The line "I'm here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, etc." was originally in the movie "They Live" by John Carpenter. Roddy Piper says the line, and claims he made it up. I've only seen "Army of Darkness" on TV so I had not heard the line in that movie, but it's definitely in "They Live".
That's a good underappreciated movie, as is "Black Moon Rising" by the same director.
... using the pseudonym Lewis Padgett. The story you're thinking of is The Proud Robot. I think there were a couple of others. I had a book "The Best Of Henry Kuttner" back in college over 20 years ago. I wish I still had it.
Java is a good language for server applications. Your points ignore a few things:
1). A cross-platform language is every bit as useful on the server as it is on clients. The main benefit is that I can do testing of Java servlets on my Windows desktop and have the application run exactly as it will under Unix, or the AS400, or wherever it is deployed. This makes it much easier to do good testing and debugging and makes for a more robust application on the server.
2). Java's performance is at its worst when the application first starts up. When an application is running there is little difference in performance between a Java app and the same one written in C. Java servlets load into memory once and stay there, so the startup penalty only affects the first request.
I've found this to be true on the client side too. I have created Java apps and run them on an old Pentium and while startup times were awful the apps were useable enough once they got running.
3). Java's garbage collection and avoidance of pointers makes Java apps more robust. A Java server app can fail without taking down the web server.
I'm surprised that anyone could mention what Macs and Linux have in common without mentioning the GNUstep project. GNUstep is an implementation of OpenStep, which is the basis for the Cocoa API on the Mac. There are GNUstep apps today that can be compiled under Cocoa. GNUstep still has a ways to go before its finished, but anyone wanting to make Mac apps work on Linux and vice versa should check it out.
I've been using mplayer for some time now and am happy with it. I too use the command line version only. The "magic keys" are very easy to remember and there is no gui to take up screen real estate that is better used for the movie. Using keys instead of mouse gestures works very well, and makes it easy to skip ahead and back a large distance (up and down arrows) or a small distance (left and right arrows). Space to pause, any key to start playing again, eacape to quit.
I agree with the assessment of xine, mostly. The function to open a movie is confusing. I find myself using xine from the command line to get around it. I also don't like the fact that it displays VCDs enlarged to 640 x 480 and there is no option to display them in their original size. VCDs generally don't look good enlarged. I only use xine because there are some movies with an MPEG audio stream (layer 1?) that xine can use but mplayer cannot.
Mplayer is more difficult to compile than most of us would like, but the developers have improved the process considerably; it used to be a lot worse.
We've had this in Illinois (at least in Cook County) for over a year too. If I want to call my neighbor across the hall I have to dial 11 digits. I also remember talking my mother through changing her dial up networking to dial 11 digits so she could get on the Internet.
Here at work I sometimes use Linux mail programs like Mozilla Mail with Notes. Notes supports IMAP for reading your email and LDAP for accessing the company address book. We've been doing this using Netscape Mail on the Macintosh for years (Notes client is available for the Mac but the Mac users didn't want to buy it) and it works just as well for Linux. For Notes databases (other than email) you can make them useable over the Web with a reasonable amount of work. Notes *developers* need the full client, but many Notes users could probably do without it.
being jailed for tax evasion. At least he did some jail time, so it was better than nothing.
Microsoft was found guilty of abusing their monopoly position to drive their competition out of business, yet they really weren't punished for it in any meaningful way.
I don't think forcing MS to carry the latest JVM is going to change much. On the other hand, it *is* forcing Microsoft to do something they don't want to do, and that's better than nothing.
It should be pretty obvious that nobody has succeeded in sueing Microsoft. When people say things like "Who do you sue?" what they are really saying is that they don't want to take responsibility for for what might be a bad decision, that they aren't smart enough to tell a good decision from a bad one, and they need a decision that they won't get fired for, even if it is less than optimum.
I think this is why managers spend the money on Gartner Group reports. They're wrong half the time, but you won't get fired for following their recommendations.
I get a lot of spam at work (maybe 30 or more/day) and almost none at home. I am careful about giving out my email address, and in fact I think I've given out the home address more than the work address. It puzzled me that I was getting so much spam at work, then someone here mentioned that we should not use auto-reply with Lotus Notes because that replies to spammers and confirms your email address. Of course everyone here sets Notes to auto-reply when they are on vacation, etc. I'm convinced this courtesy is the source of my spam problem.
It's too late to do anything now. Yeesh.
WinTV PVR is like this, but...
on
Review: EyeTV
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· Score: 1
I bought a Hauppage WinTV PVR which does for WinTel boxes what this does for the Mac. You can record in MPEG-1 (VCD) format or MPEG-2 at several different bitrates.
This works pretty well for watching recordings on the PC that you don't intend to keep. Forget it for making permanent copies to VCD or DVD though. High quality MPEG encoding can't be done in real time. You need to capture to some other format (MJPEG or Huffyuv) then convert to MPEG afterwards. MPEG compression for a two hour movie in VCD format can take almost 24 hours. Compressing to DivX is much faster and takes half the disk space, but cannot be played on most current DVD players.
In any case, VCDs created from MPEG captures using this card look OK on the computer, but really awful on a real TV. If VCDs for your TV is what you want get a cheaper card without MPEG encoding and use Virtual Dub, TMPGenc, etc. as described at vcdhelp.com.
It amazes me that anyone could make a digital copy of a movie that has not been released to theaters without the cooperation of someone involved in making or distributing the movie. How would you do it otherwise?
I also think that anyone who really wanted to see that movie would pay to see it in a theater eventually.
Why is it always the really big movies that get pirated a week before they're released? Why didn't this happen to Freddie Got Fingered or Jackass, The Movie?
I too have to suspect some movie industry involvement in these leaks.
Way back at the start of my computer career (1979) we used the VM operating system on our mainframe. For some reason there was a login id for each printer. We also had the ability to send messages to one another; if you knew somebody's login you could send him a message that would pop up on his screen.
Eventually somebody figured out how to log in as our printer and send messsages to various users that they had used up their allotment of paper for the month and would not be allowed to print anything else. Those messages caused a certain amount of confusion in the office!
I *have* bought commercial software on Linux: Visual Age for Java Professional 3.0 (and would have bought 3.5 if IBM had made it available), Quake for Linux, and three or four boxed distros.
On the other hand, my Windows ME box at home is totally dedicated to converting my video collection to VCDs and I didn't buy any of that software. Some of it (Virtual Dub, Huffyuv codec, various video filters, Video CD burning software) is even Open Source or Free Software. If I thought that there was better software out there for this purpose I'd buy it. The *time* I devote to this project is worth that much. Turns out the free stuff is the best available.
I just bought the DVD of the TV show, and I had seen it when it was originally broadcast and liked it well enough to buy the VHS tapes. In any case, a couple of weeks ago I went to see a live performance of the musical "Carousel" with my wife. Not the kind of thing I did before I got married! However, when I was watching HHGG a few days later I noticed a new gag I never "got" before.
When the Heart Of Gold is being attacked by the missiles from Magrothea and everyone thinks they're going to die, Mike the computer starts singing:
"When you walk through a storm keep your head up high..."
Yeah, "You'll never walk alone" from Carousel. I had to play it back a couple of times before I believed it.
I have to wonder how successful this would be. It seems to me I could rent a DVD for either movie and keep it longer than 24 hours for the same money. I'd be able to watch it on a nice home theater rather than on a computer, with vastly better picture quality, and I wouldn't have to download for two or more hours.
The second thing I wonder is how they could prevent me from loading the movie into Virtual Dub and making a DivX or some other format file out of it, which would not have the DRM stuff in it.
As long as they offer the same stuff I can get at Blockbuster I don't see this succeeding
My wife and I have just discovered Ikea, and in the past three weeks I have put together a kitchen table with two chairs, a chest of drawers, and two end tables. None of them were that hard to put together, but I did have a leftover part after finishing the chest of drawers whose purpose was obvious only after it was too late to put it in (plastic strip that joins the two back panels of the chest. Instead of the strip I have a small gap that nobody ever sees anyway.)
The big problem with Ikea stuff is a). damaged parts (one of the end tables had a cracked piece. Instead of going through the grief of returning it I used Elmer's glue and used vise grip pliers to clamp the piece shut until it dried.) and b). missing parts (a friend bought something that was missing all the special screws needed to assemble it).
Generally the stuff is designed so that the parts fit together only one way. Better prevention of missing and damaged parts would be more useful than microsprocessors to help you put the stuff together.
When I was in high school I read a Ray Bradbury story that really impressed me, and that right now seems really prophetic. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the story, but I can attempt to summarize it, badly:
There is a man who goes crazy, and declares war on the two-way radios (cellphones) everyone is using. He puts ice cream in the two-way radio in his car. He goes on a bus with a diathermy machine in a briefcase and jams all the radio transmissions so that all the people on the bus, all of whom are using their cellphones, are forced to talk to each other. The police capture him. There was more to it, but I can't remember it.
The point was the man went crazy because he was forced to always be in touch with anyone who wanted to talk to him. There was no place he could go to get away.
I don't own a cellphone and this very badly remembered story probably influenced me not to get one.
I bought Sam and Max to play on my 386, just to have something better to do with that box than throw it out. I played it on my 486 too, and when I put Linux on the 486 I made it a dual boot with DOS 5.0 so I could still play it. A couple of weeks ago I tried playing it on my Pentium under Linux using ScummVm--not perfect, but promising. Now there is as sequel coming out! Wonderful!
Sam and Max was a terrific, and very funny, game. It is the only game I never got bored with.
If they reissued the original modified to work under Windows 95 and later I'd buy that too.
I bought my first Betamax AFTER it was clear that VHS would win, because video stores everywhere were dumping Beta titles for $5 apiece and I thought it would be a great opportunity to build a home video library (prerecorded tapes were $80 apiece then and used VHS movies were not as easy to find as they are now). I bought hundreds of the damned things.
For about a year now I have been using a TV capture card to convert my tape library to Video CDs or DivX. I have found that VHS tapes, even very old ones, give a better picture when playing on modern equipment than the Beta tapes do. In fact, many of my Beta tapes are unplayable. They might play on a television, but as input to a capture card all you get is a blue screen. I have decided that I will try to dub all my unplayable Betas to VHS instead of VCDs.
About the only Beta tapes that look good are those that haven't been played much, and pretty much any VHS recorded at the 2 hour speed looks better.
I saw Mac OSX demonstrated when someone from Apple demonstrated their Web Objects product. As a NeXTSTEP fan and Window Maker and GNUstep user I was impressed, but I missed the NeXTSTEP scrollbars. These scrollbars have both arrows at the same end of the scrollbar, the scrollbar is at the LEFT of the thing being scrolled, and the thumb never gets too small to grab with the mouse.
In OSX you can optionally move both arrows to the same side of the scrollbar, but there is apparently no way to move scrollbars to the left side of a list box, for example. Having scrollbars on the left works a lot better. Try it once and you'll never want to go back.
The Apple guy, who used to be a NeXT guy, seemed to agree with me.
I don't like Utopian novels much and never read about a world I'd like to live in in one of them. Having said that, Starship Troopers qualifies as a sort of Utopian novel, and Heinlein's ideas are more convincing than most.
The basic premise in his world is that only retired soldiers can vote. Those who are currently soldiers and those who have never been soldiers cannot. Anybody can volunteer for a term of duty and nobody can be rejected for any reason, not even the disabled. The idea is that to be allowed to vote you have to prove that you can put the greater good ahead of your own self interest, and military service is the way you do that.
The director of the movie called the novel a "Fascist Utopia" but in fact there is nothing Fascist about it.
My company has thousands of stores all over the U.S., each of which has a small AS400. WebSphere 2.0 runs on this hardware (slowly) but later versions of WebSphere have too large a footprint. 2.0 will not be supported indefinitely, and it has poor support for JSPs among other things.
AS400s are proprietary as hell and the cost of upgrading the memory in thousands of them is not something to take lightly.
We tried running JRun and other products on an NT box and just using the AS400 as a database server. This works fine until you start running batch jobs on the AS400. At that point your servlets just get ignored. The problem seems to be that if the AS400 is running at full capacity then it ignores any requests coming from outside it. An AS400 with sufficient memory works fine as a database server, but again we didn't want to buy the memory.
IBM's officially blessed solution involves running Tomcat on the AS400. We have found that it has a smaller footprint than even WebSphere 2.0, decent support for JSPs, and performance actually improves. We plan to roll out Tomcat chainwide.
I'd be surprised if your boss wasn't willing to do some tests of various application servers to see which work and perform the best.
I've done a little LDAP work with Java using JNDI. It should not be too difficult to knock out a Swing app that can read and update an LDAP address book, and it would of course be cross platform. Browsing an address book is what people do 90% of the time, so they should tolerate using a separate application to update it.
Actually, there is a good way to use Notes from Linux that I use myself at our office. Any Notes mail account can be accessed through IMAP, and any Notes address book can be searched using LDAP. As a result you can use just about any Linux email client (Netscape Communicator, GNUMail.app, sylpheed, etc.) as a Notes mail client.
Any Notes database can generally be viewed as a website, and that is another cross-platform way of using Notes email.
The only thing you can't do is check your Notes calendar, but I generally wouldn't do that in any case. When somebody wants to schedule you for a meeting an email is always sent anyway.
In any case, it is possible to use Notes for email without needing the Notes client.
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The line "I'm here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, etc." was originally in the movie "They Live" by John Carpenter. Roddy Piper says the line, and claims he made it up. I've only seen "Army of Darkness" on TV so I had not heard the line in that movie, but it's definitely in "They Live".
That's a good underappreciated movie, as is "Black Moon Rising" by the same director.
... using the pseudonym Lewis Padgett. The story you're thinking of is The Proud Robot. I think there were a couple of others. I had a book "The Best Of Henry Kuttner" back in college over 20 years ago. I wish I still had it.
Java is a good language for server applications. Your points ignore a few things:
1). A cross-platform language is every bit as useful on the server as it is on clients. The main benefit is that I can do testing of Java servlets on my Windows desktop and have the application run exactly as it will under Unix, or the AS400, or wherever it is deployed. This makes it much easier to do good testing and debugging and makes for a more robust application on the server.
2). Java's performance is at its worst when the application first starts up. When an application is running there is little difference in performance between a Java app and the same one written in C. Java servlets load into memory once and stay there, so the startup penalty only affects the first request.
I've found this to be true on the client side too. I have created Java apps and run them on an old Pentium and while startup times were awful the apps were useable enough once they got running.
3). Java's garbage collection and avoidance of pointers makes Java apps more robust. A Java server app can fail without taking down the web server.
I'm surprised that anyone could mention what Macs and Linux have in common without mentioning the GNUstep project. GNUstep is an implementation of OpenStep, which is the basis for the Cocoa API on the Mac. There are GNUstep apps today that can be compiled under Cocoa. GNUstep still has a ways to go before its finished, but anyone wanting to make Mac apps work on Linux and vice versa should check it out.
I've been using mplayer for some time now and am happy with it. I too use the command line version only. The "magic keys" are very easy to remember and there is no gui to take up screen real estate that is better used for the movie. Using keys instead of mouse gestures works very well, and makes it easy to skip ahead and back a large distance (up and down arrows) or a small distance (left and right arrows). Space to pause, any key to start playing again, eacape to quit.
I agree with the assessment of xine, mostly. The function to open a movie is confusing. I find myself using xine from the command line to get around it. I also don't like the fact that it displays VCDs enlarged to 640 x 480 and there is no option to display them in their original size. VCDs generally don't look good enlarged. I only use xine because there are some movies with an MPEG audio stream (layer 1?) that xine can use but mplayer cannot.
Mplayer is more difficult to compile than most of us would like, but the developers have improved the process considerably; it used to be a lot worse.
We've had this in Illinois (at least in Cook County) for over a year too. If I want to call my neighbor across the hall I have to dial 11 digits. I also remember talking my mother through changing her dial up networking to dial 11 digits so she could get on the Internet.
Here at work I sometimes use Linux mail programs like Mozilla Mail with Notes. Notes supports IMAP for reading your email and LDAP for accessing the company address book. We've been doing this using Netscape Mail on the Macintosh for years (Notes client is available for the Mac but the Mac users didn't want to buy it) and it works just as well for Linux. For Notes databases (other than email) you can make them useable over the Web with a reasonable amount of work. Notes *developers* need the full client, but many Notes users could probably do without it.
being jailed for tax evasion. At least he did some jail time, so it was better than nothing.
Microsoft was found guilty of abusing their monopoly position to drive their competition out of business, yet they really weren't punished for it in any meaningful way.
I don't think forcing MS to carry the latest JVM is going to change much. On the other hand, it *is* forcing Microsoft to do something they don't want to do, and that's better than nothing.
It should be pretty obvious that nobody has succeeded in sueing Microsoft. When people say things like "Who do you sue?" what they are really saying is that they don't want to take responsibility for for what might be a bad decision, that they aren't smart enough to tell a good decision from a bad one, and they need a decision that they won't get fired for, even if it is less than optimum.
I think this is why managers spend the money on Gartner Group reports. They're wrong half the time, but you won't get fired for following their recommendations.
I get a lot of spam at work (maybe 30 or more/day) and almost none at home. I am careful about giving out my email address, and in fact I think I've given out the home address more than the work address. It puzzled me that I was getting so much spam at work, then someone here mentioned that we should not use auto-reply with Lotus Notes because that replies to spammers and confirms your email address. Of course everyone here sets Notes to auto-reply when they are on vacation, etc. I'm convinced this courtesy is the source of my spam problem.
It's too late to do anything now. Yeesh.
I bought a Hauppage WinTV PVR which does for WinTel boxes what this does for the Mac. You can record in MPEG-1 (VCD) format or MPEG-2 at several different bitrates.
This works pretty well for watching recordings on the PC that you don't intend to keep. Forget it for making permanent copies to VCD or DVD though. High quality MPEG encoding can't be done in real time. You need to capture to some other format (MJPEG or Huffyuv) then convert to MPEG afterwards. MPEG compression for a two hour movie in VCD format can take almost 24 hours. Compressing to DivX is much faster and takes half the disk space, but cannot be played on most current DVD players.
In any case, VCDs created from MPEG captures using this card look OK on the computer, but really awful on a real TV. If VCDs for your TV is what you want get a cheaper card without MPEG encoding and use Virtual Dub, TMPGenc, etc. as described at vcdhelp.com.
It amazes me that anyone could make a digital copy of a movie that has not been released to theaters without the cooperation of someone involved in making or distributing the movie. How would you do it otherwise?
I also think that anyone who really wanted to see that movie would pay to see it in a theater eventually.
Why is it always the really big movies that get pirated a week before they're released? Why didn't this happen to Freddie Got Fingered or Jackass, The Movie?
I too have to suspect some movie industry involvement in these leaks.
Way back at the start of my computer career (1979) we used the VM operating system on our mainframe. For some reason there was a login id for each printer. We also had the ability to send messages to one another; if you knew somebody's login you could send him a message that would pop up on his screen.
Eventually somebody figured out how to log in as our printer and send messsages to various users that they had used up their allotment of paper for the month and would not be allowed to print anything else. Those messages caused a certain amount of confusion in the office!
I *have* bought commercial software on Linux: Visual Age for Java Professional 3.0 (and would have bought 3.5 if IBM had made it available), Quake for Linux, and three or four boxed distros.
On the other hand, my Windows ME box at home is totally dedicated to converting my video collection to VCDs and I didn't buy any of that software. Some of it (Virtual Dub, Huffyuv codec, various video filters, Video CD burning software) is even Open Source or Free Software. If I thought that there was better software out there for this purpose I'd buy it. The *time* I devote to this project is worth that much. Turns out the free stuff is the best available.
I just bought the DVD of the TV show, and I had seen it when it was originally broadcast and liked it well enough to buy the VHS tapes. In any case, a couple of weeks ago I went to see a live performance of the musical "Carousel" with my wife. Not the kind of thing I did before I got married! However, when I was watching HHGG a few days later I noticed a new gag I never "got" before.
When the Heart Of Gold is being attacked by the missiles from Magrothea and everyone thinks they're going to die, Mike the computer starts singing:
"When you walk through a storm keep your head up high..."
Yeah, "You'll never walk alone" from Carousel. I had to play it back a couple of times before I believed it.
I have to wonder how successful this would be. It seems to me I could rent a DVD for either movie and keep it longer than 24 hours for the same money. I'd be able to watch it on a nice home theater rather than on a computer, with vastly better picture quality, and I wouldn't have to download for two or more hours.
The second thing I wonder is how they could prevent me from loading the movie into Virtual Dub and making a DivX or some other format file out of it, which would not have the DRM stuff in it.
As long as they offer the same stuff I can get at Blockbuster I don't see this succeeding
My wife and I have just discovered Ikea, and in the past three weeks I have put together a kitchen table with two chairs, a chest of drawers, and two end tables. None of them were that hard to put together, but I did have a leftover part after finishing the chest of drawers whose purpose was obvious only after it was too late to put it in (plastic strip that joins the two back panels of the chest. Instead of the strip I have a small gap that nobody ever sees anyway.)
The big problem with Ikea stuff is a). damaged parts (one of the end tables had a cracked piece. Instead of going through the grief of returning it I used Elmer's glue and used vise grip pliers to clamp the piece shut until it dried.) and b). missing parts (a friend bought something that was missing all the special screws needed to assemble it).
Generally the stuff is designed so that the parts fit together only one way. Better prevention of missing and damaged parts would be more useful than microsprocessors to help you put the stuff together.
When I was in high school I read a Ray Bradbury story that really impressed me, and that right now seems really prophetic. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the story, but I can attempt to summarize it, badly:
There is a man who goes crazy, and declares war on the two-way radios (cellphones) everyone is using. He puts ice cream in the two-way radio in his car. He goes on a bus with a diathermy machine in a briefcase and jams all the radio transmissions so that all the people on the bus, all of whom are using their cellphones, are forced to talk to each other. The police capture him. There was more to it, but I can't remember it.
The point was the man went crazy because he was forced to always be in touch with anyone who wanted to talk to him. There was no place he could go to get away.
I don't own a cellphone and this very badly remembered story probably influenced me not to get one.
I bought Sam and Max to play on my 386, just to have something better to do with that box than throw it out. I played it on my 486 too, and when I put Linux on the 486 I made it a dual boot with DOS 5.0 so I could still play it. A couple of weeks ago I tried playing it on my Pentium under Linux using ScummVm--not perfect, but promising. Now there is as sequel coming out! Wonderful!
Sam and Max was a terrific, and very funny, game. It is the only game I never got bored with.
If they reissued the original modified to work under Windows 95 and later I'd buy that too.
I bought my first Betamax AFTER it was clear that VHS would win, because video stores everywhere were dumping Beta titles for $5 apiece and I thought it would be a great opportunity to build a home video library (prerecorded tapes were $80 apiece then and used VHS movies were not as easy to find as they are now). I bought hundreds of the damned things.
For about a year now I have been using a TV capture card to convert my tape library to Video CDs or DivX. I have found that VHS tapes, even very old ones, give a better picture when playing on modern equipment than the Beta tapes do. In fact, many of my Beta tapes are unplayable. They might play on a television, but as input to a capture card all you get is a blue screen. I have decided that I will try to dub all my unplayable Betas to VHS instead of VCDs.
About the only Beta tapes that look good are those that haven't been played much, and pretty much any VHS recorded at the 2 hour speed looks better.
I saw Mac OSX demonstrated when someone from Apple demonstrated their Web Objects product. As a NeXTSTEP fan and Window Maker and GNUstep user I was impressed, but I missed the NeXTSTEP scrollbars. These scrollbars have both arrows at the same end of the scrollbar, the scrollbar is at the LEFT of the thing being scrolled, and the thumb never gets too small to grab with the mouse.
In OSX you can optionally move both arrows to the same side of the scrollbar, but there is apparently no way to move scrollbars to the left side of a list box, for example. Having scrollbars on the left works a lot better. Try it once and you'll never want to go back.
The Apple guy, who used to be a NeXT guy, seemed to agree with me.
I don't like Utopian novels much and never read about a world I'd like to live in in one of them. Having said that, Starship Troopers qualifies as a sort of Utopian novel, and Heinlein's ideas are more convincing than most.
The basic premise in his world is that only retired soldiers can vote. Those who are currently soldiers and those who have never been soldiers cannot. Anybody can volunteer for a term of duty and nobody can be rejected for any reason, not even the disabled. The idea is that to be allowed to vote you have to prove that you can put the greater good ahead of your own self interest, and military service is the way you do that.
The director of the movie called the novel a "Fascist Utopia" but in fact there is nothing Fascist about it.
My company has thousands of stores all over the U.S., each of which has a small AS400. WebSphere 2.0 runs on this hardware (slowly) but later versions of WebSphere have too large a footprint. 2.0 will not be supported indefinitely, and it has poor support for JSPs among other things.
AS400s are proprietary as hell and the cost of upgrading the memory in thousands of them is not something to take lightly.
We tried running JRun and other products on an NT box and just using the AS400 as a database server. This works fine until you start running batch jobs on the AS400. At that point your servlets just get ignored. The problem seems to be that if the AS400 is running at full capacity then it ignores any requests coming from outside it. An AS400 with sufficient memory works fine as a database server, but again we didn't want to buy the memory.
IBM's officially blessed solution involves running Tomcat on the AS400. We have found that it has a smaller footprint than even WebSphere 2.0, decent support for JSPs, and performance actually improves. We plan to roll out Tomcat chainwide.
I'd be surprised if your boss wasn't willing to do some tests of various application servers to see which work and perform the best.
I've done a little LDAP work with Java using JNDI. It should not be too difficult to knock out a Swing app that can read and update an LDAP address book, and it would of course be cross platform. Browsing an address book is what people do 90% of the time, so they should tolerate using a separate application to update it.
Actually, there is a good way to use Notes from Linux that I use myself at our office. Any Notes mail account can be accessed through IMAP, and any Notes address book can be searched using LDAP. As a result you can use just about any Linux email client (Netscape Communicator, GNUMail.app, sylpheed, etc.) as a Notes mail client.
Any Notes database can generally be viewed as a website, and that is another cross-platform way of using Notes email.
The only thing you can't do is check your Notes calendar, but I generally wouldn't do that in any case. When somebody wants to schedule you for a meeting an email is always sent anyway.
In any case, it is possible to use Notes for email without needing the Notes client.