I'm not a Windows person, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but how does thew MS plan to license Windows play into this?
Traditionally quick releases were common when you paid for each new release. The more new releases, the more money in your pocket. The last thing you want to do is delay a new release by years. Of course the new releases also introduced more bugs. which can really hurt your image.
If you go too quick customers may want skip releases. That is really bad from a revenue point. If you market two products but only sell one, you're really cut into your profits.
If you go by a subscription model, you can delay releases. You still get a revenue stream because the license fees keep comming. You can also focus your devopers on fixing the existing bugs and making sure the new release is stable which helps with customer satisfaction.
This can be good for your customers because their software may be more stable, but it may also cause them pain if they need to wait 2-5 years between releases to get a badly needed feature.
The catch is that your competition may not be as slow and may slowly chip away at your market if you remain stagnant too long.
My question is: Can MS do this because of their license strategy, or because the current US economy is slow and IS spending is slow in many companies?
The first new feature they introduce will create an incompatability with InfoZIP & other clones. I'm sure the users of such products will complain loudly.
You'd be amazed, but we still use a few of the round reel tape drives similar to those in these pictures. We tried to get rid of them but our users had a minor stroke. They said that certain government agencies only accept round tape and we are legally obligated to keep them. I'm not sure I believe them, but we still have the tape drives anyway.
Of course, IBM stopped manufacturing them over 15 years ago. Thank goodness the hardware so reliable. I guess that is why it costs so much, because they never fail.
Companies can't easily stop growing. When some financial analyst says "AOL doesn't project any increase in market share" or "no new revenue sources" their stock price will go way down in a big hurry. A lot of people believe that if you are not growing, your competitors will be.
Knowing nothing about the business, would you invest your 401k in a company which isn't growing, or would you invest in one projecting 15% growth over the next year? This seems to be especially true in a down market.
First, I'm not a chemist nor a biologist, nor an astronomer.
We look for carbon based life, because that is almost all we see around us. When looking for a needle in a haystack, you must first decide what the needle should look like and where in the haystack to look. We have a relly big haystack to search and we're searching it from a mile away.
The ideas I've heard is that carbon based life is more likely than other forms of life, simply because carbon is abundant and is very likely to form complex chemical bonds given it's place in the periodic table. Look one row lower and you find silicon. It can form many of the same bonds, but is much less abundant.
We also look for life similar in form to use, because we see what it takes to survive on earth. Given a similar habit, we should expect to find similar results as on earth. If you take a given environments, the same evolutionary results should take place because it is "survival of the fittest". What works here best, should work there best. They may have green feathers, two mouths, and smell like a garbage can, but on a general scale we should find things similar.
That isn't to say other forms of life couldn't exist, but if you are looking for something you need to start somewhere.
If you look on earth, almost every war has been fought to either gain resources or to protect resources already owned. They may "color" them with religious overtones or liberations, but essentially they are all the same. Side benefits can have consequences to liberty or religion, but they are not usually a primary concern.
Now let's assume there is an intellligent life out there which can find us and is able to get to us. What is here that they would want? Humans make really poor slaves. If you work a person too hard they die and it takes years to raise and educate a replacement. Plus we're stubborn, prone to disease, slow healing, and relatively fragile. I doubt anything cabable of reaching earth could use us.
The same thing has happened throughout the world. Most countries don't have slaves anymore because modern machinery is too efficient. The better the machinery gets, the less manual labor is needed. Those very few places on earth which still have slavery are very poor remote places where modern machinery is too expensive. Given time, they'll use machinery too.
If they came for natural resources, why would they bother? Why go to the effort to enslave or destroy us when they could get every resource we have somewhere else? Just look in our solar system. There is abundant water and minerals everywhere. Earth isn't very unique except for the abundance life.
The real question I would like answered is: If/when we DO find life, what is the plan? A very large portion of population would have a difficult time with this. How do we proceed? Does any government have a plan in place for this? My guess is that if life does exist and is contacted, we won't know about it for a long, long time.
Is it me, or are CIO's who issue this completely clueless? Has anyone anywhere on any mid to large size company ever "standardized" on a single server platform? There are always sneeky people who slip in a Linux or Apple or some other non-standard platform.
All biases aside, there are some things which just naturaly perform better on different servers. As much as I like Linux, there are some problems that Linux isn't the best solution for. Windows is fine, but there are some thinks it doesn't do well.
Choose a solution based on a problem. Don't choose a solution based on a policy.
MVS (or OS/390 or zOS) already tried this years ago. What they found out is that it is possible to automate about 80% of the stuff, and the other 20% still go to a normal human. It frees up people from the easy, redundant stuff, but it doesn't eliminate them completely. There are too many variables in a computer to remove a person from administering it.
There is more to it than just cost of software. Here are just a few.
Supportability: Which one requires more people time to maintain? How much training is needed? People cost adds up quickly.
Vendor Support: A large company will spend more on software if they feel they will get better support. If you can't reach someone at 2:00am and your system is down, being cheap is being stupid.
Life span: They will also look at the long term feasibility of the solution. If a cheaper solution can't be easily upgraded, most companies will shy away from it.
Vendor reputation: A cheaper, smaller vendor can face problems simply because they are smaller. A big business doesn't like the idea of giving a small company money if they won't be in business for the long hall.
Existing contracts: If you deal with a new company, the lawyers will become involved. This is added cost. If you are already dealing with a company, it can be much easier to change an existing contract.
Integration: Which solution fits better into an existing infrastructure?
Return business: Large companies sometimes agree to "return the favor" in exchange for a large contract. For example, a software company bidding for a telecom contract, may agree to switch to that telecom in agreement for winning the contract. I don't know how ethical it is, but it happens. When IBM sold it's Advantis network to AT&T, AT&T agreed to outsource some of it's operations to IBM's Global Services division.
Techie preference: This often is important to the bosses, but a smart business will ask the people using the solution which one they prefer. IMHO, nothing kills a project quicker than having the users say "we hate this."
I'll bet Disney & other major theme parks love this. They can buy them by the gross, charge $50 a day and parents can attach them to their kids in case they get lost. It increases safety & makes them money. Everything Disney loves (especially the money part).
I doubt the average person would poney up $400 when 99.99% of the time there isn't any real concern. I'd be more curious how a 3 year old deals with a device being attached to his/her wrist. Mine would start screaming after a few minutes. He doesn't like paper wristbands from a local amusement park being on his wrist for more than 5 minutes, much less a device which is bulky & he can't remove.
And for the people who raise privacy concerns, get over it. Kids have no privacy, they never have and never will.
Before technology parents still spied on their kids. They put a phone in a central location, searched rooms when the kids were not there, watched the odometer on a car to see how far they've been driving. 20 years ago, few kids had a television in their room because parents actually cared what their kids were watching.
As a parent, the idea isn't to be a friend to your kid. When they are young you protect them. As they get older you give them more freedom. The difficulty is that too much freedom and a kid can hurt themself, too little and they don't learn what they need to survive on their own.
Sometimes the need to protect & the need to give freedom are very conflicting and, when in doubt, some parents go for the hyper conservative approach.
This last week I installed Debian for the first time. I'd heard really bad stories about it and was expecting it to be difficult. I was very happy with the install. The only thing that made it difficult were:
1.) the sheer number of ways to install (CD, Floppy, NFS, FTP..). The documentation isn't terribly clear on separating each method.
and
2.) It didn't autodetect my network cards. No big deal since it let me select the modules for them.
All and all, I thought it was one of the easier installs I'd had on Linux.
Now installing OS/2 Warp v3.0, that was difficult...
Back in the 50s they predicted that massive planetary starvation would begin in the 70s. In the 70s it was predicted that starvation would begin by 2000. The last time I checked, the government is still paying some farmers not to produce to keep the overproduction of food at a minimum.
Both my father & father in-law are farmers and trust me, the US products much more food than it needs despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer acres being farmed. Advances in pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, & seed genetics are very impressive. For example, there are soybeans now which are resistant to Round-Up. Round-Up will kill a tree if you spray enough on it. This allows for better weed control which allows for better yields. They are also chainging the way they farm. No-till drilling & other method changes are becomming the norm now. There is much less soil erosion & farmers seem to be much more conscious about crop rotation to preserve the quality of the soil which also increases yields. The funny thing is that farmers are in a catch-22 situation. They produce so much that their product isn't worth much. To make a living they need to increase yields so they have more of an income. When they increase more they produce more of a surpluss which drives the prices further down, increasing the need for more bigger yeids to make a profit.
As for the forests, most people don't realize that there are more trees in the US than there were 100 years ago. The reason for that is urban areas around cities. Before the 'burbs most of that land was farm land. The first thing the farmers did was cut down the trees because it is difficult to plant in a forset. When a new house is built in the 'burbs, the first thing they do is plant trees.
I don't think that better fuel economy & preservation is bad, but let's look at the whole picture before we sound like chicken little. I'd also be highly sceptical of any group like the World Wildlife Fund. Groups like this are no different than any business sponsored research. They survive by private funding, so the best way to increase your funding is to shout alarming reports and gain attention.
Most people disregard studies that Windows is better than Linux if they are sponsored by MicroSoft. Why should we treat this any different?
I'm don't know the details of each bug, but off hand I'd say this is an unfair comparison.
The length of time to patch a bug isn't as simple as how impactive it is. It depends on lots of factors including where the bug is and how impactive the fix is. Any bug can be a real pain to fix if it is the right place.
Also, I'd hope that any server side software goes through a little more scrutiny than client side software. Which would you rather have, a single client not working or all users for a site not working?
Of course, this doesn't excuse the fact that yet another MS IEE bug has surfaced. Is anyone keeping count of the major security bugs?
I work for a large shop and here are my experiences running Linux on the Mainframe.
First, I'm a mainframe person. I like the mainframe. I've used Linux at home for about 6 years so I was chosen to be on a "proof of concept" with running Linux under VM. I've been doing OS/390 & z/OS support for about 4 years. I'm in the "30 & under" crowd and I've seen both the Unix & mainframe side of support.
We've played with TurboLinux, SuSE, & the RedHat beta for the zSeries. We're running zVM 4.2.
First, lots of things work really well. It was strange seeing the normal Linux boot messages appearing in zVM. We've been primarily using the 2.4 series kernel, but we have tested things with the 2.2 series. We've played with Oracle, WebSphere, DB2 Connect, Samba, Apache, IBM HTTPD server. The only technical problem we really had was Samba caused kernel crashes. Some patches from the IBM z/Linux site fixed it.
The biggest problems we have had are philosophical and percepteion based. Here are some of the difficulties:
We had to force our customers to a shared outage window. Even VM needs to be IPLed every year or so. If they can't tolerate a 6 hour window every quarter or 6 months, we won't support them on the zSeries. A second box could make it a true zero downtime machine, but we are initially targeting the low usage, non critical machines.
Lots of people have the delusion that the zSeries processor is hundreds of times faster than other processors. It isn't. It's fast, but not several magnitudes faster than the other processors out there. It's also not designed for heavy computational applications. Don't try, you'll hate the results. It can be done on a limited basis, but don't try and compute PI. It works better on I/O related applications which are traditional mainframe strengths.
A lot of the code on the zSeries for Linux is the first generation to be released there. A lot of the performance perks for that platform are not there yet. If there is enough adoption, ISVs will make the performance better, but right now a lot of them are testing the water.
Some people have the illusion that if you take a piece of crap application on Solaris or NT and run it on Linux, it will run better. The OS typically doesn't make your piece of crap any better.
When people buy an Intel or Solaris server, they typically get the most memory & disk space they can afford. This is the worst thing to do under VM. We had a lot of people want 2GB of RAM and 100GB of disk space. Later analysis showed they could survive with much less memory (some as little as 128M) and used almost none of the disk. The reason for this is simple. Whey you buy a Sun or Intel server, upgrading them is a pain, so you do the pain up front. Under VM you can change the amount of memory & allocate more disk very easily. This was a big learning curve for people, and not just the Unix people. The major difference we found in the memory is because Linux uses it as disk cache. On the zSeries the hardware has lots of it's cache on on it.
People needed to understand they were sharing CPU & memory. Performance tuning has a very big impact. On Intel or Sun who cares if your application is looping endlessly. On VM everyone cares. Lots of our Unix sysadmins really hated this fact and the customers couldn't fathom it. You want to put applications with LOW USAGE on this platform. The idea behind sharing is that nobody needs all of the CPU all of the time. If you run at 100% on a 4-way Pentium CPU, you won't like sharing CPU with dozens of other virtual servers and they won't like sharing with you. This was probably the most difficult thing to stress to the users.
This isn't emulating Intel. It took a while to get people to understand that VM wasn't emulating an Intel machine and that the nice pre-compiled intel binaries don't work. Lots of people went out looking for software from ISVs and the ISVs said "Sure we support Linux". What they didn't say is "We support Linux/390". There is a very big difference. Linux is not just Linux on Intel and it took some education to get this through to the users.
Once we convinced people that it isn't running Intel, they tried to recompile their favorite programs and found out that for some applications a "simple" recompile wasn't enough. I would imagine that the power-pc folks had similar problems, but some programs take a little investigation.
There were some really nice aspects of running on a zSeries.
Disaster Recovery is easier. Mainframe DR has been established for decades and it isn't terribly different with Linux on the mainframe. Much more simple than having dozens of individual machines to recover.
The hardware never fails. It may be expensive, but CPUs have a 30 year mean time to failure, the disk is all raid, multiple IO chanels help ensure there is not single point of failure. Hardware can typically be swapped out without taking an outage. CPUs can by dynamically added.
If you want to copy an existing virtual server and make a test copy, that can be done in minutes. That makes it really nice for developers who want to do the "what if I do this" tests.
VM's programmable operator facility makes for some nice system automation. You can also create Rexx scripts for your operations so they never even need to logon to Linux to do certain work.
Creating a new server is easy. No more running through the install screens. Once you have one customized, just use it as a template for new servers.
We were able to have certain drives shared as read-only across all images. This makes support a little easier. We made one Linux have the drive read-write. When we changed it there, we just unmounted & remounted it on the other images (a Rexx script made that painless) and it was magically everywhere. We can even take down the read-write linux to be sure something isn't accidentally changed. We've been experimenting with sharing lots of Linux mount points this way. We estimate we can concentrate about 100GB down to 2 GB which cuts down the overall cost. The majority of code on all Linux images are the same and will tolerate being shared, so as long as your environment is stable and you do some planning, you can dramatically cut down on disk usage. The amount of disk you save is directly related to the number of images your machine can handle.
The virtual-linux to virtual-linux IP traffic happends at memory-to-memory speed. It's also very nice not to worry about network issues when trying to debug a problem because there is no physical network.
Recovery is easier if an image won't boot. Just attach the drive to another, running image and fix the problem. No need to physically go to the machine.
Sorry to ramble, but this is what we have found. Linux on the zSeries has it's place and does work, but it's not a solution to every problem. Few things are.
I'm in no way an expert in the matter, but according to one theory I've read, some scientists think it is possible to travel through time using Einstein's theories.
The trick is that you can only travel as far back as when the time meachine was started. On other words, we haven't met a time traveler because the time machine hasn't been invented yet. Once the machine is invented people from the future can travel to that point, but not before. He'd be the start of that chain. From the article it appears as if he'd be following some of that theory.
Of course, as the article points out, transporting a person & a sub atomic particle are different & quantom laws are a little different. Don't forget, according to quantom theory a particle can exist in two places at the same time for brief periods. I'd guess the engineers haven't made that possible yet on a human level. Just another challenge for them. Once they get that solved I'd like to see them make it impossible for cops to figure out how fast I'm going & where I am at the same time.
I would think that large amusement parks (i.e. Disney World) would be the best initial target. Similar to the two-way radios some offer now. For parents with large families it would be more of a piece-of-mind thing than anything else.
Of course, the small children I know would probably start screaming 5 seconds after they realize that you put something strange on them they can't take off. Lots of kids have a real problem with stuff like that because on a hot summer day it will bother them.
It's funny, but I bet a lot of the same people who don't see a problem with movie & music piracy are the same people who complain bitterly about GPL violations in software.
The person (or company) who creates the product gets to determine how to distribute it. Get over it.
Also, just because the movie industry is bringing in more at the box office doesn't mean they are making money. It costs lots of money to make movies today. I'd be interested in knowing what their profits are compared to 1959, not their sales.
If I remember from High School, there's enough Deuterium in the earth's oceans to last thousands and thousands of years at our current growth rate if fusion becomes feasable.
Of course, my High School physics class was a long time ago in a city far far away so I could wrong.
Interesting. I have almost the exact same thing except that I don't pay the $30.00 a month and my tuition reimbursement doesn't have a limit as long as it's approved by management.
I would disagree about the inability to negotiate with a large corporation and you don't need to be a "superstar" to do it. I've always found that if you are professional, show pride in your work, work well with others, and can do good problem solving and design methods you can do very well in business. A good manager will almost always reward someone he doesn't need to manage. If you make a manager's life easier they will want you to stay.
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I'm not a Windows person, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but how does thew MS plan to license Windows play into this?
Traditionally quick releases were common when you paid for each new release. The more new releases, the more money in your pocket. The last thing you want to do is delay a new release by years. Of course the new releases also introduced more bugs. which can really hurt your image.
If you go too quick customers may want skip releases. That is really bad from a revenue point. If you market two products but only sell one, you're really cut into your profits.
If you go by a subscription model, you can delay releases. You still get a revenue stream because the license fees keep comming. You can also focus your devopers on fixing the existing bugs and making sure the new release is stable which helps with customer satisfaction.
This can be good for your customers because their software may be more stable, but it may also cause them pain if they need to wait 2-5 years between releases to get a badly needed feature.
The catch is that your competition may not be as slow and may slowly chip away at your market if you remain stagnant too long.
My question is: Can MS do this because of their license strategy, or because the current US economy is slow and IS spending is slow in many companies?
The first new feature they introduce will create an incompatability with InfoZIP & other clones. I'm sure the users of such products will complain loudly.
You'd be amazed, but we still use a few of the round reel tape drives similar to those in these pictures. We tried to get rid of them but our users had a minor stroke. They said that certain government agencies only accept round tape and we are legally obligated to keep them. I'm not sure I believe them, but we still have the tape drives anyway.
Of course, IBM stopped manufacturing them over 15 years ago. Thank goodness the hardware so reliable. I guess that is why it costs so much, because they never fail.
The sad thing is that the error he is reporting makes sense to me, as is his panic if this happens in production.
Companies can't easily stop growing. When some financial analyst says "AOL doesn't project any increase in market share" or "no new revenue sources" their stock price will go way down in a big hurry. A lot of people believe that if you are not growing, your competitors will be.
Knowing nothing about the business, would you invest your 401k in a company which isn't growing, or would you invest in one projecting 15% growth over the next year? This seems to be especially true in a down market.
First, I'm not a chemist nor a biologist, nor an astronomer.
We look for carbon based life, because that is almost all we see around us. When looking for a needle in a haystack, you must first decide what the needle should look like and where in the haystack to look. We have a relly big haystack to search and we're searching it from a mile away.
The ideas I've heard is that carbon based life is more likely than other forms of life, simply because carbon is abundant and is very likely to form complex chemical bonds given it's place in the periodic table. Look one row lower and you find silicon. It can form many of the same bonds, but is much less abundant.
We also look for life similar in form to use, because we see what it takes to survive on earth. Given a similar habit, we should expect to find similar results as on earth. If you take a given environments, the same evolutionary results should take place because it is "survival of the fittest". What works here best, should work there best. They may have green feathers, two mouths, and smell like a garbage can, but on a general scale we should find things similar.
That isn't to say other forms of life couldn't exist, but if you are looking for something you need to start somewhere.
If you look on earth, almost every war has been fought to either gain resources or to protect resources already owned. They may "color" them with religious overtones or liberations, but essentially they are all the same. Side benefits can have consequences to liberty or religion, but they are not usually a primary concern.
Now let's assume there is an intellligent life out there which can find us and is able to get to us. What is here that they would want? Humans make really poor slaves. If you work a person too hard they die and it takes years to raise and educate a replacement. Plus we're stubborn, prone to disease, slow healing, and relatively fragile. I doubt anything cabable of reaching earth could use us.
The same thing has happened throughout the world. Most countries don't have slaves anymore because modern machinery is too efficient. The better the machinery gets, the less manual labor is needed. Those very few places on earth which still have slavery are very poor remote places where modern machinery is too expensive. Given time, they'll use machinery too.
If they came for natural resources, why would they bother? Why go to the effort to enslave or destroy us when they could get every resource we have somewhere else? Just look in our solar system. There is abundant water and minerals everywhere. Earth isn't very unique except for the abundance life.
The real question I would like answered is: If/when we DO find life, what is the plan? A very large portion of population would have a difficult time with this. How do we proceed? Does any government have a plan in place for this? My guess is that if life does exist and is contacted, we won't know about it for a long, long time.
You'll know when the software industry matures. It is when the next release of a product introduces more new features than new bugs.
Is it me, or are CIO's who issue this completely clueless? Has anyone anywhere on any mid to large size company ever "standardized" on a single server platform? There are always sneeky people who slip in a Linux or Apple or some other non-standard platform.
All biases aside, there are some things which just naturaly perform better on different servers. As much as I like Linux, there are some problems that Linux isn't the best solution for. Windows is fine, but there are some thinks it doesn't do well.
Choose a solution based on a problem. Don't choose a solution based on a policy.
MVS (or OS/390 or zOS) already tried this years ago. What they found out is that it is possible to automate about 80% of the stuff, and the other 20% still go to a normal human. It frees up people from the easy, redundant stuff, but it doesn't eliminate them completely. There are too many variables in a computer to remove a person from administering it.
There is more to it than just cost of software. Here are just a few.
Supportability: Which one requires more people time to maintain? How much training is needed? People cost adds up quickly.
Vendor Support: A large company will spend more on software if they feel they will get better support. If you can't reach someone at 2:00am and your system is down, being cheap is being stupid.
Life span: They will also look at the long term feasibility of the solution. If a cheaper solution can't be easily upgraded, most companies will shy away from it.
Vendor reputation: A cheaper, smaller vendor can face problems simply because they are smaller. A big business doesn't like the idea of giving a small company money if they won't be in business for the long hall.
Existing contracts: If you deal with a new company, the lawyers will become involved. This is added cost. If you are already dealing with a company, it can be much easier to change an existing contract.
Integration: Which solution fits better into an existing infrastructure?
Return business: Large companies sometimes agree to "return the favor" in exchange for a large contract. For example, a software company bidding for a telecom contract, may agree to switch to that telecom in agreement for winning the contract. I don't know how ethical it is, but it happens. When IBM sold it's Advantis network to AT&T, AT&T agreed to outsource some of it's operations to IBM's Global Services division.
Techie preference: This often is important to the bosses, but a smart business will ask the people using the solution which one they prefer. IMHO, nothing kills a project quicker than having the users say "we hate this."
It isn't as trendy as wireless, but the newer HPNA networks go over existing phone lines, have 10mbps speed, and don't disrupt normal phone use.
For non-public networks, they work fine. You could then setup a masquerade router and share external connectivity.
It does work, but I'm not sure about how activly HPNA is being updated...
It isn't too often you hear the word "success" in the same article as until it began to burn up
I'll bet Disney & other major theme parks love this. They can buy them by the gross, charge $50 a day and parents can attach them to their kids in case they get lost. It increases safety & makes them money. Everything Disney loves (especially the money part).
I doubt the average person would poney up $400 when 99.99% of the time there isn't any real concern. I'd be more curious how a 3 year old deals with a device being attached to his/her wrist. Mine would start screaming after a few minutes. He doesn't like paper wristbands from a local amusement park being on his wrist for more than 5 minutes, much less a device which is bulky & he can't remove.
And for the people who raise privacy concerns, get over it. Kids have no privacy, they never have and never will.
Before technology parents still spied on their kids. They put a phone in a central location, searched rooms when the kids were not there, watched the odometer on a car to see how far they've been driving. 20 years ago, few kids had a television in their room because parents actually cared what their kids were watching.
As a parent, the idea isn't to be a friend to your kid. When they are young you protect them. As they get older you give them more freedom. The difficulty is that too much freedom and a kid can hurt themself, too little and they don't learn what they need to survive on their own.
Sometimes the need to protect & the need to give freedom are very conflicting and, when in doubt, some parents go for the hyper conservative approach.
Rember, according to the rules you are to spend two months salary on the ring. That's two months gross salary, not net.
;)
I recommend working at a lemonaid stand for the two months when you calculate this. On a good day you could clear $5.
This last week I installed Debian for the first time. I'd heard really bad stories about it and was expecting it to be difficult. I was very happy with the install. The only thing that made it difficult were:
1.) the sheer number of ways to install (CD, Floppy, NFS, FTP..). The documentation isn't terribly clear on separating each method.
and
2.) It didn't autodetect my network cards. No big deal since it let me select the modules for them.
All and all, I thought it was one of the easier installs I'd had on Linux.
Now installing OS/2 Warp v3.0, that was difficult...
Let's stop trying to do the impossible and spend the money on more credible science... like cold fusion in a bottle.
Seriously, if someone could get it to work, the impact would be beyond belief.
Back in the 50s they predicted that massive planetary starvation would begin in the 70s. In the 70s it was predicted that starvation would begin by 2000. The last time I checked, the government is still paying some farmers not to produce to keep the overproduction of food at a minimum.
Both my father & father in-law are farmers and trust me, the US products much more food than it needs despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer acres being farmed. Advances in pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, & seed genetics are very impressive. For example, there are soybeans now which are resistant to Round-Up. Round-Up will kill a tree if you spray enough on it. This allows for better weed control which allows for better yields. They are also chainging the way they farm. No-till drilling & other method changes are becomming the norm now. There is much less soil erosion & farmers seem to be much more conscious about crop rotation to preserve the quality of the soil which also increases yields. The funny thing is that farmers are in a catch-22 situation. They produce so much that their product isn't worth much. To make a living they need to increase yields so they have more of an income. When they increase more they produce more of a surpluss which drives the prices further down, increasing the need for more bigger yeids to make a profit.
As for the forests, most people don't realize that there are more trees in the US than there were 100 years ago. The reason for that is urban areas around cities. Before the 'burbs most of that land was farm land. The first thing the farmers did was cut down the trees because it is difficult to plant in a forset. When a new house is built in the 'burbs, the first thing they do is plant trees.
I don't think that better fuel economy & preservation is bad, but let's look at the whole picture before we sound like chicken little. I'd also be highly sceptical of any group like the World Wildlife Fund. Groups like this are no different than any business sponsored research. They survive by private funding, so the best way to increase your funding is to shout alarming reports and gain attention.
Most people disregard studies that Windows is better than Linux if they are sponsored by MicroSoft. Why should we treat this any different?
I'm don't know the details of each bug, but off hand I'd say this is an unfair comparison.
The length of time to patch a bug isn't as simple as how impactive it is. It depends on lots of factors including where the bug is and how impactive the fix is. Any bug can be a real pain to fix if it is the right place.
Also, I'd hope that any server side software goes through a little more scrutiny than client side software. Which would you rather have, a single client not working or all users for a site not working?
Of course, this doesn't excuse the fact that yet another MS IEE bug has surfaced. Is anyone keeping count of the major security bugs?
I work for a large shop and here are my experiences running Linux on the Mainframe.
First, I'm a mainframe person. I like the mainframe. I've used Linux at home for about 6 years so I was chosen to be on a "proof of concept" with running Linux under VM. I've been doing OS/390 & z/OS support for about 4 years. I'm in the "30 & under" crowd and I've seen both the Unix & mainframe side of support.
We've played with TurboLinux, SuSE, & the RedHat beta for the zSeries. We're running zVM 4.2.
First, lots of things work really well. It was strange seeing the normal Linux boot messages appearing in zVM. We've been primarily using the 2.4 series kernel, but we have tested things with the 2.2 series. We've played with Oracle, WebSphere, DB2 Connect, Samba, Apache, IBM HTTPD server. The only technical problem we really had was Samba caused kernel crashes. Some patches from the IBM z/Linux site fixed it.
The biggest problems we have had are philosophical and percepteion based. Here are some of the difficulties:
We had to force our customers to a shared outage window. Even VM needs to be IPLed every year or so. If they can't tolerate a 6 hour window every quarter or 6 months, we won't support them on the zSeries. A second box could make it a true zero downtime machine, but we are initially targeting the low usage, non critical machines.
Lots of people have the delusion that the zSeries processor is hundreds of times faster than other processors. It isn't. It's fast, but not several magnitudes faster than the other processors out there. It's also not designed for heavy computational applications. Don't try, you'll hate the results. It can be done on a limited basis, but don't try and compute PI. It works better on I/O related applications which are traditional mainframe strengths.
A lot of the code on the zSeries for Linux is the first generation to be released there. A lot of the performance perks for that platform are not there yet. If there is enough adoption, ISVs will make the performance better, but right now a lot of them are testing the water.
Some people have the illusion that if you take a piece of crap application on Solaris or NT and run it on Linux, it will run better. The OS typically doesn't make your piece of crap any better.
When people buy an Intel or Solaris server, they typically get the most memory & disk space they can afford. This is the worst thing to do under VM. We had a lot of people want 2GB of RAM and 100GB of disk space. Later analysis showed they could survive with much less memory (some as little as 128M) and used almost none of the disk. The reason for this is simple. Whey you buy a Sun or Intel server, upgrading them is a pain, so you do the pain up front. Under VM you can change the amount of memory & allocate more disk very easily. This was a big learning curve for people, and not just the Unix people. The major difference we found in the memory is because Linux uses it as disk cache. On the zSeries the hardware has lots of it's cache on on it.
People needed to understand they were sharing CPU & memory. Performance tuning has a very big impact. On Intel or Sun who cares if your application is looping endlessly. On VM everyone cares. Lots of our Unix sysadmins really hated this fact and the customers couldn't fathom it. You want to put applications with LOW USAGE on this platform. The idea behind sharing is that nobody needs all of the CPU all of the time. If you run at 100% on a 4-way Pentium CPU, you won't like sharing CPU with dozens of other virtual servers and they won't like sharing with you. This was probably the most difficult thing to stress to the users.
This isn't emulating Intel. It took a while to get people to understand that VM wasn't emulating an Intel machine and that the nice pre-compiled intel binaries don't work. Lots of people went out looking for software from ISVs and the ISVs said "Sure we support Linux". What they didn't say is "We support Linux/390". There is a very big difference. Linux is not just Linux on Intel and it took some education to get this through to the users.
Once we convinced people that it isn't running Intel, they tried to recompile their favorite programs and found out that for some applications a "simple" recompile wasn't enough. I would imagine that the power-pc folks had similar problems, but some programs take a little investigation.
There were some really nice aspects of running on a zSeries.
Disaster Recovery is easier. Mainframe DR has been established for decades and it isn't terribly different with Linux on the mainframe. Much more simple than having dozens of individual machines to recover.
The hardware never fails. It may be expensive, but CPUs have a 30 year mean time to failure, the disk is all raid, multiple IO chanels help ensure there is not single point of failure. Hardware can typically be swapped out without taking an outage. CPUs can by dynamically added.
If you want to copy an existing virtual server and make a test copy, that can be done in minutes. That makes it really nice for developers who want to do the "what if I do this" tests.
VM's programmable operator facility makes for some nice system automation. You can also create Rexx scripts for your operations so they never even need to logon to Linux to do certain work.
Creating a new server is easy. No more running through the install screens. Once you have one customized, just use it as a template for new servers.
We were able to have certain drives shared as read-only across all images. This makes support a little easier. We made one Linux have the drive read-write. When we changed it there, we just unmounted & remounted it on the other images (a Rexx script made that painless) and it was magically everywhere. We can even take down the read-write linux to be sure something isn't accidentally changed. We've been experimenting with sharing lots of Linux mount points this way. We estimate we can concentrate about 100GB down to 2 GB which cuts down the overall cost. The majority of code on all Linux images are the same and will tolerate being shared, so as long as your environment is stable and you do some planning, you can dramatically cut down on disk usage. The amount of disk you save is directly related to the number of images your machine can handle.
The virtual-linux to virtual-linux IP traffic happends at memory-to-memory speed. It's also very nice not to worry about network issues when trying to debug a problem because there is no physical network.
Recovery is easier if an image won't boot. Just attach the drive to another, running image and fix the problem. No need to physically go to the machine.
Sorry to ramble, but this is what we have found. Linux on the zSeries has it's place and does work, but it's not a solution to every problem. Few things are.
I'm in no way an expert in the matter, but according to one theory I've read, some scientists think it is possible to travel through time using Einstein's theories.
The trick is that you can only travel as far back as when the time meachine was started. On other words, we haven't met a time traveler because the time machine hasn't been invented yet. Once the machine is invented people from the future can travel to that point, but not before. He'd be the start of that chain. From the article it appears as if he'd be following some of that theory.
Of course, as the article points out, transporting a person & a sub atomic particle are different & quantom laws are a little different. Don't forget, according to quantom theory a particle can exist in two places at the same time for brief periods. I'd guess the engineers haven't made that possible yet on a human level. Just another challenge for them. Once they get that solved I'd like to see them make it impossible for cops to figure out how fast I'm going & where I am at the same time.
I would think that large amusement parks (i.e. Disney World) would be the best initial target. Similar to the two-way radios some offer now. For parents with large families it would be more of a piece-of-mind thing than anything else.
Of course, the small children I know would probably start screaming 5 seconds after they realize that you put something strange on them they can't take off. Lots of kids have a real problem with stuff like that because on a hot summer day it will bother them.
It's funny, but I bet a lot of the same people who don't see a problem with movie & music piracy are the same people who complain bitterly about GPL violations in software.
The person (or company) who creates the product gets to determine how to distribute it. Get over it.
Also, just because the movie industry is bringing in more at the box office doesn't mean they are making money. It costs lots of money to make movies today. I'd be interested in knowing what their profits are compared to 1959, not their sales.
If I remember from High School, there's enough Deuterium in the earth's oceans to last thousands and thousands of years at our current growth rate if fusion becomes feasable.
Of course, my High School physics class was a long time ago in a city far far away so I could wrong.
Interesting. I have almost the exact same thing except that I don't pay the $30.00 a month and my tuition reimbursement doesn't have a limit as long as it's approved by management.
I would disagree about the inability to negotiate with a large corporation and you don't need to be a "superstar" to do it. I've always found that if you are professional, show pride in your work, work well with others, and can do good problem solving and design methods you can do very well in business. A good manager will almost always reward someone he doesn't need to manage. If you make a manager's life easier they will want you to stay.