Other partners? If IBM buys SCO, there won't be any other partners [that would sell the software]. The Monterey partners are IBM, SCO, Sequent, and Intel. IBM already owns Sequent and I don't think Intel has any plans to actually sell the OS themselves.
Re:What will become of the Monterey Alliance now?
on
Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 2
I don't think it'll hurt Monterey at all. From the start it was pretty obvious that Monterey was mostly an IBM project. I think IBM got the others involved just to grab some easy tech instead of doing it themselves.
Monterey is really just the next version of AIX. If there's anything in Monterey that IBM really needs SCO for, I expect IBM will simply buy SCO.
I expect that IBM will buy out SCO. SCO is already working with IBM on Monterey and IBM has a habit of buying out it's partners. IBM has already bought Sequent (the other partner in Monterey).
IBM is always buying other companies and with them jumping into Linux, I really expected them to buyout some one. Of course, I don't see any Linux company in particular that would make sense for IBM to purchase. Of course, making sense to me isn't a requirement for IBM....
SCO may be a good target for IBM. IBM has already bought their other Monterey partnet (Sequent) and IBM has track record of buying their partners.
Another datapoint: on the site there is a list of "anti-spammers that they won't send spam to". That list, at least, looks legit (I'm on it and a friend that does anti-spam stuff for an ISP has a lot of addresses on it).
This, of course, wouldn't be all that hard to fake, but it's a pretty big list and does (in my opinion) give some creditability to the whole thing.
The problem that I've run into is that you do the right thing by contacting the owner the of the ip address and get a rather clueless response like "That's not ours" (when you've already checked that they DO own the address) or (my favorite) "That couldn't have come from us, no one is in the office during those times....".
I don't think doing something really malicious would be cool, but something that's simply annoying to a clued admin, but would alert them to the fact they've got a real problem yet limit the damage from the unclued. The ideas I've had have been (assuming it's a Linux box) put a call to halt in the crontab or put on ipchains rules that keep things under control.
The POWER instruction set is actually not that different than PowerPC. You can compile something on any one type of RS/6000 and have it run on any other type. The reason for this is that there is set of instructions (called common) that will run on POWER, POWER2, PowerPC, POWER3, and everything else they've put in the RS/6000.
I think the biggest problem with making a working non-AIX flavor of *nix on these older RS/6000s is the lack of documentation on the firmware.
I don't find a well written Perl progam any less messy than a Python program. Again, if it's well written, it's well written. The language has little to do with it. I'll grant you that regular expression that looks like line noise isn't going to be pretty, but that sort of regexp should only be there if it's really needed.
I return to large perl projects with no problems at all.... Which is why I maintain that writing managable code is the burden of the programmer and not the language.
I don't feel that Perl inflicts any more of a chore for design than Python. I'll grant that if you are a real OO purist, Perl and C++ aren't for you.
Obsfuscated Perl is the fault of the programmer, not the language. You can write gross code in any language. I agree that some languages do make it easier to write obsfuscated code, but ultimately the programmer is still one to blame.
I find languages that try to enforce style very irritating. The use of white space in Python, for example, really turns me off to that language.
Re:Competing with pretty good products
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
I don't think it's true that MySQL's only advantage is price. The problems I've seen (at least with Oracle, DB/2, and Sybase) is that they have a lot of overhead. They consume a lot of memory for openers. If you really don't need things like transactions, something like MySQL is probably going to be faster.
In my opinion, MySQL has it's place and Oracle has it's place. It's simply a matter of using the right tool for the job.
The RS/6000s aren't that expensive. A Power3 based 44P Model 170 lists at around $10,000. A bit more than the typical PC, but no need to keep it under lock and key.
The Power4 chip is expected to show up in similar models and, I would expect, in similar price ranges.
As a side note, you can use vmtune under AIX to control the percentage of free memory that is used for file cache. The default is 80%. Not exactly what you want (it's system wide, not on a filesystem by filesystem basis), but it does give you some control.
Stuff like moving around paging is LVM. You're moving a logical volume, that lv can contain different things like JFS or paging.
I'm really hoping they'll port the whole LVM at some point. One of the things I like most about AIX is the LVM -- being able to do stuff like increase the size of the live filesystem is wonderful (that's sort of a LVM/JFS tag team).
Well, one example is that there is a load balancing system that funnels processes to the least loaded node. Seti user cranks up his job on all the nodes, and now they all look equally loaded..... blows the load balancing nicely.
There's also daemons that come in overnight and run researchers code on idle CPUs.... with seti running, there is no idle CPU.....
No, they haven't paid for it. At least at the university I work for, the network infrastructure is NOT covered by student fees. If we actually could charge them in a manner similar to an ISP, we could offer MUCH better service.
As it stands now, the network in the dorms is rather heavily subsidized by money from other places -- like research grants.
It's the bandwidth. Usenet doesn't suck down much bandwidth and the admin has control over it. If alt.binaries.* starts taking up too much space, the admin can throttle it.
I don't care what my users do as long as they don't prevent other users from doing what they do. If one use is directly related to what the university actually does (ie, it's for a class or research), it's going to get win over something that is unrelated.
Claiming that this is some kind of censorship is like claiming filesystem quotas are some form of censorship (which I've had users claim).
I think making it a free speech issue is reading far too much into it. I'm a sysadmin at a university and we're always facing things like folks wasting CPU by running Seti@home on public machines, or wasting bandwidth putting up their porn web page, etc.
We don't stop these due to some objection to the content, we stop them because they are impeding the use of the machines/network for what they were purchased for -- the academic mission of the university. If they want to run Seti on their own PC, that's fine, but we're going to kill it if we see it on a multi-user *nix box.
If some one has a high bandwidth use that is a real part of a class or research, we do everything we can to support that.
The early OS/2 (prior to 2.0) was a Microsoft product, not an IBM product.
When OS/2 2.0 came out it was, in my opinion, much superior to the current MS offerings (Win 3). The lack of success had much more to do with the Microsoft hype (and IBM not marketing it very well) than any weakness in OS/2.
I remember when 2.0 came out and the MS hype machine jumped in. They told everyone to wait for Win95 because OS/2 required too much memory to run (OS/2 didn't run very well on machines with less than 8MB, this was in the days that 4MB was the common amount of memory). MS made the claim that their product wouldn't require you to upgrade your machine, etc.... Well, Win95 finally came out and guess how well it ran on a 4MB machine (or an 8MB machine for that matter).
I consider being hard for the lusers to type a feature..... I don't use Lovecraftian names for machines lusers have any business using. For those we stick something very luserish: colors. They can handle green, orange, blue, teal, etc... Admittedly, colors are pretty limited since you soon run out (unless you swerve back into the non-luserfriendly ones like magenta), but so far that's not been a problem.
Predicting the next move isn't really what chess players at this level count on. You play assuming that your opponent will make the best move in reply.
It's true that prediction can be a factor in opening preparation at the Gradmaster level, but this game is well out of the opening.
The problem is that Go has such a larger move tree. Why bother with chess? Because it isn't solved yet, but has a smaller tree than Go... Once chess is solved, I would expect Go to be the next challenge.
It's not like this is a new plan cooked up by Microsoft. Many Unix vendors are already doing similar things. Sun, SGI, and IBM give big discounts to universities on their Unix products. IBM is especially prone to giving away a lot of stuff.
I don't see Microsoft getting very far because the others will simply do similar things. Universities live on freebies and discounts.
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Other partners? If IBM buys SCO, there won't be any other partners [that would sell the software]. The Monterey partners are IBM, SCO, Sequent, and Intel. IBM already owns Sequent and I don't think Intel has any plans to actually sell the OS themselves.
I don't think it'll hurt Monterey at all. From the start it was pretty obvious that Monterey was mostly an IBM project. I think IBM got the others involved just to grab some easy tech instead of doing it themselves.
Monterey is really just the next version of AIX. If there's anything in Monterey that IBM really needs SCO for, I expect IBM will simply buy SCO.
I expect that IBM will buy out SCO. SCO is already working with IBM on Monterey and IBM has a habit of buying out it's partners. IBM has already bought Sequent (the other partner in Monterey).
IBM is always buying other companies and with them jumping into Linux, I really expected them to buyout some one. Of course, I don't see any Linux company in particular that would make sense for IBM to purchase. Of course, making sense to me isn't a requirement for IBM....
SCO may be a good target for IBM. IBM has already bought their other Monterey partnet (Sequent) and IBM has track record of buying their partners.
Another datapoint: on the site there is a list of "anti-spammers that they won't send spam to". That list, at least, looks legit (I'm on it and a friend that does anti-spam stuff for an ISP has a lot of addresses on it).
This, of course, wouldn't be all that hard to fake, but it's a pretty big list and does (in my opinion) give some creditability to the whole thing.
The problem that I've run into is that you do the right thing by contacting the owner the of the ip address and get a rather clueless response like "That's not ours" (when you've already checked that they DO own the address) or (my favorite) "That couldn't have come from us, no one is in the office during those times....".
I don't think doing something really malicious would be cool, but something that's simply annoying to a clued admin, but would alert them to the fact they've got a real problem yet limit the damage from the unclued. The ideas I've had have been (assuming it's a Linux box) put a call to halt in the crontab or put on ipchains rules that keep things under control.
The POWER instruction set is actually not that different than PowerPC. You can compile something on any one type of RS/6000 and have it run on any other type. The reason for this is that there is set of instructions (called common) that will run on POWER, POWER2, PowerPC, POWER3, and everything else they've put in the RS/6000.
I think the biggest problem with making a working non-AIX flavor of *nix on these older RS/6000s is the lack of documentation on the firmware.
I don't find 4.3 to be slower than previous versions of AIX 4. In fact, I'm seeing the best performance out of 4.3.3 these days.
I don't find a well written Perl progam any less messy than a Python program. Again, if it's well written, it's well written. The language has little to do with it. I'll grant you that regular expression that looks like line noise isn't going to be pretty, but that sort of regexp should only be there if it's really needed.
I return to large perl projects with no problems at all.... Which is why I maintain that writing managable code is the burden of the programmer and not the language.
I don't feel that Perl inflicts any more of a chore for design than Python. I'll grant that if you are a real OO purist, Perl and C++ aren't for you.
Obsfuscated Perl is the fault of the programmer, not the language. You can write gross code in any language. I agree that some languages do make it easier to write obsfuscated code, but ultimately the programmer is still one to blame.
I find languages that try to enforce style very irritating. The use of white space in Python, for example, really turns me off to that language.
I don't think it's true that MySQL's only advantage is price. The problems I've seen (at least with Oracle, DB/2, and Sybase) is that they have a lot of overhead. They consume a lot of memory for openers. If you really don't need things like transactions, something like MySQL is probably going to be faster.
In my opinion, MySQL has it's place and Oracle has it's place. It's simply a matter of using the right tool for the job.
Yes, the current switch adapter is a PCI card. There is also a microchannel version since there's still a lot of MCA based nodes out there.
However, IBM has said that the PCI bus is too limiting and the next generation switch will have a special interface (probably right on the CPU bus).
The RS/6000s aren't that expensive. A Power3 based 44P Model 170 lists at around $10,000. A bit more than the typical PC, but no need to keep it under lock and key.
The Power4 chip is expected to show up in similar models and, I would expect, in similar price ranges.
As a side note, you can use vmtune under AIX to control the percentage of free memory that is used for file cache. The default is 80%. Not exactly what you want (it's system wide, not on a filesystem by filesystem basis), but it does give you some control.
Stuff like moving around paging is LVM. You're moving a logical volume, that lv can contain different things like JFS or paging.
I'm really hoping they'll port the whole LVM at some point. One of the things I like most about AIX is the LVM -- being able to do stuff like increase the size of the live filesystem is wonderful (that's sort of a LVM/JFS tag team).
Well, one example is that there is a load balancing system that funnels processes to the least loaded node. Seti user cranks up his job on all the nodes, and now they all look equally loaded..... blows the load balancing nicely.
There's also daemons that come in overnight and run researchers code on idle CPUs.... with seti running, there is no idle CPU.....
"near idle" does not equal "not wasting CPU"
No, they haven't paid for it. At least at the university I work for, the network infrastructure is NOT covered by student fees. If we actually could charge them in a manner similar to an ISP, we could offer MUCH better service.
As it stands now, the network in the dorms is rather heavily subsidized by money from other places -- like research grants.
It's the bandwidth. Usenet doesn't suck down much bandwidth and the admin has control over it. If alt.binaries.* starts taking up too much space, the admin can throttle it.
I don't care what my users do as long as they don't prevent other users from doing what they do. If one use is directly related to what the university actually does (ie, it's for a class or research), it's going to get win over something that is unrelated.
Claiming that this is some kind of censorship is like claiming filesystem quotas are some form of censorship (which I've had users claim).
I think making it a free speech issue is reading far too much into it. I'm a sysadmin at a university and we're always facing things like folks wasting CPU by running Seti@home on public machines, or wasting bandwidth putting up their porn web page, etc.
We don't stop these due to some objection to the content, we stop them because they are impeding the use of the machines/network for what they were purchased for -- the academic mission of the university. If they want to run Seti on their own PC, that's fine, but we're going to kill it if we see it on a multi-user *nix box.
If some one has a high bandwidth use that is a real part of a class or research, we do everything we can to support that.
The early OS/2 (prior to 2.0) was a Microsoft product, not an IBM product.
When OS/2 2.0 came out it was, in my opinion, much superior to the current MS offerings (Win 3). The lack of success had much more to do with the Microsoft hype (and IBM not marketing it very well) than any weakness in OS/2.
I remember when 2.0 came out and the MS hype machine jumped in. They told everyone to wait for Win95 because OS/2 required too much memory to run (OS/2 didn't run very well on machines with less than 8MB, this was in the days that 4MB was the common amount of memory). MS made the claim that their product wouldn't require you to upgrade your machine, etc.... Well, Win95 finally came out and guess how well it ran on a 4MB machine (or an 8MB machine for that matter).
I consider being hard for the lusers to type a feature..... I don't use Lovecraftian names for machines lusers have any business using. For those we stick something very luserish: colors. They can handle green, orange, blue, teal, etc...
Admittedly, colors are pretty limited since you soon run out (unless you swerve back into the non-luserfriendly ones like magenta), but so far that's not been a problem.
Then you can move onto Lovecraft's mythology... Cthulhu, hastur, yog-sothoth, and so on.
Predicting the next move isn't really what chess players at this level count on. You play assuming that your opponent will make the best move in reply.
It's true that prediction can be a factor in opening preparation at the Gradmaster level, but this game is well out of the opening.
The problem is that Go has such a larger move tree. Why bother with chess? Because it isn't solved yet, but has a smaller tree than Go... Once chess is solved, I would expect Go to be the next challenge.
It's not like this is a new plan cooked up by Microsoft. Many Unix vendors are already doing similar things. Sun, SGI, and IBM give big discounts to universities on their Unix products. IBM is especially prone to giving away a lot of stuff.
I don't see Microsoft getting very far because the others will simply do similar things. Universities live on freebies and discounts.