Well.. the processor itself is 70W. There's 2 of them, that's 140W. Then there's memory (4G of it), a 180G disk drive, all the support chips (yeah, things like disk controller chips and PCI driver chipsets and memory/cache interface chips are nice to have if you actually want to do any computing), the PCI card for the Infiniband... and pretty soon that 750W power supply isn't as much overkill as you thought.
And what makes you think that a dual-CPU G5 blade would cost significantly less than a tower G5? (Hint - what's the price tag on a dual-CPU 1U G4 rackmount?)
Tower or blade, the budget covered a bit over 2,000 processors, memory, networking, and all the rest of it. When you consider that some 20% of the budget was *networking* gear (Cisco, Infiniband, all that stuff), the blade/tower distinction didn't matter much.
About all going with blades would have done is made the footprint smaller - and that would have just made the cooling issues even worse.....
The actual clustering will be done over 10-gigabit Infiniband. (For a good time, figure out what the maximum bandwidth of a PCI-X slot is, and compare..)
Nobody cares about the noise. It's in a machine room, not office space. All the offices are on the other side of the atrium.
And I doubt that it can be much noisier than the printer room was when there were 2 IBM3800 printers going full-tilt (400 pages a minute each. No, that's not a typo. Four Hundred. Feed it a box of 3,200 pages of fanfold, and you *might* have time to go pee before it ran out again).
Actually, we didn't spend more money for physical space to keep these systems. The whole thing fits into about 3,000 square feet. We have over 10,000 square feet of machine room that we built back in 1989 (sized to hold an IBM 3084 and an IBM 3090-300J plus all the disk drives that went with them). Good thing our director at the time spec'ed out "all the floor space we're likely to ever need".....
To get it into 25 racks, you need to get it into a 1U form factor. At that point, cooling becomes an issue - you have 40 750W power supplies *per rack* then. We're talking about a space about the size of a phone booth, and the heat equivalent of 20 hair driers on HIGH all going at once. It's gonna get TOASTY at that point. Even if you consider a 2U and expanding out to 50 racks, that's still a lot of heat per square foot.
Remember - the CPU and the memory are going to generate the same number of BTU/hour whether in a tower case or a 2U rack. And going to the *as yet unannounced* 2U just makes the cooling problem worse...
Please note that what IBM calls the G5 and G6 CPU cores used in the S/390 and Z-series are a DIFFERENT chip than the Power series. The big push in the S/390 series is I/O bandwidth and reliability. Even the smallest S/390 currently available will take up to 256 I/O channels - which will *each* support a number of Fiberchannel-class connections.
Reliability - it does things like have 14 CPU dies on a card - 12 processors and 2 spares. Each CPU is actually 2 running in lockstep with a comparator. At the end of each instruction, the two sides are compared for "same state" - if they agree, the entire state of the processor is latched into a memory array. If they disagree, the hardware tries to clear a possible soft error by reloading the state from that array and retrying the failing instruction - if they agree this time, it logs a soft error and goes on. If they still disagree, another chipset called the 'processor controller' reads out that latch and loads it into one of the spares, and starts it running from there.....
On the other hand, the 750 chipset that the world calls the G5 is a different beast, which will kick the S/390's butt on CPU speed. But it can't get anywhere near the z-series for reliability and I/O.
Exposure to the facilities? All I'll say there is that I know of at least 4 people who have posted to this story that could throw a paper airplane from their cubicle and have a reasonable chance of landing it on the blueprints.;)
I said there wasn't capacity on that generator. I didn't say anything about the existence of other generators - and there's a distinction between pulling copper to get power grid capacity to the cluster and having emergency power backup for same. That diesel is for emergency backup, not local power generation - we've got a nice coal-fired beast on campus for that.
In addition, you have to remember that the cluster most likely has different backup power requirements than our production systems. Our production systems (the central mail server, the large database machines, etc) really need to stay up - we're talking about things that if the power substation near the airport goes out, the whole campus is screwed till it comes back online, if we don't have backup power.
Look at how many services were out when we did the cut-over - everything was affected, from E-mail to the library catalog. That's what emergency power is for - so you don't have an event like that without the multi-week notice that the install had.
On the other hand, does a compute cluster really need that level of power backup, or can we significantly trim the budget by merely having a really good power conditioner to make sure there's nice clean non-ripply power, and enough battery backup to allow the cluster to do a suspend-to-disk and poweroff cleanly? Yes, if we take a power hit in that scenario, some researchers have to wait for their results - but the business of the university as a whole isn't disrupted.
Or possibly the plan is to have the conditioner and batteries for now, and have someplace to cable in a backup diesel generator in the future - remember that 1,100 G5s, a bunch of Infiniband switches are a chunk of change - and then you get the expense of the power/cooling work. Suddenly you start thinking about how to put the non-essential costs into the next fiscal year.;)
(The above is not intended as an actual statement of the actual design or plans, just an illustrative discussion of the fact that there are a lot of tradeoffs that need to be made when planning and designing large-scale installations of any sort).
No, I'm speaking as the hypothetical person in charge of an ISP. I may not want to receive mail from AOL, but I can't afford to piss off my users who want to get mail from their Aunt Tillie.
Explain to them that they can't get mail from AOL because some other company called CA-something sold a wazziz to somebody in Zimbabwe who misused it? And AOL wasn't even involved in the slightest? But you can't get mail from there anymore?
Yeah. Right. Dream on. And pass me that pipe, I'm trying to forget the last time I had to explain this sort of thing to users, and it *WAS* AOL's screw-up. Maybe if I take enough hits from that pipe, I won't hear that sucking sound of subscribers leaving for an ISP that actually delivers the mail....
Umm... the IETF isn't trying to do ANYTHING. It's been published as an Internet-Draft. This is the IETF way of getting (possibly half-baked) ideas out for wider review and commentary. As such, there's very little editorial control over what gets out as an I-D. If you don't believe me, google around for these gems:
And you can't pull Verisign out of your 'trusted root CA' list because you'll cut yourself off from too many places you want to talk to. As Randy Bush often says on the NANOG mailing list, "I encourage my competitors to design their networks this way".
The actual requirement is "The MSA knows who the sender is, and provides an audit trail".
There's no reason for the MSA that I use to know all my E-mail addresses. In fact, once it's authenticated me, there's no real reason for it to even look at the RFC822 From: header, because it knows who I am, it's logged who I am, and if I try anything funny, the MSA admin will know where to find me and beat the snot out of me.
The *real* problem with this proposal is that there's the underlying assumption that a CA can't go rogue because it will hurt business. There's only one problem with that:
There's several *large* providers that are spammer-friendly, and aren't being blocked by the rest of the world mostly because they also have enough *legitimate* customers that it's not feasible to block them.
If you're an ISP, you can't block another ISP because they're a spam haven if the other ISP also happens to be the home of CNN, or Amazon, or (fill in the blank).
Similarly, you can say "We'll just piss on any CA that goes rogue". It's a lot harder to actually DO if you suddenly discover that the same rogue CA also signed the cert for AOL....
Actually, this summer's outage for the new diesel backup generator was something else entirely - that was merely replacing two older natural-gas fired generators that were no longer sufficient to fully back up all the existing hardware. That install has been in the planning stages for a long time, and was needed for current operations.
Do the math - the new generator is rated at 600kva and is already carrying several hundred machines (including a very power-hungry Sun E10K and a number of E6K-class machines). There's not enough capacity on that generator for 1,100 more systems.
(And I just wanted to say "This is All Kevin's Fault" - except for a few unrelated parts we blame on Randy;)
It's not so much "more acute" as "you learn to pay more attention".
If you're a sailor, you pay more attention to water currents, and exactly what the waves look like today. You learn that if there's 2 patterns of waves crossing like this, it means one thing, but if they're crossing like that it means another. No additional sensory ability needed, just experience and learning. It just manifests as being able to look at the water, and know there's a storm coming...
If you happen to be a farmer or hunter, you learn there's a lot more in the sky than what the average city dweller thinks about. You'll learn to expect where the moon/planets/etc are any given time of night/year. Again, no ability needed, just experience and learning. It just manifests as knowing that the haze around the moon means something specific in the weather is coming...
Don't believe me? Next time you're a passenger in a car, roll down the window and LISTEN carefully - different things going by will sound different. Trust me - you can hear curb cuts and drains as you go by, if you're paying attention.
But if a blind person manages to pay attention to such things (mostly because they know they can possibly end up as roadkill if they don't), people for some reason conclude their hearing is "enhanced".
It's not enhanced, most people just don't pay attention, that's all.
"Because every mega-computing project I've ever heard about used Intel processors?"
*BZZT*. But thank you for playing. Trot over to www.top500.org, and out of the top 20, we have:
Number 1 is based on a custom chipset. Numbers 2, 9, 10 and 20 are Alphas. Numbers 3, 6, 11, 17, and 19 are Xeons. 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 18 are IBM Power series. 7 is a Fujitsu, and 8 is Itanium. Oh, and of 21-30, 6 more are Power chipsets....
In fact, out of the top 500, there's 127 HP SPP boxes, 102 IBM Powers, 99 Intel Pentiums, 48 SGIs, 21 Alphas, and assorted odd stuff (an Intel Paragon for instance..;) So yeah, *all* the high end stuff is Intel...
Ok, so how do you explain the Saturn project which got the US to the moon? Worked on the first try. Would you argue that that system was less complex than say a simple internet web server called IIS?
Actually, yes. And it barely worked on the first try.
5,000 integrated circuits (versus 30M or so on a Pentium), no disk drive, 74K of ROM, 4K of RAM. In other words, less horsepower than your average programmable calculator.
And as it was, the damned thing still had a bug on final approach.
See http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/computer.htm for the details, or google for 'apollo moon computer'.
"Why IBM hasn't done that yet, I can't guess, expect for the slim possibility than even they aren't sure how sound the footing beneath them is. If they do go to court against SCO, they'll be bringing several issues, such as the GPL and various software patent issues, to their first true legal test, and I can empathize if they are slightly uncomfortable in doing so."
Actually, IBM is quite sure of its footing, and you can see a lot of what IBM's tactics will be in Eric Raymond's position paper for OSI. What should have set off huge warning bells for SCO was IBM's 3 paragraph press release, which included the sentence "This will be resolved in the normal legal process.". For comparison, 2 days later another IBM press release about IBM donating WiFi support to 600 Boys & Girls Clubs ran to 12 paragraphs. Now think about that - they're certain enough of the outcome of a $3B lawsuit that they're spending 4 times as much effort talking about a donation of 6,000 PCs.
IBM is by nature a slow-moving and cautious company, and at the current time there's no reason for them to hurry. Remember - they took 17 years to resolve their anti-trust case a few decades ago, and will spend as many months as they feel needed to get their cased lined up. Also, note that delay may be in IBM's interest - the longer SCO persists in acting foolish, the better the chances that SCO will give IBM more things to use against them.
But rest assured - IBM is pissed, and is readying the corporate equivalent of a "shock and awe" retaliation. They fully intend to leave SCO headquarters looking like Dresden after the firestorms.
Why Dresden rather than Hiroshima? Well, Dresden was a firestorm rather than an explosion - almost all the damage was fueled by the city itself burning rather than externally provided. Similarly, most of the damage to be done to SCO will be fuled by SCO, not IBM...;)
Yeah, but you have to hold it VERY STILL, or every time it gets interesting, the web browser misinterprets all the twitching and you end up at http://www.disney.com
I agree. Instead of teaching people how to hack systems, wouldn't it make more sense to teach them how to set up firewalls properly, restrict setuid, restrict the number of services running, set up a patching strategy, and run an intrusion detection system like PSAD? People interested in programming could take a course focused on verifying user input, and avoiding buffer overruns. That sort of thing would be useful to kids, instead of just making them unemployable.
On the flip side, across the hall I've got a loaner box from Vendor X. Said box would be classified by most people as a "computer appliance" - it has one main function, but also has an Ethernet interface whos sole purpose is to provide a remote management function. Now tell me - how do I evaluate said box to see whether it meets our security standards unless I have at least a half a clue about how to hack said box?
Go back and look at the recent Hotmail/MSN password change debacle. Very likely, all set up by people with good sysadmin skills, but nobody with any pen-test skills looked at it before it went live. As a result, some guy who does have skills in that area found a big gaping hole in under 5 minutes.
Think of the embarassment they'd have saved themselves if they'd hired one graduate from a class like this.....
Now ask yourself - is your shop going to be next?
(Oh.. and that box? I haven't totally broken it yet. But the first hour or so of testing found a number of things that don't give me warm and fuzzies...)
Has it ever occurred to the Slashdot community that maybe, just MAYBE, NVidia *wanted* to release an open source driver but was unable to legally do so?
Remember that a *lot* of the intellectual property in there isn't NVidia's, it's other companies like SGI. And I guarantee that if NVidia open-sourced another company's stuff, they'd have a lawyer knocking at their door in 30 mins or less.
The power problem is that a cybersecurity chief that's three levels below Tom Ridge on the org chart doesn't have the political cojones to beat other agencies into shape.
Go look at the security mess over at the Department of the Interior - I suspect some of their web sites are *STILL* off the air after the court order a year or so ago. Those guys spent the better part of a decade basically saying alternately "Eat me!" and "We dont have a clue" before a federal judge finally got fed up.
It isn't power to use against citizens that's the problem - it's power to beat other government agencies into submission.
A lot of places, the cashier takes the customer's cash, places it on the spot just *above* the register, the change is returned, and then the customer's cash stashed in the correct slots.
This ensures that if the purchase is (say) $7, and the customer hands you a $10, when you give him $3 back, he can't say "No, I gave you a $20", because you can just point at it still on the nose of the register. Equally important, it prevents the *cashier* from accepting a $20, putting it in the drawer, and then giving you change for a $10.
Remember - if the customer already has his wallet out and has pulled out a $20, you can *ring up* that he gave you a $10, take the $20 and put it in the drawer, give him change for a $10, and he's screwed. If he can *point* at the $20 sitting there, this scam doesn't work....
Slashdot Mirror
Well.. the processor itself is 70W. There's 2 of them, that's 140W. Then there's memory (4G of it), a 180G disk drive, all the support chips (yeah, things like disk controller chips and PCI driver chipsets and memory/cache interface chips are nice to have if you actually want to do any computing), the PCI card for the Infiniband... and pretty soon that 750W power supply isn't as much overkill as you thought.
There are no announced dual-CPU G5 blades.
And what makes you think that a dual-CPU G5 blade would cost significantly less than a tower G5? (Hint - what's the price tag on a dual-CPU 1U G4 rackmount?)
Tower or blade, the budget covered a bit over 2,000 processors, memory, networking, and all the rest of it. When you consider that some 20% of the budget was *networking* gear (Cisco, Infiniband, all that stuff), the blade/tower distinction didn't matter much.
About all going with blades would have done is made the footprint smaller - and that would have just made the cooling issues even worse.....
Nope.
The *management* net is gigabit ethernet.
The actual clustering will be done over 10-gigabit Infiniband. (For a good time, figure out what the maximum bandwidth of a PCI-X slot is, and compare..)
Nobody cares about the noise. It's in a machine room, not office space. All the offices are on the other side of the atrium.
And I doubt that it can be much noisier than the printer room was when there were 2 IBM3800 printers going full-tilt (400 pages a minute each. No, that's not a typo. Four Hundred. Feed it a box of 3,200 pages of fanfold, and you *might* have time to go pee before it ran out again).
Actually, we didn't spend more money for physical space to keep these systems. The whole thing fits into about 3,000 square feet. We have over 10,000 square feet of machine room that we built back in 1989 (sized to hold an IBM 3084 and an IBM 3090-300J plus all the disk drives that went with them). Good thing our director at the time spec'ed out "all the floor space we're likely to ever need".....
To get it into 25 racks, you need to get it into a 1U form factor. At that point, cooling becomes an issue - you have 40 750W power supplies *per rack* then. We're talking about a space about the size of a phone booth, and the heat equivalent of 20 hair driers on HIGH all going at once. It's gonna get TOASTY at that point. Even if you consider a 2U and expanding out to 50 racks, that's still a lot of heat per square foot.
Remember - the CPU and the memory are going to generate the same number of BTU/hour whether in a tower case or a 2U rack. And going to the *as yet unannounced* 2U just makes the cooling problem worse...
Yes, we thought a LOT about these sort of issues.
Please note that what IBM calls the G5 and G6 CPU cores used in the S/390 and Z-series are a DIFFERENT chip than the Power series. The big push in the S/390 series is I/O bandwidth and reliability. Even the smallest S/390 currently available will take up to 256 I/O channels - which will *each* support a number of Fiberchannel-class connections.
0 .h tml
Reliability - it does things like have 14 CPU dies on a card - 12 processors and 2 spares. Each CPU is actually 2 running in lockstep with a comparator. At the end of each instruction, the two sides are compared for "same state" - if they agree, the entire state of the processor is latched into a memory array. If they disagree, the hardware tries to clear a possible soft error by reloading the state from that array and retrying the failing instruction - if they agree this time, it logs a soft error and goes on. If they still disagree, another chipset called the 'processor controller' reads out that latch and loads it into one of the spares, and starts it running from there.....
On the other hand, the 750 chipset that the world calls the G5 is a different beast, which will kick the S/390's butt on CPU speed. But it can't get anywhere near the z-series for reliability and I/O.
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/99
Exposure to the facilities? All I'll say there is that I know of at least 4 people who have posted to this story that could throw a paper airplane from their cubicle and have a reasonable chance of landing it on the blueprints. ;)
;)
I said there wasn't capacity on that generator. I didn't say anything about the existence of other generators - and there's a distinction between pulling copper to get power grid capacity to the cluster and having emergency power backup for same. That diesel is for emergency backup, not local power generation - we've got a nice coal-fired beast on campus for that.
In addition, you have to remember that the cluster most likely has different backup power requirements than our production systems. Our production systems (the central mail server, the large database machines, etc) really need to stay up - we're talking about things that if the power substation near the airport goes out, the whole campus is screwed till it comes back online, if we don't have backup power.
Look at how many services were out when we did the cut-over - everything was affected, from E-mail to the library catalog. That's what emergency power is for - so you don't have an event like that without the multi-week notice that the install had.
On the other hand, does a compute cluster really need that level of power backup, or can we significantly trim the budget by merely having a really good power conditioner to make sure there's nice clean non-ripply power, and enough battery backup to allow the cluster to do a suspend-to-disk and poweroff cleanly? Yes, if we take a power hit in that scenario, some researchers have to wait for their results - but the business of the university as a whole isn't disrupted.
Or possibly the plan is to have the conditioner and batteries for now, and have someplace to cable in a backup diesel generator in the future - remember that 1,100 G5s, a bunch of Infiniband switches are a chunk of change - and then you get the expense of the power/cooling work. Suddenly you start thinking about how to put the non-essential costs into the next fiscal year.
(The above is not intended as an actual statement of the actual design or plans, just an illustrative discussion of the fact that there are a lot of tradeoffs that need to be made when planning and designing large-scale installations of any sort).
No, I'm speaking as the hypothetical person in charge of an ISP. I may not want to receive mail from AOL, but I can't afford to piss off my users who want to get mail from their Aunt Tillie.
Explain to them that they can't get mail from AOL because some other company called CA-something sold a wazziz to somebody in Zimbabwe who misused it? And AOL wasn't even involved in the slightest? But you can't get mail from there anymore?
Yeah. Right. Dream on. And pass me that pipe, I'm trying to forget the last time I had to explain this sort of thing to users, and it *WAS* AOL's screw-up. Maybe if I take enough hits from that pipe, I won't hear that sucking sound of subscribers leaving for an ISP that actually delivers the mail....
Umm... the IETF isn't trying to do ANYTHING. It's been published as an Internet-Draft. This is the IETF way of getting (possibly half-baked) ideas out for wider review and commentary. As such, there's very little editorial control over what gets out as an I-D. If you don't believe me, google around for these gems:
- 11 .txt
t h- 04.txt
draft-terrell-logic-analy-bin-ip-spec-ipv7-ipv8
draft-terrell-math-quant-new-para-redefi-bin-ma
"Why didn't you go to the police?"
"Well, I noticed that the bloke carrying the thermonuclear device was the local constable...."
(Apologies to Monty Python and the Pirhana Brothers)
EXACTLY.
And you can't pull Verisign out of your 'trusted root CA' list because you'll cut yourself off from too many places you want to talk to. As Randy Bush often says on the NANOG mailing list, "I encourage my competitors to design their networks this way".
Close..
The actual requirement is "The MSA knows who the sender is, and provides an audit trail".
There's no reason for the MSA that I use to know all my E-mail addresses. In fact, once it's authenticated me, there's no real reason for it to even look at the RFC822 From: header, because it knows who I am, it's logged who I am, and if I try anything funny, the MSA admin will know where to find me and beat the snot out of me.
The *real* problem with this proposal is that there's the underlying assumption that a CA can't go rogue because it will hurt business. There's only one problem with that:
There's several *large* providers that are spammer-friendly, and aren't being blocked by the rest of the world mostly because they also have enough *legitimate* customers that it's not feasible to block them.
If you're an ISP, you can't block another ISP because they're a spam haven if the other ISP also happens to be the home of CNN, or Amazon, or (fill in the blank).
Similarly, you can say "We'll just piss on any CA that goes rogue". It's a lot harder to actually DO if you suddenly discover that the same rogue CA also signed the cert for AOL....
soon as in the past tense? It was a Slashdot article a few days ago
2 8/ 1746213&mode=thread
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/
Actually, this summer's outage for the new diesel backup generator was something else entirely - that was merely replacing two older natural-gas fired generators that were no longer sufficient to fully back up all the existing hardware. That install has been in the planning stages for a long time, and was needed for current operations.
;)
Do the math - the new generator is rated at 600kva and is already carrying several hundred machines (including a very power-hungry Sun E10K and a number of E6K-class machines). There's not enough capacity on that generator for 1,100 more systems.
(And I just wanted to say "This is All Kevin's Fault" - except for a few unrelated parts we blame on Randy
It's not so much "more acute" as "you learn to pay more attention".
If you're a sailor, you pay more attention to water currents, and exactly what the waves look like today. You learn that if there's 2 patterns of waves crossing like this, it means one thing, but if they're crossing like that it means another. No additional sensory ability needed, just experience and learning. It just manifests as being able to look at the water, and know there's a storm coming...
If you happen to be a farmer or hunter, you learn there's a lot more in the sky than what the average city dweller thinks about. You'll learn to expect where the moon/planets/etc are any given time of night/year. Again, no ability needed, just experience and learning. It just manifests as knowing that the haze around the moon means something specific in the weather is coming...
Don't believe me? Next time you're a passenger in a car, roll down the window and LISTEN carefully - different things going by will sound different. Trust me - you can hear curb cuts and drains as you go by, if you're paying attention.
But if a blind person manages to pay attention to such things (mostly because they know they can possibly end up as roadkill if they don't), people for some reason conclude their hearing is "enhanced".
It's not enhanced, most people just don't pay attention, that's all.
"crack legal team".
Yeah. That would explain shitloads.
"Because every mega-computing project I've ever heard about used Intel processors?"
;) So yeah, *all* the high end stuff is Intel...
*BZZT*. But thank you for playing. Trot over to www.top500.org, and out of the top 20, we have:
Number 1 is based on a custom chipset. Numbers 2, 9, 10 and 20 are Alphas. Numbers 3, 6, 11, 17, and 19 are Xeons. 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 18 are IBM Power series. 7 is a Fujitsu, and 8 is Itanium. Oh, and of 21-30, 6 more are Power chipsets....
In fact, out of the top 500, there's 127 HP SPP boxes, 102 IBM Powers, 99 Intel Pentiums, 48 SGIs,
21 Alphas, and assorted odd stuff (an Intel Paragon for instance..
Actually, yes. And it barely worked on the first try.
5,000 integrated circuits (versus 30M or so on a Pentium), no disk drive, 74K of ROM, 4K of RAM. In other words, less horsepower than your average programmable calculator.
And as it was, the damned thing still had a bug on final approach.
See http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/computer.htm for the details, or google for 'apollo moon computer'.
Actually, IBM is quite sure of its footing, and you can see a lot of what IBM's tactics will be in Eric Raymond's position paper for OSI. What should have set off huge warning bells for SCO was IBM's 3 paragraph press release, which included the sentence "This will be resolved in the normal legal process.". For comparison, 2 days later another IBM press release about IBM donating WiFi support to 600 Boys & Girls Clubs ran to 12 paragraphs. Now think about that - they're certain enough of the outcome of a $3B lawsuit that they're spending 4 times as much effort talking about a donation of 6,000 PCs.
IBM is by nature a slow-moving and cautious company, and at the current time there's no reason for them to hurry. Remember - they took 17 years to resolve their anti-trust case a few decades ago, and will spend as many months as they feel needed to get their cased lined up. Also, note that delay may be in IBM's interest - the longer SCO persists in acting foolish, the better the chances that SCO will give IBM more things to use against them.
But rest assured - IBM is pissed, and is readying the corporate equivalent of a "shock and awe" retaliation. They fully intend to leave SCO headquarters looking like Dresden after the firestorms.
Why Dresden rather than Hiroshima? Well, Dresden was a firestorm rather than an explosion - almost all the damage was fueled by the city itself burning rather than externally provided. Similarly, most of the damage to be done to SCO will be fuled by SCO, not IBM...
Yeah, but you have to hold it VERY STILL, or every time it gets interesting, the web browser misinterprets all the twitching and you end up at http://www.disney.com
On the flip side, across the hall I've got a loaner box from Vendor X. Said box would be classified by most people as a "computer appliance" - it has one main function, but also has an Ethernet interface whos sole purpose is to provide a remote management function. Now tell me - how do I evaluate said box to see whether it meets our security standards unless I have at least a half a clue about how to hack said box?
Go back and look at the recent Hotmail/MSN password change debacle. Very likely, all set up by people with good sysadmin skills, but nobody with any pen-test skills looked at it before it went live. As a result, some guy who does have skills in that area found a big gaping hole in under 5 minutes.
Think of the embarassment they'd have saved themselves if they'd hired one graduate from a class like this.....
Now ask yourself - is your shop going to be next?
(Oh.. and that box? I haven't totally broken it yet. But the first hour or so of testing found a number of things that don't give me warm and fuzzies...)
Has it ever occurred to the Slashdot community that maybe, just MAYBE, NVidia *wanted* to release an open source driver but was unable to legally do so?
Remember that a *lot* of the intellectual property in there isn't NVidia's, it's other companies like SGI. And I guarantee that if NVidia open-sourced another company's stuff, they'd have a lawyer knocking at their door in 30 mins or less.
The power problem is that a cybersecurity chief that's three levels below Tom Ridge on the org chart doesn't have the political cojones to beat other agencies into shape.
Go look at the security mess over at the Department of the Interior - I suspect some of their web sites are *STILL* off the air after the court order a year or so ago. Those guys spent the better part of a decade basically saying alternately "Eat me!" and "We dont have a clue" before a federal judge finally got fed up.
It isn't power to use against citizens that's the problem - it's power to beat other government agencies into submission.
A lot of places, the cashier takes the customer's cash, places it on the spot just *above* the register, the change is returned, and then the customer's cash stashed in the correct slots.
This ensures that if the purchase is (say) $7, and the customer hands you a $10, when you give him $3 back, he can't say "No, I gave you a $20", because you can just point at it still on the nose of the register. Equally important, it prevents the *cashier* from accepting a $20, putting it in the drawer, and then giving you change for a $10.
Remember - if the customer already has his wallet out and has pulled out a $20, you can *ring up* that he gave you a $10, take the $20 and put it in the drawer, give him change for a $10, and he's screwed. If he can *point* at the $20 sitting there, this scam doesn't work....