Replace z9 with HP? Probably not, depends a little what kind of applications. If you need more data processing than cpu power, nothing beats mainframes even today. Yes, nice, fast cpus can have a lot of cycles, nice raids can have fast access times but when it comes to processing massive amounts of data in a small (funny, smaller than most racks) box - good luck. The goal is to use the new system for massive data manipulation and batch processing, and as a feeder to dozens of satellite systems.
The trick, of course, is converting all the Cobol and JCL logic as well as the IMS, VSAM, and ISAM data into something Oracle can use;)
Let's not forget that the current system uses CICS heavily, and is world-wide so that every country has its own data store (which is true in many companies). This is nice, since it helps with uptime (downtime for the business is job processing and number crunching time for the mainframe). Replacing that with a single Oracle instance? Not quite the same.
Tandem is nice, but I still have to vote for VMS, in all of its incarnations - best OS and hardware combo ever.
Still in use, too BTW. Younger than Unix, better designed than the old HP and IBM iron, and more hacker resilient than a defense sat.
I don't work on them anymore, sadly, and my new company is IBM based. Kind of a shame - they are trying to replace a bunch of extremely busy Z9 mainframes with 2 HP Itanium systems. Somehow I don't think those shiny new(er) machines will handle the load that keeps several Z9s busy...
If by Japanese games you mean Final Fantasy, anything by Square Enix, and Devil May Cry? I'm ok with that:) I'm quite happy with Guitar Hero, Rockband, Oblivion, my huge pile of FPS games, GTA, race games, Halo, Assassin's Creed, etc.
As tired as I am of IT, I frequently do the same. When I was 16 I worked as a stock clerk at a stationary company for min wage.
WOW that was hard work. I even got a damaged shoulder (and incredibly limited worker's comp) from it.
IT is boring sometimes, and sure, I'd love to have a "better" job, but it's not bad, and it beats the heck out of most work!
My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers, and happy. My grandparents worked at any job they could get and were glad to have it. My parents were engineers and HATED it. I do IT and find it "not as great as I'd like", and sometimes on-call is a serious annoyance. I think the only conclusion I can draw from this is that I'm incredibly lucky to have the luxury of complaining about work. My grandparents frequently didn't know if they would even be able to feed their tiny family, and often went without food.
Compared to this, whining because I get the occasional call in the middle of the night seems retarded. OTOH, there are other things it would be nice to do.:)
Same here. Best advice I was ever given - learn to do your *second* favorite hobby for a living.
I'm also fatigued from 13 years in IT. I've lost the love of tech for tech's sake, so I moved into a more stable production-support role at a stable company. Fast-paced always broken stuff was fun at 20, but at 30 I like being able to leave on time nearly every day.
My hobbies are still intact, and I enjoy sharing them with my kids.
As for home computer tinkering? I went from Linux kernel hacking to owning Macs. LOL. I really want computers that just do the "thing" I got them for these days.
If Apple doesn't attempt to stop blatant illegal uses of its DRM, it won't be able to convince the media companies to use it.
I SERIOUSLY doubt that Apple cares about people converting formats, as long as they don't make a huge deal about it. If I were to buy it in the "non-drm" format, they don't care if I convert it to OGG, WAV, or WMA. If it's in the DRM format though, they are breaking *their* contract if they don't try to prevent it.
Why the heck is everyone so passionate about this? Like has been said a million times - if you don't like the RIAA/Apple/Microsoft/Etc, don't support them. Write and record your own music. Support local artists. Use a tape deck or some generic MP3 player.
As a long time opponent of homogeneous computing/infrastructure I think this is a great move. Any security conscious shop makes certain to balance the management benefits along with the heterogeneous benefits.
Sure, it's cute and cheap to run everything on any one platform, but like they always say "spread out or one grenade will get you all".
Well, I am all OSX at home and Linux at work (since getting rid of an EXTREMELY disappointing Vista install), and I have to agree - the XBOX 360 is probably the only good thing to come out of MS in years. I have 2 Elites and 2 of the white Premium versions, and none have had so much as a hiccup.
This is saying something, since two of them are in a kid's room. They are frequently piled up with dirty laundry, abused, and generally left on for days. Still, they have had no issues. One of the Premiums is actually from launch, and both Elites are from the Elite launch.
We (as a family) game about 20-25 hours a week, min. The Elite in the family area has been used for extremely long GH2/3/RockBand sets that went almost entire weekends.
Sorry, but not all of the Xbox 360s are crap - some actually work just fine, thank you. I wish I could say the same for the PS2, which I've had to replace 5 times now (before giving up).
My guess is they'd call it FireWire 3200, since they currently have "Firewire 400" and "Firewire 800". That's going off the spec here on the Apple page.
I haven't found too much use for my FW800 port... I just hope that I can find a sweet external drive for the FW3200;)
Vitamin D can also be gotten from quite a few sources, many of which are common in European diets... as well as among many other groups that live in the far northern regions. Inuit seem to do ok without the small benefit of very pale skin.
If you think self selection had nothing to do with it, explain Inuit to me, please? Northern tribes of Native Americans? They didn't end up blonde and white, nor red-haired and white. Theoretically we all diverged from largely similar stock, right? Aside from massive cultural differences, I don't see what would make a specific skin color that huge a difference between Northern Europe and North America.
Sorry, but I just don't see how there is a dramatic evolutionary need to be blonde in only one specific region of Northern Europe.
I'm going to say that it was 2 parts natural selection, 8 parts self-selection. It's just not that long a timeframe.
You are describing natural selection... the point of the article was that humans have been self-selecting traits that don't necessarily have anything to do with fitness. In fact, the pale skin is a major disadvantage in many situations, even in situ.
This is more a question of fashion than it is of fitness. For all we know, the lighter skin in the north became popular because "Throgdar the Mighty" beat the pulp out of a bunch of people, and he just happened to be into slightly lighter-skinned (than whatever was average at the time) women... so other wanna-be Throgdars aped his preference.
The same occurs now with Blondes, for example. There is no "fitness" criteria favoring blonde hair in the slightest. There is, however, an amazing societal bias towards it for whatever reason. Well, in the dark and middle ages it was harder to make your hair blonde - so therefore it became a genetic selection.
Let us also recall that physiological genocide is a pretty basic human trait - as soon as group 1 can find even a tiny physical difference between them and group 2 (we're brunettes, and the bad guys are blonde), they use that as a basis for extermination and targeting. Of course, that also means that they self-select within their own group to make certain that consistency is maintained. Even to go so far as to reject children who for some reason don't conform. Redheads, for example, have been rejected from certain clans because they didn't match up properly, so must have been the result of "improper breeding".
Europeans no more chose to evolve paler skin than polar bears did white, thick fur. I disagree - they very carefully bread for paler skin, despite the difficulties it caused. Look it up - "fairest of them all" etc. In fact, there was an article just a few days ago about the UK having to pull skin-lightening medications off the shelves due to the dangers. The view hasn't changed.
Skin color (and skin condition) were major selection criteria during the middle-ages in Europe. Nobody wanted people who were "different" than the ideal. On one end you get the Hapsburgs, on the other you get populations that are just very consistent in look.
I can certainly think of some areas where I could get a full charge while in traffic! Interesting idea... I wonder if the safety issues and the cost would outweigh the benefits?
Automotive companies have repeatedly stated that in order to "meet expectations" a car needs to travel roughly 300 miles per "fueling" and the "fueling" needs to take 5-10 minutes at most.
I think you hit the nail on the head - if they can get a charge down to under 10 minutes and the range up to 200+ miles, it will be quite popular.
Personally, I'd like to see some sort of inductive charger for batteries like this that I can use for a laptop. Rather than cabling everything up, you just rest your laptop on the mat within range for 10 minutes, and you're good to go.
Well, for my part, I use mainly Vim and edit/tpu for creating pages. I do some work with Eclipse, but in general I'd say 90% of my pages are done by hand.
No, they're not huge amazing apps or pages. Yes, they are important - things like SAP reports, system uptime reports, graphs, charts, metrics of all types. Stuff like that - mainly backoffice pages that I use to make management happy by giving them the data they want in easy ways.
So, for me, a pocket guide that I can toss next to my laptop for a few days while I'm writing one of these sites is helpful. I can find something in a few seconds, without having to question the veracity of the source (like with a general web query) or put up with tons of ads.
A difference engine is identical to a mainframe in that it is centralized;)
The basic cycle from main->mini->micro(pc) is always the same. Information has to be consistent, so it is centralized. It has to be available, so it ends up decentralized. The decentralization leads to inconsistency...
My vote has always been pro-terminals. Wireless, high-speed, pretty terminals, but definitely terminals. Of course, that's colored by 10 years supporting minicomputers and mainframes, and too much time fixing broken microcomputers:)
I note that he mentions there is a list of "browsers that support" any given tag, and some notes. If it actually has some of the quick workarounds for the different browsers, I'm so buying this book.
I hate setting up something, then spending hours looking up workarounds for some random tag or other on IE.
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I'd say 98 was the best version. XP is pretty good too.
The trick, of course, is converting all the Cobol and JCL logic as well as the IMS, VSAM, and ISAM data into something Oracle can use
Let's not forget that the current system uses CICS heavily, and is world-wide so that every country has its own data store (which is true in many companies). This is nice, since it helps with uptime (downtime for the business is job processing and number crunching time for the mainframe). Replacing that with a single Oracle instance? Not quite the same.
Tandem is nice, but I still have to vote for VMS, in all of its incarnations - best OS and hardware combo ever.
Still in use, too BTW. Younger than Unix, better designed than the old HP and IBM iron, and more hacker resilient than a defense sat.
I don't work on them anymore, sadly, and my new company is IBM based.
Kind of a shame - they are trying to replace a bunch of extremely busy Z9 mainframes with 2 HP Itanium systems. Somehow I don't think those shiny new(er) machines will handle the load that keeps several Z9s busy...
If by Japanese games you mean Final Fantasy, anything by Square Enix, and Devil May Cry? I'm ok with that :)
I'm quite happy with Guitar Hero, Rockband, Oblivion, my huge pile of FPS games, GTA, race games, Halo, Assassin's Creed, etc.
I really hope that isn't true. I have really enjoyed my 360, and while I was a big fan of the PS2, the PS3 just hasn't done it for me.
So, for now at least, I'm 360 all the way.
As tired as I am of IT, I frequently do the same. When I was 16 I worked as a stock clerk at a stationary company for min wage.
:)
WOW that was hard work. I even got a damaged shoulder (and incredibly limited worker's comp) from it.
IT is boring sometimes, and sure, I'd love to have a "better" job, but it's not bad, and it beats the heck out of most work!
My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers, and happy. My grandparents worked at any job they could get and were glad to have it. My parents were engineers and HATED it. I do IT and find it "not as great as I'd like", and sometimes on-call is a serious annoyance. I think the only conclusion I can draw from this is that I'm incredibly lucky to have the luxury of complaining about work. My grandparents frequently didn't know if they would even be able to feed their tiny family, and often went without food.
Compared to this, whining because I get the occasional call in the middle of the night seems retarded. OTOH, there are other things it would be nice to do.
Same here. Best advice I was ever given - learn to do your *second* favorite hobby for a living.
I'm also fatigued from 13 years in IT. I've lost the love of tech for tech's sake, so I moved into a more stable production-support role at a stable company. Fast-paced always broken stuff was fun at 20, but at 30 I like being able to leave on time nearly every day.
My hobbies are still intact, and I enjoy sharing them with my kids.
As for home computer tinkering? I went from Linux kernel hacking to owning Macs. LOL. I really want computers that just do the "thing" I got them for these days.
LOL! I totally hadn't thought of that, either! Good show :D
Finally an intelligent comment.
If Apple doesn't attempt to stop blatant illegal uses of its DRM, it won't be able to convince the media companies to use it.
I SERIOUSLY doubt that Apple cares about people converting formats, as long as they don't make a huge deal about it. If I were to buy it in the "non-drm" format, they don't care if I convert it to OGG, WAV, or WMA. If it's in the DRM format though, they are breaking *their* contract if they don't try to prevent it.
Why the heck is everyone so passionate about this? Like has been said a million times - if you don't like the RIAA/Apple/Microsoft/Etc, don't support them. Write and record your own music. Support local artists. Use a tape deck or some generic MP3 player.
Come off it people, this is LAME.
Just pointing this out as a Linux/Windows/Mac user:
The fact that the newest OSX installs and Linux installs aren't slow on my older machines would be...?
Microsoft designs sluggish, crappy operating systems. The hardware eventually gets to the point that they run ok.
As a long time opponent of homogeneous computing/infrastructure I think this is a great move. Any security conscious shop makes certain to balance the management benefits along with the heterogeneous benefits.
Sure, it's cute and cheap to run everything on any one platform, but like they always say "spread out or one grenade will get you all".
Shoppers are not commuters. Commuters have trains to catch. Shoppers are just killing time.
When I am trying to catch a train it wouldn't matter *who* was playing - if I miss my train and am late to work it'll matter a whole lot more.
Well, I am all OSX at home and Linux at work (since getting rid of an EXTREMELY disappointing Vista install), and I have to agree - the XBOX 360 is probably the only good thing to come out of MS in years. I have 2 Elites and 2 of the white Premium versions, and none have had so much as a hiccup.
This is saying something, since two of them are in a kid's room. They are frequently piled up with dirty laundry, abused, and generally left on for days. Still, they have had no issues. One of the Premiums is actually from launch, and both Elites are from the Elite launch.
We (as a family) game about 20-25 hours a week, min. The Elite in the family area has been used for extremely long GH2/3/RockBand sets that went almost entire weekends.
Sorry, but not all of the Xbox 360s are crap - some actually work just fine, thank you. I wish I could say the same for the PS2, which I've had to replace 5 times now (before giving up).
Oooooh - that drive is seriously lust-worthy :D
I see 3 of those 500GB models in that little rack replacing my current external FW-400 RAID in about 10 days...
My guess is they'd call it FireWire 3200, since they currently have "Firewire 400" and "Firewire 800". That's going off the spec here on the Apple page.
;)
I haven't found too much use for my FW800 port... I just hope that I can find a sweet external drive for the FW3200
Vitamin D can also be gotten from quite a few sources, many of which are common in European diets... as well as among many other groups that live in the far northern regions. Inuit seem to do ok without the small benefit of very pale skin.
If you think self selection had nothing to do with it, explain Inuit to me, please? Northern tribes of Native Americans? They didn't end up blonde and white, nor red-haired and white. Theoretically we all diverged from largely similar stock, right? Aside from massive cultural differences, I don't see what would make a specific skin color that huge a difference between Northern Europe and North America.
Sorry, but I just don't see how there is a dramatic evolutionary need to be blonde in only one specific region of Northern Europe.
I'm going to say that it was 2 parts natural selection, 8 parts self-selection. It's just not that long a timeframe.
I'm sure shielding would be required, of course. There are also heat issues and numerous other problems.
It is possible on a small scale near computers, like this mouse pad.
You are describing natural selection... the point of the article was that humans have been self-selecting traits that don't necessarily have anything to do with fitness. In fact, the pale skin is a major disadvantage in many situations, even in situ.
This is more a question of fashion than it is of fitness. For all we know, the lighter skin in the north became popular because "Throgdar the Mighty" beat the pulp out of a bunch of people, and he just happened to be into slightly lighter-skinned (than whatever was average at the time) women... so other wanna-be Throgdars aped his preference.
The same occurs now with Blondes, for example. There is no "fitness" criteria favoring blonde hair in the slightest. There is, however, an amazing societal bias towards it for whatever reason. Well, in the dark and middle ages it was harder to make your hair blonde - so therefore it became a genetic selection.
Let us also recall that physiological genocide is a pretty basic human trait - as soon as group 1 can find even a tiny physical difference between them and group 2 (we're brunettes, and the bad guys are blonde), they use that as a basis for extermination and targeting. Of course, that also means that they self-select within their own group to make certain that consistency is maintained. Even to go so far as to reject children who for some reason don't conform. Redheads, for example, have been rejected from certain clans because they didn't match up properly, so must have been the result of "improper breeding".
Skin color (and skin condition) were major selection criteria during the middle-ages in Europe. Nobody wanted people who were "different" than the ideal. On one end you get the Hapsburgs, on the other you get populations that are just very consistent in look.
I can certainly think of some areas where I could get a full charge while in traffic! Interesting idea... I wonder if the safety issues and the cost would outweigh the benefits?
Automotive companies have repeatedly stated that in order to "meet expectations" a car needs to travel roughly 300 miles per "fueling" and the "fueling" needs to take 5-10 minutes at most.
I think you hit the nail on the head - if they can get a charge down to under 10 minutes and the range up to 200+ miles, it will be quite popular.
Personally, I'd like to see some sort of inductive charger for batteries like this that I can use for a laptop. Rather than cabling everything up, you just rest your laptop on the mat within range for 10 minutes, and you're good to go.
Well, for my part, I use mainly Vim and edit/tpu for creating pages. I do some work with Eclipse, but in general I'd say 90% of my pages are done by hand.
No, they're not huge amazing apps or pages.
Yes, they are important - things like SAP reports, system uptime reports, graphs, charts, metrics of all types. Stuff like that - mainly backoffice pages that I use to make management happy by giving them the data they want in easy ways.
So, for me, a pocket guide that I can toss next to my laptop for a few days while I'm writing one of these sites is helpful. I can find something in a few seconds, without having to question the veracity of the source (like with a general web query) or put up with tons of ads.
A difference engine is identical to a mainframe in that it is centralized ;)
:)
The basic cycle from main->mini->micro(pc) is always the same. Information has to be consistent, so it is centralized. It has to be available, so it ends up decentralized. The decentralization leads to inconsistency...
My vote has always been pro-terminals. Wireless, high-speed, pretty terminals, but definitely terminals. Of course, that's colored by 10 years supporting minicomputers and mainframes, and too much time fixing broken microcomputers
I wish - that is hilarious and frighteningly true :D
I note that he mentions there is a list of "browsers that support" any given tag, and some notes. If it actually has some of the quick workarounds for the different browsers, I'm so buying this book.
I hate setting up something, then spending hours looking up workarounds for some random tag or other on IE.