Speaking as someone who has been conncting unix servers, NT Servers and OS/390 boxes for some n years now, heres my 2 cents worth.
OS/390 may be old and creaky but they still have all the data. Your bank account, you tax bill,your credit rating, your utility bill, your share portfolio are almost certaily held on an OS/390.
I first established an TCP/IP connection to a SUN/OS box in abount '93 the current TCP/IP stack and POSIX support on OS/390 are excellent, indeed, OS/390 was the first platform to get POSIX 95 certified.
SNA is just as fast and slightly more reliable than TCP/IP. Its also a complete BASTARD to configure.
TCP/IP is actually being adopted very rapidly by OS/390 sites. Most 3270 emulation travels at least some of the way over TCP/IP. Nearly all new interconnectivity is being done over TCP/IP rather than SNA.
As for "legacy" applications. For "legacy" read working -- and as confucus he say -- if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Most OS/390 people have been listening to "the mainframe is dead" all thier working lives. Over the years various pundits have announced that Gene Amdahl's machine and it's desendents would be superceded by:--
8 bit mini computers.
16 bit mini computers -- DEC PDP-11
32 bit mini computers -- DEC VAX
UNIXes of various sorts.
DOS pcs.
Windows pcs
NT pcs.
None of this ever happened, and, it probably never will. The biggest ever dent made in IBMs profitability was made by the plug compatable manaufacturers such as Amdahl,Fujitsi and Hitachi who made cheaper faster mainframes.
Well there were certainly some bugs. Our installation found then and fixed them around about November '98.
There certainly was a lot of hype and several hundred pundits earning big bucks telling people the world was going to end.
So was it completely hype or did all those Y2K pundits save us from doom? Well think about this-
Italy had the lowest Y2K spend in Europe and probably the entire industrialised world. It got to the stage where the US state department, department of trade etc. were approaching italy at ambasador level to castigate them for there lack of preparedness. The Italians had wine to drink and motorcycles to make so they generally ignored all this hysterical pressure from the US and spent next to nothing fix thier "Y2K" bugs.
So come January first with all the media in the world desperate to report a Y2K bug, in all those pathetic reports of non bugs, did you here one report of anyone or thing in Italy suffer from a single Y2K bug?
No!
On balance I would say the Italians got it right. They saved themselves a pile of money and everybody got to party on new years eve.
Making fun of a poor unemployed homeless individual should not be funny.
Watching two not very intelligent criminal musicians self destruct should not be funny.
Watching a sad middle aged servant become infatuated with his young rich employer should not be funny.
Watching a bad tempered repressed uptight indiviadual destroy his family an hotel business through sheer bad temper should not be funny.
But everybody laughs at Charlie Chaplin, thr Blues Brothers, Twelth Nigh and Fawlty Towers.
Political Correctness and humour and just plain incompatable. Nobody can love a person without a sense of humour. Love will save our planet. So lets just send all those humourless PC creeps to the gas chamber and save our planet.;-)
All the fibre channel cable I have worked with has a "minimum radius" of about 2 feet. I.E if you bend it more than then curve of a four foot wide circle -- it doeasn't break but too much light leaks out of the fibre to get a coherent signel.
At about one foot radius it starts to break.
This would not be very practical in the hostile environment we call home.
I think the reason Java gets such a bad press in slashdot is that it has such a good press everI personaly think it is a cute little language BUT -- an alien just arrived on the planet and reading newspapers magazines etc would conclude that the web runs on Java (on NT servers, with oracle databases). I think a high percentage of slashdotters actually work out there in the trenches and if you work in the real world of the internet/web three things become very obvious very quickly.
--> The most important code is written in C. Not C++, not ADA, and certainly not Java.
--> 90% of the rest is written in PERL.
--> It runs on BSD.
None of this is ever mentioned in most articles about the web, and, it gets annoying! The urge to put the record straight gets unbearable after a while. So once again:--
90% of the web runs apache on BSD, which is 100% pure C code, the dynamic content, admin and management is done in PERL.
The law also allows me to put in a lisencing agreement that the person using my software must do so standing on their head.
Hmm. I think you will find that the reason license aggreements are so popular among software giants is that they allow precisely such clauses.
I am not an expert on american law by I am sure M$ would not put ".. you will not reverse engineer this product..." , and , in the case of SQLServer ".. you will not publish or publicly discuss the results of any benchmark tests you may make.." --- unless they though they could make it stick. Seen any independant SQLServer benchmarks recently?
This is the crux of the question is do slash.dotters object to the principle of patenting ideas full stop, or, just the patenting of dumb ideas.
If your priciple objection is to the patenting of dumb ideas then you should have no problem with the google patent. Thier search algorithms are certainly different from all the others and produce good and consitent results. It seems like they are patenting something "original, not obvious, and which works". There may be some prior art here as a ton of work has been done on search algorithms over the years, but generally speaking this looks like a "good" patent.
If the main objection is to patents per se, then I would say we are a bunch of hypocrytes. The whole high tech industry which produces all the goodies we love to play with is driven by patents. IBM is not going to spend billions researching "copper" etc. and give as those lovely gigahertz processors if some company in tiawan can rip off the design as soon as it is working.
Although I disagree with that accustation of intelligence. I mean would anyone intelligent accept what in the computer industry is minimum wage and work an average 60 hours a week while their employer charges $2000 plus per day!
Having been in the "clean-up crew" trying to salvage something meaningful from AndersEn managed projects I am very surprised that they managed a 75% success rate in something as complex as on line shopping. These guys don't fart, struggle over chewing gum and certainly couldn't do both at the same time.
I think the palm is one of those devices like a Samuri sword, a Harley Davidson or a bicycle where the basic design was just so right that it is valid forever.
The big difference between the Palm and all the others (wince,Psion casio etc) is that Palm owners actually use the things!
There can only be so many (good) ways to design an electronic diary and telephone book and PalmOs hot it just rigth. There are simple, easy and effective and therefore people use them. Other people see them used and buy them and use them....
The only time I ever see someone using a WinCE I just want well WINCE, its so painfull to watch them fiddling with the totally inappropriate GUI interface.
I think the Palm is just right and hope future models continue this tradition, WinCE can never catch up because nobody at MS ever read a book on ergonomics.
This progressive/regresive stuff just doensn't make sense.
The main reason that sales taxes are do widly adopted in europe is that that work out much fairer in the long term.
I will be that Bill Gates pays more in sales tax than he does in income tax. Any seriously rich person does not pay that much income tax, he may spend a fortune on accountants and lawyers not paying it, but they don't end up paying anything like the 30-40% a working stiff gets stuck with.
On the other hand sales tax is quite difficult to aviod. (Except in the US where you have these wierd interstate commerce laws).
Its just too inconvienient to have a lawyer pleading "poverty" and/or "justifiable business expense" when put down the first payment on the Ferrari.
As a British citizen born and bred I feel qualified to answer some of these questions.
who decides -- a member of a police force which makes the LAPD look a model of political correctness and the KeyStone Cops look competent.
who watches the watcher -- some faceless beaureucrats at the Home Office. These people operate in complete secrecy and are not democraticaly accountable.
what will they decide is normal? -- you guessed it "white, middle class, and BORING".
Some years ago I had a cotract in Saudi Arabia. There every single copier had a 2mm high serial number etched in the glass. So every photcopy had at least one serial number on it!
You may also be interested that a friend of mine was working as a forensic scientist at the home office in London. One of his tasks was to identify who was leaking information from Thatchers cabinet office. They tracked the leaker down by analysing defects in the photocopy and getting a history of which copiers were used in which order. Apparently this would have been accepted as evidence in court if it ever came to trial.
She also claimed that given a verified sample from a given computer printer they could establish if another document was printed on that printer. Dot matrix, laser, or inkjet it didn't matter each printer has enough charecteristic defects and inaccuracies to uniquly identify it.
This looks another high(ish) tech company adopting the M$ business model. It work likes this:- If by skill or fluke you become the market leader in your sector. You want to protect this position. You could of course do this by continuing to provide innivative solutions and excellent service, but this is hard work. Instead what you do whenever someone looks like challenging your postition you unleash a pack of lawers. The fact that legaly you don't have a leg to stand on does not matter -- your rival must respond to the suit which causes time and money, plus, you almost always get the preliminary injunction. For a small rival company the existence of a law suit will usually sink the company. For a larger target like B&N the preliminary injunction will disrupt your development plans , and, probably your sales and marketing as well. This disruption is not trivial re-scheduling and replanning your development efforts costs $'000s. M$ of course are famous for this type of stuff (e.g. copyrighting words like "bookshelf"). The only solution that I can see is too lobby congress and get all software patents and silly copyrights abolished.
There are lies damn lies and statistics, yes, 50% (probably 90%) of corporations have at least one LINUX server running somewhere, my comapny has three, BUT , by the same token they are also running 2,500 NT based servers scattered around the world, and 4 DEC PDP-11 s. which run an X25 mail switch (until next month -- as they are only Y1.9999 compliant). It would be interesting to know which is the oldest machine actually in production. When I was last there Rank/Xerox in London were running some very early DEC PDP boxes (circa 1974) as a mail switch I wonder if it still runs.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who has been conncting unix servers, NT Servers and OS/390 boxes for some n years now, heres my 2 cents worth.
OS/390 may be old and creaky but they still have all the data. Your bank account, you tax bill ,your credit rating, your utility bill, your share portfolio are almost certaily held on an OS/390.
I first established an TCP/IP connection to a SUN/OS box in abount '93 the current TCP/IP stack and POSIX support on OS/390 are excellent, indeed, OS/390 was the first platform to get POSIX 95 certified.
SNA is just as fast and slightly more reliable than TCP/IP. Its also a complete BASTARD to configure.
TCP/IP is actually being adopted very rapidly by OS/390 sites. Most 3270 emulation travels at least some of the way over TCP/IP. Nearly all new interconnectivity is being done over TCP/IP rather than SNA.
As for "legacy" applications. For "legacy" read working -- and as confucus he say -- if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Most OS/390 people have been listening to "the mainframe is dead" all thier working lives. Over the years various pundits have announced that Gene Amdahl's machine and it's desendents would be superceded by :--
8 bit mini computers.
16 bit mini computers -- DEC PDP-11
32 bit mini computers -- DEC VAX
UNIXes of various sorts.
DOS pcs.
Windows pcs
NT pcs.
None of this ever happened, and, it probably never will. The biggest ever dent made in IBMs profitability was made by the plug compatable manaufacturers such as Amdahl,Fujitsi and Hitachi who made cheaper faster mainframes.
Well there were certainly some bugs. Our installation found then and fixed them around about November '98.
There certainly was a lot of hype and several hundred pundits earning big bucks telling people the world was going to end.
So was it completely hype or did all those Y2K pundits save us from doom? Well think about this-
Italy had the lowest Y2K spend in Europe and probably the entire industrialised world. It got to the stage where the US state department, department of trade etc. were approaching italy at ambasador level to castigate them for there lack of preparedness. The Italians had wine to drink and motorcycles to make so they generally ignored all this hysterical pressure from the US and spent next to nothing fix thier "Y2K" bugs.
So come January first with all the media in the world desperate to report a Y2K bug, in all those pathetic reports of non bugs, did you here one report of anyone or thing in Italy suffer from a single Y2K bug?
No!
On balance I would say the Italians got it right. They saved themselves a pile of money and everybody got to party on new years eve.
Making fun of a poor unemployed homeless individual should not be funny.
Watching two not very intelligent criminal musicians self destruct should not be funny.
Watching a sad middle aged servant become infatuated with his young rich employer should not be funny.
Watching a bad tempered repressed uptight indiviadual destroy his family an hotel business through sheer bad temper should not be funny.
But everybody laughs at Charlie Chaplin, thr Blues Brothers, Twelth Nigh and Fawlty Towers.
Political Correctness and humour and just plain incompatable. Nobody can love a person without a sense of humour. Love will save our planet. So lets just send all those humourless PC creeps to the gas chamber and save our planet. ;-)
If you kink it ---- it breaks.
All the fibre channel cable I have worked with has a "minimum radius" of about 2 feet. I.E if you bend it more than then curve of a four foot wide circle -- it doeasn't break but too much light leaks out of the fibre to get a coherent signel.
At about one foot radius it starts to break.
This would not be very practical in the hostile environment we call home.
Java bashing?
I think the reason Java gets such a bad press in slashdot is that it has such a good press everI personaly think it is a cute little language BUT -- an alien just arrived on the planet and reading newspapers magazines etc would conclude that the web runs on Java (on NT servers, with oracle databases). I think a high percentage of slashdotters actually work out there in the trenches and if you work in the real world of the internet/web three things become very obvious very quickly.
--> The most important code is written in C. Not C++, not ADA, and certainly not Java.
--> 90% of the rest is written in PERL.
--> It runs on BSD.
None of this is ever mentioned in most articles about the web, and, it gets annoying! The urge to put the record straight gets unbearable after a while. So once again:--
90% of the web runs apache on BSD, which is 100% pure C code, the dynamic content, admin and management is done in PERL.
The law also allows me to put in a lisencing agreement that the person using my software must do so standing on their head.
Hmm. I think you will find that the reason license aggreements are so popular among software giants is that they allow precisely such clauses.
I am not an expert on american law by I am sure M$ would not put ".. you will not reverse engineer this product ..." , and , in the case of SQLServer ".. you will not publish or publicly discuss the results of any benchmark tests you may make .." --- unless they though they could make it stick. Seen any independant SQLServer benchmarks recently?
This is the crux of the question is do slash.dotters object to the principle of patenting ideas full stop, or, just the patenting of dumb ideas.
If your priciple objection is to the patenting of dumb ideas then you should have no problem with the google patent. Thier search algorithms are certainly different from all the others and produce good and consitent results. It seems like they are patenting something "original, not obvious, and which works". There may be some prior art here as a ton of work has been done on search algorithms over the years, but generally speaking this looks like a "good" patent.
If the main objection is to patents per se, then I would say we are a bunch of hypocrytes. The whole high tech industry which produces all the goodies we love to play with is driven by patents. IBM is not going to spend billions researching "copper" etc. and give as those lovely gigahertz processors if some company in tiawan can rip off the design as soon as it is working.
wos = Waste Of Space.
Therefore I think wosies would be the correct spelling.
I wont be able to sleep till I find one.
Right On.
Although I disagree with that accustation of intelligence. I mean would anyone intelligent accept what in the computer industry is minimum wage and work an average 60 hours a week while their employer charges $2000 plus per day!
Having been in the "clean-up crew" trying to salvage something meaningful from AndersEn managed projects I am very surprised that they managed a 75% success rate in something as complex as on line shopping. These guys don't fart, struggle over chewing gum and certainly couldn't do both at the same time.
Classic design never dates!.
I think the palm is one of those devices like a Samuri sword, a Harley Davidson or a bicycle where the basic design was just so right that it is valid forever.
The big difference between the Palm and all the others (wince,Psion casio etc) is that Palm owners actually use the things!
There can only be so many (good) ways to design an electronic diary and telephone book and PalmOs hot it just rigth. There are simple, easy and effective and therefore people use them. Other people see them used and buy them and use them ....
The only time I ever see someone using a WinCE I just want well WINCE, its so painfull to watch them fiddling with the totally inappropriate GUI interface.
I think the Palm is just right and hope future models continue this tradition, WinCE can never catch up because nobody at MS ever read a book on ergonomics.
The main reason that sales taxes are do widly adopted in europe is that that work out much fairer in the long term.
I will be that Bill Gates pays more in sales tax than he does in income tax. Any seriously rich person does not pay that much income tax, he may spend a fortune on accountants and lawyers not paying it, but they don't end up paying anything like the 30-40% a working stiff gets stuck with.
On the other hand sales tax is quite difficult to aviod. (Except in the US where you have these wierd interstate commerce laws).
Its just too inconvienient to have a lawyer pleading "poverty" and/or "justifiable business expense" when put down the first payment on the Ferrari.
As a British citizen born and bred I feel qualified to answer some of these questions.
who decides -- a member of a police force which makes the LAPD look a model of political correctness and the KeyStone Cops look competent.
who watches the watcher -- some faceless beaureucrats at the Home Office. These people operate in complete secrecy and are not democraticaly accountable.
what will they decide is normal? -- you guessed it "white, middle class, and BORING".
Some years ago I had a cotract in Saudi Arabia. There every single copier had a 2mm high serial number etched in the glass. So every photcopy had at least one serial number on it!
You may also be interested that a friend of mine was working as a forensic scientist at the home office in London. One of his tasks was to identify who was leaking information from Thatchers cabinet office. They tracked the leaker down by analysing defects in the photocopy and getting a history of which copiers were used in which order. Apparently this would have been accepted as evidence in court if it ever came to trial.
She also claimed that given a verified sample from a given computer printer they could establish if another document was printed on that printer. Dot matrix, laser, or inkjet it didn't matter each printer has enough charecteristic defects and inaccuracies to uniquly identify it.
There are no secrets anymore!
This looks another high(ish) tech company adopting the M$ business model. It work likes this:- If by skill or fluke you become the market leader in your sector. You want to protect this position. You could of course do this by continuing to provide innivative solutions and excellent service, but this is hard work. Instead what you do whenever someone looks like challenging your postition you unleash a pack of lawers. The fact that legaly you don't have a leg to stand on does not matter -- your rival must respond to the suit which causes time and money, plus, you almost always get the preliminary injunction. For a small rival company the existence of a law suit will usually sink the company. For a larger target like B&N the preliminary injunction will disrupt your development plans , and, probably your sales and marketing as well. This disruption is not trivial re-scheduling and replanning your development efforts costs $'000s. M$ of course are famous for this type of stuff (e.g. copyrighting words like "bookshelf"). The only solution that I can see is too lobby congress and get all software patents and silly copyrights abolished.
Hmm, I suppose the events of July 1776, October 1916 and that little local riot around the Bastille in Paris never really amounted to much then.
There are lies damn lies and statistics, yes, 50% (probably 90%) of corporations have at least one LINUX server running somewhere, my comapny has three, BUT , by the same token they are also running 2,500 NT based servers scattered around the world, and 4 DEC PDP-11 s. which run an X25 mail switch (until next month -- as they are only Y1.9999 compliant). It would be interesting to know which is the oldest machine actually in production. When I was last there Rank/Xerox in London were running some very early DEC PDP boxes (circa 1974) as a mail switch I wonder if it still runs.