They're probably computing cost over the expected lifetime.
Combine IT salary for 3-5 years, power over 3-5 years, etc. etc. and that number makes sense.
This is the crux of IBM's virtualizations ads; you can get rid of admins and save big bucks. Also electricity and floor space, but you have to throw salaries in there to come up with the savings they suggest.
Why does it take less IT salary as suggested above for 4000 virtual Linux servers on a mainframe than with 4000 Linux servers?
typical small thinking.you think a project like this is cheap or easy? imagine the risk the company setting this up is taking, if anything goes with the system?
No risk, except to the taxpayer, who will fund whatever bright ideas the FAA has.
The IRS and FBI are a couple of good mentions of massive software system development failures, but the FAA itself has been a leading contender for failure all along. Every failure of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars is replaced with "never mind, that was outdated by the time we pulled the plug anyway, Project *NextGen* will be much better."
"We're putting out bids now, to the same people that just blew the last one."
Thousands of companies also depend on trucks to haul freight, and those trucks might do a very good job at hauling freight in their own context, but that doesn't make those trucks a freight train.:-)
It would if they're all moving together. Oh wait, I guess with freight trucks that would be convoy.:)
Multiple servers, I agree. But one server for hundreds of users and thousands of jobs, that's a mainframe, even if the AS/400 does scale down to PC server size. It also scales up to mainframe size.
This was modded as informative, but many multi-billion dollar corporations run on the AS/400. When you have hundreds of users and thousands of jobs running against terabytes of online storage, and even run Websphere at the same time, you have to tip your hat and call a midrange a mainframe.
"but most are overloaded with jargon like upstream/downstream, nightly builds, and so forth"
Actually, the answer is put quotes around the phrase and put into Google and click on Google Search. If enough doesn't jump out at you where it's obvious that you can click and read enough to explain it to you, try what is "nightly builds" or other question phrases with it.
You won't stop seeing new jargon. I still do this on a regular basis.
Also, beyond jargon, I do the same thing for how to questions. If I asked what is the best way to join an open source project, the results will include threads like this one from/.
I have lots of how to questions. The more you do, the more questions you have.
But someone has already asked, and the answers are on the internet, waiting.
Which is a food? A) pink B) car C) Britney Spears D) Hamburger
Because it only takes at most 4 tries to "crack" it.
From the summary, so new alternatives (image recognition) are being created. This, of course, seems breakable as well --
Current CAPTCHA requirements of recognizing characters in light pastels and embossed over backgrounds, in twisted shapes and topsy turvy, is next to to the ultimate OCR (doctor's handwriting being the ultimate), and yet that feat is tossed off as "seems breakable".
Is it currently breakable, or just "seems breakable", and hasn't everything about AI "seemed" so doable for the last few decades?
I would be glad for us to have the OCR technology that is so "seemingly" simple which would require us to ratchet up the difficulty level of CAPTCHA's.
As for the payment of small amounts of money to people with little money and access to the internet, being people they will be able to recognize CAPTCHA's that filter in just that, people. The whole point of these people is to post url's that own Windoze PC's when the misleading link is clicked.
Delete their spam and ban them by email domain (or specific if a legitimate ISP domain) and IP address, and after awhile you will rarely see any of them again.
It helps to get a head start by banning email domains that aren't ISP domains like.info.
All in all, this slashdot exercise should be scheduled in the future with a title like, "Now that we have hand printed character recognition in colorful poses within busy backgrounds, what do we shoot for next in CAPTCHA's?"
I think it's appropriate for US companies to send jobs over to India and China for cheap labor and then find out that the cheap labor isn't going to buy their products, nor the Anericans whose jobs were offshored who are usually making much less.
The more they do it, the less customers they will have.
How many software assurance accounts are active for Windows XP Home or Pro? If I'm not mistaken, every one of those would provide an upgrade license to some flavor of Vista. That in turn would, I'd think, be counted as a "Vista license sold."
yeah, I posted the same thing in the last thread. This is immediate across the board "sales" for all desktops on Software Assurance, just by edict. It's what Software Assurance was supposed to provide, and now does. There's your huge source of beginning numbers from Microsoft for Vista, which is much more of an impact on the numbers than actual sales of PC's since Vista was released.
But as I also posted, this isn't the biggest startup sales of an OS in history, it's the slowest upgrade of an OS ever promised and paid for.
It's important to remember that most of Microsoft's Windows sales are to OEM and corporate customers, not directly to end-users via retail or online sales.
In fact, wouldn't they automatically count everyone on the Software Assurance plan, which they tried to make every corporate customer?
That's not the fastest OS sales in history, that's the latest delivery of a paid for upgrade in history.
But, Cringley doesn't seem to get this and is blaming LEAN for what they are doing -
He's just citing the name of what IBM calls its program. If you read the posts from IBM'ers, they refer to it that way internally. It's an IBM program being referred to, however much or little it resembles the actual process.
But they are pulling an SCO (and was part of SCO pulling an SCO). They don't want to resolve an alleged problem, they want to scare the bejesus out of corporations from switching to Linux and other open source software.
Even any "licensing" deals they arrange with corporations won't be for the money, it's to scare other corporations.
The money is in maintaining their monopoly. All they can hope to do to keep it is scare corporations away from open source software. Vaguely concealed threats of lawsuits is all they have left.
They're doing what they can while the Bush administration, which gave them a sweetheart walkaway from the Netscape suit, is still around.
If you have evidence, show it. If it's infringing, it'll be removed. But you don't want to. You want to spread FUD to generate $$$.
Right. In my opinion, this will push many organizations worldwide to go ahead and go to Linux sooner instead of just considering it. Better not to be a Microsoft customer at all than one who will be asked for audits that show how much alleged patent infringing open source software they have installed.
Sure, Microsoft can go after non-customers but most of the world will give them a one fingered salute.
IBM seems to be using Cringley's number problem as a red herring agaist the existence of coming layoffs.
Right. They limited it by comparing to current US regulars (130,000), but Cringely was talking worldwide and said it is also impacting contractors. And he also acknowledged it's not imminent, but a steadily continuing action.
Anyone should know the numbers are only speculation based on whatever can be gleaned from IBM's actions. It is a not unreasonable number as a percentage of worldwide employment to attempt to either downsize off of nonprofitable contracts or move the work to India and the like.
Also anyone who has read the IBM'ers comments to Cringely's posts these past two weeks would not see very many disagreements from people who are seeing firsthand what IBM ambiguously denies.
But I have just ended up maintaining some code written in your country nearly two decades ago.
Thanks for your viewpoint from India. I also work on twenty year old business code, at least portions of it are. And I have for a long time now, almost twenty years.:) But at different places, different times.
It is not important how old the code is. What is important is whether a business depends on it. And it takes a great deal of intelligence to absorb the workings of such code and modify it without breaking it. Not many people have that ability to handle it. That's why there is a worldwide shortage of programmers. You will see from most of these posts that they are server admins or other types of IT people, very rarely a programmer, who complain of losing their job.
The complaints are not so much about other people "taking our jobs", but corporations sending work off for prices we cannot compete on. We are complaining about a race to third world wages. There are certain types of Americans who think this raises everyone's boat, while the rest of us see ours sinking.
In the end it is all about trade balance. If the money spent there is spent back here to buy American goods and services, and vice versa, then it is beneficial to many. But of course rarely does that happen. Usually there is a rather large trade imbalance, and again some see that as self correcting. For example, they see the higher IT wages there that you describe as part of that correction. But I think more damage is done than can be corrected.
As for the negative comments, you have to realize some are young, some subscribe to the universal thought that I am better because others are worse, some are just nasty people, and the rest are understandably bitter when their jobs are sent overseas to make rich men richer. It is not as bad as the caste system, but bad for here nonetheless.
I missed the thing about adding words to the English language. If useful to many, it becomes part of the language. If useful to a few, such as just in India, it becomes a dialect such as a Caribbean dialect, where it sounds like English but we're not sure what they're saying.:)
In the end we won't have the money to buy anything from these companies sending the jobs overseas, so that will be the correction. But like I say, more damage will be done than can be corrected.
Thanks again for your insight. It's good to see the insight from someone who has always known programming is for them.
I banned non-ARIN IP address ranges because the content of my site on missing US women had not been of interest outside North America up until now. The only visits I got from outside North America were bot scripts and scoundrels.
Given the world wide programming community interest in Reiser's case, and especially with the Russian roots of Nina, I will drop the worldwide IP range bans for awhile. Thanks for reminding me about that.
Neighbors noted it was gone, police noted they found it with surveillance of him, and he had it parked a walking distance away with crime books on evidence in it, still saturated with water, and the front seat removed.
To get rid of it would raise more questions than a missing front seat, and he didn't have much money to start with, which is the reason Nina disappeared, to be able to do some of the things you suggest in just getting rid of it.
He found the BASIC flood-fill routine to be buggy and quite poor, and set about to rewrite it.
I remember at Z-Soft in 1986 where Z-Soft was licensing a small Windows version of PC Paintbrush to Microsoft, a comment from Z-Soft founder getting off an exasperating phone call with someone at Microsoft.
"I could just write a flood fill routine for them if that's what it takes."
That would have been same time period the clock was being written too. Not sure if flood fill code had to be sent to them or not to get it resolved.:)
Slashdot Mirror
They're probably computing cost over the expected lifetime.
Combine IT salary for 3-5 years, power over 3-5 years, etc. etc. and that number makes sense.
This is the crux of IBM's virtualizations ads; you can get rid of admins and save big bucks. Also electricity and floor space, but you have to throw salaries in there to come up with the savings they suggest.
Why does it take less IT salary as suggested above for 4000 virtual Linux servers on a mainframe than with 4000 Linux servers?
rd
typical small thinking.you think a project like this is cheap or easy? imagine the risk the company setting this up is taking, if anything goes with the system?
No risk, except to the taxpayer, who will fund whatever bright ideas the FAA has.
The IRS and FBI are a couple of good mentions of massive software system development failures, but the FAA itself has been a leading contender for failure all along. Every failure of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars is replaced with "never mind, that was outdated by the time we pulled the plug anyway, Project *NextGen* will be much better."
"We're putting out bids now, to the same people that just blew the last one."
And the one before that.
rd
and here I thought our previous best source of intel, curveball, was nutty.
rd
Did they send a moose in with the squirrel?
Oh, wait a minute. That was to spy on Boris and Natasha.
Never mind.
Thousands of companies also depend on trucks to haul freight, and those trucks might do a very good job at hauling freight in their own context, but that doesn't make those trucks a freight train. :-)
:)
It would if they're all moving together. Oh wait, I guess with freight trucks that would be convoy.
Multiple servers, I agree. But one server for hundreds of users and thousands of jobs, that's a mainframe, even if the AS/400 does scale down to PC server size. It also scales up to mainframe size.
rd
FYI...AS/400 is NOT a mainframe
This was modded as informative, but many multi-billion dollar corporations run on the AS/400. When you have hundreds of users and thousands of jobs running against terabytes of online storage, and even run Websphere at the same time, you have to tip your hat and call a midrange a mainframe.
rd
"but most are overloaded with jargon like upstream/downstream, nightly builds, and so forth"
/.
Actually, the answer is put quotes around the phrase and put into Google and click on Google Search. If enough doesn't jump out at you where it's obvious that you can click and read enough to explain it to you, try what is "nightly builds" or other question phrases with it.
You won't stop seeing new jargon. I still do this on a regular basis.
Also, beyond jargon, I do the same thing for how to questions. If I asked what is the best way to join an open source project, the results will include threads like this one from
I have lots of how to questions. The more you do, the more questions you have.
But someone has already asked, and the answers are on the internet, waiting.
rd
Which is a food?
.info.
A) pink
B) car
C) Britney Spears
D) Hamburger
Because it only takes at most 4 tries to "crack" it.
From the summary, so new alternatives (image recognition) are being created. This, of course, seems breakable as well --
Current CAPTCHA requirements of recognizing characters in light pastels and embossed over backgrounds, in twisted shapes and topsy turvy, is next to to the ultimate OCR (doctor's handwriting being the ultimate), and yet that feat is tossed off as "seems breakable".
Is it currently breakable, or just "seems breakable", and hasn't everything about AI "seemed" so doable for the last few decades?
I would be glad for us to have the OCR technology that is so "seemingly" simple which would require us to ratchet up the difficulty level of CAPTCHA's.
As for the payment of small amounts of money to people with little money and access to the internet, being people they will be able to recognize CAPTCHA's that filter in just that, people. The whole point of these people is to post url's that own Windoze PC's when the misleading link is clicked.
Delete their spam and ban them by email domain (or specific if a legitimate ISP domain) and IP address, and after awhile you will rarely see any of them again.
It helps to get a head start by banning email domains that aren't ISP domains like
All in all, this slashdot exercise should be scheduled in the future with a title like, "Now that we have hand printed character recognition in colorful poses within busy backgrounds, what do we shoot for next in CAPTCHA's?"
And a summary without "seems easy enough".
rd
I have some nasty comments about this, but first let me switch to AC.
I think it's appropriate for US companies to send jobs over to India and China for cheap labor and then find out that the cheap labor isn't going to buy their products, nor the Anericans whose jobs were offshored who are usually making much less.
The more they do it, the less customers they will have.
rd
As a Microsoft shareholder, I don't like this. What a waste of money! I mean, paying 3 billion would be high, but 6 billion?
When I saw that aQuantive and its 2800 employees are located in Seattle, I knew why Gates paid the huge premium for the company.
rd
Software Assurance.
How many software assurance accounts are active for Windows XP Home or Pro? If I'm not mistaken, every one of those would provide an upgrade license to some flavor of Vista. That in turn would, I'd think, be counted as a "Vista license sold."
yeah, I posted the same thing in the last thread. This is immediate across the board "sales" for all desktops on Software Assurance, just by edict. It's what Software Assurance was supposed to provide, and now does. There's your huge source of beginning numbers from Microsoft for Vista, which is much more of an impact on the numbers than actual sales of PC's since Vista was released.
But as I also posted, this isn't the biggest startup sales of an OS in history, it's the slowest upgrade of an OS ever promised and paid for.
Software Assurance. 40 million served, finally.
rd
It's important to remember that most of Microsoft's Windows sales are to OEM and corporate customers, not directly to end-users via retail or online sales.
In fact, wouldn't they automatically count everyone on the Software Assurance plan, which they tried to make every corporate customer?
That's not the fastest OS sales in history, that's the latest delivery of a paid for upgrade in history.
rd
But, Cringley doesn't seem to get this and is blaming LEAN for what they are doing -
He's just citing the name of what IBM calls its program. If you read the posts from IBM'ers, they refer to it that way internally. It's an IBM program being referred to, however much or little it resembles the actual process.
rd
Don't pull a SCO.
But they are pulling an SCO (and was part of SCO pulling an SCO). They don't want to resolve an alleged problem, they want to scare the bejesus out of corporations from switching to Linux and other open source software.
Even any "licensing" deals they arrange with corporations won't be for the money, it's to scare other corporations.
The money is in maintaining their monopoly. All they can hope to do to keep it is scare corporations away from open source software. Vaguely concealed threats of lawsuits is all they have left.
They're doing what they can while the Bush administration, which gave them a sweetheart walkaway from the Netscape suit, is still around.
rd
If you have evidence, show it. If it's infringing, it'll be removed. But you don't want to. You want to spread FUD to generate $$$.
Right. In my opinion, this will push many organizations worldwide to go ahead and go to Linux sooner instead of just considering it. Better not to be a Microsoft customer at all than one who will be asked for audits that show how much alleged patent infringing open source software they have installed.
Sure, Microsoft can go after non-customers but most of the world will give them a one fingered salute.
rd
IBM seems to be using Cringley's number problem as a red herring agaist the existence of coming layoffs.
Right. They limited it by comparing to current US regulars (130,000), but Cringely was talking worldwide and said it is also impacting contractors. And he also acknowledged it's not imminent, but a steadily continuing action.
Anyone should know the numbers are only speculation based on whatever can be gleaned from IBM's actions. It is a not unreasonable number as a percentage of worldwide employment to attempt to either downsize off of nonprofitable contracts or move the work to India and the like.
Also anyone who has read the IBM'ers comments to Cringely's posts these past two weeks would not see very many disagreements from people who are seeing firsthand what IBM ambiguously denies.
rd
In one paragraph, I could increase your productivity 10 times based upon your comments about legacy code.
I hope you can read code better than you can read posts, because your reading comprehension sucks.
rd
But I have just ended up maintaining some code written in your country nearly two decades ago.
:) But at different places, different times.
:)
Thanks for your viewpoint from India. I also work on twenty year old business code, at least portions of it are. And I have for a long time now, almost twenty years.
It is not important how old the code is. What is important is whether a business depends on it. And it takes a great deal of intelligence to absorb the workings of such code and modify it without breaking it. Not many people have that ability to handle it. That's why there is a worldwide shortage of programmers. You will see from most of these posts that they are server admins or other types of IT people, very rarely a programmer, who complain of losing their job.
The complaints are not so much about other people "taking our jobs", but corporations sending work off for prices we cannot compete on. We are complaining about a race to third world wages. There are certain types of Americans who think this raises everyone's boat, while the rest of us see ours sinking.
In the end it is all about trade balance. If the money spent there is spent back here to buy American goods and services, and vice versa, then it is beneficial to many. But of course rarely does that happen. Usually there is a rather large trade imbalance, and again some see that as self correcting. For example, they see the higher IT wages there that you describe as part of that correction. But I think more damage is done than can be corrected.
As for the negative comments, you have to realize some are young, some subscribe to the universal thought that I am better because others are worse, some are just nasty people, and the rest are understandably bitter when their jobs are sent overseas to make rich men richer. It is not as bad as the caste system, but bad for here nonetheless.
I missed the thing about adding words to the English language. If useful to many, it becomes part of the language. If useful to a few, such as just in India, it becomes a dialect such as a Caribbean dialect, where it sounds like English but we're not sure what they're saying.
In the end we won't have the money to buy anything from these companies sending the jobs overseas, so that will be the correction. But like I say, more damage will be done than can be corrected.
Thanks again for your insight. It's good to see the insight from someone who has always known programming is for them.
rd
I banned non-ARIN IP address ranges because the content of my site on missing US women had not been of interest outside North America up until now. The only visits I got from outside North America were bot scripts and scoundrels.
Given the world wide programming community interest in Reiser's case, and especially with the Russian roots of Nina, I will drop the worldwide IP range bans for awhile. Thanks for reminding me about that.
rd
Neighbors noted it was gone, police noted they found it with surveillance of him, and he had it parked a walking distance away with crime books on evidence in it, still saturated with water, and the front seat removed.
To get rid of it would raise more questions than a missing front seat, and he didn't have much money to start with, which is the reason Nina disappeared, to be able to do some of the things you suggest in just getting rid of it.
rd
He found the BASIC flood-fill routine to be buggy and quite poor, and set about to rewrite it.
:)
I remember at Z-Soft in 1986 where Z-Soft was licensing a small Windows version of PC Paintbrush to Microsoft, a comment from Z-Soft founder getting off an exasperating phone call with someone at Microsoft.
"I could just write a flood fill routine for them if that's what it takes."
That would have been same time period the clock was being written too. Not sure if flood fill code had to be sent to them or not to get it resolved.
rd
Dropping the kids off doesn't mean she had to enter the house, yet she did.
To have a "discussion"/argument, which didn't go quite as well as this dialogue.
rd
If she was killed then it is strange that the body was efficiently disposed of, but that the car was left to be found by the police.
It wasn't found easily. It was parked about a quarter mile away from his house on a side street. He was still using it.
rd