Coincidentally, I just accepted a job at a company making immunohistochemical staining equipment (Ventana Medical Systems) and all I can say is, look at the stock over the past 5 years and tell me this article's prediction holds water.
Ventana's been making the stuff that runs the staining process for a long time, and has done VERY well by it. Their results are outstanding and have proven to be good medicine!
As an employee of IBM (I work on enterprise storage products) I have this anecdotal story to relate:
The NSA buys lots of our gear, the large multi-terabyte enterprise-class disk storage arrays. In the case I heard about, there were a small handful of boxes. We keep track of the code loaded on each of them for support reasons, so we have a good sense of where each box is and what it's doing.
Our warranty on those arrays is 3 years.
At the end of the warranty period, it is the policy of the NSA to replace the gear outright and start fresh. What we learned was, these boxes had never been put into operation and sat on their shop floor as "excess capacity" (happens in the larger shops, it's a good idea). They had never been attached as storage to their mainframes.
The NSA crushed them. Brand new, unused and perfectly functional with ZERO data on them. Crushed to scrap.
That hurts, guys. It really does. My tax dollars paid for them, my sweat and tears makes them run, and the gov't just hauls them outside and crushes them when they can't get support via the original warranty terms. They will never let a shred of data leave their shop for fear of losing control of classified info, but damn, these never had any!
That's a pretty trite answer but I'm on vacation, so I'll respond.
Let me throw it back at you this way: assume you are SPRINTING a marathon, one that lasts a whole year. You are contractually obligated to run as fast as you can, at peak speed from the start to the end and you can't stop for anything, you have to eat and drink and eliminate on the run.
Now let's say you catch a cold, or the flu in the middle of the race. Your biological system starts to steal resources to increase white blood cell counts, to fight the infection and eliminate it. In the meantime you are slowing down, staggering, unable to concentrate on the task. The flu can take DAYS to eliminate from your system. In that time, you have failed to fulfill the contract (ie, maintain max speed) and lost the race.
These are the conditions placed on the vendors of enterprise level storage systems. Modelling error recovery after biological systems doesn't work that easily. You MUST FIX THE ERROR RIGHT NOW when it happens and reject the failed part and isolate it from the system. We strive to do it in mere seconds, which corresponds to just shy of the timeout values of the host system that's trying to use your storage.
When you stub your finger, it doesn't fall off immediately because it MIGHT inhibit your ability to work at max efficiency. Yet, that's how it has to happen in storage. We see a part start to fail, and blammo, we shut it off and call for service.
As they say in the army: "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid."
We spend billions on research, and only a fraction of the technologies that we invent (yes I am an IBM employee) turn into real products, but that's the whole idea.
Think of copper interconnects. Think of the 'pixie dust'. Think of the Power5 architecture. All of these things are working their way into YOUR badass PC of the future. These weren't the only things we came up with, but our process DID create them.
We must look really far forward and not sit on our laurels, that's a great way to lose the game against our competitors.
Storage Tank is software, not hardware. It virtualizes all your storage into one bigass logical storage unit, which you can then attach your hosts to over a switched fiber or similar network. It's a very clever set of abstractions and protocol conversions.
I know a few of the guys working on this project, and they're most definitely software people.
Caveat: I'm an employee of IBM's Storage Systems/Technology group, but I'm not working on that particular project. I am only discussing things that were in the previous press releases about this product so you won't get anything confidential out of this post.
The concern I have (my role in storage systems is error isolation and recovery) is that when you are running all these individual cubes, each one is trying to isolate what might have happened to its peers (or to itself) and when an error starts to propagate from one cube to the next, which it will invariably do sometime, you could end up with multiple cubes saying "IT'S THAT GUY!" and shooting him (ie, cutting him off) when in fact it was yet ANOTHER cube that started the whole thing by corrupting a message and is innocently sitting there not showing any failures.
So assuming that situation occurs, you have 1 failed and 1 not-failed cube which need to be fixed, and shutting off the failed one requires removal, which isn't part of the service model for the product. Needless to say, I'm going to be REALLY impressed when they get this working. My peers at IBM are awesome when it comes to storage, so I'm actually not being sarcastic when I say that.
Ok I fatfingered it... 2 should have been 20, for about a year and a half worth of data. Also, one of the reasons I found myself in Bentonville related to the occasional inability to do basic math sometimes:)
As a guest of WalMart I was able to enter their data center and see this Terraplex first hand. It's massive. It's thousands upon thousands of disks in ~8' frames, rows upon rows of racks. I walked down it and across it and up it and was simply awestruck by the idea of that many disks in one spot.
The gentleman who gave me the tour indicated they have something like 72 weeks (1 year plus 2 weeks) of purchase data on LIVE disk arrays, plus huge archives of the same data on tape. If you buy anything and use your credit, debit, or whatever card they can figure out your sales history obscenely quickly. Be afriad. Be very afraid.
I also got to see Walmart.com (Sun E15k) and Samsclub.com (A bunch of HP boxes in a smallish frame), they were creepy, in a sense... all those sales going on at once, converging on a spot not a few feet from me.
I'm puzzled why the poster referred to the title of the guy as "Staff Software Engineer" as if it's something special at IBM. Not to denigrate the work he's done, but 'staff engineer' is not worth mentioning. In context as seen from an IBM Engineers perspective (I'm also staff, fwiw) it's pretty funny that you would even include it. Here's the ranks for those that might care:
Band 1-5: The non-technical types.
Band 6: "nothing" Engineer (new hires)
Band 7: Staff Engineer (basically, you get staff in your first few years at IBM unless you're a total moron, and if you DON'T make staff at some point they basically have to promote or fire you)
Band 8: Advisory Engineer (most IBM engineers spend the bulk of their career as advisory)
Band 9: Senior Engineer (the fastest I've seen senior made was 10 years, and it's typically 15+ before you get to senior)
Band 10: Senior Technical Staff Member or STSM (most engineers at IBM never make it this far)
Band 11: Distinguished Engineer (you have to walk on water and have saved entire villages from destruction to get to this, you basically do whatever you want with a huge budget and work on only the coolest stuff)
Band 12: IBM Fellow (you are the uber shiznit, report to the execs, and the world is your oyster)
Look at this as an insight into the workings of the hive mind at IBM. We are the borg, yada yada yada.
Tried it on a single purchased track from iTunes. Compiled playfair on my linux box, transferred the.m4p file over, put its drm key into ~/.drms, and playfair converted it in seconds.
I then moved the file over to my laptop which has never seen iTunes or an iPod, and was able to play the file (renamed to.m4a) perfectly thru Winamp5.
I used to work for Lucent/AG Communication Systems. The project I was on, their ClientCare call center system (think big... an entire in and outbound call center solution for arbitrarily large companies), ran on Solaris and FreeBSD. We had Solaris for the big Oracle Parallel server DB and FreeBSD tied the little bits and pieces together such as the CSR clients [which ran on Windows], the ISDN line management, and the playback of our utterly annoying hold music. It worked rather well, in the end. I think they're still doing it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
My UID, 41761, is prime. What do I win?!?
Ventana's been making the stuff that runs the staining process for a long time, and has done VERY well by it. Their results are outstanding and have proven to be good medicine!
As an employee of IBM (I work on enterprise storage products) I have this anecdotal story to relate:
The NSA buys lots of our gear, the large multi-terabyte enterprise-class disk storage arrays. In the case I heard about, there were a small handful of boxes. We keep track of the code loaded on each of them for support reasons, so we have a good sense of where each box is and what it's doing.
Our warranty on those arrays is 3 years.
At the end of the warranty period, it is the policy of the NSA to replace the gear outright and start fresh. What we learned was, these boxes had never been put into operation and sat on their shop floor as "excess capacity" (happens in the larger shops, it's a good idea). They had never been attached as storage to their mainframes.
The NSA crushed them. Brand new, unused and perfectly functional with ZERO data on them. Crushed to scrap.
That hurts, guys. It really does. My tax dollars paid for them, my sweat and tears makes them run, and the gov't just hauls them outside and crushes them when they can't get support via the original warranty terms. They will never let a shred of data leave their shop for fear of losing control of classified info, but damn, these never had any!
Why do they treat our tax money so callously?
That's a pretty trite answer but I'm on vacation, so I'll respond.
Let me throw it back at you this way: assume you are SPRINTING a marathon, one that lasts a whole year. You are contractually obligated to run as fast as you can, at peak speed from the start to the end and you can't stop for anything, you have to eat and drink and eliminate on the run.
Now let's say you catch a cold, or the flu in the middle of the race. Your biological system starts to steal resources to increase white blood cell counts, to fight the infection and eliminate it. In the meantime you are slowing down, staggering, unable to concentrate on the task. The flu can take DAYS to eliminate from your system. In that time, you have failed to fulfill the contract (ie, maintain max speed) and lost the race.
These are the conditions placed on the vendors of enterprise level storage systems. Modelling error recovery after biological systems doesn't work that easily. You MUST FIX THE ERROR RIGHT NOW when it happens and reject the failed part and isolate it from the system. We strive to do it in mere seconds, which corresponds to just shy of the timeout values of the host system that's trying to use your storage.
When you stub your finger, it doesn't fall off immediately because it MIGHT inhibit your ability to work at max efficiency. Yet, that's how it has to happen in storage. We see a part start to fail, and blammo, we shut it off and call for service.
Wait one damn minute here.
As they say in the army: "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid."
We spend billions on research, and only a fraction of the technologies that we invent (yes I am an IBM employee) turn into real products, but that's the whole idea.
Think of copper interconnects. Think of the 'pixie dust'. Think of the Power5 architecture. All of these things are working their way into YOUR badass PC of the future. These weren't the only things we came up with, but our process DID create them.
We must look really far forward and not sit on our laurels, that's a great way to lose the game against our competitors.
Storage Tank is software, not hardware. It virtualizes all your storage into one bigass logical storage unit, which you can then attach your hosts to over a switched fiber or similar network. It's a very clever set of abstractions and protocol conversions.
I know a few of the guys working on this project, and they're most definitely software people.
Caveat: I'm an employee of IBM's Storage Systems/Technology group, but I'm not working on that particular project. I am only discussing things that were in the previous press releases about this product so you won't get anything confidential out of this post.
i c_storage/CIB_Hardware/
The original intent, when this was previewed a year or so ago, was that dead bricks would just stay in there and not require disassembly. See http://www.almaden.ibm.com/StorageSystems/autonom
for some more discussion.
The concern I have (my role in storage systems is error isolation and recovery) is that when you are running all these individual cubes, each one is trying to isolate what might have happened to its peers (or to itself) and when an error starts to propagate from one cube to the next, which it will invariably do sometime, you could end up with multiple cubes saying "IT'S THAT GUY!" and shooting him (ie, cutting him off) when in fact it was yet ANOTHER cube that started the whole thing by corrupting a message and is innocently sitting there not showing any failures.
So assuming that situation occurs, you have 1 failed and 1 not-failed cube which need to be fixed, and shutting off the failed one requires removal, which isn't part of the service model for the product. Needless to say, I'm going to be REALLY impressed when they get this working. My peers at IBM are awesome when it comes to storage, so I'm actually not being sarcastic when I say that.
Ok I fatfingered it... 2 should have been 20, for about a year and a half worth of data. Also, one of the reasons I found myself in Bentonville related to the occasional inability to do basic math sometimes :)
As a guest of WalMart I was able to enter their data center and see this Terraplex first hand. It's massive. It's thousands upon thousands of disks in ~8' frames, rows upon rows of racks. I walked down it and across it and up it and was simply awestruck by the idea of that many disks in one spot.
The gentleman who gave me the tour indicated they have something like 72 weeks (1 year plus 2 weeks) of purchase data on LIVE disk arrays, plus huge archives of the same data on tape. If you buy anything and use your credit, debit, or whatever card they can figure out your sales history obscenely quickly. Be afriad. Be very afraid.
I also got to see Walmart.com (Sun E15k) and Samsclub.com (A bunch of HP boxes in a smallish frame), they were creepy, in a sense... all those sales going on at once, converging on a spot not a few feet from me.
I'm puzzled why the poster referred to the title of the guy as "Staff Software Engineer" as if it's something special at IBM. Not to denigrate the work he's done, but 'staff engineer' is not worth mentioning. In context as seen from an IBM Engineers perspective (I'm also staff, fwiw) it's pretty funny that you would even include it. Here's the ranks for those that might care:
Band 1-5: The non-technical types.
Band 6: "nothing" Engineer (new hires)
Band 7: Staff Engineer (basically, you get staff in your first few years at IBM unless you're a total moron, and if you DON'T make staff at some point they basically have to promote or fire you)
Band 8: Advisory Engineer (most IBM engineers spend the bulk of their career as advisory)
Band 9: Senior Engineer (the fastest I've seen senior made was 10 years, and it's typically 15+ before you get to senior)
Band 10: Senior Technical Staff Member or STSM (most engineers at IBM never make it this far)
Band 11: Distinguished Engineer (you have to walk on water and have saved entire villages from destruction to get to this, you basically do whatever you want with a huge budget and work on only the coolest stuff)
Band 12: IBM Fellow (you are the uber shiznit, report to the execs, and the world is your oyster)
Look at this as an insight into the workings of the hive mind at IBM. We are the borg, yada yada yada.
Ask and ye shall recieve:
.m4a (unprotected AAC) instead of .m4p (protected AAC).
I assume you've got it compiled, probably on a Linux box or equiavalent.
Make a directory under your home directory called ".drms" (watch for the leading ".")
On your iTunes installed machine (assuming Windows here) go look in C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USERNAME\Application Data\drms
Copy the contents of that directory into ~/.drms and you should be good to go.
playfair makes you specify the new filename, make sure you use
If your install is like mine, iTunes put it in:
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USERNAME\Application Data\drms
Copy the contents of that directory into ~/.drms and you should be good to go.
Tried it on a single purchased track from iTunes. Compiled playfair on my linux box, transferred the .m4p file over, put its drm key into ~/.drms, and playfair converted it in seconds.
.m4a) perfectly thru Winamp5.
I then moved the file over to my laptop which has never seen iTunes or an iPod, and was able to play the file (renamed to
So far, one good data point!
I used to work for Lucent/AG Communication Systems. The project I was on, their ClientCare call center system (think big... an entire in and outbound call center solution for arbitrarily large companies), ran on Solaris and FreeBSD. We had Solaris for the big Oracle Parallel server DB and FreeBSD tied the little bits and pieces together such as the CSR clients [which ran on Windows], the ISDN line management, and the playback of our utterly annoying hold music. It worked rather well, in the end. I think they're still doing it that way.
Here's a link to the product itself: http://www.agcs.com/productsv2/CallCenter/works.ht m
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