Well, patents should by definition contain innovation, and even this guy probably figured that mentioning Microsoft and innovation together might tip the USPTO off to the scam Come on moderators, this one is hilarious, you've gotta mod this one up. I'm not even one of the raging anti-MS types but I bust a damned gut laughing at it.
Yeah, I was just thinking about buying more memory for my camera too. Plus I'm extra pissed bcs I got a 2.4 mpixel clicker and now (a scant 6-7 mos later) 3 mpixel + are coming in at the same price point as mine. Being a gear junkie sucks sometimes. Still, can't wait to get my hands on some of this when (if?) it becomes available.
Too bad the S/390 pictured is the baby A20... they shoulda put the whoppers on the page! Our company will be trying out Linux on one of our S/390 systems soon (not all by itself, it will be sharing space with the OS/390 LPARS)... I will faithfully report anything of interest that crops up to Slashdot.
It's not Jes, it's JES. JES - Job Entry Subsystem - which is your flavour - JES2 or JES3? We are the JES folks, keeping your bank account happy since the 1970's.......
IA-64 is a LIW chip, not RISC. Unfartunately I don't know if this will allow it to be faster (probably largely dependent upon the instruction types being used in a given app) ie - might be faster for graphics processing but slower or equally fast as an Ultra Sparc for something like networking.
Actually the battery-life problem is probably pretty close to resolution... many companies working on batteries plus Sanyo or one of the big Japanese companies working on 3 cm x 3 cm x 0.5 cm fuel cells to power PDA's and cell phones. They estimate about 1 month for a cell phone on one fully filled (charged?) fuel cell.
And the IBM S390 hardware can be opened up and you can pull a processor card right out, machine keeps running, nothing but a few recovery cycles... it's a pretty sweet machine too. Our shop has one G4 and one G5 CPC, the G4 has about 6 GB of 'ram', we run 4 production images on the G5. IBM techies have got 40,000+ Linux images running under VM on S390 hardware - check out http://s390.ibm.com/
With the current rise in unsecured home systems running NT with persistent high-speed connections I would imagine you could do the DDoS on the 13/14 top level nameservers relatively easily, although it might require more than 1000 high-end systems with T1 connections... An interesting conversation since I had been ruminating on this very subject only days ago. Imagine how apeshit J. Reno & the Administration would go if the whole Internet slowly ground to a halt. Almost brings a smile to my face. I think we should start building a self-contained/. net just in case!
That started the concept of other possible y2k bugs, but the credit card issues were dealt with rather quickly. Actually, there were a fair number of people that realized the Y2K problem existed as early as around 1992. There was a large company in Germany (a bank I think? I can't remember now since the article came out back in about 1997) where a programmer with some foresight eventually got to speak with the president of the company and convinced him of the need to correct the problem early. Really early, like 1995-1996 they were done anything written in-house on any platform and didn't have to scramble madly as the date approached. When the article was being written they had decided to contract some of their mainframe programmers out to other companies and were hoping to come out ahead money-wise!
At the company I worked for in 1995-1996 I was doing IPL'ing (booting) our MVS systems with the date set to Jan01,2000, to check and make sure that applications (actually started tasks which are MVS's equiv. to daemons) from some vendors would run OK (at the time they didn't).
The company I currently work for had some bugs that were identified in older in-house written COBOL and PL/I code on our OS/390 platforms that if unfixed would have had a major business impact, and there was at least one minor bug that I'm aware of that got missed. Our AIX and PC (Windows) platforms were OK as far as I know, the Windows guys simply upgraded all software to vendor-certified Y2K compliant versions or drop support for it and remove it from the servers, and there isn't much stuff written in-house for the PC platforms. Plus they don't really supply any business critical applications that we couldn't live without for a week or a little more.
In the end I don't think we would have had the catastrophes that the worst prophets of doom were predicting, but there would have been some pretty major business disruptions. And like the company I work for, most businesses (especially the large ones with millions of lines of old code on mature platforms) would never publicly disclose what they found and what they didn't for fear of potential lawsuits by shareholders, business partners etc.
When my friends ask, I tell them that some fixes had to be made and that I can't go into any detail -- and so far I haven't seen any Y2K+1 potential problems this year (1hr in so far here in the Eastern Time Zone) -- Happy New Year!
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Re:The Price of Red Hat
on
ZD on Red Hat
·
· Score: 1
$300 American sounds too high... I was quoted $130 Cdn which translates to about $80-90 U.S., but that was from a University so it may be student pricing? Still, too much $$. Xoom.com offering 5.2 for $29 (U.S) is much more inline with reality.
Slashdot Mirror
And now the damned site is suffering the /. effect!
Well, patents should by definition contain innovation, and even this guy probably figured that mentioning Microsoft and innovation together might tip the USPTO off to the scam Come on moderators, this one is hilarious, you've gotta mod this one up. I'm not even one of the raging anti-MS types but I bust a damned gut laughing at it.
Yeah, I was just thinking about buying more memory for my camera too. Plus I'm extra pissed bcs I got a 2.4 mpixel clicker and now (a scant 6-7 mos later) 3 mpixel + are coming in at the same price point as mine. Being a gear junkie sucks sometimes. Still, can't wait to get my hands on some of this when (if?) it becomes available.
Too bad the S/390 pictured is the baby A20... they shoulda put the whoppers on the page! Our company will be trying out Linux on one of our S/390 systems soon (not all by itself, it will be sharing space with the OS/390 LPARS)... I will faithfully report anything of interest that crops up to Slashdot.
It's not Jes, it's JES. JES - Job Entry Subsystem - which is your flavour - JES2 or JES3? We are the JES folks, keeping your bank account happy since the 1970's.......
IA-64 is a LIW chip, not RISC. Unfartunately I don't know if this will allow it to be faster (probably largely dependent upon the instruction types being used in a given app) ie - might be faster for graphics processing but slower or equally fast as an Ultra Sparc for something like networking.
Actually the battery-life problem is probably pretty close to resolution... many companies working on batteries plus Sanyo or one of the big Japanese companies working on 3 cm x 3 cm x 0.5 cm fuel cells to power PDA's and cell phones. They estimate about 1 month for a cell phone on one fully filled (charged?) fuel cell.
And the IBM S390 hardware can be opened up and you can pull a processor card right out, machine keeps running, nothing but a few recovery cycles... it's a pretty sweet machine too. Our shop has one G4 and one G5 CPC, the G4 has about 6 GB of 'ram', we run 4 production images on the G5. IBM techies have got 40,000+ Linux images running under VM on S390 hardware - check out http://s390.ibm.com/
With the current rise in unsecured home systems running NT with persistent high-speed connections I would imagine you could do the DDoS on the 13/14 top level nameservers relatively easily, although it might require more than 1000 high-end systems with T1 connections... An interesting conversation since I had been ruminating on this very subject only days ago. Imagine how apeshit J. Reno & the Administration would go if the whole Internet slowly ground to a halt. Almost brings a smile to my face. I think we should start building a self-contained /. net just in case!
D'oh!
----
That started the concept of other possible y2k bugs, but the credit card issues were dealt with rather quickly. Actually, there were a fair number of people that realized the Y2K problem existed as early as around 1992. There was a large company in Germany (a bank I think? I can't remember now since the article came out back in about 1997) where a programmer with some foresight eventually got to speak with the president of the company and convinced him of the need to correct the problem early. Really early, like 1995-1996 they were done anything written in-house on any platform and didn't have to scramble madly as the date approached. When the article was being written they had decided to contract some of their mainframe programmers out to other companies and were hoping to come out ahead money-wise!
At the company I worked for in 1995-1996 I was doing IPL'ing (booting) our MVS systems with the date set to Jan01,2000, to check and make sure that applications (actually started tasks which are MVS's equiv. to daemons) from some vendors would run OK (at the time they didn't).
The company I currently work for had some bugs that were identified in older in-house written COBOL and PL/I code on our OS/390 platforms that if unfixed would have had a major business impact, and there was at least one minor bug that I'm aware of that got missed. Our AIX and PC (Windows) platforms were OK as far as I know, the Windows guys simply upgraded all software to vendor-certified Y2K compliant versions or drop support for it and remove it from the servers, and there isn't much stuff written in-house for the PC platforms. Plus they don't really supply any business critical applications that we couldn't live without for a week or a little more.
In the end I don't think we would have had the catastrophes that the worst prophets of doom were predicting, but there would have been some pretty major business disruptions. And like the company I work for, most businesses (especially the large ones with millions of lines of old code on mature platforms) would never publicly disclose what they found and what they didn't for fear of potential lawsuits by shareholders, business partners etc.
When my friends ask, I tell them that some fixes had to be made and that I can't go into any detail -- and so far I haven't seen any Y2K+1 potential problems this year (1hr in so far here in the Eastern Time Zone) -- Happy New Year!
----
$300 American sounds too high... I was quoted $130 Cdn which translates to about $80-90 U.S., but that was from a University so it may be student pricing? Still, too much $$. Xoom.com offering 5.2 for $29 (U.S) is much more inline with reality.