on HP, and, days of manual reading on Solaris.
Until the industry recognises that it requires a certain amount of unteachable skills to become a skilled programmer, then, the education system will always be flawed.
No one could teach me to play the violin because I am tone deaf.
I am too cack handed to ever be a sculptor.
Most people do not have the basic pattern recognition and logic skills to become any good at programming.
When I started there was very little formal CS education. Instead you were given a set of aptitude tests, if you passed you got the job.
My old boss used to say "Not everybody who passed the apptitude test became a good programmer, but, nobody who failed the test was ever any good!".
So.
Identify the people with the potential to be skilled programmers and designers, then, concentrate on training them. Point the rest at law school where a lack of logical though procesess is a positive advantage.
Well however you judge culture, the French seem to have very little of it.
Apart from some isolated pockets in Brittany and Provence there is a uniform blandness about France which is to a large extent enforced by an over-centralised government. I mean every school in France is running the same timetable!
And as for "ridiculously low prices" Levis, Nikes, Budwiesser, Coke etc. sell at premium prices in Europe. Three times the US price is quite usual, but, people are prepared to pay more for "american" (made by children in asia) branded goods.
France has no Rock and Roll.
The French have no humor. (They like!! Jerry Lewis).
The only unique cultural expresion they have is an astonishing rudeness towards strangers.
The Italians have better food.
The Germans have a better life.
The Brits make better music.
The Californians make better wine.
Everyone makes better beer.
The Belgians have better everything!!! ('cept wine).
I would think "Mayo on fries" was a big PLUS. So Canada wins 4 to 2.
DUH? your fed up with America, so you want to move to a city with over 200 McDondalds outlets, where Budwieser is a bestselling beer and the average suburban steet is almost indistinguishable from the same in Boston.
If it wasn't for the Nazi skinheads and football thugs you wouldn't know you had left the Evil Empire. :-)
But the french havn't got any culture!
They had some about 150 years ago, but now they have zilch.
When was the last time a French author was on the best seller list of any country other than France. (( and its not about parochialism; Chzeks, Russians, Argentinians, Mexicans, Celyonise, Trididadians and Egyptians have all appeared on British best seller lists in recent years)).
When was the last time you listened to French music from the last 80 years.
Name a living French painter.
The French are an insular, small minded society who fear anything which is not "francais". The result of this close minded attitude to anything foriegn has ironically backfired. French teenagers have an obsession with American (USA!) culture because to then it looks fresh and interesting compared to the officially preserved static near death culture in which they live.
This seems like the most sensable approach for this particular case.
First copyright everything! Especially the header files for your APIs. Its enormously difficult to make a workalike product if you have to create new header files which are different enough from the old header files so as not to violate copyright.
If you really need to work on a 99.999% availability environment then I wouldn't worry too much about low quality clones. They will need to fight your (well earned!) reputation for reliability.
Charge a lot! Large corparations like to spend shareholders money and are absurdly suspicious of cheap software.
Sell a package which includes source code, installation, support, maintenance, upgrades, user group membership and anything else you can think of. A cheappo clone would not be able to compete with this level of service.
A low risk (low reward!) alternative would be to sell out to an established software vendor. Most large software copanies are desperate for some new product lines!
It is the oprating system that runs on most IBM mainframes (and the Hitachi, Fujitsu compatables).
RACF is (one of) the security systems you can use on the OS/390 OS.
It is interesting how little "mindshare" this OS has, condsider:-
Evertime you get a bill, there is a 90% chance that it was produced by one of these machines.
There is something like a 95% chance that you bank account is managed by one of these machines.
When you buy an airline ticket the booking will be processed by an IBM mainframe -- for sure!
Something like 90% of all the business data in the world is sitting in databases managed by IBM mainframes.
So noe you know :-)
Neither for that matter is Qt.
Kerebos was developed by one of those cumbersome collaberations supported by UNIX vendors which were so popular in the late '80s.
Kerebros is almost unique among these groups in coming up with a succesful and usable product. Other examples are the ubiqutious but plodding Motif toolkit and KDEs commercial ancestor CDE. Most of these comercial collaborations however produced real turkeys like DCE.
This may seem off-topic -- BUT -- the whole reason that M$ has been able to hi-jack kerebros software is that they don't have a GPL type licence. I always though the GPL seemed like paranoid overkill, but, it turns out that RMS was right and everybody is trying to kill us ;-).
Try this at home.
Go into your web browsers "preferences" , "options" or whatever menu and TRUN OFF the JVM.
Then go surfing.
I personally have my JVM turned off. About once every three or four weeks I get a "cannot run Java applet" message.In most cases this happens when browsing a really cr*ppy looking web site.
For many valid reasons, time to load, inconsitences in JVMs , piss poor performance, profesionals avaid java applets like the plague.
Interestingly, while there is a lot of hype about Java servlets, and, they are not inherently evel like applets, a quick survey of top websites will reveal a pretty unanimous consensus.
OS is linux or solaris.
Webserver is apache.
CGI scripts are PHP or Perl.