So they hadn't kept up to date with patches. How exactly is an IBM/iSeries fault.
I've worked with the S36/S38/AS400/iSeries/I5 for decades. The thing has always been rock solid. Not quite in the mainframe realm of up time, but in 20+ years I have only seen the machine down twice unplanned. Both cases due to hardware borking, fscking disks.
You can refresh all you like, no problem.
The downside is the lack of a decent gui, screen scrapers just don't cut it. IBM should make the X protocol or VNC protocol availbale as part of fully integratd tool kit. Make it easy to code a gui as a 5250 display and most business would stay on it for another 20 years.
The cool technical thing about the beast is not the ASIC or the chips but rather the idea of single level storage, Frank Soltis the designer is one of the many unsung pioneers of the computing industry.
Eveybody gets there own private space with natural light and non locking door. Individual climate controls, lighting under user control. 8 power sockets, 2 ethernet, no phone. VOIP to a central phone system.
Have a standard office furniture, desk, chair, lamp etc but allow the user to take the cash value and furnish their own office if they wish.
I'd go for:- Large cheap picnic table, 8' x 3' about 3' high. Cheap set of drawers on wheels, lockable, for under desk. Expensive chair. Large whiteboard. Bankers lamp.
I'd also sort out the tech a similar way, standard set up with good kybd/screen + IT support or cash value in which case IT is responsible as far as the socket in the wall.
After three years the user is allowed to update, most users will keep their old stuff and take the cash.
Yes the above will cost $$$ and goes beyond the norm.
No I'm not kidding, give me one example of a Linux or Windows running on a 16 way SMP box.
It's been talked about how do we identify cpus. You would go with the external interface. Anything that accepts x86 code is a x86 cpu. Intel, AMD...Transmeta etc. If an external instruction set is deconstructed to lower level op codes is the cpu still an x86. Take a look at the P4 design docs, they talk about micro op codes as do most cpus that try to maintain backward compatability for their instruction set.
I'd love to learn/dicuss from/with some of the big names pretty sure an argument is not what I ever want.
Would seem that being unable to attack the point you attack the person:-) Been working 20+ years in computing as a developer. I'll grow older but not up, if you ever understand why you might stop being so rude when you have a perceived cloak of anonimity to protect you.
Which university, which papers? I have yet to see anything with MS on it that makes me do anything other than yawn. IBM got mired in process refinement during the 90s, make the same stuff better. Google I'm not to sure about, they have a lot of people with credentials but they seem to go strangely silent when they work for google?
Nothing wrong with academic research but it's rarely blue sky and if it's being funded by a business it's usually difficult to get info. Prehaps I'm looking in the wrong arenas but ACMS/IEEE plus top ten CS Universities plus the research arms of IBM/MS etc never seem to show anything radical. If I have to read one more paper on OO-RDBMS mapping or network agents I think I'm going to scream.
Now I'm far from being and academic and I'm not qualified to judge the work in any meaningful way other than with my own prejudicies. So prehaps I'm being too hard but the more phd dissertations I read the more convinced I am that the papers are being deliberately written in a confusing manner with the idea being if they throw in enough long words then they'll get the phd from a submission hold or knock out rather than an original idea that significantly extends knowledge.
Prehaps, I'm just becoming old. But reading Church, Turing, Shannon, McCarthy et al Is enjoyable, prehaps because I know the value of the work, prehaps because I can follow most of it, I don't know but I read most modern work and feel as if I'm being insulted. Almost a case of 'yeah so what, show me the breakthrough, show me the new idea, new application'.
Although I tend to agree with most of the above. I am concerned that nowhere is CompuSci blue sky research being done. Where is Princeton of the 40s, Burroughs of the 50s, Bell Labs of the 60s, Xerox Parc of the 70s? Yes I did sort of make up the dates etc to make a point but it's still pretty close.
Today it seems that all research must show a profit/product. Is any where looking to hire the cream of post docs, those with radical ideas and the skills to implement. How about tackling a big problem e.g. the first generally available quantum computer, the first self aware AI? Instead we have supposedly intelligent thinkers working on a cheap laptop, ohh look it's lime green, radical man! AI research more interested in mechanics than biology.
I would love for a goverment or a company to challenge a hard problem e.g. landing a man on the moon, we had a pretty good idea how to get there we just needed the impetus to go. Now Bush would not be ideal figure head for AI research. But Google, setting aside a billion dollars and 100 postions to tackle quantum computing would be a landmark idea, fixed term of five years now off you go.
Could we the great unwashed fund such a project through a non-profit? Linux users for AI or some such. Rather than the big splash of google the slowly building wave?
Which large scale SMP system does Linux & Win run on? I thought the HAL for Windows was designed for 16 way and that Linux SMP is being added as needed. The issues of SMP are prevalent on both systems, when devloping the OS the multi processing was not high on the priorities.
Von Nueman(sp) is the uniprocessor architecture. Single bottle neck through which all data and instructions must pass.
I remember a time before x86 and the current x86 chips are just x86 on the surface. The x86 instruction set is split up at a lower level to allow pipe lining etc.
I'm not sure tenure counts for anything in computing but if it does you're pretty dumb claiming it anonymously, I've now got my fingers crossed your not some big name CompuSci guy:-)
Given that most of the CompuSci papers that deal with the big picture had been written by 1960, any body could read the fundamental papers in under a year and have a damn good understanding about computers. Now I'm not saying that all valuable research had been completed by 1960 but the vast majority had been. I would say OO, Packet Networks & non Von Nueman machines are areas that came after 1960 and could be classified as ground breaking. I'm hard pressed to name anything else?
Linux is nobodies saviour. It's an OS. It's my OS of choice and has been since '96 but that doesn't mean it's anything special. I might switch to another GPL OS in the future, Minix seems the best bet, but maybe Plan9 or some OS designed for multiprocessors. I doubt I'll be running Linux in 5 years!
Those with money set the laws and only fools are ruled by any of those three.
Why is it that with intel talking about a radical change in consumer hardware the level of comments on/. is barely higher then that on AOL.
We have had multi processor machines for ages. This is not a sudden unknown. Look up transputer, connection machine, beowulf, cray. There is still ground to be covered but it's not unkown territory. The difference is this is intel, intel needs a big market to sell to.
This is not going to make significant difference to the end user, most of them will still write letters, calculate spreadsheets and browse the web. It might be enough to finally expose MS et al for what they have always been, the parasites.
Where this is going to hit home is in the realm of programming and OS.
Want to run an OS primarily designed for uniprocessing on a multi way architecture? Look at the issues Win&Lin have with SMP, limited to 16 processors I believe. Numa and beowulf are a different kettle of fish. So what will we have on these massive SMP architectures?
Programming, at last we might be getting out from under VonNuman. Progress might be possible after 30+ years of stagnation. The symbolic/functional languages are going to start to move forward. Hell we might even get to run on stack based cpus with energy reclamation automated:-) Of course a nice message passing symbolic language might score big.
But given then history of software we'll have a bunch of ignorant, loud mouth idiots running around telling everybody the one true way is Java with mutex and semaphores. PHBs will grab at the first thing that has enterpise written on it and is 'guaranteed'. Most programmers will code how they have always coded head down, ass up. The number of processors will double every two years and the speed of software will continue to halve in the same period.
Of course nobody will suggest that a staged conversion should take place. There will be all these reasons to throw everything away and start over. Because this time we'll get it right!
Look children the sky is falling, run around and be scared. But don't you worry the new religion will save you. It's called science and it will solve all your problems. Just trust the men in white coats after all they are all knowing!
Languages and compilers are already here that do multi core processing. I'm hoping that this is the start of more and more cores in desktop systems. I remember the days of the transputer and the connection machine. Chuck Moore of Forth fame has a new comapny that is in the process of producing a 'sea of processors'. Simple stack based cores that are linked.
More and more cores means that exisitng langugages are less and less efficient. You want to control task distribution on a 32 core machine? What happens if a core fails is the whole machine fscked?
Functional programming will come to the fore and I can sleep at night knowing that the language debacle of the last 50 years has closed and we can start making some progress. So far we peaked in '59 (LISP), rallied a bit in the '70s (SmallTalk) and then went senile in the 90s (Java).
Do the Math Major/Compu Sci minor. If you're good enough to get a Phd then the problem of getting a job after your BSc will be trivial. With a Math major no decent software company will care. Likewise most financial companies will snap you up.
ISO-9000 is not meant to ease the software development process. It's design is to make the process auditable. It takes some very good ideas about development and totally buries them in bullshit.
If you look who pushes for ISO-9000 it's large and slow moving companies that are used to a large and wasteful style of doing business. The people that sing the praises of ISO-9000 are not usually the ones who have to do the work.
If I were you I'd look for a way to get out from under ISO-9000. It that's not possible decide wether you want to stay with a company that thinks so little of it's staff that it mandates the use of a procedure that takes thousands of pages to describe.
I've been through BS-5750, ISO-9000, SOX, 21CfrPart11 etc etc etc and it's always the same shit. Software is unlike any other process/tool/discipline that man has ever tried to control, the problems of bad software will not be solved by old and tired audit systems. There is no silver bullet that will address all problems!
Re:Sounds like a business opportunity to me
on
IT Reference Posters?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Are you nuts. Do you know how much money we have to spend at NASA to make it sound like we actually do something? Piece of rope indeed. Listen bud, we gotta have the most expensive stuff or else everybody will think we ain't the best. It's not a pretty world out there, everybody is getting in on the space game, we have to raise our costs just to have a chance of looking competent.
Of course back in the 50s it was a different time you know, it was a different time.
WTF do you mean RedStone is no good! Show me another sub-orbital tech that is as cheap?
Now maybe if you want orbital you need Gemini, but for most space tourisim RedStone would do just fine. The components in one of those things can't cost more than $10K in bulk. Produce a limited number of capsules plus multiple rockets, say ten launches a day at $25k a pop. Think Vespa not Bentley.
Above all over play the danger card, this is not some fair ride, this is not some plane ride, but rather this is helping push the barries of space travel. When you lose people and you will, make sure it's headline news on the TV and in the papers. Release annual crash DVDs. Publish your survival rates, the lower the better. Watch as you book up all your flights years in advance.
I'm suprised the X prize didn't attract at least one RedStone based entrant.
But, of course it's no good. I mean it cheaply does waht we need with no bling. Silly notion, we need to spend a couple of billion to replicate what we had in the 50s.
The Brits do HALO jumps in Norway/Sweden. It's a High Altitude/Low Opening jump. Basically they free fall below the terrain high points before opening! I think thy refer to it as character building. The interesting part is how they exit the plane, as the plane performs a high load turn they jump and are catapultated many miles away from their jump point. The idea being they dis-embark in friendly air space but land in occupied territory. Sort of makes you wonder why they chose Norway/Sweden for 'training' runs:-)
And of course hardware costs are the biggest cost in a large IT shop?
I come from a mainframe/mini background centralised processing is cheaper than distributed.
The down side is how much It process and procedures get in the way. I'm watching my current IT dept. implode due to management insisting things are done a certain way. We're unable to help users in a timely manner due to the checks and controls management have imposed. This is not good.
Are you sure you've understood Lisp or is the post a joke?
I can only speak of my productivity with Lisp not yours.
I'm not able to judge Lisp implmentations, I tend just to use them but I've just added an item on my futures list to study some implementations.
I've never compiled Lisp it's an interactive language to me. Macros run when invoked and not before.
Never hit namespace issues enough to see if there were alternatives.
car/cdr are not descriptive unless you are working on an IBM-704. But they've been around for 40+ years so it might be a little late to change them.
I've always been able to override the default macros, never wanted to thou.
What basic data structure can you not make with a list of pairs.
The original syntax was an idea by original designer, not sure wether it was ever published, 'nother item for the list.
I think our differences are down to what we mean by peak. I want power, I want the ability to futz with code/ideas how I want. You seem to value ease of use more than power.
Slashdot Mirror
So they hadn't kept up to date with patches. How exactly is an IBM/iSeries fault.
I've worked with the S36/S38/AS400/iSeries/I5 for decades. The thing has always been rock solid. Not quite in the mainframe realm of up time, but in 20+ years I have only seen the machine down twice unplanned. Both cases due to hardware borking, fscking disks.
You can refresh all you like, no problem.
The downside is the lack of a decent gui, screen scrapers just don't cut it. IBM should make the X protocol or VNC protocol availbale as part of fully integratd tool kit. Make it easy to code a gui as a 5250 display and most business would stay on it for another 20 years.
The cool technical thing about the beast is not the ASIC or the chips but rather the idea of single level storage, Frank Soltis the designer is one of the many unsung pioneers of the computing industry.
I've never had to do this but here's my ideas.
:-
Eveybody gets there own private space with natural light and non locking door.
Individual climate controls, lighting under user control.
8 power sockets, 2 ethernet, no phone. VOIP to a central phone system.
Have a standard office furniture, desk, chair, lamp etc but allow the user to take the cash value and furnish their own office if they wish.
I'd go for
Large cheap picnic table, 8' x 3' about 3' high.
Cheap set of drawers on wheels, lockable, for under desk.
Expensive chair.
Large whiteboard.
Bankers lamp.
I'd also sort out the tech a similar way, standard set up with good kybd/screen + IT support or cash value in which case IT is responsible as far as the socket in the wall.
After three years the user is allowed to update, most users will keep their old stuff and take the cash.
Yes the above will cost $$$ and goes beyond the norm.
I did not ignore the example it's a numa not a smp box!
Like I said the x86 doesn't run x86 under the covers it just presents an interface.
No I'm not kidding, give me one example of a Linux or Windows running on a 16 way SMP box.
:-) Been working 20+ years in computing as a developer. I'll grow older but not up, if you ever understand why you might stop being so rude when you have a perceived cloak of anonimity to protect you.
It's been talked about how do we identify cpus. You would go with the external interface. Anything that accepts x86 code is a x86 cpu. Intel, AMD...Transmeta etc. If an external instruction set is deconstructed to lower level op codes is the cpu still an x86. Take a look at the P4 design docs, they talk about micro op codes as do most cpus that try to maintain backward compatability for their instruction set.
I'd love to learn/dicuss from/with some of the big names pretty sure an argument is not what I ever want.
Would seem that being unable to attack the point you attack the person
NUMA not SMP
Cache/Virtual memory were hardly revolutionary, think of a turing machine and it's almost impossible not to see that memory could be virtual.
IC/LSI/VLSI/CMOS are vital to modern computers but not to the theory of computers. Might as well have steam powered cpus.
Optical interconnect, now your grasping.
Which university, which papers? I have yet to see anything with MS on it that makes me do anything other than yawn. IBM got mired in process refinement during the 90s, make the same stuff better. Google I'm not to sure about, they have a lot of people with credentials but they seem to go strangely silent when they work for google?
Nothing wrong with academic research but it's rarely blue sky and if it's being funded by a business it's usually difficult to get info. Prehaps I'm looking in the wrong arenas but ACMS/IEEE plus top ten CS Universities plus the research arms of IBM/MS etc never seem to show anything radical. If I have to read one more paper on OO-RDBMS mapping or network agents I think I'm going to scream.
Now I'm far from being and academic and I'm not qualified to judge the work in any meaningful way other than with my own prejudicies. So prehaps I'm being too hard but the more phd dissertations I read the more convinced I am that the papers are being deliberately written in a confusing manner with the idea being if they throw in enough long words then they'll get the phd from a submission hold or knock out rather than an original idea that significantly extends knowledge.
Prehaps, I'm just becoming old. But reading Church, Turing, Shannon, McCarthy et al Is enjoyable, prehaps because I know the value of the work, prehaps because I can follow most of it, I don't know but I read most modern work and feel as if I'm being insulted. Almost a case of 'yeah so what, show me the breakthrough, show me the new idea, new application'.
Although I tend to agree with most of the above. I am concerned that nowhere is CompuSci blue sky research being done. Where is Princeton of the 40s, Burroughs of the 50s, Bell Labs of the 60s, Xerox Parc of the 70s? Yes I did sort of make up the dates etc to make a point but it's still pretty close.
Today it seems that all research must show a profit/product. Is any where looking to hire the cream of post docs, those with radical ideas and the skills to implement. How about tackling a big problem e.g. the first generally available quantum computer, the first self aware AI? Instead we have supposedly intelligent thinkers working on a cheap laptop, ohh look it's lime green, radical man! AI research more interested in mechanics than biology.
I would love for a goverment or a company to challenge a hard problem e.g. landing a man on the moon, we had a pretty good idea how to get there we just needed the impetus to go. Now Bush would not be ideal figure head for AI research. But Google, setting aside a billion dollars and 100 postions to tackle quantum computing would be a landmark idea, fixed term of five years now off you go.
Could we the great unwashed fund such a project through a non-profit? Linux users for AI or some such. Rather than the big splash of google the slowly building wave?
Which large scale SMP system does Linux & Win run on? I thought the HAL for Windows was designed for 16 way and that Linux SMP is being added as needed. The issues of SMP are prevalent on both systems, when devloping the OS the multi processing was not high on the priorities.
:-)
Von Nueman(sp) is the uniprocessor architecture. Single bottle neck through which all data and instructions must pass.
I remember a time before x86 and the current x86 chips are just x86 on the surface. The x86 instruction set is split up at a lower level to allow pipe lining etc.
I'm not sure tenure counts for anything in computing but if it does you're pretty dumb claiming it anonymously, I've now got my fingers crossed your not some big name CompuSci guy
Given that most of the CompuSci papers that deal with the big picture had been written by 1960, any body could read the fundamental papers in under a year and have a damn good understanding about computers. Now I'm not saying that all valuable research had been completed by 1960 but the vast majority had been. I would say OO, Packet Networks & non Von Nueman machines are areas that came after 1960 and could be classified as ground breaking. I'm hard pressed to name anything else?
Linux is nobodies saviour. It's an OS. It's my OS of choice and has been since '96 but that doesn't mean it's anything special. I might switch to another GPL OS in the future, Minix seems the best bet, but maybe Plan9 or some OS designed for multiprocessors. I doubt I'll be running Linux in 5 years!
Those with money set the laws and only fools are ruled by any of those three.
Why is it that with intel talking about a radical change in consumer hardware the level of comments on /. is barely higher then that on AOL.
:-) Of course a nice message passing symbolic language might score big.
We have had multi processor machines for ages. This is not a sudden unknown. Look up transputer, connection machine, beowulf, cray. There is still ground to be covered but it's not unkown territory. The difference is this is intel, intel needs a big market to sell to.
This is not going to make significant difference to the end user, most of them will still write letters, calculate spreadsheets and browse the web. It might be enough to finally expose MS et al for what they have always been, the parasites.
Where this is going to hit home is in the realm of programming and OS.
Want to run an OS primarily designed for uniprocessing on a multi way architecture? Look at the issues Win&Lin have with SMP, limited to 16 processors I believe. Numa and beowulf are a different kettle of fish. So what will we have on these massive SMP architectures?
Programming, at last we might be getting out from under VonNuman. Progress might be possible after 30+ years of stagnation. The symbolic/functional languages are going to start to move forward. Hell we might even get to run on stack based cpus with energy reclamation automated
But given then history of software we'll have a bunch of ignorant, loud mouth idiots running around telling everybody the one true way is Java with mutex and semaphores. PHBs will grab at the first thing that has enterpise written on it and is 'guaranteed'. Most programmers will code how they have always coded head down, ass up. The number of processors will double every two years and the speed of software will continue to halve in the same period.
Of course nobody will suggest that a staged conversion should take place. There will be all these reasons to throw everything away and start over. Because this time we'll get it right!
Look children the sky is falling, run around and be scared. But don't you worry the new religion will save you. It's called science and it will solve all your problems. Just trust the men in white coats after all they are all knowing!
Wake up, fer crisakes, wake up.
Trouble is we need a farily high rate of reaction to power cars.
Languages and compilers are already here that do multi core processing. I'm hoping that this is the start of more and more cores in desktop systems. I remember the days of the transputer and the connection machine. Chuck Moore of Forth fame has a new comapny that is in the process of producing a 'sea of processors'. Simple stack based cores that are linked.
More and more cores means that exisitng langugages are less and less efficient. You want to control task distribution on a 32 core machine? What happens if a core fails is the whole machine fscked?
Functional programming will come to the fore and I can sleep at night knowing that the language debacle of the last 50 years has closed and we can start making some progress. So far we peaked in '59 (LISP), rallied a bit in the '70s (SmallTalk) and then went senile in the 90s (Java).
I have one of these on my desk at work. Just seems to work. Although I'm a light user, maybe two reams a year.
Jeez how old are you?
Do the Math Major/Compu Sci minor. If you're good enough to get a Phd then the problem of getting a job after your BSc will be trivial. With a Math major no decent software company will care. Likewise most financial companies will snap you up.
Are all college kids this dumb in the US?
ISO-9000 is not meant to ease the software development process. It's design is to make the process auditable. It takes some very good ideas about development and totally buries them in bullshit.
If you look who pushes for ISO-9000 it's large and slow moving companies that are used to a large and wasteful style of doing business. The people that sing the praises of ISO-9000 are not usually the ones who have to do the work.
If I were you I'd look for a way to get out from under ISO-9000. It that's not possible decide wether you want to stay with a company that thinks so little of it's staff that it mandates the use of a procedure that takes thousands of pages to describe.
I've been through BS-5750, ISO-9000, SOX, 21CfrPart11 etc etc etc and it's always the same shit. Software is unlike any other process/tool/discipline that man has ever tried to control, the problems of bad software will not be solved by old and tired audit systems. There is no silver bullet that will address all problems!
Take a look at SparkNotes, Barnes and Noble stock them http://www.sparknotes.com/sparkcharts/
Are you nuts. Do you know how much money we have to spend at NASA to make it sound like we actually do something? Piece of rope indeed. Listen bud, we gotta have the most expensive stuff or else everybody will think we ain't the best. It's not a pretty world out there, everybody is getting in on the space game, we have to raise our costs just to have a chance of looking competent.
Of course back in the 50s it was a different time you know, it was a different time.
WTF do you mean RedStone is no good! Show me another sub-orbital tech that is as cheap?
Now maybe if you want orbital you need Gemini, but for most space tourisim RedStone would do just fine. The components in one of those things can't cost more than $10K in bulk. Produce a limited number of capsules plus multiple rockets, say ten launches a day at $25k a pop. Think Vespa not Bentley.
Above all over play the danger card, this is not some fair ride, this is not some plane ride, but rather this is helping push the barries of space travel. When you lose people and you will, make sure it's headline news on the TV and in the papers. Release annual crash DVDs. Publish your survival rates, the lower the better. Watch as you book up all your flights years in advance.
I'm suprised the X prize didn't attract at least one RedStone based entrant.
But, of course it's no good. I mean it cheaply does waht we need with no bling. Silly notion, we need to spend a couple of billion to replicate what we had in the 50s.
Trust but verify?
:-)
The Brits do HALO jumps in Norway/Sweden. It's a High Altitude/Low Opening jump. Basically they free fall below the terrain high points before opening! I think thy refer to it as character building. The interesting part is how they exit the plane, as the plane performs a high load turn they jump and are catapultated many miles away from their jump point. The idea being they dis-embark in friendly air space but land in occupied territory. Sort of makes you wonder why they chose Norway/Sweden for 'training' runs
So memorable in fact you can't even recall his name?
And of course hardware costs are the biggest cost in a large IT shop?
I come from a mainframe/mini background centralised processing is cheaper than distributed.
The down side is how much It process and procedures get in the way. I'm watching my current IT dept. implode due to management insisting things are done a certain way. We're unable to help users in a timely manner due to the checks and controls management have imposed. This is not good.
Does anyone know where their engine came from?
Has anybody seen this card in person?
This is something that OpenSource could be doing are http://www.ode.org/ responding to this?
My guess is that this engine is OpenSource and running on some sort of FPGA. Would help if a standard such as OpenGL could be drafted.
Forget games, there's a large market for physics models in design houses.
Go look up Absynthe and find out the active ingredients.
But I was using it more as an example of relative quality. Any malt or absynthe is light years better.
I'd like to try LSD but I'll wait until the FDA sanctions production and checks the labs. I give it another 5 years before it happens.
Are you sure you've understood Lisp or is the post a joke?
I can only speak of my productivity with Lisp not yours.
I'm not able to judge Lisp implmentations, I tend just to use them but I've just added an item on my futures list to study some implementations.
I've never compiled Lisp it's an interactive language to me. Macros run when invoked and not before.
Never hit namespace issues enough to see if there were alternatives.
car/cdr are not descriptive unless you are working on an IBM-704. But they've been around for 40+ years so it might be a little late to change them.
I've always been able to override the default macros, never wanted to thou.
What basic data structure can you not make with a list of pairs.
The original syntax was an idea by original designer, not sure wether it was ever published, 'nother item for the list.
I think our differences are down to what we mean by peak. I want power, I want the ability to futz with code/ideas how I want. You seem to value ease of use more than power.