IBM is more than willing to pay it. When I worked there the company was fond of pointing out that they make around a billion dollars a year just from their patent portfolio.
While filing patents is not a requirement to keep your job at IBM, many organizations within the company are starting to look for patents and IP when promoting people to senior technical positions such as Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) and Distinguished Engineer (DE). One of the DEs in my division has even been pushing for it to be a requirement to obtain those positions in the future.
That was the premise of a short story called "All the Troubles of the World" by Isaac Asimov. In it the world has turned to a large supercomputer called Multivac to produce a daily list of the crimes that will be committed so that the authorities can prevent them from happening.
Eventually they realize it wasn't the best idea. Let's just hope that our society realizes the same thing before it all ends up like Asimov's short story "Franchise" in which Multivac picks elected officials based on a single voter's thoughts...
The short answer: you can't customize the views any more than you can with the Windows version.
The long answer: The Linux version of Notes is almost identical to the Windows version in terms of behavior -- it's just a native Notes plugin running inside of the eclipse framework. Pretty much everything inside the window frame is identical to Windows, so any supposed limitations of the Windows client are there in the eclipsified version.
Apparently you're using an older version of Notes then. I've yet to hear of anyone that's gotten a GA version of Notes 7 to run under any version of Wine.
When I was running 6.5 with Wine it was very particular about the version; I had to use some crummy version (of Wine) from June 2004 or it just didn't work, which meant no bug fixes or patches. Within IBM there are countless Domino databases we're expected to use and not all of them worked properly with Notes under Wine so that was also an issue for those of us using Linux.
People have already mentioned stuff like tons of memory, redundancy up the wazoo, etc. And those that have said it are correct; mainframes are not good at CPU intensive work (they aren't really designed to be). They're incredible at I/O-bound workloads, hence their popularity with financial institutions, airlines, retailers, etc.
For me, the real killer app is Linux under z/VM on a mainframe. I work for IBM testing enterprise Linux distributions on our mainframes, so my job involves a lot of Linux installs, quite a bit of administration (I currently have 8 Linux guests I use for installs and tests but would ideally have about 20), and a bunch of debugging, scripting, etc.
I can dynamically create or attach devices to my systems. Want another network adaptor? Poof! Want another chunk of disk space? Voila! More CPUs? No problem! I can install RHEL or SLES, copy it to a spare block of space, and then copy that install as many times as I want and then customize it. With a mainframe and today's storage systems, I can flashcopy a full Linux image in a few seconds and have it up and running in another 15 - 30 seconds.
The absolute worst thing about having experience with Linux on a mainframe? Being spoiled by it. Now whenever there is trouble with any of my personal machines I cringe and wish I could just bring up another guest or flashcopy another install and bring it up. Trying to debug bootloader issues with my ThinkPad stunk and made me wish I could just enable tracing or get a dump from an underlying hypervisor.
I will freely admit that mainframes can be expensive and may require a fair amount of work to get set up, but man, once they're up and configured, it's absolutely amazing how easy and powerful they can be. And it can be quite a feeling to have a system with 32 GB or more of RAM and a couple dozen CPUs running Linux.:-)
Definitely not a publicity stunt. Do you really want someone that's been taking the nastiest viruses apart and possibly improving them to be completely unrestricted while using University-owned computing resources?
Aycock delivered a talk on the virus course at my University last spring and talked about the process he went through to develop the course and some of the things he learned from teaching it.
One of the things he outlined was the security procedures that he and the University developed, which were much more comprehensive than the article suggests and certainly would have made abusing the system quite difficult.
In a talk Aycock delivered last spring about the virus course he mentioned that a good portion of the curriculum was designed to promote ethical use of the knowledge students were picking up. It sounded like they didn't even consider offering the course unless there was a significant ethical component. I'm sure it's the same for the spam & spyware course.
While Nat's project shares the name of Apple's new technology that will be included in Tiger, it's a completely different concept. Instead of having customizable UI widgets Nat's stuff displays "relevant" information as you use your computer.
For example, if a friend IMs you and says "I can't wait for our camping trip this weekend!" the dashboard will show things like your recent emails about the camping trip, your camping bookmarks, and any files or notes you've got on your hard drive about camping (example stolen from Nat's site verbatim).
If you're going to compare Dashboard to any OS X technology, it's probably closer to a tweaked Spotlight.
Why is this potential profit being taken from the cable companies and given to the government? What is the reason for it? Is it that the government has to do it since this is a service the people need but one the private sector cannot provide due to the size or the financial feasability of it? No, certainly not. Cable companies are doing well.
Because the local cable company is Adelphia, who has yet to roll out cable modems in this area.
There are a bunch of local ISPs in the area that might be willing to do this. Based right in Hanover is segNET, which provides a lot of the bandwidth to companies in the area. Across the river in Norwich, VT is ValleyNet, which was one of the first ISPs in the area (it now has something like 5,000 - 10,000 subscribers).
ValleyNet also happens to be a non-profit organization originally formed by Dartmouth and the Montshire Museum of Science. VN is always trying to help get the community connected to the Net so if they're something that they can contribute, they probably will.
Most of you probably don't realize just how backwards the Upper Valley is. Until recently DSL in the area was only offered by a couple of places and cost upwards of $150/mo., even for individuals. Thanks to ValleyNet people can now get low-speed DSL for about $30/mo.
And for you cable fans out there: there are *no* cable modems in the area. The local cable company is Adelphia, who (last I heard) suspended the installation of the new equipment needed for cable modems back when they filed for bankruptcy.
Why do I know all this? Because I live right across the river from Hanover and I used to work for ValleyNet.
The current version of Halo doesn't actually support Xbox Live. I haven't heard anything about Bungie coming out with a version of Halo that does XBL before Halo 2 comes out next November. Halo 2 will definitely support XBL and is supposed to include everything that the Bungie people wanted to do with Halo 1 but didn't.
I don't know about you, but the fact that Xbox Live doesn't work with dial-up prevents me from considering buying it.
That's one of the main points of Xbox Live; who the hell actually wants to play with someone on a dialup connection when you've got a broadband connection?
Besides, dialup isn't all that feasible with most games. Bungie recommends 256 Kbps of bandwidth per player for Halo. That's not a bullshit figure either -- there have been times when I've been in 8+ player games here on campus and we're getting lag on the school's 10/100 network because of P2P filetraders in the building utilizing 50% or more of the intracampus bandwidth.
Re:Does anyone have first hand experience?
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 1
I used g4u last year to ghost a lab full of machines running a custom version of mandrake and it typically took 8 - 10 hours to copy the drive from the master and install it on another machine. That was for 6 GB worth of data. Copying the data from the master was pretty quick (maybe 0.5 - 1.5 hours).
The machines were 333 MHz Celerons with 15 GB Quantum IDE HDs.
I think there's some more info on what I did last year on the Clarkson Open Source Institute website: http://cosi.clarkson.edu (check the Lemur/Lab team page).
Some friends and I were just discussing something similar to this at lunch.
There is a major college right near by that has a campus-wide wireless network that's completely open to anyone with a WiFi card. We were thinking about equipping a small PC with an 802.11b card and hiding it somewhere on campus to use as a server.
During the discussion I remembered this story on techweb last year about a network server that went missing for a few years after it was walled in.
So the ultimate idea is to find someplace with a WiFi network that's doing some remodeling and hide the box behind some drywall. With no wires to trace, the odds of someone finding it are very slim.
Actually, it might be possible depending on what model Mac you've got. With older Macs that have serial ports and use OpenFirmware you can connect them together via a standard serial cable. Not sure how you'd do it with any Mac made in the last 4 years that only has USB.
2 or 3 years ago at MacHack Quinn ("The Eskimo") and someone else wrote OFPong -- an implementation of Pong that used OpenFirmware's built-in Forth Interpreter. As soon as I heard about it I connected an old Mac Classic II to my beige G3 using a serial cable and started playing.:-)
The ISOs are hardly obsolete when they release them. Usually Terra Soft (the vendor that produces Yellow Dog) releases the ISOs a few weeks after the CDs start shipping.
They usually give themselves a few weeks to sell some CDs so they have SOME capital to continue development. I can hardly fault them for that, and to tell you the truth, I really don't mind because I'm already using the latest versions of a lot of the software that's included with Yellow Dog.
So you have to wait a couple of weeks to `yup update`* your distro, big deal.
* yup, or Yellow Dog Update, is a cross-platform CLI package management tool that Terra Soft maintains (similar to Debian's apt-get, but trimmed down).
I love how the Wired article mentions that Feinstein showed up with a pirated copy of Shrek, saying that her "aide" did it. Sure, Dianne, sure. You keep telling yourself you're not a dirty, DVD-copying pirate.
What really pisses me off is the ignorance (stupidity?) of these people. The Wired article mentions that "copies of TV broadcasts made for one-time personal use are also permitted." How long before Valenti has that changed? If people can't make recordings, does this mean that they'll watch MORE television so they don't miss anything?
Also, does "one-time" mean that I can stop and restart a recording? Does it only work if EVERY second of the recording is viewed? So if I record an extra 5 minutes of crap and never watch it, will the recording still work? What if I'm watching a recording and miss something because because the telephone rings. Am I shit out of luck?
Another interesting bit was Hollings' statement that interest in HDTV and broadband Internet would pick up if "high-quality content were available." Yeah right, like I'm going to go out and buy an HDTV set so I can watch crap like Harry Potter in high definition or pay $200/mo. for 192 Kbps DSL service (around here) so I can download JLo's latest craptacular track from Amazon for a couple of bucks.
Hollings and the rest of the Congressional idiots that keep coming up with this crap should get their heads out of their "analog holes."
My school offers two programming classes; the first teaches BASIC, and the second teaches Visual Basic or C++ (using Visual C++).
Originally, the second class used 386s & Borland (whatever their product is called), but the year that I took the class they switched to Pentiums & Visual C++.
I already knew C++ and had experience with CodeWarrior and the various GNU tools, and I found that using Visual C++ was like re-learning the whole language all over again (it just sucked big time).
Now, I've heard that the classes use Mainfunction to do a weekly project, and they spend their time working only with Visual C++.
I recently started a Linux programming group (club) at school, and many of the kids who want to join learned C++ there at the school and I've had to turn away a lot of them because they can't use anything but Visual C++ (they have no idea what gcc is and can't seem to grasp that VC++ is a POS that only works with Winblows).
My concern is that Visual C++ is producing a whole new generation of ignorant Windows programmers, and I'm not aware of any high school in the area that actually uses GNU tools for programming...
Sounds like the whole problem with Java Server Pages and the Model 1/Model 2 debate over which is better.:-)
Does PHP allow you to create objects like Java does with JavaBeans? You could put all your code in a handy-dandy object and then just call methods to have it spit out the dynamic stuff.
JSP would be a nice solution - you could use multilingual ResourceBundles.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM is more than willing to pay it. When I worked there the company was fond of pointing out that they make around a billion dollars a year just from their patent portfolio.
While filing patents is not a requirement to keep your job at IBM, many organizations within the company are starting to look for patents and IP when promoting people to senior technical positions such as Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) and Distinguished Engineer (DE). One of the DEs in my division has even been pushing for it to be a requirement to obtain those positions in the future.
That was the premise of a short story called "All the Troubles of the World" by Isaac Asimov. In it the world has turned to a large supercomputer called Multivac to produce a daily list of the crimes that will be committed so that the authorities can prevent them from happening.
t he_World
Eventually they realize it wasn't the best idea. Let's just hope that our society realizes the same thing before it all ends up like Asimov's short story "Franchise" in which Multivac picks elected officials based on a single voter's thoughts...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Troubles_of_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(Asimov)
The short answer: you can't customize the views any more than you can with the Windows version.
The long answer: The Linux version of Notes is almost identical to the Windows version in terms of behavior -- it's just a native Notes plugin running inside of the eclipse framework. Pretty much everything inside the window frame is identical to Windows, so any supposed limitations of the Windows client are there in the eclipsified version.
Apparently you're using an older version of Notes then. I've yet to hear of anyone that's gotten a GA version of Notes 7 to run under any version of Wine.
When I was running 6.5 with Wine it was very particular about the version; I had to use some crummy version (of Wine) from June 2004 or it just didn't work, which meant no bug fixes or patches. Within IBM there are countless Domino databases we're expected to use and not all of them worked properly with Notes under Wine so that was also an issue for those of us using Linux.
People have already mentioned stuff like tons of memory, redundancy up the wazoo, etc. And those that have said it are correct; mainframes are not good at CPU intensive work (they aren't really designed to be). They're incredible at I/O-bound workloads, hence their popularity with financial institutions, airlines, retailers, etc.
:-)
For me, the real killer app is Linux under z/VM on a mainframe. I work for IBM testing enterprise Linux distributions on our mainframes, so my job involves a lot of Linux installs, quite a bit of administration (I currently have 8 Linux guests I use for installs and tests but would ideally have about 20), and a bunch of debugging, scripting, etc.
I can dynamically create or attach devices to my systems. Want another network adaptor? Poof! Want another chunk of disk space? Voila! More CPUs? No problem! I can install RHEL or SLES, copy it to a spare block of space, and then copy that install as many times as I want and then customize it. With a mainframe and today's storage systems, I can flashcopy a full Linux image in a few seconds and have it up and running in another 15 - 30 seconds.
The absolute worst thing about having experience with Linux on a mainframe? Being spoiled by it. Now whenever there is trouble with any of my personal machines I cringe and wish I could just bring up another guest or flashcopy another install and bring it up. Trying to debug bootloader issues with my ThinkPad stunk and made me wish I could just enable tracing or get a dump from an underlying hypervisor.
I will freely admit that mainframes can be expensive and may require a fair amount of work to get set up, but man, once they're up and configured, it's absolutely amazing how easy and powerful they can be. And it can be quite a feeling to have a system with 32 GB or more of RAM and a couple dozen CPUs running Linux.
Definitely not a publicity stunt. Do you really want someone that's been taking the nastiest viruses apart and possibly improving them to be completely unrestricted while using University-owned computing resources?
Aycock delivered a talk on the virus course at my University last spring and talked about the process he went through to develop the course and some of the things he learned from teaching it.
One of the things he outlined was the security procedures that he and the University developed, which were much more comprehensive than the article suggests and certainly would have made abusing the system quite difficult.
In a talk Aycock delivered last spring about the virus course he mentioned that a good portion of the curriculum was designed to promote ethical use of the knowledge students were picking up. It sounded like they didn't even consider offering the course unless there was a significant ethical component. I'm sure it's the same for the spam & spyware course.
While Nat's project shares the name of Apple's new technology that will be included in Tiger, it's a completely different concept. Instead of having customizable UI widgets Nat's stuff displays "relevant" information as you use your computer.
For example, if a friend IMs you and says "I can't wait for our camping trip this weekend!" the dashboard will show things like your recent emails about the camping trip, your camping bookmarks, and any files or notes you've got on your hard drive about camping (example stolen from Nat's site verbatim).
If you're going to compare Dashboard to any OS X technology, it's probably closer to a tweaked Spotlight.
Why is this potential profit being taken from the cable companies and given to the government? What is the reason for it? Is it that the government has to do it since this is a service the people need but one the private sector cannot provide due to the size or the financial feasability of it? No, certainly not. Cable companies are doing well.
Because the local cable company is Adelphia, who has yet to roll out cable modems in this area.
There are a bunch of local ISPs in the area that might be willing to do this. Based right in Hanover is segNET, which provides a lot of the bandwidth to companies in the area. Across the river in Norwich, VT is ValleyNet, which was one of the first ISPs in the area (it now has something like 5,000 - 10,000 subscribers).
ValleyNet also happens to be a non-profit organization originally formed by Dartmouth and the Montshire Museum of Science. VN is always trying to help get the community connected to the Net so if they're something that they can contribute, they probably will.
Most of you probably don't realize just how backwards the Upper Valley is. Until recently DSL in the area was only offered by a couple of places and cost upwards of $150/mo., even for individuals. Thanks to ValleyNet people can now get low-speed DSL for about $30/mo.
And for you cable fans out there: there are *no* cable modems in the area. The local cable company is Adelphia, who (last I heard) suspended the installation of the new equipment needed for cable modems back when they filed for bankruptcy.
Why do I know all this? Because I live right across the river from Hanover and I used to work for ValleyNet.
The current version of Halo doesn't actually support Xbox Live. I haven't heard anything about Bungie coming out with a version of Halo that does XBL before Halo 2 comes out next November. Halo 2 will definitely support XBL and is supposed to include everything that the Bungie people wanted to do with Halo 1 but didn't.
I don't know about you, but the fact that Xbox Live doesn't work with dial-up prevents me from considering buying it.
That's one of the main points of Xbox Live; who the hell actually wants to play with someone on a dialup connection when you've got a broadband connection?
Besides, dialup isn't all that feasible with most games. Bungie recommends 256 Kbps of bandwidth per player for Halo. That's not a bullshit figure either -- there have been times when I've been in 8+ player games here on campus and we're getting lag on the school's 10/100 network because of P2P filetraders in the building utilizing 50% or more of the intracampus bandwidth.
I used g4u last year to ghost a lab full of machines running a custom version of mandrake and it typically took 8 - 10 hours to copy the drive from the master and install it on another machine. That was for 6 GB worth of data. Copying the data from the master was pretty quick (maybe 0.5 - 1.5 hours).
The machines were 333 MHz Celerons with 15 GB Quantum IDE HDs.
I think there's some more info on what I did last year on the Clarkson Open Source Institute website: http://cosi.clarkson.edu (check the Lemur/Lab team page).
Some friends and I were just discussing something similar to this at lunch.
There is a major college right near by that has a campus-wide wireless network that's completely open to anyone with a WiFi card. We were thinking about equipping a small PC with an 802.11b card and hiding it somewhere on campus to use as a server.
During the discussion I remembered this story on techweb last year about a network server that went missing for a few years after it was walled in.
So the ultimate idea is to find someplace with a WiFi network that's doing some remodeling and hide the box behind some drywall. With no wires to trace, the odds of someone finding it are very slim.
Actually, it might be possible depending on what model Mac you've got. With older Macs that have serial ports and use OpenFirmware you can connect them together via a standard serial cable. Not sure how you'd do it with any Mac made in the last 4 years that only has USB.
:-)
2 or 3 years ago at MacHack Quinn ("The Eskimo") and someone else wrote OFPong -- an implementation of Pong that used OpenFirmware's built-in Forth Interpreter. As soon as I heard about it I connected an old Mac Classic II to my beige G3 using a serial cable and started playing.
Those two questions are answered on Google's Zeitgeist page: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
The ISOs are hardly obsolete when they release them. Usually Terra Soft (the vendor that produces Yellow Dog) releases the ISOs a few weeks after the CDs start shipping.
They usually give themselves a few weeks to sell some CDs so they have SOME capital to continue development. I can hardly fault them for that, and to tell you the truth, I really don't mind because I'm already using the latest versions of a lot of the software that's included with Yellow Dog.
So you have to wait a couple of weeks to `yup update`* your distro, big deal.
* yup, or Yellow Dog Update, is a cross-platform CLI package management tool that Terra Soft maintains (similar to Debian's apt-get, but trimmed down).
I love how the Wired article mentions that Feinstein showed up with a pirated copy of Shrek, saying that her "aide" did it. Sure, Dianne, sure. You keep telling yourself you're not a dirty, DVD-copying pirate.
What really pisses me off is the ignorance (stupidity?) of these people. The Wired article mentions that "copies of TV broadcasts made for one-time personal use are also permitted." How long before Valenti has that changed? If people can't make recordings, does this mean that they'll watch MORE television so they don't miss anything?
Also, does "one-time" mean that I can stop and restart a recording? Does it only work if EVERY second of the recording is viewed? So if I record an extra 5 minutes of crap and never watch it, will the recording still work? What if I'm watching a recording and miss something because because the telephone rings. Am I shit out of luck?
Another interesting bit was Hollings' statement that interest in HDTV and broadband Internet would pick up if "high-quality content were available." Yeah right, like I'm going to go out and buy an HDTV set so I can watch crap like Harry Potter in high definition or pay $200/mo. for 192 Kbps DSL service (around here) so I can download JLo's latest craptacular track from Amazon for a couple of bucks.
Hollings and the rest of the Congressional idiots that keep coming up with this crap should get their heads out of their "analog holes."
My school offers two programming classes; the first teaches BASIC, and the second teaches Visual Basic or C++ (using Visual C++).
Originally, the second class used 386s & Borland (whatever their product is called), but the year that I took the class they switched to Pentiums & Visual C++.
I already knew C++ and had experience with CodeWarrior and the various GNU tools, and I found that using Visual C++ was like re-learning the whole language all over again (it just sucked big time).
Now, I've heard that the classes use Mainfunction to do a weekly project, and they spend their time working only with Visual C++.
I recently started a Linux programming group (club) at school, and many of the kids who want to join learned C++ there at the school and I've had to turn away a lot of them because they can't use anything but Visual C++ (they have no idea what gcc is and can't seem to grasp that VC++ is a POS that only works with Winblows).
My concern is that Visual C++ is producing a whole new generation of ignorant Windows programmers, and I'm not aware of any high school in the area that actually uses GNU tools for programming...
Sounds like the whole problem with Java Server Pages and the Model 1/Model 2 debate over which is better. :-)
Does PHP allow you to create objects like Java does with JavaBeans? You could put all your code in a handy-dandy object and then just call methods to have it spit out the dynamic stuff.
JSP would be a nice solution - you could use multilingual ResourceBundles.