A tiny 2 bedroom flat in London city center can cost £200k-£500k GBP which would be $320k-$800k.
Yes - in Mayfair or Hampstead or somewhere silly like that.
But London is fairly well set up for commuting, on some routes at least. I can get from my home in Hertfordshire (where things are green, spacious, and far, far cheaper than London) to my job in the City in 30-35 minutes. I can get a train straight to two airports, and I'm ten minutes walk from the shops. You just have to be a little smart about avoiding the obvious places to live, because they become hotspots as insane demand drives up the price. Do a little research, and you can find somewhere affordable and convenient.
straight to money talk, then I could show slavery was necessary.
In fact, slavery was bad economically no matter how it seemed when spoken in terms of money.
What you are trying to say is that something that looks good in the short term might not be so good in the long term. At least I hope that's what it was, because the above sentence makes no sense at all. How can something be bad economically but good in terms of money!? You can only make slavery look good "in terms of money" if your economic analysis was strictly short-term.
That's the funny thing, all things considered, what's profitable is usually what's right. Why should that be? Because individuals choose how to spend their money depending on their true perceptions of right and wrong. I know so many people who say they hate corporations, but these same people happily spend their money on Sony products, Gap clothes, etc etc.
You can see what anyone truly believes - regardless of what they say - by seeing how they spend their money.
Today we call many of these people attempting to prevent more IP protection and possibly turn it around communists, hippies, or simply people who want everything for free.
That's the thing, tho', most of these people do just want things for free. Seriously. Some people use P2P as a method for listening to an album to decide whether to buy it, but many don't, they just download the MP3 and consider that they own the album. The basis of trade is that both parties get what they want - if either doesn't then it's called "exploitation" or "theft". And because exploitation is wrong, it doesn't necessarily follow that theft is right.
Personally, I think we'll have to move into more of a socialistic/non-capitalistic society.
Well, you have to understand what a market is. A market is just an algorithm for allocating finite resources, on the basis that the people who value a resource the most will be willing to pay more for it than those who value it less. There is a law called supply and demand, which is that as demand for a resource goes up, if the supply is finite, then units of that resource will cost more, until an equilibrium is reached between the rate at which it can be supplied (produced) and the rate at which it can be consumed (bought). Similarly, if demand goes down, the price must also go down in order for the supply to be consumed. In the real world, this happens, because maintaining inventory is expensive, and often it is cheaper to take a loss per unit than to store everything in the hope that the demand goes up. This is very true in high tech and media and agriculture, where the very act of storing for a long period of time dimishes value, over and above the cost of actually renting a warehouse, etc.
So, when an infinite supply of energy and raw materials is available, and both the manufacturing process and transportation are instantaneous for any volume of matter, then capitalism will be obsolete because the problem it addresses - finite resource allocation - will no longer exist. Until that happens, tho', a market will always be more efficient.
To many, the very concept of "Intellectual Property" (Intellectual Robbery?) is absurd, due to there being no cost of distribution for an idea.
Those people are foolish. There's no cost for distributing an idea once someone else has thought of it, built a prototype and refined it to make sure the idea works and is useful, etc etc. That's what the patent system (when it's working correctly, which is not now) is supposed to be about: you cannot patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea, and even then, only if it is novel.
It obviously costs something in time and money to create ideas and technologies. Has anyone done a scientific study comparing the creativity levels of countries with differing copyright systems? I'd love to see one done, as its results could shed light on the (non-)benefits given by extending copyright terms.
Purely empirically, based on my observations of the world around me, countries with strong IP laws - like the US, UK, Switzerland, Japan and others - have the highest standards of living, the lowest infant mortality rates, the highest literacy rates, the most Nobel prize winning scientists, and in fact lead the world in pretty much any metric you want. Countries without strong IP laws, or at least the enforcement of those laws, come right near the bottom.
Already, in genomics, the cost of discovering the function of a gene in the human genome confers upon the discoverer a monopoly on its use in drugs and treatments. This allows research firms to plant flags on the genes in our bodies, and charge whatever licensing fees they could imagine for their use. Even if the cost of the retrovirus to be distributed into our bodies to flip this genomic "switch" is virtually nothing, we will end up paying thousands of dollars per treatment, not just to fund the development of new therapies, but to line the pockets of the company's shareholders.
If you think you have a technique for discovering the functions of genes without spending billions of dollars, then you've just won yourself a Nobel prize, my friend. They'll be erecting statues and naming hospitals after you.
But what most people (deliberately) ignore is that the cost is not in reproducing an object, but developing it. These treatments would not even exist if those shareholders had not risked their own money to underwrite development. Ask any ill patient to choose between an expensive cure and no cure at all, and I wonder what he would say.
Finally, someone invents what was considered to be impossible, cheap and efficient matter cloning that can finally put an end to the starving masses and bring poverty to its knees. It can clone prescription drugs and cure millions and all this with practically no cost.
But the food problem has already been solved from a technological perspective. The problem now is political; people like Robert Mugabe starving sections of the population to maintain his grip on power, or forced collectivization of farms which destroys food production. Humans have been growing food for a long time, and it's pretty well understood.
The problem with cloning prescription drugs is that this technique will not help in the discovery of prescription drugs, a very expensive process, nor will it help in getting FDA approval, which is even more expensive. People criticize drug companies for spending so much on marketing, but how can doctors prescribe a treatment, or patients ask for it, if no-one knows about it. Actually manufacturing of the pill is easy, once you've done all that.
You have hit upon the problem at the heart of digital reproduction, and it's this: it decouples the resources required to develop and item from the resources required to duplicate it. In the mind of the the typical Slashbot, because something can be copied cheaply, it has no value. The cost of actually making it is abstracted. The production of software by hobbyists bears no relation to the production of other intellectual properties such as pharmceuticals or blockbuster movies which do require substantial amounts of money upfront.
So there would be no problem when it comes to cloning a loaf of bread becaue bread is cheap anyway - in fact, it may even be more expensive to power your machine than to just grow wheat! Most of the cost of bread is in the raw materials and the transportation of the materials and the finished product. But the economics are totally different for things like pharmaceuticals.
10 of these ought to be more powerful than anything else that's been built. 1060 processors, 5760gb of RAM
You're not even close. This cluster has 48 nodes with 128 processors apiece, but each node can take up to 512. Each node also has up to a terabyte of RAM.
The card could use a challenge/response system with the merchant. Each card has a symmetric key pair - the public key is your account number used for billing. The private key is known only to the card, and is used to sign a challenge phrase from the merchant. Challenge phrases would be unique to each transaction (given out by the financial institution per transaction). This way, cards couldn't be cloned.
What most people don't know is that there is a difference between a chipcard and a smartcard. Most credit cards are actually chipcards - they use a chip, the little metal bit on the front to store data instead of a magnetic strip, but they have (almost) no computational capability onboard. They can only give the reader the information it asks for. A real smartcard actually does have computational ability, a power source, etc but it is orders of magnitude more expensive per card, and in most cases it's simply not economic for the credit card issuer to give them away. Only a smartcard can decide whether or not to give up a piece of information, a chipcard can only respond to requests "give me the data in slot a" "ok".
The word "legacy" keeps popping up in correlation with mainframes, and this is really why most of them are still around - legacy code that no one wants to re-do for other systems
You seem to be labouring under the idea that a mainframe is necessarily old. Let me clue you in: they're still being actively developed, and an IBM zSeries will handily spank the top-of-the-line Unix boxes from Sun without breaking a sweat.
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations)
None of those things you mention can be done with a "network of workstations" in any comparable way to what can be done with a mainframe. Next you'll be saying a "beowulf cluster" can replace a mainframe. Nothing in the Unix world comes even close to IBM's Sysplex. Mainframes have 99.999% uptimes as standard. Mainframes can deliver quality-of-service (QoS) - you know in advance exactly how long your job will take to complete, because you know that the system can guarantee a minimum level of resource, no matter what else it is doing. You can hot swap drives, processors, nodes, anything you want.
will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door.
It's a fact that it is easier to write programs in COBOL than it is in C++. No memory leaks, no dangling pointers, etc and it's natively integrated with the database and operating system.
It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
Quite simply, you are wrong. Plug in an IBM mainframe and it does what it says on the box, all fully integrated. It'll do what it was supposed to do, for decades if necessary, and when it's obsolete you can upgrade to a new one and your old software will run flawlessly first time, but faster. IBM proved this when they moved from 48-bit CPUs to 64-bit. As I have said before, this simply doesn't happen in the Unix world. A mainframe is a nuclear power station and a PC is the engine in your car. Sure you could use thousands and thousands of cars to generate the electricity for a city, but why would you?
Ennio Flaiano: "In Italy there are two categories of fascists: the fascists and the antifascists".
Maybe it's a translation artifact; I took the quote directly from my English copy of "The Rage and The Pride" by Fallaci. Tha article you linked to appears to be the original newspaper article, but the book is the "full version" of what she meant to say but couldn't fit in.
And what happens when an Iraqi captures one of these Sipper sets? He can listen in to Rumsfeld and Bush? Encryption should be between the two endpoints, IMO, like IPSec.
I'm sure that the Pentagon, with access to expert advice from the NSA, CIA, ARPA, MIT etc etc didn't think of that.
things come to mind reading this. For one thing, they appear to be using Microsoft Chat over the internet to communicate reconnaissance information. Whether such communication is secure is something I'd really like the govt. to think about, if not it could be putting soldiers at risk.
Microsoft chat, like almost everything else they do, is really a toolkit for building your own applications on. It can be hardened and deployed to communicate sensitive financial and corporate data, as necessary.
One thing that is mission critical is tech support, and apparently they have a top tier (premier?) support from Microsoft. I wonder if anybody short of say IBM could offer a competing Open Source (*BSD or Linux) based solution?
Sun have a large contract for tactical computing systems with the US Army; I can only assume that it was too expensive to deploy Tadpoles in the field. And no matter what anyone says, a Dell laptop running the OEM install of Windows is far easier to support than the same laptop running Linux, if only because Dell have done more testing and have more techs with experience. That may change someday, but it's how it is for now.
Just imagine the beautiful irony though, if a helicopter's armor was immune to a laser, but a rock hurled from a sling knock it out of the sky?
That's pretty much what happened in Somalia, modern helicopters came under attack from untrained men armed with WW2-era bolt-action rifles. Of course, only Nicholas de Genova would describe that as "beautiful".
Were you to try to do ANYTHING with a mainframe (I'm thinking s/390 or z/OS here) armed with the knowledge you mentioned you would be so horribly lost it wouldn't even be funny.
Exactly. It's also very much a chicken-and-egg problem to get into the mainframe world, becuase the barriers to entry are much higher from the standpoint of working on the technologies at home to get that all-important First Job. It's easy to build a $500 linux server or buy a $1000 used ultrasparc sun machine to learn some unix and unix coding on, but... how are you going to learn mainframe stuff?
In this economy? IBM can hoover up entire graduating classes with the promise of steady jobs then send them to Mainframe School. What're you gonna do, sit round for 6 months, 12 months, longer, working in Starbucks and waiting for a hot dotcom job, or go work for Big Blue with its health and dental and matching 401k and bottomless pockets? It's really not the problem the scaremongers are saying it is. Any of the big systems integrators - Accenture, CSC, EDS, Unisys - could do it, and they will, as soon as it's necessary to their businesses.
What path would a kid take to get into real datacenter hardware?
Go work for Unisys, IBM, CSC or EDS. Volunteer for the mainframes - there probably won't be much competition. Your colleagues will laugh at you, and tell you all about their "hot" Java skills. Quit after 5 years and become a contractor. Laugh at your former colleagues who're discovering that their skills are a cheap commodity now.
A German researcher is claiming 40 winks in the office can give more of a boost to the working day than a dozen cups of coffee.
Yeah, the Germans get lots of nice perks, 8 weeks paid vacation a year, government-subsidized visits to health spas, the works. It sounds pretty good, but the real cost of it is 12-13% unemployment and rising. Meanwhile in the good ol' US of A, workers don't have so many perks, but a heck of a lot fewer of them are unemployed. I guess you have to jump on a plane and take your choice.
The reason M$ has not been willing to show the windows code is that they have borrowed unix-code to the NT. Especially the network and memory handling routines come to mind first.
Microsoft used BSD code, but the BSD license permits this. You can try this simple experiment on your own PC, assuming you have Cygwin:
C:\WINNT\system32> strings FTP.EXE |grep -i copyright @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Now why would Microsoft leave that in there if they were deliberately trying to hide it?
Microsoft once had a Unix OS product of their own, Xenix. It ran on the old PC/AT processor (Linux needs at least a 386 for the hardware MMU). Way back in the day, Microsoft licensed Unix from AT&T, ported it to a variety of platforms (many of which no longer exist, this was in the 1970s), then sold Xenix to SCO, who ported it to the 386 and sold it as their own product for a while. Back then, while you could license source code from AT&T, the Unix name wasn't included, hence the name Xenix for what was essentially indistinguishable from "official" Unix. I believe a term of the sale was that Microsoft would not compete directly in the Unix space. I guess that condition must have expired. How amusing that Microsoft are now trying to license their own product back!
Assuming that the people who wrote these scripts wrote them on their own, they shouldn't be in violation of Verisign's patent and anyone that writes their own search query autocompletion script isn't violating this one regardless of whether it does the same thing or not because they wrote it on their own.
If the method is "obvious" to a practitioner in the field, as decided by the courts, then the patent will be shot down. If the same technique was used before the patent was filed, that is "prior art" and the patent will be declared invalid by the courts. If an identical technique was used after the patent is submitted (and hence published in the online patent database) there's no way to prove it wasn't copied from the original patent submitter. If the same thing is done by a wholly different technique, the courts will declare that the original patent simply didn't apply.
I just don't get the idea of software patents. Sure, if I write some nifty little app that someone copies/steals and sells as their own, I can see a problem there. But I'm having a hard time saying that if I write that nifty app and patent it, then no one else can write an app like mine, regardless of whether they come up with the code by themselves.
You are corrent - you don't get it. Patents don't protect doing things, they protect specific, non-obvious ways of doing things. Clean-room implementations are fine (example: Compaq's cloning of the IBM BIOS). If you actually read a patent, you will see that it is very specific about the way it was done, that's why patent titles are in the style of "A technique for X" or "A method of Y". Anyone else can still do X and Y, so long as they either a) invented their own, wholly different technique for doing it or b) if they want to do it in the same way, they pay for the cost of discovering it by licensing the patent.
a game where the player runs around in a 3d world with a first person perspective shooting everything in sight
You could not patent such a thing - but you could patent a specific collision detection technique that you invented for use in the game, for example. See the difference?
the senior management appointed by the Bush administration
Gee, because the dot-com bubble didn't form under Clinton, did it?
The Patent Office have a very simple approach: let the courts sort it out. Ultimately that is sensible, since the courts can deal with only the patents that are contested, rather than researching every single one in-depth. Courts can call expert witnesses, but the Patent Office can't hire experts in every scientific discipline to do nothing by check patents all day. The Patent Office just records a) what you thought of and b) when you thought of it - nothing more.
I find it interesting that a math double-major, who's considering becoming a math professor, uses C++ as his language of choice, with Java coming second. Not Lisp, not Scheme, not Haskell - C++.
Clever programmers use Lisp, Scheme and Haskell.
Smart programmers use whatever language the market's hiring, and don't get caught up on language wars.
But why do we (as members of the hard working croud) care? Assuming a strong ethical standard exists in your management chain, slackers will either be terminated or reassigned to meaningless tasks while you enevitably rise up to the next level of the food chain. So what good does it do you (other than personal frustration over seeing a coworker shirk while you work your tail off) to try to convert those that don't want to be converted? Come on, give up!
LOL because hard-working self-proclaimed "geeks" only want to be techies, yet a company needs managers (or at least thinks it does) and there's no-one else to promote but the slackers. A slacker with a nice suit will always win over a techie who showers less than once a week.
That's the paradox of IT: you can either risk being managed by an idiot or become a manager yourself. Everyone has to choose one or the other sometime. So long as "geeks" cling to the "hacker mystique" of only writing "code" and never learning Powerpoint, this will not change.
Geeks think they're living up to some ideal when they stick to coding exclusively, but here's the thing: ESR never worked in an office, why believe anything he says about how to do your job?
Those who know what we're doing just aren't advertising it, and on the most part we have to wait for the raw aggregate processing power of readily available computer technology to reach much higher levels before we can put our theories to nontrivial test.
Consider the raw data complexity of the human brain
That's a lame excuse. It would be an accomplishment to create a machine as intelligent as a mosquito, but that hasn't been done yet. Saying that we need to wait 'til computers are as fast as human brains is just hiding from the real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
A tiny 2 bedroom flat in London city center can cost £200k-£500k GBP which would be $320k-$800k.
Yes - in Mayfair or Hampstead or somewhere silly like that.
But London is fairly well set up for commuting, on some routes at least. I can get from my home in Hertfordshire (where things are green, spacious, and far, far cheaper than London) to my job in the City in 30-35 minutes. I can get a train straight to two airports, and I'm ten minutes walk from the shops. You just have to be a little smart about avoiding the obvious places to live, because they become hotspots as insane demand drives up the price. Do a little research, and you can find somewhere affordable and convenient.
straight to money talk, then I could show slavery was necessary.
In fact, slavery was bad economically no matter how it seemed when spoken in terms of money.
What you are trying to say is that something that looks good in the short term might not be so good in the long term. At least I hope that's what it was, because the above sentence makes no sense at all. How can something be bad economically but good in terms of money!? You can only make slavery look good "in terms of money" if your economic analysis was strictly short-term.
That's the funny thing, all things considered, what's profitable is usually what's right. Why should that be? Because individuals choose how to spend their money depending on their true perceptions of right and wrong. I know so many people who say they hate corporations, but these same people happily spend their money on Sony products, Gap clothes, etc etc.
You can see what anyone truly believes - regardless of what they say - by seeing how they spend their money.
Today we call many of these people attempting to prevent more IP protection and possibly turn it around communists, hippies, or simply people who want everything for free.
That's the thing, tho', most of these people do just want things for free. Seriously. Some people use P2P as a method for listening to an album to decide whether to buy it, but many don't, they just download the MP3 and consider that they own the album. The basis of trade is that both parties get what they want - if either doesn't then it's called "exploitation" or "theft". And because exploitation is wrong, it doesn't necessarily follow that theft is right.
Personally, I think we'll have to move into more of a socialistic/non-capitalistic society.
Well, you have to understand what a market is. A market is just an algorithm for allocating finite resources, on the basis that the people who value a resource the most will be willing to pay more for it than those who value it less. There is a law called supply and demand, which is that as demand for a resource goes up, if the supply is finite, then units of that resource will cost more, until an equilibrium is reached between the rate at which it can be supplied (produced) and the rate at which it can be consumed (bought). Similarly, if demand goes down, the price must also go down in order for the supply to be consumed. In the real world, this happens, because maintaining inventory is expensive, and often it is cheaper to take a loss per unit than to store everything in the hope that the demand goes up. This is very true in high tech and media and agriculture, where the very act of storing for a long period of time dimishes value, over and above the cost of actually renting a warehouse, etc.
So, when an infinite supply of energy and raw materials is available, and both the manufacturing process and transportation are instantaneous for any volume of matter, then capitalism will be obsolete because the problem it addresses - finite resource allocation - will no longer exist. Until that happens, tho', a market will always be more efficient.
To many, the very concept of "Intellectual Property" (Intellectual Robbery?) is absurd, due to there being no cost of distribution for an idea.
Those people are foolish. There's no cost for distributing an idea once someone else has thought of it, built a prototype and refined it to make sure the idea works and is useful, etc etc. That's what the patent system (when it's working correctly, which is not now) is supposed to be about: you cannot patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea, and even then, only if it is novel.
It obviously costs something in time and money to create ideas and technologies. Has anyone done a scientific study comparing the creativity levels of countries with differing copyright systems? I'd love to see one done, as its results could shed light on the (non-)benefits given by extending copyright terms.
Purely empirically, based on my observations of the world around me, countries with strong IP laws - like the US, UK, Switzerland, Japan and others - have the highest standards of living, the lowest infant mortality rates, the highest literacy rates, the most Nobel prize winning scientists, and in fact lead the world in pretty much any metric you want. Countries without strong IP laws, or at least the enforcement of those laws, come right near the bottom.
Already, in genomics, the cost of discovering the function of a gene in the human genome confers upon the discoverer a monopoly on its use in drugs and treatments. This allows research firms to plant flags on the genes in our bodies, and charge whatever licensing fees they could imagine for their use. Even if the cost of the retrovirus to be distributed into our bodies to flip this genomic "switch" is virtually nothing, we will end up paying thousands of dollars per treatment, not just to fund the development of new therapies, but to line the pockets of the company's shareholders.
If you think you have a technique for discovering the functions of genes without spending billions of dollars, then you've just won yourself a Nobel prize, my friend. They'll be erecting statues and naming hospitals after you.
But what most people (deliberately) ignore is that the cost is not in reproducing an object, but developing it. These treatments would not even exist if those shareholders had not risked their own money to underwrite development. Ask any ill patient to choose between an expensive cure and no cure at all, and I wonder what he would say.
Finally, someone invents what was considered to be impossible, cheap and efficient matter cloning that can finally put an end to the starving masses and bring poverty to its knees. It can clone prescription drugs and cure millions and all this with practically no cost.
But the food problem has already been solved from a technological perspective. The problem now is political; people like Robert Mugabe starving sections of the population to maintain his grip on power, or forced collectivization of farms which destroys food production. Humans have been growing food for a long time, and it's pretty well understood.
The problem with cloning prescription drugs is that this technique will not help in the discovery of prescription drugs, a very expensive process, nor will it help in getting FDA approval, which is even more expensive. People criticize drug companies for spending so much on marketing, but how can doctors prescribe a treatment, or patients ask for it, if no-one knows about it. Actually manufacturing of the pill is easy, once you've done all that.
You have hit upon the problem at the heart of digital reproduction, and it's this: it decouples the resources required to develop and item from the resources required to duplicate it. In the mind of the the typical Slashbot, because something can be copied cheaply, it has no value. The cost of actually making it is abstracted. The production of software by hobbyists bears no relation to the production of other intellectual properties such as pharmceuticals or blockbuster movies which do require substantial amounts of money upfront.
So there would be no problem when it comes to cloning a loaf of bread becaue bread is cheap anyway - in fact, it may even be more expensive to power your machine than to just grow wheat! Most of the cost of bread is in the raw materials and the transportation of the materials and the finished product. But the economics are totally different for things like pharmaceuticals.
10 of these ought to be more powerful than anything else that's been built. 1060 processors, 5760gb of RAM
You're not even close. This cluster has 48 nodes with 128 processors apiece, but each node can take up to 512. Each node also has up to a terabyte of RAM.
The card could use a challenge/response system with the merchant. Each card has a symmetric key pair - the public key is your account number used for billing. The private key is known only to the card, and is used to sign a challenge phrase from the merchant. Challenge phrases would be unique to each transaction (given out by the financial institution per transaction). This way, cards couldn't be cloned.
What most people don't know is that there is a difference between a chipcard and a smartcard. Most credit cards are actually chipcards - they use a chip, the little metal bit on the front to store data instead of a magnetic strip, but they have (almost) no computational capability onboard. They can only give the reader the information it asks for. A real smartcard actually does have computational ability, a power source, etc but it is orders of magnitude more expensive per card, and in most cases it's simply not economic for the credit card issuer to give them away. Only a smartcard can decide whether or not to give up a piece of information, a chipcard can only respond to requests "give me the data in slot a" "ok".
The word "legacy" keeps popping up in correlation with mainframes, and this is really why most of them are still around - legacy code that no one wants to re-do for other systems
You seem to be labouring under the idea that a mainframe is necessarily old. Let me clue you in: they're still being actively developed, and an IBM zSeries will handily spank the top-of-the-line Unix boxes from Sun without breaking a sweat.
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations)
None of those things you mention can be done with a "network of workstations" in any comparable way to what can be done with a mainframe. Next you'll be saying a "beowulf cluster" can replace a mainframe. Nothing in the Unix world comes even close to IBM's Sysplex. Mainframes have 99.999% uptimes as standard. Mainframes can deliver quality-of-service (QoS) - you know in advance exactly how long your job will take to complete, because you know that the system can guarantee a minimum level of resource, no matter what else it is doing. You can hot swap drives, processors, nodes, anything you want.
will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door.
It's a fact that it is easier to write programs in COBOL than it is in C++. No memory leaks, no dangling pointers, etc and it's natively integrated with the database and operating system.
It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
Quite simply, you are wrong. Plug in an IBM mainframe and it does what it says on the box, all fully integrated. It'll do what it was supposed to do, for decades if necessary, and when it's obsolete you can upgrade to a new one and your old software will run flawlessly first time, but faster. IBM proved this when they moved from 48-bit CPUs to 64-bit. As I have said before, this simply doesn't happen in the Unix world. A mainframe is a nuclear power station and a PC is the engine in your car. Sure you could use thousands and thousands of cars to generate the electricity for a city, but why would you?
Ennio Flaiano: "In Italy there are two categories of fascists: the fascists and the antifascists".
Maybe it's a translation artifact; I took the quote directly from my English copy of "The Rage and The Pride" by Fallaci. Tha article you linked to appears to be the original newspaper article, but the book is the "full version" of what she meant to say but couldn't fit in.
And what happens when an Iraqi captures one of these Sipper sets? He can listen in to Rumsfeld and Bush? Encryption should be between the two endpoints, IMO, like IPSec.
I'm sure that the Pentagon, with access to expert advice from the NSA, CIA, ARPA, MIT etc etc didn't think of that.
things come to mind reading this. For one thing, they appear to be using Microsoft Chat over the internet to communicate reconnaissance information. Whether such communication is secure is something I'd really like the govt. to think about, if not it could be putting soldiers at risk.
Microsoft chat, like almost everything else they do, is really a toolkit for building your own applications on. It can be hardened and deployed to communicate sensitive financial and corporate data, as necessary.
One thing that is mission critical is tech support, and apparently they have a top tier (premier?) support from Microsoft. I wonder if anybody short of say IBM could offer a competing Open Source (*BSD or Linux) based solution?
Sun have a large contract for tactical computing systems with the US Army; I can only assume that it was too expensive to deploy Tadpoles in the field. And no matter what anyone says, a Dell laptop running the OEM install of Windows is far easier to support than the same laptop running Linux, if only because Dell have done more testing and have more techs with experience. That may change someday, but it's how it is for now.
Just imagine the beautiful irony though, if a helicopter's armor was immune to a laser, but a rock hurled from a sling knock it out of the sky?
That's pretty much what happened in Somalia, modern helicopters came under attack from untrained men armed with WW2-era bolt-action rifles. Of course, only Nicholas de Genova would describe that as "beautiful".
Were you to try to do ANYTHING with a mainframe (I'm thinking s/390 or z/OS here) armed with the knowledge you mentioned you would be so horribly lost it wouldn't even be funny.
;-)
Actually, it would be funny
Exactly. It's also very much a chicken-and-egg problem to get into the mainframe world, becuase the barriers to entry are much higher from the standpoint of working on the technologies at home to get that all-important First Job. It's easy to build a $500 linux server or buy a $1000 used ultrasparc sun machine to learn some unix and unix coding on, but ... how are you going to learn mainframe stuff?
In this economy? IBM can hoover up entire graduating classes with the promise of steady jobs then send them to Mainframe School. What're you gonna do, sit round for 6 months, 12 months, longer, working in Starbucks and waiting for a hot dotcom job, or go work for Big Blue with its health and dental and matching 401k and bottomless pockets? It's really not the problem the scaremongers are saying it is. Any of the big systems integrators - Accenture, CSC, EDS, Unisys - could do it, and they will, as soon as it's necessary to their businesses.
What path would a kid take to get into real datacenter hardware?
Go work for Unisys, IBM, CSC or EDS. Volunteer for the mainframes - there probably won't be much competition. Your colleagues will laugh at you, and tell you all about their "hot" Java skills. Quit after 5 years and become a contractor. Laugh at your former colleagues who're discovering that their skills are a cheap commodity now.
A German researcher is claiming 40 winks in the office can give more of a boost to the working day than a dozen cups of coffee.
Yeah, the Germans get lots of nice perks, 8 weeks paid vacation a year, government-subsidized visits to health spas, the works. It sounds pretty good, but the real cost of it is 12-13% unemployment and rising. Meanwhile in the good ol' US of A, workers don't have so many perks, but a heck of a lot fewer of them are unemployed. I guess you have to jump on a plane and take your choice.
The reason M$ has not been willing to show the windows code is that they have borrowed unix-code to the NT. Especially the network and memory handling routines come to mind first.
Microsoft used BSD code, but the BSD license permits this. You can try this simple experiment on your own PC, assuming you have Cygwin:
C:\WINNT\system32> strings FTP.EXE |grep -i copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Now why would Microsoft leave that in there if they were deliberately trying to hide it?
Microsoft once had a Unix OS product of their own, Xenix. It ran on the old PC/AT processor (Linux needs at least a 386 for the hardware MMU). Way back in the day, Microsoft licensed Unix from AT&T, ported it to a variety of platforms (many of which no longer exist, this was in the 1970s), then sold Xenix to SCO, who ported it to the 386 and sold it as their own product for a while. Back then, while you could license source code from AT&T, the Unix name wasn't included, hence the name Xenix for what was essentially indistinguishable from "official" Unix. I believe a term of the sale was that Microsoft would not compete directly in the Unix space. I guess that condition must have expired. How amusing that Microsoft are now trying to license their own product back!
Assuming that the people who wrote these scripts wrote them on their own, they shouldn't be in violation of Verisign's patent and anyone that writes their own search query autocompletion script isn't violating this one regardless of whether it does the same thing or not because they wrote it on their own.
If the method is "obvious" to a practitioner in the field, as decided by the courts, then the patent will be shot down. If the same technique was used before the patent was filed, that is "prior art" and the patent will be declared invalid by the courts. If an identical technique was used after the patent is submitted (and hence published in the online patent database) there's no way to prove it wasn't copied from the original patent submitter. If the same thing is done by a wholly different technique, the courts will declare that the original patent simply didn't apply.
I just don't get the idea of software patents. Sure, if I write some nifty little app that someone copies/steals and sells as their own, I can see a problem there. But I'm having a hard time saying that if I write that nifty app and patent it, then no one else can write an app like mine, regardless of whether they come up with the code by themselves.
You are corrent - you don't get it. Patents don't protect doing things, they protect specific, non-obvious ways of doing things. Clean-room implementations are fine (example: Compaq's cloning of the IBM BIOS). If you actually read a patent, you will see that it is very specific about the way it was done, that's why patent titles are in the style of "A technique for X" or "A method of Y". Anyone else can still do X and Y, so long as they either a) invented their own, wholly different technique for doing it or b) if they want to do it in the same way, they pay for the cost of discovering it by licensing the patent.
a game where the player runs around in a 3d world with a first person perspective shooting everything in sight
You could not patent such a thing - but you could patent a specific collision detection technique that you invented for use in the game, for example. See the difference?
the senior management appointed by the Bush administration
Gee, because the dot-com bubble didn't form under Clinton, did it?
The Patent Office have a very simple approach: let the courts sort it out. Ultimately that is sensible, since the courts can deal with only the patents that are contested, rather than researching every single one in-depth. Courts can call expert witnesses, but the Patent Office can't hire experts in every scientific discipline to do nothing by check patents all day. The Patent Office just records a) what you thought of and b) when you thought of it - nothing more.
I find it interesting that a math double-major, who's considering becoming a math professor, uses C++ as his language of choice, with Java coming second. Not Lisp, not Scheme, not Haskell - C++.
Clever programmers use Lisp, Scheme and Haskell.
Smart programmers use whatever language the market's hiring, and don't get caught up on language wars.
But why do we (as members of the hard working croud) care? Assuming a strong ethical standard exists in your management chain, slackers will either be terminated or reassigned to meaningless tasks while you enevitably rise up to the next level of the food chain. So what good does it do you (other than personal frustration over seeing a coworker shirk while you work your tail off) to try to convert those that don't want to be converted? Come on, give up!
LOL because hard-working self-proclaimed "geeks" only want to be techies, yet a company needs managers (or at least thinks it does) and there's no-one else to promote but the slackers. A slacker with a nice suit will always win over a techie who showers less than once a week.
That's the paradox of IT: you can either risk being managed by an idiot or become a manager yourself. Everyone has to choose one or the other sometime. So long as "geeks" cling to the "hacker mystique" of only writing "code" and never learning Powerpoint, this will not change.
Geeks think they're living up to some ideal when they stick to coding exclusively, but here's the thing: ESR never worked in an office, why believe anything he says about how to do your job?
What interesting words start with "po" ??
I dunno, I get no matches for "pr0n". Is there another spelling?
Those who know what we're doing just aren't advertising it, and on the most part we have to wait for the raw aggregate processing power of readily available computer technology to reach much higher levels before we can put our theories to nontrivial test.
Consider the raw data complexity of the human brain
That's a lame excuse. It would be an accomplishment to create a machine as intelligent as a mosquito, but that hasn't been done yet. Saying that we need to wait 'til computers are as fast as human brains is just hiding from the real problem.