Well I'll be damned... The spec does indeed spell out how to build w/ coax and twinax. I work in storage and I had not ever seen anything but Fibre and HSSDC/DB-9 in the field. (I meant RJ-45 terminated when I said twised pair. I know that HSSDC/DB-9 cables are copper.) I have yet to actually FIND a RJ-45, Coax or Twinax GBIC/SFP though. Where would one find these gems? RJ-45 GBICs are easy to find, but I don't think they are cleared for Fibre Channel, just GigE.
Optical fiber is not required for shorter distances, however, because Fibre Channel also works using coaxial cable and ordinary telephone twisted pair. Fibre Channel offers point-to-point, switched, and loop interfaces.
Too bad whoever wrote that was completely full of it. Fibre Channel does not exist over coax or twisted pair.
Coax really isn't used much for data cabling any more.
Twisted Pair? Who knows. I expect the error rates are too high for the extremely tight specs required by Fibre Channel.
Errr... I doubt the CPSC gave IBM much of a choice. If your has a defect that causes it to catches on fire, and you are in business, then you MUST recall it, no exceptions.
No, they probably don't keep track of the MAC's students are using, but it is relatively trivial to ask a managed hub or switch which MAC's are one which port, ergo, which room the offender occupies.
When you think of unconsitutional, you are probably thinking of two parts:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: "[Congress has the power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Article I, Section 9, Clause 6: "No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another."
1) The obvious: Of course the federal government is the only power that can regulate commerce "among the several states". Duh. That means that State C cannot do anything out of the ordinary (i.e. charge special tolls) for vessels going between States A and B that happen to pass through State C.
2) Amendment X states that any powers neither reserved by the federal government, nor prohibited to the states, the states are allowed to have. That means that unless it says "No state", or Congress retains the power for itself, then the state may do it. That means the feds can pass no law giving preference to the "ports" of one state over another, but that does not limit what the states may do in any way. When the founding fathers meant to restrict states, it was explicitly called out. (i.e. Art. I, Sec. 10)
3) State A cannot compel State B to collect tax for State A. However, State B is perfectly allowed to voluntarily do so, and pass the revenue along. They can do this because Art I, Sec. 9, Cls. 6 does not limit states, only the federal government. That means that Amd. X lets that power default to the states.
4) But that is regulating Interstate Commerce, you say! A power explicitly reserved for Congress! Nope. State A may tax businesses within State A more or less however it pleases. Just because the money comes from out of state matters not. Right now, it is perfecly constitutional for State B to make residents pay tax on goods purchased from State A. (This is the case in most states, actually.) This is becasuse State B has the power to tax it's own residents.
Here's a summary. If Kasparov didn't like the conditions, he didn't have to play. It's that fucking simple. Got it? No one forced him to play at gunpoint. What do you mean, "IBM sternly insisted on it's terms"? Kasparov was not an IBM employee, and was under no obligation to accept anything. He could have "sternly insisted" on different terms right back. You are correct, if he didn't agree, there would be no tournament. "He had no choice."?!?! He could have chosen not to play. And why would that have been a problem?
If he wanted a rematch, he should have arranged for one ahead of time.
No, Deep Blue would probably not have beaten someone of Kasparov's skills in an ordinary tournament without reprogramming. So? Kasparov apparently thought he could beat the machine under the conditions presented to him. He turned out to be wrong. That was his own damn fault.
When you play a slot machine, you know that, on average, you will lose money. Does that make the slot machine "unfair"? Just as long as the casino doesn't promise something otherwise, there is no deception. If IBM had done something like give Kasparov "fake" sample games, or had a grandmaster play in the machine's place, yes, that would have been unfair and cheating. They did none of those things. Did they re-program in the middle? Yes. They never promised not to.
On your comment that it was all a ploy to make IBM money: You are a master of the obvious. IBM is a for-profit corporation. Everything they do is designed to make money. Yes, it was a plublicity stunt. What did you think it was, a product announcement?
One last thing: I never said that Deep Blue was a better chess player than Kasparov. It probably wasn't. I never said that Deep Blue still would have won if Kasparov was allowed more prep. It probably wouldn't have. I just said that Deep Blue won. Which it did.
There was nothing "unfair" about Kasparov accepting terms that were not in his favor. He made that decision, and it didn't work out as he planned. Too bad.
What cheating? Kasparov agreed to the conditions ahead of time. Nobody forced him to play. Did the IBM team do anything that they promised not to do? No.
Kasparov knew that he would not have access to the computer before the tournament. He knew that the team would have access to his previous games. He probably knew the computer could be reprogrammed between games.
Kasparov collapsed. So what? That's his problem. The fact that he made some major mistakes is not IBM's fault. Are you saying that Deep Blue should have gone easy on him when he stopped playing well?
Just because Kasparov did not negotiate more preparation for himself does not make the tournament unfair. Perhaps this was due to arrogance on his part. He might have assumed he could beat the machine without prep. If he didn't like the pre-conditons, he never had to agree to play.
"...the most unfair, manipulated, match in chess history"?!?! You act as if IBM drugged his food and deprived him of sleep. He lost, fair and square. If he wanted to prepare more, this could have been negotiated ahead of time. If he wanted a rematch, he could have asked for that too. Not IBM's problem.
Just because it was programmed just to beat Kasparov doesn't make the machine any less valid. Yes, it was slightly re-programmed after each game, but again, why should that change anything? It wasn't re-programmed in the middle of a particular game.
The fact is that a computer beat the world's top-ranked chess player in a tournament. Period. No, it probably could not have beat every single grandmaster at the time, but again, it was never claimed that it could.
Why should IBM have felt obligated to offer the machine up for a re-match, or set up against all comers? IBM isn't in the chess-playing business. They proved their point and moved on.
This setup is similar to old-fashioned timesharing, but on a far more massive scale. This puts together CPU power, network bandwidth, and storage capacity on a huge, cross-machine basis. The cross-machine capbility is the real trick.
With the technology in the works for this, you could combine together a zillion powerful boxes for the CPU power. (This would be similar to current clustering, but far more dynamic.) You could then attach an half an exabyte of storage, all of which would be pooled together for on-the-fly allocation of any given size, without any regard to which box the storage was in or what OS it ran.
All these concepts have been done before for decades. (Mainframes have done dynamic workload allocation for about 20 years, and AS/400's have used consolidated storage pools for quite some time.) However, combining them to form one massive pile of IT power, with the reliability you expect from the telephone company is a completely new idea.
You need another 10 terabytes of storage for a database expansion? No problem! Punch a few buttons, put in your Visa number, and in a couple of seconds, your filesystem is now twice as big. Maybe 2 terabytes came from a data farm in Boulder, CO, 6 from Gaithersburg, MD, and the last 2 from RTP, NC. None of that is your concern.
PWC was the second-biggest "business consulting" firm. The biggest IT Consulting firm was, and will continue to be, IBM Global Services. It will simply now have a much bigger business consulting wing. (It already had one, it just wasn't as large.)
Err... isn't this pretty common among programming languages? My C and Pascal are a little rusty (I have spent the last three years sentenced to protocol diagnosis), but isn't the default parameter passing behavior to pass by value, and only pass by reference (making it variable) upon request?
Sounds like data protection to me, not crack-headed design.
Actually, near the end, the Aptivas were very reasonably priced. However, they still sucked. Machines made for the extremely price sensitive retail consumer market always suck, unless you buy a "high-end" system.
The reason IBM is pulling out of commodity markets is mainly because of IBM's structure. IBM is built, through and through, as a solutions company. Half of the employees are employed in services (which customers pay for), and many of the rest do service-related work, (such as back-end support, which IBM pays for). IBM is not built to just sell boxes and fix them when they break (ala Dell). IBM wants to be paid to make businesses more effcient through the use of information technology. It just so happens that IBM makes an awful lot of information technology equipment that should be able to make an integrated solution better than a mish-mash of stuff from 10 different vendors. This also means that the company has a fair amount of overhead, which makes commodity sales difficult.
With a company built like that, it is difficult to do manufacturing cheaply, since the company is not built around lean manufacturing. It would be as if an automaker decided build all their own parts, and run the dealerships too. Instead, automakers buy the non-strategic parts from the outside (like bolts, misc. plastic crap, etc.) but produce engines and bodies in-house. And of course, dealers are independent franchises.
For IBM, the consumer market is worthless. Consumers just want a box, and that's it. They don't have information techonology problems that IBM can solve any better then Dell can.
Same thing for hard drives. There are many hard drive manufacturers, each of which makes drives of approximately the same sizes and speeds. (Most of which use IBM technology.) IBM can bring nothing important to the table, because hard drives are interchangable, just like the nuts and bolts in a car. The end customer doesn't care who makes those, because they are all the same.
To answer your questions on the ThinkPads: The ThinkPads are the best business laptops on the market, hands down. IBM knows it, its competitors know it, and the people who buy laptops know it. They aren't the cheapest, but they are the best. IBM can get them away from commodity status because CIO's who spend money on information technology specify IBM laptops, but they don't specify IBM hard drives, or keyboards, or memory chips, etc.
The "make the best, cost be damned", strategy didn't work in consumer boxes because the average consumer has no fscking clue how to tell the difference between a good machine with solid components, and crap, so he/she just buys on price, which I have already demonstrated to you IBM can't win.
If you ever sit down to a Dell or Compaq laptop, and then use a business-line ThinkPad, it is real easy to tell the difference. The ThinkPad just "feels" like a quality machine. The keyboard pushes just right, the screen doesn't torque much, the switches click correctly, the thing doesnt creak when you put stress on the case, etc. Even the the outside of the case is a special no-slip coating, as opposed to plain old matte plastic.
This comment contains so much crap, it is astounding.
IBM designs their laptops and either makes them or has someone else make them to their design. So somebody probably got the bright idea to just buy random Taiwan made laptops and slap an IBM logo on them - they think that this will reduce costs and increase competitiveness with new designs intoduced monthly.
IIRC The i-Series ThinkPads were designed by IBM and produced by Acer. (I am a RTP IBM'er and had to use an engineering sample of the i-Series for a little while, so I know they are developed in-house.)
All other ThinkPads are designed by IBM, and built by IBM. So you had that part right.
How on earth to do you take the fact that IBM has dropped funding for Linux support, and end up with the conclusion that IBM is OEM'ing (relabling) laptops? (Something that IBM has never done.) My mind is boggled.
The only have to look at thir Aptiva line of desktops to see where this stratigy will go - their good name will carry a few customers for a while, but in the end, nobody will pay a premium IBM price for a non-IBM product with an IBM sticker slaped on the front.
The Aptivas were designed by IBM (and if I find the designer somewhere in IBM that has the flat-head screw fetish (anyone that has ever had to service Aptivas and PC 300s will know what I mean), I will bring on the LART:-), and produced by IBM and contract manufacturers. HP and Compaq did this also for their retail lines. (As opposed to the business boxen, which are a completely different animal.)
IBM pulled out of retail because it is simply impossible to make any significant amount of money selling computers in stores. The sales were structured in such a way that the manufacturer, not the store, has to take the depreciation hits for the decreases in price. Over the past several years, the best that any company has done in retail is about break even. (HP) IBM and Compaq lost money the moment E-machines entered the market. It is impossible to make money when a comptitor (E-machines) has no qualms about losing money.
Wholesale spying is not justified by the war on terrorism. Especially for us non-Arab, born and raised in America types.
Um, wholesale spying is not justified on U.S. citizens, period. All citizens (and for that matter, residents) are granted equal protection under the constitution, Arab or not, native born or not. There should be no distinctions. (Okay, there is the exception that the president must be native-born.)
Gee, IBM wants to take over the computer industry... Stop the presses!
I have news for ZDNet... It is the fiduciary duty of every publicly owned corporation to attempt to gain a monopoly in every market it enters. It is not illegal to have a monopoly, just illegal to take advantage of that monopoly to retain and extend dominance.
It should come as a surprise to no one that IBM is attempting to wring profit out of open source. What else to you expect it to do? IBM does not exist to promote free software. It exists to make money, and if free (beer or speech) software is a way to do that, so be it.
And no, IBM will not be buying Sun any time soon. They have plenty of money dedicated to continuing the improvement of the already quite fine pSeries/RS6k boxes. What do they need to buy Sun for, when they have a perfectly good UNIX box already? What a moron. Buying competition at an inflated price simply to put them out of business would be a silly and stupid move.
No, you can't build something like a Netfinity (oops. er - xSeries eServer) in your garage for $2k. Built into a high-level xSeries is:
1) Hot-pluggable power supplies, drives, and PCI - slots.
2) Built-in hot-plug SCSI
3) Integrated service processor for diagnostics (essentially a computer within a computer)
4) Extremely well-tested box. (Very important to do integration testing on high-end units.)
5) Very nice, serviceable, rack-mount chassis
6) Crap-load of PCI slots
7) Light-path diagnostics. (Lets somebody without training figure out what's broke.)
8) IBM Director
9) Well-designed cooling that would be impossible to achieve with a garage box. (Do you know how to do airflow modeling?)
10) Support.
The list goes on...
Yes, they will become a commodity, in that you will be able to get them from multiple major manufacturers, but don't expect to build it yourself in your basement anytime soon.
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition, 2000
English/American English is not like French. Even if this was a new word we do not need the permission of some ridiculous "academy" (which everyone ignores anyway) to create new words. The meaning of "transitioning" is unambiguous and most importantly: It gets Ms. Dubinsky's point across just fine.
When I did router support for IBM's (now defunct) Network Hardware Division, I had my very own/24 just for my office, which had all of a dozen boxes in it... Even though that isn't my job anymore, there are definately no address restrictions here...
Life is so very fine,
when your corp. is class A number nine.
I work for IBM SAN Support, so I am obviously most familiar with our products, which are indeed quite good, but there are several sources for most of this stuff (except the tape drives).
Here's what you are going to need...
1) A big honkin' network and fast video processing boxes (This is the most odious requirement, the rest is quite easy)... You are going to need some serious bandwidth to pipe this stuff. Unless your compression is onboard, Gigabit ethernet is your only option for multiple cameras. (You would be pushing the bandwidth for Fast Ethernet on an uncompressed stream) Even then, you aren't going to be able to pipe 1GB/s through the box, because you are probably not going to get an adapter to go at line speed. Also, unless video compression is a lot easier than I thought, you are going to need an damn fast machine to handle that many compression streams simultaneously.
There may be some professional boxes with an embedded MPEG encoder so you don't have to try and to that heavy lifting on a server. (I know the chips exist, as IBM sells them (they are used in the TiVo)) Where would you get such boxes? I don't know.
2) I am no sizing expert, but you are going to probably need, oh, about 3 impressive servers (read: plenty of 64-bit PCI slots, perferably on separate busses) to handle data "buffering" and tape backup chores. These servers would need Fibre Channel boards for the I/O, and of course your network adapters. Two of each.
3) Tape drives: Piece of cake. IBM happens to sell an LTO (Linear Tape Open) library, the 3584, that will do nicely. Fully configured, it has a half-petabyte capacity using 150GB carts. The max. theoretical spindle speed w/o compression (which would be useless here) is 15 MB/sec. My actual observed field speeds are around 10-12 MB/sec. (Backing up the uncompressible Win2k SP2.) Each drive frame can accommodate 12 drives, and you can bolt together up to six frames to form a library. (There can also be drive-less "expansion frames") The tapes aren't cheap ($150/each, IIRC) but still aren't bad. The LTO drives are currently the fastest and largest drives on the market, and I don't think anyone other LTO vendor sells a big honkin' library like the 3584. As far as your automation needs, the robotics can easily handle the puny number of daily changes you need, although you are going to be making a LOT of use of the 10-slot "I/O" door to insert and remove tapes.
4) It sounds like you need a highly avail. box for disk storage. A Symmetrix is a popular, but expensive, choice. IBM of course has the 2105 "Shark" box, which is just as good, and not nearly as pricey. I have heard Hitachi also makes a pretty decent storage machine. You don't need a very large one, because you only need to hold the data long enough to pipe it to tape, however, I'd suggest at least a day's worth. I think you will need more than one though, as 180 MB/sec of I/O is probably going to be rough on any box. (I really don't know what the I/O bandwidth of those boxes are, though. That's what sales drones are for.)
5) Infrastructure equipment. I reccommend the InRange FC-9000 fibre channel switch for your SAN. Non-blocking and quite reliable. I know nothing about network equipment.
5) Someone that knows real backup software cold... Veritas NetBackup or Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM Rocks!) is what you need, but it is not trivial to configure.
You think all that "Digital Rights Management" crap is cheap? Of course technology companies don't want this, it's damn expensive! Yes, the costs can be passed on to you, but at the expense of shrinking the market. (Stuff gets costly, less people buy it.)
It is a big mistake to assume that all of corporate America moves in lockstep. Movie studios don't give a rat's ass how much your computer costs, but HP, Dell, and IBM do.
The constitution is silent on the issue of private debts. The monetary clause merely specifies that the States cannot make their own coin to pay their own debts to their own people in anything but hard currency. "Make" as in "manufacture" not, mandate the use of.
The clause just specifies that the states cannot create their own currency, outside of that that could be redeemed for gold or silver. That means, that unless a state wants to mandate the use of "hard" currency for taxes, etc., it must use currency authorized by the federal government. However, if a state does want to issue gold or silver certificates, it is more than welcome. In any case, to make interstate commerce easier, each state has chosen to accept federal currency as legal tender.
The constitution is completely silent on whether or not the national currency should be pegged directly to precious metals. If the framers wanted that way, they almost certainly would have said so. The ability to regulate the money supply (which cannot be done with hard currency) comes in quite handy to facilitate economic stimulus in times of hardship.
Fact: The current monetary system is illegal according to the US constitution.
Moron. Try actually reading the constitution. Article 1, section 10, only applies to states. It's pretty clear on this point. In fact, "No State" are the first two freakin words, so your lazy ass that wasn't paying attention in high school civics wouldn't even have to read that far.
Section 10.
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex
post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops... Yes, I know about Fibre over copper. When I said "Twisted pair" I meant RJ-45 terminated TP. I know all about HSSDC and DB-9 connectors.
Well I'll be damned... The spec does indeed spell out how to build w/ coax and twinax. I work in storage and I had not ever seen anything but Fibre and HSSDC/DB-9 in the field. (I meant RJ-45 terminated when I said twised pair. I know that HSSDC/DB-9 cables are copper.) I have yet to actually FIND a RJ-45, Coax or Twinax GBIC/SFP though. Where would one find these gems? RJ-45 GBICs are easy to find, but I don't think they are cleared for Fibre Channel, just GigE.
Optical fiber is not required for shorter distances, however, because Fibre Channel also works using coaxial cable and ordinary telephone twisted pair. Fibre Channel offers point-to-point, switched, and loop interfaces.
Too bad whoever wrote that was completely full of it. Fibre Channel does not exist over coax or twisted pair.
Coax really isn't used much for data cabling any more.
Twisted Pair? Who knows. I expect the error rates are too high for the extremely tight specs required by Fibre Channel.
SirWired
Errr... I doubt the CPSC gave IBM much of a choice. If your has a defect that causes it to catches on fire, and you are in business, then you MUST recall it, no exceptions.
No, they probably don't keep track of the MAC's students are using, but it is relatively trivial to ask a managed hub or switch which MAC's are one which port, ergo, which room the offender occupies.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: "[Congress has the power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Article I, Section 9, Clause 6: "No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another."
1) The obvious: Of course the federal government is the only power that can regulate commerce "among the several states". Duh. That means that State C cannot do anything out of the ordinary (i.e. charge special tolls) for vessels going between States A and B that happen to pass through State C.
2) Amendment X states that any powers neither reserved by the federal government, nor prohibited to the states, the states are allowed to have. That means that unless it says "No state", or Congress retains the power for itself, then the state may do it. That means the feds can pass no law giving preference to the "ports" of one state over another, but that does not limit what the states may do in any way. When the founding fathers meant to restrict states, it was explicitly called out. (i.e. Art. I, Sec. 10)
3) State A cannot compel State B to collect tax for State A. However, State B is perfectly allowed to voluntarily do so, and pass the revenue along. They can do this because Art I, Sec. 9, Cls. 6 does not limit states, only the federal government. That means that Amd. X lets that power default to the states.
4) But that is regulating Interstate Commerce, you say! A power explicitly reserved for Congress! Nope. State A may tax businesses within State A more or less however it pleases. Just because the money comes from out of state matters not. Right now, it is perfecly constitutional for State B to make residents pay tax on goods purchased from State A. (This is the case in most states, actually.) This is becasuse State B has the power to tax it's own residents.
SirWired
Here's a summary. If Kasparov didn't like the conditions, he didn't have to play. It's that fucking simple. Got it? No one forced him to play at gunpoint. What do you mean, "IBM sternly insisted on it's terms"? Kasparov was not an IBM employee, and was under no obligation to accept anything. He could have "sternly insisted" on different terms right back. You are correct, if he didn't agree, there would be no tournament. "He had no choice."?!?! He could have chosen not to play. And why would that have been a problem?
If he wanted a rematch, he should have arranged for one ahead of time.
No, Deep Blue would probably not have beaten someone of Kasparov's skills in an ordinary tournament without reprogramming. So? Kasparov apparently thought he could beat the machine under the conditions presented to him. He turned out to be wrong. That was his own damn fault.
When you play a slot machine, you know that, on average, you will lose money. Does that make the slot machine "unfair"? Just as long as the casino doesn't promise something otherwise, there is no deception. If IBM had done something like give Kasparov "fake" sample games, or had a grandmaster play in the machine's place, yes, that would have been unfair and cheating. They did none of those things. Did they re-program in the middle? Yes. They never promised not to.
On your comment that it was all a ploy to make IBM money: You are a master of the obvious. IBM is a for-profit corporation. Everything they do is designed to make money. Yes, it was a plublicity stunt. What did you think it was, a product announcement?
One last thing: I never said that Deep Blue was a better chess player than Kasparov. It probably wasn't. I never said that Deep Blue still would have won if Kasparov was allowed more prep. It probably wouldn't have. I just said that Deep Blue won. Which it did.
There was nothing "unfair" about Kasparov accepting terms that were not in his favor. He made that decision, and it didn't work out as he planned. Too bad.
SirWired
What cheating? Kasparov agreed to the conditions ahead of time. Nobody forced him to play. Did the IBM team do anything that they promised not to do? No.
Kasparov knew that he would not have access to the computer before the tournament. He knew that the team would have access to his previous games. He probably knew the computer could be reprogrammed between games.
Kasparov collapsed. So what? That's his problem. The fact that he made some major mistakes is not IBM's fault. Are you saying that Deep Blue should have gone easy on him when he stopped playing well?
Just because Kasparov did not negotiate more preparation for himself does not make the tournament unfair. Perhaps this was due to arrogance on his part. He might have assumed he could beat the machine without prep. If he didn't like the pre-conditons, he never had to agree to play.
"...the most unfair, manipulated, match in chess history"?!?! You act as if IBM drugged his food and deprived him of sleep. He lost, fair and square. If he wanted to prepare more, this could have been negotiated ahead of time. If he wanted a rematch, he could have asked for that too. Not IBM's problem.
SirWired
Just because it was programmed just to beat Kasparov doesn't make the machine any less valid. Yes, it was slightly re-programmed after each game, but again, why should that change anything? It wasn't re-programmed in the middle of a particular game.
The fact is that a computer beat the world's top-ranked chess player in a tournament. Period. No, it probably could not have beat every single grandmaster at the time, but again, it was never claimed that it could.
Why should IBM have felt obligated to offer the machine up for a re-match, or set up against all comers? IBM isn't in the chess-playing business. They proved their point and moved on.
SirWired
This setup is similar to old-fashioned timesharing, but on a far more massive scale. This puts together CPU power, network bandwidth, and storage capacity on a huge, cross-machine basis. The cross-machine capbility is the real trick.
With the technology in the works for this, you could combine together a zillion powerful boxes for the CPU power. (This would be similar to current clustering, but far more dynamic.) You could then attach an half an exabyte of storage, all of which would be pooled together for on-the-fly allocation of any given size, without any regard to which box the storage was in or what OS it ran.
All these concepts have been done before for decades. (Mainframes have done dynamic workload allocation for about 20 years, and AS/400's have used consolidated storage pools for quite some time.) However, combining them to form one massive pile of IT power, with the reliability you expect from the telephone company is a completely new idea.
You need another 10 terabytes of storage for a database expansion? No problem! Punch a few buttons, put in your Visa number, and in a couple of seconds, your filesystem is now twice as big. Maybe 2 terabytes came from a data farm in Boulder, CO, 6 from Gaithersburg, MD, and the last 2 from RTP, NC. None of that is your concern.
This, my friends, is new.
PWC was the second-biggest "business consulting" firm. The biggest IT Consulting firm was, and will continue to be, IBM Global Services. It will simply now have a much bigger business consulting wing. (It already had one, it just wasn't as large.)
Err... isn't this pretty common among programming languages? My C and Pascal are a little rusty (I have spent the last three years sentenced to protocol diagnosis), but isn't the default parameter passing behavior to pass by value, and only pass by reference (making it variable) upon request?
Sounds like data protection to me, not crack-headed design.
SirWired
Actually, near the end, the Aptivas were very reasonably priced. However, they still sucked. Machines made for the extremely price sensitive retail consumer market always suck, unless you buy a "high-end" system.
The reason IBM is pulling out of commodity markets is mainly because of IBM's structure. IBM is built, through and through, as a solutions company. Half of the employees are employed in services (which customers pay for), and many of the rest do service-related work, (such as back-end support, which IBM pays for). IBM is not built to just sell boxes and fix them when they break (ala Dell). IBM wants to be paid to make businesses more effcient through the use of information technology. It just so happens that IBM makes an awful lot of information technology equipment that should be able to make an integrated solution better than a mish-mash of stuff from 10 different vendors. This also means that the company has a fair amount of overhead, which makes commodity sales difficult.
With a company built like that, it is difficult to do manufacturing cheaply, since the company is not built around lean manufacturing. It would be as if an automaker decided build all their own parts, and run the dealerships too. Instead, automakers buy the non-strategic parts from the outside (like bolts, misc. plastic crap, etc.) but produce engines and bodies in-house. And of course, dealers are independent franchises.
For IBM, the consumer market is worthless. Consumers just want a box, and that's it. They don't have information techonology problems that IBM can solve any better then Dell can.
Same thing for hard drives. There are many hard drive manufacturers, each of which makes drives of approximately the same sizes and speeds. (Most of which use IBM technology.) IBM can bring nothing important to the table, because hard drives are interchangable, just like the nuts and bolts in a car. The end customer doesn't care who makes those, because they are all the same.
To answer your questions on the ThinkPads: The ThinkPads are the best business laptops on the market, hands down. IBM knows it, its competitors know it, and the people who buy laptops know it. They aren't the cheapest, but they are the best. IBM can get them away from commodity status because CIO's who spend money on information technology specify IBM laptops, but they don't specify IBM hard drives, or keyboards, or memory chips, etc.
The "make the best, cost be damned", strategy didn't work in consumer boxes because the average consumer has no fscking clue how to tell the difference between a good machine with solid components, and crap, so he/she just buys on price, which I have already demonstrated to you IBM can't win.
If you ever sit down to a Dell or Compaq laptop, and then use a business-line ThinkPad, it is real easy to tell the difference. The ThinkPad just "feels" like a quality machine. The keyboard pushes just right, the screen doesn't torque much, the switches click correctly, the thing doesnt creak when you put stress on the case, etc. Even the the outside of the case is a special no-slip coating, as opposed to plain old matte plastic.
I hope all this was educational.
SirWired
This comment contains so much crap, it is astounding.
:-), and produced by IBM and contract manufacturers. HP and Compaq did this also for their retail lines. (As opposed to the business boxen, which are a completely different animal.)
IBM designs their laptops and either makes them or has someone else make them to their design. So somebody probably got the bright idea to just buy random Taiwan made laptops and slap an IBM logo on them - they think that this will reduce costs and increase competitiveness with new designs intoduced monthly.
IIRC The i-Series ThinkPads were designed by IBM and produced by Acer. (I am a RTP IBM'er and had to use an engineering sample of the i-Series for a little while, so I know they are developed in-house.)
All other ThinkPads are designed by IBM, and built by IBM. So you had that part right.
How on earth to do you take the fact that IBM has dropped funding for Linux support, and end up with the conclusion that IBM is OEM'ing (relabling) laptops? (Something that IBM has never done.) My mind is boggled.
The only have to look at thir Aptiva line of desktops to see where this stratigy will go - their good name will carry a few customers for a while, but in the end, nobody will pay a premium IBM price for a non-IBM product with an IBM sticker slaped on the front.
The Aptivas were designed by IBM (and if I find the designer somewhere in IBM that has the flat-head screw fetish (anyone that has ever had to service Aptivas and PC 300s will know what I mean), I will bring on the LART
IBM pulled out of retail because it is simply impossible to make any significant amount of money selling computers in stores. The sales were structured in such a way that the manufacturer, not the store, has to take the depreciation hits for the decreases in price. Over the past several years, the best that any company has done in retail is about break even. (HP) IBM and Compaq lost money the moment E-machines entered the market. It is impossible to make money when a comptitor (E-machines) has no qualms about losing money.
IBM has NEVER OEM'd PC's of any kind.
SirWired
Wholesale spying is not justified by the war on terrorism. Especially for us non-Arab, born and raised in America types.
Um, wholesale spying is not justified on U.S. citizens, period. All citizens (and for that matter, residents) are granted equal protection under the constitution, Arab or not, native born or not. There should be no distinctions. (Okay, there is the exception that the president must be native-born.)
SirWired
I thought it went without saying that fiduciary duty is bound by the legal and ethical environment within which the corporation resides.
Did I really need to spell that out?
SirWired
Gee, IBM wants to take over the computer industry... Stop the presses!
I have news for ZDNet... It is the fiduciary duty of every publicly owned corporation to attempt to gain a monopoly in every market it enters. It is not illegal to have a monopoly, just illegal to take advantage of that monopoly to retain and extend dominance.
It should come as a surprise to no one that IBM is attempting to wring profit out of open source. What else to you expect it to do? IBM does not exist to promote free software. It exists to make money, and if free (beer or speech) software is a way to do that, so be it.
And no, IBM will not be buying Sun any time soon. They have plenty of money dedicated to continuing the improvement of the already quite fine pSeries/RS6k boxes. What do they need to buy Sun for, when they have a perfectly good UNIX box already? What a moron. Buying competition at an inflated price simply to put them out of business would be a silly and stupid move.
SirWired
No, you can't build something like a Netfinity (oops. er - xSeries eServer) in your garage for $2k. Built into a high-level xSeries is:
1) Hot-pluggable power supplies, drives, and PCI - slots.
2) Built-in hot-plug SCSI
3) Integrated service processor for diagnostics (essentially a computer within a computer)
4) Extremely well-tested box. (Very important to do integration testing on high-end units.)
5) Very nice, serviceable, rack-mount chassis
6) Crap-load of PCI slots
7) Light-path diagnostics. (Lets somebody without training figure out what's broke.)
8) IBM Director
9) Well-designed cooling that would be impossible to achieve with a garage box. (Do you know how to do airflow modeling?)
10) Support.
The list goes on...
Yes, they will become a commodity, in that you will be able to get them from multiple major manufacturers, but don't expect to build it yourself in your basement anytime soon.
SirWired
Um, no.
intr.v. transitioned, transitioning, transitions
1.To make a transition.
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition, 2000
English/American English is not like French. Even if this was a new word we do not need the permission of some ridiculous "academy" (which everyone ignores anyway) to create new words. The meaning of "transitioning" is unambiguous and most importantly: It gets Ms. Dubinsky's point across just fine.
SirWired
When I did router support for IBM's (now defunct) Network Hardware Division, I had my very own /24 just for my office, which had all of a dozen boxes in it... Even though that isn't my job anymore, there are definately no address restrictions here...
Life is so very fine,
when your corp. is class A number nine.
SirWired
First, a disclaimer...
I work for IBM SAN Support, so I am obviously most familiar with our products, which are indeed quite good, but there are several sources for most of this stuff (except the tape drives).
Here's what you are going to need...
1) A big honkin' network and fast video processing boxes (This is the most odious requirement, the rest is quite easy)... You are going to need some serious bandwidth to pipe this stuff. Unless your compression is onboard, Gigabit ethernet is your only option for multiple cameras. (You would be pushing the bandwidth for Fast Ethernet on an uncompressed stream) Even then, you aren't going to be able to pipe 1GB/s through the box, because you are probably not going to get an adapter to go at line speed. Also, unless video compression is a lot easier than I thought, you are going to need an damn fast machine to handle that many compression streams simultaneously.
There may be some professional boxes with an embedded MPEG encoder so you don't have to try and to that heavy lifting on a server. (I know the chips exist, as IBM sells them (they are used in the TiVo)) Where would you get such boxes? I don't know.
2) I am no sizing expert, but you are going to probably need, oh, about 3 impressive servers (read: plenty of 64-bit PCI slots, perferably on separate busses) to handle data "buffering" and tape backup chores. These servers would need Fibre Channel boards for the I/O, and of course your network adapters. Two of each.
3) Tape drives: Piece of cake. IBM happens to sell an LTO (Linear Tape Open) library, the 3584, that will do nicely. Fully configured, it has a half-petabyte capacity using 150GB carts. The max. theoretical spindle speed w/o compression (which would be useless here) is 15 MB/sec. My actual observed field speeds are around 10-12 MB/sec. (Backing up the uncompressible Win2k SP2.) Each drive frame can accommodate 12 drives, and you can bolt together up to six frames to form a library. (There can also be drive-less "expansion frames") The tapes aren't cheap ($150/each, IIRC) but still aren't bad. The LTO drives are currently the fastest and largest drives on the market, and I don't think anyone other LTO vendor sells a big honkin' library like the 3584. As far as your automation needs, the robotics can easily handle the puny number of daily changes you need, although you are going to be making a LOT of use of the 10-slot "I/O" door to insert and remove tapes.
4) It sounds like you need a highly avail. box for disk storage. A Symmetrix is a popular, but expensive, choice. IBM of course has the 2105 "Shark" box, which is just as good, and not nearly as pricey. I have heard Hitachi also makes a pretty decent storage machine. You don't need a very large one, because you only need to hold the data long enough to pipe it to tape, however, I'd suggest at least a day's worth. I think you will need more than one though, as 180 MB/sec of I/O is probably going to be rough on any box. (I really don't know what the I/O bandwidth of those boxes are, though. That's what sales drones are for.)
5) Infrastructure equipment. I reccommend the InRange FC-9000 fibre channel switch for your SAN. Non-blocking and quite reliable. I know nothing about network equipment.
5) Someone that knows real backup software cold... Veritas NetBackup or Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM Rocks!) is what you need, but it is not trivial to configure.
SirWired
You think all that "Digital Rights Management" crap is cheap? Of course technology companies don't want this, it's damn expensive! Yes, the costs can be passed on to you, but at the expense of shrinking the market. (Stuff gets costly, less people buy it.)
It is a big mistake to assume that all of corporate America moves in lockstep. Movie studios don't give a rat's ass how much your computer costs, but HP, Dell, and IBM do.
SirWired
The constitution is silent on the issue of private debts. The monetary clause merely specifies that the States cannot make their own coin to pay their own debts to their own people in anything but hard currency. "Make" as in "manufacture" not, mandate the use of.
SirWired
The clause just specifies that the states cannot create their own currency, outside of that that could be redeemed for gold or silver. That means, that unless a state wants to mandate the use of "hard" currency for taxes, etc., it must use currency authorized by the federal government. However, if a state does want to issue gold or silver certificates, it is more than welcome. In any case, to make interstate commerce easier, each state has chosen to accept federal currency as legal tender.
The constitution is completely silent on whether or not the national currency should be pegged directly to precious metals. If the framers wanted that way, they almost certainly would have said so. The ability to regulate the money supply (which cannot be done with hard currency) comes in quite handy to facilitate economic stimulus in times of hardship.
SirWired
Fact: The current monetary system is illegal according to the US constitution.
Moron. Try actually reading the constitution. Article 1, section 10, only applies to states. It's pretty clear on this point. In fact, "No State" are the first two freakin words, so your lazy ass that wasn't paying attention in high school civics wouldn't even have to read that far.
Section 10.
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex
post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
SirWired