If you look at gump, you will see that apache are starting
to do nightly builds of all the main OSS Java projects on the Kaffe/classpath/gcj toolchain.
Cloudscape is a long way down the dependency graph, and you shouldnt expect it for a while. We need to get ant to boot first, which is seemingly a compiler
problem.
This would let us get rid of all those low grade sherlock holmes, hg wells junk. Jungle book: back to kipling estate. We'd even have to knock down the castle in the middle of disney{land,world} because of its infringement of the Neuschwansteinschloss in Bavaria, Germany.
Yeah, IBM drives had a bit of a bad reputation, but the 6 year old laptop that acts as my home server (and part of the hifi rack) is running a 3 year old disk 7x24 with no trouble yet.
Regarding Dell vs IBM, IBM probably put a lot more effort into fixing stuff down and testing the results -experience paying off. laptops are all the PCs IBM really do these days , so get a lot of focus.
Whereas dell play off between the various Taiwanese ODMs (compal and the like) and go with whoever comes in lowest price "with an acceptable AFR".
Their notion of acceptable may differ from yours; an HDD loss is a cost to them, a disaster to anyone who didnt back up.
---- I toasted a laptop once. Always pull out the battery before you do memory swaps, as it may just be in standby...
Actually that was exactly the homework I got at my university (edinburgh). we had a base kernel for a 68k000 and had to add in support for the memory manager chip and then multiple processes. Two weeks, with other coursework.
I agree you dont need to know all the language, but its important to know roughly what is there, to save yourself reimplentation effort.
enjoy C#; but we aware that a lot of its library is a very thin wrapper around win32; so all the win32 quirks are there to see. Those quirks are all in java too of course, just less obvious.
Having been involved with notebook engineering in the past, I can assure you that the notebook drives -esp. the hitachi ones- are well engineered for the weight.
The biggest issue with causes of failures is how well they are mounted, and that is where different ODM designs can vary wildly; or even the same ODM design with a different vendor's case round it. Some drives were only mounted on one side, so every shock got amplified. Others were in "quick swap on failure" units that almost guaranteed failure, they were so unsupportive of shock. Same goes for hot swap CD/DVD drive trays, BTW.
The emergence of "Consumer grade" laptops has actually done a lot to improve the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). These ones dont have so many hotswap options, but instead can lock down everything to be sure it stays supportive.
We have also done tests shipping packaged systems around by fedex with a logging accelerometer in place of an HDD. you get some interesting figures, but all well within the safety range of things.
One tip though, always tuck the laptop in behind a seat safely before you go driving down windy back roads doing italian-style "optimistic overtakes". Some things are way outside the envelope.
Actually solutions is apt. "Services" implies you get money for something they provide over time.
Solutions is "they fix problems you have". But if you squint your eyes, you see that they create half of them. Here are some of the things you need IBM Global Services to solve for you
Anything involving EBCDIC (spelling?)
Enterprise Java, with particular reference to Entity Beans, that were designed by IBM, so the story goes.
Integrating Mainframe apps with modern code
Web Services built using SOAP
I'd point to web services and EJB as examples of recent dev nightmares that came from IBM. Horrible things that convince you distributed apps are easy, but leave you with a nightmare that needs paid experts to fix.
Which is what scares me about Object REXX. It could just be there to add complexity to the mix.
yeah, this caught my eye. Now you can publicly say things like "the.NET garbage collector is way behind what Java has" or "managed code is way too slow" and not be hit by a lawsuit.
Its a tough call. Having lived in the US for four years, its nice to be back with the BBC to watch. Its not just the advertisment freeness, but (in theory) the quality of the shows raises the bar for everyone else. To attract viewers, the ad-funded TV channels have to show stuff of equal quality *or* of such stunning grossness it wouldnt be allowed on US tv. Apparently "the farm" had someone wank off a pig in front of Vanilla ice last week for example.
I also like the ad free radio channels; and the BBC tax costs less than the annual Sirius or XM sub.
One thing I don't like is how accusative they are -If there is a house without a TV license they assume that you are cheating and come round to bother you. Our (sublet) basement is unoccupied, and they will not take 'go away, nobody there' messages; we even had somebody round last week, and yet still they send letters.
There was a (in)famous incident in Northern Ireland a few years back, as the peace process brought back normality to the country. There is a village in South Armargh,
Crossmaglen, that is somewhere you dont want to go. Effectively independent from britain, the army would only patrol by helicopters, and even those would get shot down. Foot patrols used to
encounter snipers. For comparison, imagine if Falluja, Iraq, was in the US somewhere. Anyhow, after peace sort of came to Ulster/the occupied six counties, a TV detector van visited the area to see if there were any unlicensed tellies. You can imagine the outcome. I think everyone survived, but the van was left burning...
Everyone I know who has worked with CIM hates it. Maybe you have had a better experience. too many objects, too dictatorial a model. They even have a model for help desks and support calls. That is way over the top.
Sun? IBM politics. IBM, HP, Oracle, Cisco are all on the OASIS working group that has been doing an alternative (very similar one BTW) for a year: WS-RF. This is the MS counterpoint, Intel, AMD and dell brought in because they are the rest of the PC industry and do what MS says.
Sun are probably playing against IBM, even though they still hate MS and Dell. That or supporting MS on random WS specs was part of the sun/MS deal.
yeah, snicker. Manning press (bias note -I'm one of their authors) do do DRM free PDFs, which is great; I have my book on lots of machines, share copies with others, and have quite a few copies of other books up and coming. There is nothing like having 20+ PDF of currents books on a laptop when you need to do a keyword search for a topic.
yes, HP, IBM, Fujitsu and the other big players are all at work on WS-ResourceFramework
Which is very suspiciously similar to WS-Management, 'cept for the shorter name and the completely different set of signatories. Both try and provide a distributed "resources" view of SOAP endpoints, because if they were called "Distributed Objects" we'd all realise that the "Distributed Objects bad, Service Oriented Architecture" was so much bollocks.
Now, the fact that they are fairly similar means there is scope for convergence. I'd guess MS were the main author here (like DELL and AMD care about software), so if MS and IBM can be friend, and MS join the oasis working group, then we can see progress.
We dont call them parking brakes in the UK, even though we engage them to park. They are called handbrakes and when your car gets stolen, whoever gets chased round town will use them to corner entertainingly, untill they flub it and slide sideways into a wall, roll the car, etc, etc.
I have had the brakes fail on a car (original mini) and have used it to get home (Very carefully). Since the main foot brakes didnt have power assist, there wasnt a significant difference in performance.
I sheered off the bottom of an engine once in order to get back onto the correct side of a meridian. Again, it seemed like the right thing to do. When the bill came in the following week ($800), I could not help wonder if there could have been a more cost effective solution...
I had a renault megane for rental in the Alps in may.
Their fancy rfid tag ignition key is cute; just plug it in and hit the go button. There is no stop button; you just come to a halt then pull the card.
The moment you pull the card it actually puts the handbrake on. The handbrake comes off when you restart the car, put it in gear and rev the engine.
I didnt have a 125mph chase down the autoroute, but we did have a scary time doing a 3 point turn on an alpine pass in the snow. The road was closed and we had to turn round. But you cannot spin up the engine and clutch then gently come off the handbrake, as you normally do on hill turns. As soon as you hit the accelerator your brakes would come off. So the only safe way to hill starts is to make 100% sure you are in the right gear (ie forwards and not backwards), then hit the accelerator hard. Get it wrong and you drive off the mountain at speed.
I think the Renault line have added a bit too much automation these days. I note the German toys havent gone that far yet -not even Mercedes- and I think they knew what they were doing.
I must have been there in the good days. I also remember the bar staff in restaurant #1 had some spirits you could add to coffee if you were discreet enough.
now, on to the scandinavian summer students, about which the international news coverage seems to have missed out on the delights of...
we do insist that our schools cover a concept called 'evolution' in biology lessons, sometimes even hypothesis of galaxy and solar system formation in physics lessons, and generally encourage a form of thinking called 'the scientific process', in which only observable and repeatable experiments/data are to be treated with any regard.
One could argue therefore that we do persecute certain people who choose not to believe in the scientific process and its implications.
What we dont ever do is knock on people's doors to bring "the truth" to them. Which is something to think about it. Should we become door to door atheists? I can imagine it now:
us: "hello, we are here to talk to you about god" them#1: "go away, there is no god" us: "thank you, that was what we wanted to verify"
or
us: "hello, we are here to talk to you about the fishes and the ocean" them: yes? us: "you see, the fishes, they walked up on their little fins, out of the ocean" them: "did they?" us: "yes, they walked out of the ocean onto dry land. And they did it for us". them: "yes, I see it now, let us go spread the word!"
And together we could bring the happy truth about the fishes that walked to the world.
The story I have heard is that it was a military request, though civil engineers pushed for it too.
which is why (1) that kodak also recorded which direction it was looking
(2) the exif format can includes full GPS constellation and time info, as well as just lat/long -so you can do post-processing to get a better position
yes, I think novell have the potential to be a serious threat.
MS view them more as an enemy than, say, IBM, because IBM and the hardware players are either box shifters or 'solutions vendors'; making money through consultancy. Novell are a vendor of software that runs on top of other people's boxes, and that fits in with the MS business model.
But the MS business model "sell OS, sell applications, sell upgrades, own the formats and protocols" is threatened by F/OSS in general, not just vendor (a) or vendor (b), whoever they are. The vendors are just the cutting edge of linux-in-the enterprise.
Nobody -novell, redhat -will be able to to get away with the pricing models of Microsoft. Pay per PC -even when you got a copy preinstalled? Pay for a 'client access license' to server code? Pay per-processor for the OS? have a different price and features for 'server side' versus 'home user' OS? I dont think so. All the old rules are over, and that is what threatens MS the most.
LGPL says 'linkage', with a model of linkage that works well with C++ (but not java, where everything is really a lib). GPL says 'any incorporation into a program', be it static or dynamic linkage.
To say my license applies to things that produce or consume data, even if separate or remote processes is a new extension. Certainly classic GPL doesnt cover it, but you could always write a new license to extend it.
If you take an existing GPL bit of code, you probably could wrap it with more code (GPL too), and publish a service interface that provides all the core functionality of the library, to other apps/processes. It is definitely a workaround. Which doesnt need SOAP, WSDL, all those fancy things -just boring old Corba would work fine, we have the Bonobo ORB to route stuff,...etc.
You run the risk of offending people who wrote the code you have wrapped, but I think that may be better than software licenses controlling who uses the data that apps produce.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I qualify for an irish passport on account of a grandparent. So I can get that and let my uk one lapse.
Cloudscape is a long way down the dependency graph, and you shouldnt expect it for a while. We need to get ant to boot first, which is seemingly a compiler problem.
This would let us get rid of all those low grade sherlock holmes, hg wells junk. Jungle book: back to kipling estate. We'd even have to knock down the castle in the middle of disney{land,world} because of its infringement of the Neuschwansteinschloss in Bavaria, Germany.
:)
I'd like to see disney supporting that law
Yeah, IBM drives had a bit of a bad reputation, but the 6 year old laptop that acts as my home server (and part of the hifi rack) is running a 3 year old disk 7x24 with no trouble yet.
Regarding Dell vs IBM, IBM probably put a lot more effort into fixing stuff down and testing the results -experience paying off. laptops are all the PCs IBM really do these days , so get a lot of focus.
Whereas dell play off between the various Taiwanese ODMs (compal and the like) and go with whoever comes in lowest price "with an acceptable AFR".
Their notion of acceptable may differ from yours; an HDD loss is a cost to them, a disaster to anyone who didnt back up.
----
I toasted a laptop once. Always pull out the battery before you do memory swaps, as it may just be in standby...
Actually that was exactly the homework I got at my university (edinburgh). we had a base kernel for a 68k000 and had to add in support for the memory manager chip and then multiple processes. Two weeks, with other coursework.
I agree you dont need to know all the language, but its important to know roughly what is there, to save yourself reimplentation effort.
enjoy C#; but we aware that a lot of its library is a very thin wrapper around win32; so all the win32 quirks are there to see. Those quirks are all in java too of course, just less obvious.
That's funny. I read and thought "what a pretentious git". And stopped reading.
The UK satirical magazine, Private Eye, has a special place for people like this, called
pseuds corner
I remember seeing a real blacksmith on a mountain bike holiday in morocco 2 years back.
One day: fixing some iron work and then doing a bit of donkey shoe repair.
The next day: same little patch of dirt in the village, but its repairs to a battered peugeot.
So the smiths are still there, they have just specialised into "Car repair". And soon, network administration.
Having been involved with notebook engineering in the past, I can assure you that the notebook drives -esp. the hitachi ones- are well engineered for the weight.
The biggest issue with causes of failures is how well they are mounted, and that is where different ODM designs can vary wildly; or even the same ODM design with a different vendor's case round it.
Some drives were only mounted on one side, so every shock got amplified. Others were in "quick swap on failure" units that almost guaranteed failure, they were so unsupportive of shock. Same goes for hot swap CD/DVD drive trays, BTW.
The emergence of "Consumer grade" laptops has actually done a lot to improve the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). These ones dont have so many hotswap options, but instead can lock down everything to be sure it stays supportive.
We have also done tests shipping packaged systems around by fedex with a logging accelerometer in place of an HDD. you get some interesting figures, but all well within the safety range of things.
One tip though, always tuck the laptop in behind a seat safely before you go driving down windy back roads doing italian-style "optimistic overtakes". Some things are way outside the envelope.
yeah, universities would kind of expect that. Give you homework like take an OS kernel and add multiprocessing to it, give you a weekend.
Do you think languages have got more complex (JAva, C#, C++), with all the libraries you need to learn with them, or the problems have got harder?
Solutions is "they fix problems you have". But if you squint your eyes, you see that they create half of them. Here are some of the things you need IBM Global Services to solve for you
- Anything involving EBCDIC (spelling?)
- Enterprise Java, with particular reference to Entity Beans, that were designed by IBM, so the story goes.
- Integrating Mainframe apps with modern code
- Web Services built using SOAP
I'd point to web services and EJB as examples of recent dev nightmares that came from IBM. Horrible things that convince you distributed apps are easy, but leave you with a nightmare that needs paid experts to fix.Which is what scares me about Object REXX. It could just be there to add complexity to the mix.
yeah, this caught my eye. Now you can publicly say things like "the .NET garbage collector is way behind what Java has" or "managed code is way too slow" and not be hit by a lawsuit.
Nice.
There was a (in)famous incident in Northern Ireland a few years back, as the peace process brought back normality to the country. There is a village in South Armargh, Crossmaglen, that is somewhere you dont want to go. Effectively independent from britain, the army would only patrol by helicopters, and even those would get shot down. Foot patrols used to encounter snipers. For comparison, imagine if Falluja, Iraq, was in the US somewhere. Anyhow, after peace sort of came to Ulster/the occupied six counties, a TV detector van visited the area to see if there were any unlicensed tellies. You can imagine the outcome. I think everyone survived, but the van was left burning...
Everyone I know who has worked with CIM hates it. Maybe you have had a better experience. too many objects, too dictatorial a model. They even have a model for help desks and support calls. That is way over the top.
Sun? IBM politics. IBM, HP, Oracle, Cisco are all on the OASIS working group that has been doing an alternative (very similar one BTW) for a year: WS-RF. This is the MS counterpoint, Intel, AMD and dell brought in because they are the rest of the PC industry and do what MS says.
Sun are probably playing against IBM, even though they still hate MS and Dell. That or supporting MS on random WS specs was part of the sun/MS deal.
yeah, snicker. Manning press (bias note -I'm one of their authors) do do DRM free PDFs, which is great; I have my book on lots of machines, share copies with others, and have quite a few copies of other books up and coming. There is nothing like having 20+ PDF of currents books on a laptop when you need to do a keyword search for a topic.
Which is very suspiciously similar to WS-Management, 'cept for the shorter name and the completely different set of signatories. Both try and provide a distributed "resources" view of SOAP endpoints, because if they were called "Distributed Objects" we'd all realise that the "Distributed Objects bad, Service Oriented Architecture" was so much bollocks.
Now, the fact that they are fairly similar means there is scope for convergence. I'd guess MS were the main author here (like DELL and AMD care about software), so if MS and IBM can be friend, and MS join the oasis working group, then we can see progress.
But I wouldn't hold my breath.
We dont call them parking brakes in the UK, even though we engage them to park. They are called handbrakes and when your car gets stolen, whoever gets chased round town will use them to corner entertainingly, untill they flub it and slide sideways into a wall, roll the car, etc, etc.
I have had the brakes fail on a car (original mini) and have used it to get home (Very carefully). Since the main foot brakes didnt have power assist, there wasnt a significant difference in performance.
I sheered off the bottom of an engine once in order to get back onto the correct side of a meridian. Again, it seemed like the right thing to do. When the bill came in the following week ($800), I could not help wonder if there could have been a more cost effective solution...
I had a renault megane for rental in the Alps in may.
Their fancy rfid tag ignition key is cute; just plug it in and hit the go button. There is no stop button; you just come to a halt then pull the card.
The moment you pull the card it actually puts the handbrake on. The handbrake comes off when you restart the car, put it in gear and rev the engine.
I didnt have a 125mph chase down the autoroute, but we did have a scary time doing a 3 point turn on an alpine pass in the snow. The road was closed and we had to turn round. But you cannot spin up the engine and clutch then gently come off the handbrake, as you normally do on hill turns. As soon as you hit the accelerator your brakes would come off. So the only safe way to hill starts is to make 100% sure you are in the right gear (ie forwards and not backwards), then hit the accelerator hard. Get it wrong and you drive off the mountain at speed.
I think the Renault line have added a bit too much automation these days. I note the German toys havent gone that far yet -not even Mercedes- and I think they knew what they were doing.
I must have been there in the good days. I also remember the bar staff in restaurant #1 had some spirits you could add to coffee if you were discreet enough.
now, on to the scandinavian summer students, about which the international news coverage seems to have missed out on the delights of...
we do insist that our schools cover a concept called 'evolution' in biology lessons, sometimes even hypothesis of galaxy and solar system formation in physics lessons, and generally encourage a form of thinking called 'the scientific process', in which only observable and repeatable experiments/data are to be treated with any regard.
One could argue therefore that we do persecute certain people who choose not to believe in the scientific process and its implications.
What we dont ever do is knock on people's doors to bring "the truth" to them. Which is something to think about it. Should we become door to door atheists? I can imagine it now:
us: "hello, we are here to talk to you about god"
them#1: "go away, there is no god"
us: "thank you, that was what we wanted to verify"
or
us: "hello, we are here to talk to you about the fishes and the ocean"
them: yes?
us: "you see, the fishes, they walked up on their little fins, out of the ocean"
them: "did they?"
us: "yes, they walked out of the ocean onto dry land. And they did it for us".
them: "yes, I see it now, let us go spread the word!"
And together we could bring the happy truth about the fishes that walked to the world.
yes, but they do serve beer. at lunchtimes. What more do you want?
The story I have heard is that it was a military request, though civil engineers pushed for it too.
which is why
(1) that kodak also recorded which direction it was looking
(2) the exif format can includes full GPS constellation and time info, as well as just lat/long -so you can do post-processing to get a better position
yes, I think novell have the potential to be a serious threat.
MS view them more as an enemy than, say, IBM, because IBM and the hardware players are either box shifters or 'solutions vendors'; making money through consultancy. Novell are a vendor of software that runs on top of other people's boxes, and that fits in with the MS business model.
But the MS business model "sell OS, sell applications, sell upgrades, own the formats and protocols" is threatened by F/OSS in general, not just vendor (a) or vendor (b), whoever they are. The vendors are just the cutting edge of linux-in-the enterprise.
Nobody -novell, redhat -will be able to to get away with the pricing models of Microsoft. Pay per PC -even when you got a copy preinstalled? Pay for a 'client access license' to server code? Pay per-processor for the OS? have a different price and features for 'server side' versus 'home user' OS? I dont think so. All the old rules are over, and that is what threatens MS the most.
ooh, this is a slippery slope.
...etc.
LGPL says 'linkage', with a model of linkage that works well with C++ (but not java, where everything is really a lib). GPL says 'any incorporation into a program', be it static or dynamic linkage.
To say my license applies to things that produce or consume data, even if separate or remote processes is a new extension. Certainly classic GPL doesnt cover it, but you could always write a new license to extend it.
If you take an existing GPL bit of code, you probably could wrap it with more code (GPL too), and publish a service interface that provides all the core functionality of the library, to other apps/processes. It is definitely a workaround. Which doesnt need SOAP, WSDL, all those fancy things -just boring old Corba would work fine, we have the Bonobo ORB to route stuff,
You run the risk of offending people who wrote the code you have wrapped, but I think that may be better than software licenses controlling who uses the data that apps produce.