I bombed out of UT Austin about the time Dell was quitting and running his biz. I knew about his company. To me my choices were look him up and get a job there, or get a computer job at a hospital.
I figured, eh the hospital will always have money, and this kid is likely to go through ups and downs and have cash flow issues, I want the security.
Got one WWII for you, MMORPG www.battlegroundeurope.com .
Physics model, check. Hardness, check.
1/2 scale Europe, one continuous playing field (you can fly from UK airfields to West German targets or vice versa), and there are 'unfilled' areas that are accessible but don't have anything to shoot (a squad I play with recently went to the Swiss alps and parachuted down to them finishing in an apparently disastrous landing attempt).
Player-driven High Commands with all the good and bad that can imply.
Relative to the air game, you have specific fields you can fly from which are known to the enemy so you have to be careful, a naval game that includes patrol boats, freighters and destroyers as potential targets (but they are human-driven so watch yourself), lots of ground targets (tanks and trucks and AA guns and AT guns and infantry), and a strategic bombing campaign that affects supply, including equipment going to the front which could include your own planes!
Several of the more organized squads (BE speak for guilds) plan out missions with similar detail, although the fuel issues are a bit fudged IMO.
The game requires a high-end PC or Mac, no console version (constant updates so it's not exactly static).
CP / Diamond Age Weapons Fabs, Insurance
on
Fab
·
· Score: 1
There is a dark side to the fab, highlighted in that good ol' RPG Cyberpunk and of course with more flair in The Diamond Age, namely-
-people making weapon systems with these things.
Imagine if the Sunni/Baathist/aQ types could fab high quality gun tubes or missile parts- a lot more Strykers would be dead.
The chaos inherent in the release of unlimited fab powers was a major element in both these futures.
And of course there is the dark Ogre future in which the fabs are controlled by nuclear-armed AI tanks, kind of Colossus with treads and an attitude.
The logistics of war might more closely resemble a Command and Conquer game then the age-old 'make what you fight with, bring it with you', but with a dizzying design and counterdesign fight measured in hours rather then months or years.
On a more mundane level, I expect a lot more accidents due to poor QA of 'homemade' items. Ultimately a condition will be placed on most insurance policies that if it is not UL-rated any losses incurred by using home/garage fabbed appliances and gizmos will not be covered.
I mean seriously, do you trust the average person to make a toaster that won't explode?
On the other hand, we could really see a rebirth of American cottage industrialism. Just consider all those car customization shops out there, then apply that to all manner of consumer products. Could be good.
Not a single one of you talked about the REAL energy altering systemic change mankind has brought to the table, and that is albedo.
The reflectivity from all of that urbanization is pouring huge amounts of energy right back into the atmosphere that otherwise would have been absorbed.
Anyone who lives in a flyover state in a large metropolitan area knows that storms end up going around the big towns unless they have a lot of energy.
I have a tough time accepting these simulations due to albedo not being a major factor.
I would say WWIIOL has a completely different model-
* Play up to get rank (and maintain account so you keep access to all your toys),
* Work within a large uberteam (Axis or Allies), each of which may have it's own tribes or clans (squads in WWIIOLspeak),
* Beat the snot out of the other uberteam,
* Players provide content as the 'puzzles' constantly change due to new equipment or new towns being included into the map, and different attack approaches mean even the same old towns are attacked in new ways from differing directions,
* And if the game gets boring, you can switch to air, ground or sea equipment of another nation and work your way up there.
We had a piece of equipment back in the 80s that supported remote hospitals, a Phoenix concentrator connected to a sync modem. The concentrator in the computer room was nicely chilled, but the Phoenix at the hospital was in a sweaty phone room with too much equipment. This datacomm equipment was on 24/7 and worked heavily.
I went to the remote site and was trying to figure out what was wrong. I opened up the Phoenix's front end and along the way touched the board. It was actually gooey, like asphalt on a melted street. The whole board was like that.
It ran successfully that way for three more years.
WWIIOL is a unique situation in that you have a developer-run outfit that deeply believes in it's vision and runs a tight enough ship to keep it afloat through the tough times.
Moose4 has it right, the players create content by running the virtual army organizations and attacking each other with different tactics and combinations of equipment. Since the terrain is immense and varied every attack is different even using the same tactics because the ground changes and situations change. And if you get bored with a certain nation's equipment or fighting style, you can simply switch over. And the Rats are constantly introducing new equipment and play changes. The replay value is immense.
The community has stuck by CRS during the tough times because they believe in the vision as well, and have an incredible level of access and direct communication with the developers. And enough of the vision has come true to keep most interested.
If the Rats were doing this for someone else this very unique game would not exist- I think that is the most important part of WWIIOL's phoenix story.
BTW, the reviewer is showing a bit of Axis bias and ahistorical expectation- the German tanks ARE suppossed to be fragile in 1940. If you expect to recreate the Tiger killer tank experience that will probably come with a later release, and even then the German High Command will have to decide to research for it, which might be affected by the strategic bombing campaign constantly going on.
The women players of WWIIOL are an absolutely essential component of both Allied and Axis teams. They are rarely the most uber players but several very top people do happen to be female.
More importantly, WWIIOL is a team game where a commander may be corraling 50-100 players at a time in a very chaotic environment. Several of the women generals really shine in this department, and are moving up the command chain as respected commanders. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a female side Commander-in-Chief running forces in the 1000s.
It doesn't have to be pretty shiny social interaction or l33t stuff for the women to show what they can do online.
World War II Online already has an immersive world oriented towards shooting people with ballistics/armor resolution, interaction between ground sea and air units, and 3000+ people in a single game world (1940 NW Europe, the largest game world in existence). Would have been nice to see some of that $6 million thrown towards a working model.
Likely they are going to get better eye candy (which is important for immersion in infantry battles) but the vehicles are not going to be right without serious serious work. And forget about interacting with fast moving choppers and jets.
Let's get something straight here- no airliner company or for-profit corporation or university/institute is going to research this alone. There isn't enough money or incentive. It takes the crazy whacky USA military industrial complex to get this done.
So when you are taking that three hour shuttlejet trip to catch the peace protest in Hiroshima, please remember where your life-enhancing toy came from before you whine.
Something my company has done since the 80s is write in performance guarantees into the contracts. Sales weasels are always trying to undersell needed capacity, but they want that bottom line percentage worse. So several times we got our contract and when the inevitable performance crisis comes, we got a free mainframe upgrade.
In most of Cordwainer Smith's stories, the computers are all biological (typically rat tissue in a laminated substrate). Seems he didn't put much faith in electronics. But most of his stories are about some serious genetic engineering and the societal effects.
The value represented in the mainframe is not just the old code or scalability, it is a culture that prizes care, backwards-compatibility, and stability.
Don't get me wrong, mainframes are not for every situation. But network bigots haven't driven off the dinosaurs anymore then the dinos have eaten the small machines. Get the right tool for the right job.
And your economics don't work if the admin costs of an NoW gets out of control (which is likely given what happens to most shops).
Check out this paper about real-world TCO- the lizard ain't dead.
MCP was the second mainframe OS I learned (I am on my third). What you are describing is how Unisys took their proprietary A-series mainframe technology forward without having to incur the cost of the entire box. They just emulate it onto the backs of a Unix or WinNT/2K superserver.
Unisys was always big in banking and government. They still are.
I just loooooooove MCP. It is the greatest console environment ever. And the plain language commands and on-the-fly maintenance jobs typed in as syntax at the console is wonderful. And the logging, lord I still would love to have the logging facility in MVS, or any other platform for that matter.
What is really sad about the Unisys story is DMSII. The database package allowed you to do true online backups, no downtime or mirroring tricks, in the 1980s. They had it working on PC servers in the early 90's and could have taken the Oracle niche, but never saw the database as a strategic platform in it's own right.
WWIIOL's cheating problem is ameliorated by the fact that the company runs it's servers and doesn't have the server code out there. Nonetheless we do get speed hacks and the like.
The community has commanders in game that have the authority to take miscreants by the scruff of the neck and get their attention. Ultimately they can be kicked out.
Personally I think the universe is recursive, i.e. the higher dimensions curve back into what we consider to be 4-D mass and exerts effects far beyond the relatively simple Newtonian gravity.
It's a side effect of the zero dimension, i.e. no length, width, depth or time, everything is connected.
Not to mention that model railroading got Disney to build Disneyland because he wanted a bigger train set then Ward Kimball, which forced him to do Wonderful World of Disney which drove more money which got him to create the ultimate fantasy layout DisneyWorld and a rather terrifying planned community, EPCOT.
That Ace's Hardware link everybody connects to is a good overview of the IBM architecture and components, but frankly there are plenty of other machines that to my mind are mainframes as well.
I moved into computer operations management primarily to maintain control of my environment and earn a measly $1.00 more an hour to start. I had been under supervisors who made bad technical decisions in my judgement, and did not like the experience.
The job was hell on earth, and largely due to the nature of people who choose to do that job. This poster got it right, it's basically a haven for people who have the intelligence to do the job and the desire to hide out from a 'normal' job. We are not talking your team players here.
The 24x7 shifts mean job security, yeah, but also the constant wear and tear on nights and weekends meant anti-social behavior is reinforced amongst people who are self-selecting for it anyway.
The fact that I was one of them did not help as I wanted to be as lazy and non-team oriented as the rest of them but could not due to my position. I did not start out as a good leader type to begin with, and had to painfully learn the craft of training and stick and carrot with many ugly lessons learned the hard way.
One of the biggest problems we had was that we could not seriously threaten termination for anything but the most grevious of errors due to the lack of suitable replacements. The systems we run HAVE to run successfully 24x7, no exceptions period. So you cannot just plug in any dweeb with six months of VB/networking at the local community college. So training means standing over them to make sure the processes get done without failure, and takes overtime and care to make sure the mission critical stuff isn't destroyed.
Getting rational reasonable operators who were good and not insane was a difficult thing to accomplish. I literally had situations where bowling alley managers interviewed for me, and later I had to ask myself if I wouldn't have been better off hiring them instead of the jerk we got.
I am even now having to deal with the operator conundrum as a sysprog as some new guy screwed up our monthly database reorg apparently because he thinks he is a genius and understood his instructions without asking or calling.
The solution for our company re: replacement has been to outsource for new operators, try them out to see if they actually know what they are doing, and hire them if they work out.
There IS an operator advancement process at our company- select operators have made it into my systems area and others become Operations Analysts, doing similar work but more on an operationalized basis rather then systems. The Ops analysts are sharp sharp people and just as good as many of the sysprogs. So those posters who are concerned about ops being dead end should make sure there is a similar path before hiring on.
The whole experience was probably good for me as a human being as I am more likely to be sympathetic and understanding of both sides of the management and employee experience. But I am very very soured on ever BEING in ops management ever again and I would have to be very very hungry to ever consider it.
Most ex-ops people I work with feel the same way- it's kind of like helpdesking, it's a job and someone has to do it, but we aren't planning on doing it. And that is your opportunity to grab a job.
Slashdot Mirror
I bombed out of UT Austin about the time Dell was quitting and running his biz. I knew about his company. To me my choices were look him up and get a job there, or get a computer job at a hospital.
I figured, eh the hospital will always have money, and this kid is likely to go through ups and downs and have cash flow issues, I want the security.
Figure out just how I feel about that.
Got one WWII for you, MMORPG www.battlegroundeurope.com .
Physics model, check. Hardness, check.
1/2 scale Europe, one continuous playing field (you can fly from UK airfields to West German targets or vice versa), and there are 'unfilled' areas that are accessible but don't have anything to shoot (a squad I play with recently went to the Swiss alps and parachuted down to them finishing in an apparently disastrous landing attempt).
Player-driven High Commands with all the good and bad that can imply.
Relative to the air game, you have specific fields you can fly from which are known to the enemy so you have to be careful, a naval game that includes patrol boats, freighters and destroyers as potential targets (but they are human-driven so watch yourself), lots of ground targets (tanks and trucks and AA guns and AT guns and infantry), and a strategic bombing campaign that affects supply, including equipment going to the front which could include your own planes!
Several of the more organized squads (BE speak for guilds) plan out missions with similar detail, although the fuel issues are a bit fudged IMO.
The game requires a high-end PC or Mac, no console version (constant updates so it's not exactly static).
There is a dark side to the fab, highlighted in that good ol' RPG Cyberpunk and of course with more flair in The Diamond Age, namely-
-people making weapon systems with these things.
Imagine if the Sunni/Baathist/aQ types could fab high quality gun tubes or missile parts- a lot more Strykers would be dead.
The chaos inherent in the release of unlimited fab powers was a major element in both these futures.
And of course there is the dark Ogre future in which the fabs are controlled by nuclear-armed AI tanks, kind of Colossus with treads and an attitude.
The logistics of war might more closely resemble a Command and Conquer game then the age-old 'make what you fight with, bring it with you', but with a dizzying design and counterdesign fight measured in hours rather then months or years.
On a more mundane level, I expect a lot more accidents due to poor QA of 'homemade' items. Ultimately a condition will be placed on most insurance policies that if it is not UL-rated any losses incurred by using home/garage fabbed appliances and gizmos will not be covered.
I mean seriously, do you trust the average person to make a toaster that won't explode?
On the other hand, we could really see a rebirth of American cottage industrialism. Just consider all those car customization shops out there, then apply that to all manner of consumer products. Could be good.
The only way to avoid losing is to kick their ass before they kick yours.
By the time passivity has you in the Warsaw ghetto, it's too late.
Not a single one of you talked about the REAL energy altering systemic change mankind has brought to the table, and that is albedo.
The reflectivity from all of that urbanization is pouring huge amounts of energy right back into the atmosphere that otherwise would have been absorbed.
Anyone who lives in a flyover state in a large metropolitan area knows that storms end up going around the big towns unless they have a lot of energy.
I have a tough time accepting these simulations due to albedo not being a major factor.
I would say WWIIOL has a completely different model-
* Play up to get rank (and maintain account so you keep access to all your toys),
* Work within a large uberteam (Axis or Allies), each of which may have it's own tribes or clans (squads in WWIIOLspeak),
* Beat the snot out of the other uberteam,
* Players provide content as the 'puzzles' constantly change due to new equipment or new towns being included into the map, and different attack approaches mean even the same old towns are attacked in new ways from differing directions,
* And if the game gets boring, you can switch to air, ground or sea equipment of another nation and work your way up there.
There was an MCP Virgina and still is.
n
/ clearpath__plus__mcp/operating__environment.htm
Master Control Program has been around since 1958, and was the first commercial high language OS (written in Algol, the great granddaddy of C).
http://users.rcn.com/hwbingham/security.htm
MCP was the OS that ran Burroughs' mainframes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporatio
And it STILL is out there on the ClearPath systems.
http://www.unisys.com/products/clearpath__servers
MCP lives, and it likely processed some of your financials or government data.
We had a piece of equipment back in the 80s that supported remote hospitals, a Phoenix concentrator connected to a sync modem. The concentrator in the computer room was nicely chilled, but the Phoenix at the hospital was in a sweaty phone room with too much equipment. This datacomm equipment was on 24/7 and worked heavily.
I went to the remote site and was trying to figure out what was wrong. I opened up the Phoenix's front end and along the way touched the board. It was actually gooey, like asphalt on a melted street. The whole board was like that.
It ran successfully that way for three more years.
WWIIOL is a unique situation in that you have a developer-run outfit that deeply believes in it's vision and runs a tight enough ship to keep it afloat through the tough times.
Moose4 has it right, the players create content by running the virtual army organizations and attacking each other with different tactics and combinations of equipment. Since the terrain is immense and varied every attack is different even using the same tactics because the ground changes and situations change. And if you get bored with a certain nation's equipment or fighting style, you can simply switch over. And the Rats are constantly introducing new equipment and play changes. The replay value is immense.
The community has stuck by CRS during the tough times because they believe in the vision as well, and have an incredible level of access and direct communication with the developers. And enough of the vision has come true to keep most interested.
If the Rats were doing this for someone else this very unique game would not exist- I think that is the most important part of WWIIOL's phoenix story.
BTW, the reviewer is showing a bit of Axis bias and ahistorical expectation- the German tanks ARE suppossed to be fragile in 1940. If you expect to recreate the Tiger killer tank experience that will probably come with a later release, and even then the German High Command will have to decide to research for it, which might be affected by the strategic bombing campaign constantly going on.
The women players of WWIIOL are an absolutely essential component of both Allied and Axis teams. They are rarely the most uber players but several very top people do happen to be female.
More importantly, WWIIOL is a team game where a commander may be corraling 50-100 players at a time in a very chaotic environment. Several of the women generals really shine in this department, and are moving up the command chain as respected commanders. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a female side Commander-in-Chief running forces in the 1000s.
It doesn't have to be pretty shiny social interaction or l33t stuff for the women to show what they can do online.
World War II Online already has an immersive world oriented towards shooting people with ballistics/armor resolution, interaction between ground sea and air units, and 3000+ people in a single game world (1940 NW Europe, the largest game world in existence). Would have been nice to see some of that $6 million thrown towards a working model.
Likely they are going to get better eye candy (which is important for immersion in infantry battles) but the vehicles are not going to be right without serious serious work. And forget about interacting with fast moving choppers and jets.
This is why we shouldn't just cream the biosphere- who knows how many absolutely cool techs lurk under the rocks.
Actually the warhead count is estimated to be from 200-300. Refuel range of jet-delivered munitions can extend that range greatly.
I knew that UTD did Star Wars research and that it was gamma-related, so UTD has been into military research for a long time.
I've lived around the UTD area for over 25 years, it's strange to think of it as the birthplace of a new power source/weapons system.
Let's get something straight here- no airliner company or for-profit corporation or university/institute is going to research this alone. There isn't enough money or incentive. It takes the crazy whacky USA military industrial complex to get this done.
So when you are taking that three hour shuttlejet trip to catch the peace protest in Hiroshima, please remember where your life-enhancing toy came from before you whine.
Something my company has done since the 80s is write in performance guarantees into the contracts. Sales weasels are always trying to undersell needed capacity, but they want that bottom line percentage worse. So several times we got our contract and when the inevitable performance crisis comes, we got a free mainframe upgrade.
Make the weasels run on YOUR cage wheel.
In most of Cordwainer Smith's stories, the computers are all biological (typically rat tissue in a laminated substrate). Seems he didn't put much faith in electronics. But most of his stories are about some serious genetic engineering and the societal effects.
The value represented in the mainframe is not just the old code or scalability, it is a culture that prizes care, backwards-compatibility, and stability.
Don't get me wrong, mainframes are not for every situation. But network bigots haven't driven off the dinosaurs anymore then the dinos have eaten the small machines. Get the right tool for the right job.
And your economics don't work if the admin costs of an NoW gets out of control (which is likely given what happens to most shops).
Check out this paper about real-world TCO- the lizard ain't dead.
MCP was the second mainframe OS I learned (I am on my third). What you are describing is how Unisys took their proprietary A-series mainframe technology forward without having to incur the cost of the entire box. They just emulate it onto the backs of a Unix or WinNT/2K superserver.
Unisys was always big in banking and government. They still are.
I just loooooooove MCP. It is the greatest console environment ever. And the plain language commands and on-the-fly maintenance jobs typed in as syntax at the console is wonderful. And the logging, lord I still would love to have the logging facility in MVS, or any other platform for that matter.
What is really sad about the Unisys story is DMSII. The database package allowed you to do true online backups, no downtime or mirroring tricks, in the 1980s. They had it working on PC servers in the early 90's and could have taken the Oracle niche, but never saw the database as a strategic platform in it's own right.
WWIIOL's cheating problem is ameliorated by the fact that the company runs it's servers and doesn't have the server code out there. Nonetheless we do get speed hacks and the like.
The community has commanders in game that have the authority to take miscreants by the scruff of the neck and get their attention. Ultimately they can be kicked out.
Cheaters are deeply despised.
Personally I think the universe is recursive, i.e. the higher dimensions curve back into what we consider to be 4-D mass and exerts effects far beyond the relatively simple Newtonian gravity.
It's a side effect of the zero dimension, i.e. no length, width, depth or time, everything is connected.
You heard it here first.
Not to mention that model railroading got Disney to build Disneyland because he wanted a bigger train set then Ward Kimball, which forced him to do Wonderful World of Disney which drove more money which got him to create the ultimate fantasy layout DisneyWorld and a rather terrifying planned community, EPCOT.
Yep, model railroaders are scary.
Actually this one never made it to the movie theaters, but it is excellent. I never thought I would cheer a hardcore Labor guy, but Harry rules!
That Ace's Hardware link everybody connects to is a good overview of the IBM architecture and components, but frankly there are plenty of other machines that to my mind are mainframes as well.
Here is a definition that is as good as any, just keep in mind that there are plenty of other mainframes that do not have the IBM label on it.
Since everyone around here loves TCO arguments, here is the mainframe bid for cost-effective computing.
A general mainframe nerd site, with great links and how-tos.
Another good link site.
The dino web ring, a master compendium of 390-related sites.
Official IBMese for mainframes, with more sales power then you can shake an MS manager at.
The granddaddy of all user groups, SHARE kicks butt, defines system requirements to IBM, opposes UCITA, and changes your world more then any 5 computer gatherings you can mention. The members of this organization RUN your bank, credit card, hospital, government and corporate systems. Join the club.
And finally, you can run a mainframe on Linux or a Mac. Warning, IBM has very strict rules about their OS licensing, you are going into uncharted territory if you do ANYTHING remotely work-related with this. But you CAN run a mainframe emulator.
First, read this so you know my background.
I moved into computer operations management primarily to maintain control of my environment and earn a measly $1.00 more an hour to start. I had been under supervisors who made bad technical decisions in my judgement, and did not like the experience.
The job was hell on earth, and largely due to the nature of people who choose to do that job. This poster got it right, it's basically a haven for people who have the intelligence to do the job and the desire to hide out from a 'normal' job. We are not talking your team players here.
The 24x7 shifts mean job security, yeah, but also the constant wear and tear on nights and weekends meant anti-social behavior is reinforced amongst people who are self-selecting for it anyway.
The fact that I was one of them did not help as I wanted to be as lazy and non-team oriented as the rest of them but could not due to my position. I did not start out as a good leader type to begin with, and had to painfully learn the craft of training and stick and carrot with many ugly lessons learned the hard way.
One of the biggest problems we had was that we could not seriously threaten termination for anything but the most grevious of errors due to the lack of suitable replacements. The systems we run HAVE to run successfully 24x7, no exceptions period. So you cannot just plug in any dweeb with six months of VB/networking at the local community college. So training means standing over them to make sure the processes get done without failure, and takes overtime and care to make sure the mission critical stuff isn't destroyed.
Getting rational reasonable operators who were good and not insane was a difficult thing to accomplish. I literally had situations where bowling alley managers interviewed for me, and later I had to ask myself if I wouldn't have been better off hiring them instead of the jerk we got.
I am even now having to deal with the operator conundrum as a sysprog as some new guy screwed up our monthly database reorg apparently because he thinks he is a genius and understood his instructions without asking or calling.
The solution for our company re: replacement has been to outsource for new operators, try them out to see if they actually know what they are doing, and hire them if they work out.
There IS an operator advancement process at our company- select operators have made it into my systems area and others become Operations Analysts, doing similar work but more on an operationalized basis rather then systems. The Ops analysts are sharp sharp people and just as good as many of the sysprogs. So those posters who are concerned about ops being dead end should make sure there is a similar path before hiring on.
The whole experience was probably good for me as a human being as I am more likely to be sympathetic and understanding of both sides of the management and employee experience. But I am very very soured on ever BEING in ops management ever again and I would have to be very very hungry to ever consider it.
Most ex-ops people I work with feel the same way- it's kind of like helpdesking, it's a job and someone has to do it, but we aren't planning on doing it. And that is your opportunity to grab a job.