Someone else already mentioned GSM/PCS. The technology was actually *deployed* in the early nineties so it should have been patented a long time before. The telcos have compressed the inter-branch digital traffic for even longer. Nothing fancy, but it was compression and I think that came out of Bell Labs.
GSM/PCS is patented (both use similar tecnology and identical codecs) and owned by a consortium. Deployed systems have been around since the early nineties, which would put the prior art in the backend of the eighties.
I assure you that the Beitrage for my Krankenversicherung in Germany is far from free - but at least the public system isn't related to personal risk.
As for credit, this is an interesting question. For example, almost anyone working at a bank is banned from gambling in a casino. They simply don't want someone with potential gambling debts near the money.
Credit history is otherwise considered private and irrelevant and AFAIK, nobody, even banks check that (I don't know about CC companies though).
Um, everyone at home has a firewall and DMZ? If you have one, is it correctly configured? In a professional enviornment do you have just one operating system? Interesting.
In a commercial environment, I mix system types in such a way that an exploit through one isn't an exploit for another. Somewhere behind the OpenBSD/Linux/whatever, you may even find Win2K or XP. From biology we should know that monoculture is dangerous and a lack of diversity increases susceptibility to disease.
In any case, how come that one of the problems my non-computing friends have is being tricked into downloading stuff at home by IE. MS doesn't do this but they make it very, very easy for otherpeople to do so. Why didn't Win95 and onwards create an administrative as well as a user login?
You could download as a user but you could only install as an administrator. The idea of privilege separation doesn't even seem to be on XP home as shipped.
I started working with Microsoft software in the early days. I even used Microsoft Windows 1.0. It took MS until 3.1 to have it slightly useful, 3.11 was better and Win95 better still. Why did Microsoft screw up for so long?
In the days when Windows was cheap, I didn't really care so much about support. Sorry, if I have paid more for the system and again for support, I expect something better. If I pay a lot for 24x7 support and a problem occurs, I want a workaround by next business day and a fix within a week. Otherwise, it will be in the papers and the IT dept would be out of the job. Understandably, that client of mine does not use MS in critical areas like the production servers.
I like your quote about SAP. I think you will find that every major supplier of commercial software has pending law suits. Of course the six weeks min holiday, etc., in Germany represent an appalling work ethic. In India, well you will find a lot of Microsoft stuff coming from there - I agree I don't have time for the bugs, etc. In any case, I was referring to the countries' respective governments.
I remember the post "My Operating System finances Al-Queda", I thought it was a splendid troll and very funny. Sorry, I didn't realise that it was serious. Still it gives an alternative to "My operating system stops warships dead in the water - Ours!!"
Lastly, haven't you heard about Foreign Sales Companies? Microsoft pays very little taxes anyway and all foreign profits are filtered through offshore companies as a tax avoidance scam.
Yes, the networks and sites you maintain may sometimes work but are they owned by script kiddies and are launching DDOS attacks? Would you even know?
For some strange reason, Exchange seems to run without me needing to see the source code... I still cant figure that one out!
Um, what about all those times when the DB is trashed and the backup will not restore. This generally happens after you find out that replication didn't work.
Win95 didn't really takes computers out of the hands of the 'technological elite'. That was Win98 which was somewaht more stable. With WIn95, you said goodbye to the mainfarme expert and found yourself buying a PC expert instead.
It sounds very much like you never ran somthing like an autoconfigure on a big machine. Guess what? It found all those IRQs and DMA channels for you.
Believe it or not those very professions you mentioned were already served by systems that didn't require professionals to use them. The Nurse didn't want a system to go down every five minutes while inputting patient data and the lawyer didn't want case files to be opened by all and sundry. Maybe it helped them at home run new games, but it certainly didn't do much in the workspace. In any case, you are right in one respect, it took the machine out of the hands of the technological elite and put them in the hands of a "Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert".
Gates and Ballmer may be rich, but this did not come from technological prowess, it came from being a little too hard in the business.
Now even governemnts are realising the fallacy of choosing expensive, closed source implementations. Software licenses are expensive and the "Bill and Steve Show" want to push us towards a rental model. This is very expensive and their customers are seeing the danger. Server licenses are just too expensive (you pay for the base system that you are running on plus per seat for the server). As I said, this now makes Microsoft as expensive as the big boys, but without the depth of support.
Support for major systems is expensive. I have seen problems that require the resources of a major company to fix. Do you really want to be dependent upon a single company with no reputation for customer service to get you going?
I like plurality, worms and viruses have harder times when you have multiple architectures. However, I really don't like a closed source server - it can close me out of fixing it. It seems India and Germany seem to agree. Interestingly enough that although we know that India is tainted by corruption, Linux can't pay bribes, because it isn't a single company.
It sounds like (at the press conference today)they are getting a lot of military involved in the investigation panels. Why military? I would rather have some more independent people there (esp. with O'Keefe's Navy connections).
This is a nice idea, but continental Europe uses a different gauge. Again, some of the original road infrastructure was built by the Romans, but they have a slightly different width between the wheels. I can't imagine the Romans having different chariots for England than the rest of their conquests.
is my own view of MS. They really rush stuff out which is still clearly bug ridden. They also have big problems locking systems down. Remember that memo that was leaked about the issues as to which services were needed for what functionality?
This was one thing when an OS cost $50, but it isn't really excusable when you have a $5000+ system.
I know how it happened, the engineers were told to go off and produce wonderous things but there was no overriding concept. Once those things were produced they had to have the software equivalent of a file and hammer to fit them together.
Did MS innovate? Well no not really. A lot of what MS came up with is based on technology acquired from other companies. Some of the stuff they have produced has been very good, i.e., the Win2K kernel, but there is a lot of rubbish around it that isn't. It is that rubbish, incidentally that is hard to configure and either crashes or lets the intruders in.
I have worked on some big closed source projects, one as big as Win 2K with over 30 million LOC in the backend alone. It works quite well and is quite secure, despite being written in a hodge-podge of languages and having spanned 5 architectures. It just takes a lot of work and something called QA.
Lastly, I don't have a chair of inflated superiority because I don't dance in the clouds with the developers. I generally end up with my feet firmly on the ground having to work with the things and to promise clients that they are not going to be down. I don't really care about what is put in front of me, but I prefer it when I can look at the source to figure out why it is going wrong. MS is at a disadvantage there.
I have a 7200 with LiIon, and I think that you are right. I always take my battery out when I'm on AC, but I may go through weeks of not travelling. In that case, I switch to battery about once every couple of weeks and run it down/recharge.
MS nominally put their products on hold for a month, but that is all. The OpenBSD design philosopy is paranoid - Microsoft need to have the same for their core components, and to make sure that other layers can't just quietly bypass security measures for performance.
A fast webserver doesn't really do you much good if it is 0wn3d by some H4k0rz. The wird thing is that the underlying security mechanisms (identifiers, rights and objects)in NT/2K are really quite good. Regrettably, usability sucks and support for the security mechanisms by applications (especially Microsoft's own) was non-existant. Once you have busted an app with "Functions as part of the operating system", you own the kernel.
Personally, I believe in plurality and I like spreading an app between different Linux dists, FreeBSD or OpenBSD. I would also include Win2K on thatm except that essentially you pay based on connections, which can make it really pricey. However, the idea is that one system may be broken into, but not all.
Facing the external internet though, I still prefer OpenBSD.
AIX is quite big as an external server platform, probably because of the high-end IBM Web products. It is considered to be fairly secure (certainly a better rep than Solaris) and some banks run their online banking services from it.
If you really want security, go and buy OpenVMS!!!!
Theo doesn't like to enable functionality on OpenBSD until he is fairly certain that it is secure. The process isn't perfect, for example, he has also seen the OpenSSH problems - but most of the time it works.
Forget about security through obscurity, this is security through paranoia. Sometimes, it is justified.
At least Linux has versioning on its shareable libraries, but I agree that chasing versions across subprojects is far from simple.
I've been playing with some much simpler stuff which was working somewhere between Gnome 1.4 and 2 and I still can't get it right so that it will cleanly build a binary rpm.
I use rpm (far from perfect) but with apt4rpm - normally it is great at fetching prerequisites. If it finds something that clashes with what you have, it tells you. MPlayer's bits created a few problems there, I can tell you, but oh, so much better than WinDLL hell.
I still have Windows on my machine, I have media player. Why can't I use those DLLs from another operating system?
Apple is on quicksand if they want to stop you calling the provided DLLs directly. Note that no code modification is taking place so what is the problem? If Apple didn't want you to do this, they could give you a staticly linked binary.
Your last point shows that really don't understand. If I take a Codec and reverse engineer it to produce a copy, I'm on difficult ground (unless I split the reverse engineering from the programming as with the original Phoenix BIOS) and employ a team of lawyers. Invoking a DLL is quite safe because I'm using the original code. In my particular situation, I haven't even removed Windows, so neither Micrsoft nor Apple can complain.
MPlayer is far from perfect, but its flexibility (given a rebuild or two), means that it, alone of all my media players copes with every video format I throw at it. If I want DVD menus, ok I go to Ogle. For the rest, I use MPlayer.
Does anyone remember the problems over Intel's appendix H of their Pentium handbook - vital for compiler writers as it gave the optimisation rules for the processor.
Interestingly enough, at the time other companies had no problems to give out the full specs of any chipset that was shipping.
Without a detailed spec on the processor, it is difficult to write a good compiler, and night on impossible to write an operating system. If Sun are scared to give out the specs of a shipped product in public, maybe they are worried about something.
With an Open Source driver it is difficult to sign an NDA (it has been done). With an open source operating system it is impossible because too many people need real info about the behaviour of the hardware. Info will be reflected in comments and variable names. It is very difficult to agree not to disclose the information.
The way that Pirate Radio was stopped in earlier times in the UK was to make advertising illegal. If Kazaa was restricted to working with companies without a US connection, it would hurt them.
Other systems are more distributed and the open source clients do not contain spyware/advertising this is much more difficult. You can only chase after the users, many of which are in other countries.
Regrettably in some countries such as Germany, lawyers can freelance to protect copyright. A lawyer may approach a user directly and apply a fine, of which he keeps part and forwards the rest to the IP owner. If you want to challenge this in court, you can but that costs money unless you are a lawyer. Some scumbags in Germany have been applying this trick on everything from domain names to kids swapping games.
What we need is a better "Freenet" with anonymity and the ability to transfer files in bulk like ed2k.
Operating systems that have pretensions to being secure implement a bit of code called a security reference monitor or SRM. This module checks access requests and audits events accorind to system policy. By putting the security functions into one place, a system, becomes much easier to check, as usually the SRM is pretty tight.
OTOH, if you patch just two bytes in the SRM for Win2K , you can take over the machine. TCPA isn't about encrypting the operating system, it is about protecting code, whether Linux or Win, or whatever.
The public-private key pair thing is addressing the problem of ensuring that the private key never gets where it might be read. For example, a private key on a passive dongle must be read and used by the processor, so it may be intercepted by an eavesdropper It is harder if the key is only seen by a dedicated processor (GSM SIM cards work a little like that but the encyption is shit).
Of course, a hardware protected SRM may be used for a number of different things, validating the OS, encrypted file systems and SSL but unfortunately also DRM.
Has anyone read the book "Cyteen" by Cherryh. I'm not going to prostitute myself for any particular bookstore, so you can do your own lookup wherever you want. It was published about ten years and addresses nature vs. nurture amongst other things very well.
It features cloned humans who are brought up being indoctrinated via programmed learning, the so called "azi". It also features a human clone of a genius who is carefully raised in an almost identical environment (similar family, etc), producing another genius, but one who is similar but subtly different. Like the cats described above, it is very difficult to clone behaviour.
I reread the book this Christmas because of the Raelians and Clonaid. The book was quite prophetic. The author isn't a scientist (I think she teaches history) but she seems to have done one of the best writups wince Huxley's "Brave New World".
Is this still so? I would very much like to tell people that AlphaServers are currently in the most powerful systems in the world to keep people quiet. I guess they are running Tru64 though?
Is there anything public on this? I am fighting a rearguard action trying to convince management that Alphas are still relevant. It is the total absence of marketing that has really upset me with even in the Digital era, an Alpha that was off the shelf today would be compared unfavourably with a Sun or whatever that was due to be built in a year's time. Digital didn't know how to market, Compaq never understood what they had and HP just wants to kill asap so they can realise their Itanium investment with Intel.
Our primary clusters are in two fire-proof and bomb proof rooms. A direct hit by an airliner or a major truck bomb could take it out but that is about all. No computer room has an exterior wall.
Our remote cluster is far enough away that it is safe but remains close enough to participate in the main clusters (about 40Km).
Our primary worry is RMS Journalling and the VMS Distributed lock manager, If these work, then failovers are a doddle.
Note that when the company went to Alpha from VAX, Digital were extremely generous with testing facilities. The application supports two processor architectures with two executable directories left over from the VAX migration. As long as the lock manager performs well our app will quite happily fail over.
Some applications are very involved. They are not intentionally coded in a dependant way but to squeeze the last bit of performance out, you must use some architectural features, whether explicitly or depending upon their implementation in the underlying operating system. For example, VMS applications tend to use cluster services a lot to ensure high availability. The lock manager is so tuned that architecture moves can and will impact it which in turn impacts the applications (particularly databases).
is the man to watch for. He was the head of the team that designed Alpha and was ex Cray, hence the multiprocessor friendly nature of Alpha. Any idea where he is now? Is he at AMD?
When Digital went to Compaw and Compaq went to HP, one thing followed and that was US govt contract commitments. Even a commitment to a major bank or other financial organisation counts little against a contract with the DoD. The banks have been presented with a ten year plan including the migration of VMS from Alpha to Itanium and VMS has at least another 15 years to run. Compaq-Digital has told us that they have firm obligations to the DoD that prevent them from changing this.
The sad news is no EV8. Itanium is far from being debugged and doesn't seem to be a particularly clean architecture compared with Alpha and Intel aren't particularly innovative.
Sure, they have hot standbys, etc. but switching over and back is typically a painful process.
Um no. It depends upon the application and mixed cluster support for more than just migration. Where I have been working, we can switch from one Alpha to another inside half a minute. Most of the delay is due to lock remastering (the app uses a *lot* of locks).
The app here may be over ten years old, but it has been continually updated.
With the numbers planned for the Iraq conflict, relatively few will be special forces. The rest are not so well trained and some of them are, to be frank, a little lazy. As someone else replied, compass navigation in a desert isn't the easiest of tasks with not so many reference points. With dead reckoning, you can go very wrong, very quickly.
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Someone else already mentioned GSM/PCS. The technology was actually *deployed* in the early nineties so it should have been patented a long time before. The telcos have compressed the inter-branch digital traffic for even longer. Nothing fancy, but it was compression and I think that came out of Bell Labs.
GSM/PCS is patented (both use similar tecnology and identical codecs) and owned by a consortium. Deployed systems have been around since the early nineties, which would put the prior art in the backend of the eighties.
As for credit, this is an interesting question. For example, almost anyone working at a bank is banned from gambling in a casino. They simply don't want someone with potential gambling debts near the money.
Credit history is otherwise considered private and irrelevant and AFAIK, nobody, even banks check that (I don't know about CC companies though).
In a commercial environment, I mix system types in such a way that an exploit through one isn't an exploit for another. Somewhere behind the OpenBSD/Linux/whatever, you may even find Win2K or XP. From biology we should know that monoculture is dangerous and a lack of diversity increases susceptibility to disease.
In any case, how come that one of the problems my non-computing friends have is being tricked into downloading stuff at home by IE. MS doesn't do this but they make it very, very easy for otherpeople to do so. Why didn't Win95 and onwards create an administrative as well as a user login?
You could download as a user but you could only install as an administrator. The idea of privilege separation doesn't even seem to be on XP home as shipped.
I started working with Microsoft software in the early days. I even used Microsoft Windows 1.0. It took MS until 3.1 to have it slightly useful, 3.11 was better and Win95 better still. Why did Microsoft screw up for so long?
In the days when Windows was cheap, I didn't really care so much about support. Sorry, if I have paid more for the system and again for support, I expect something better. If I pay a lot for 24x7 support and a problem occurs, I want a workaround by next business day and a fix within a week. Otherwise, it will be in the papers and the IT dept would be out of the job. Understandably, that client of mine does not use MS in critical areas like the production servers.
I like your quote about SAP. I think you will find that every major supplier of commercial software has pending law suits. Of course the six weeks min holiday, etc., in Germany represent an appalling work ethic. In India, well you will find a lot of Microsoft stuff coming from there - I agree I don't have time for the bugs, etc. In any case, I was referring to the countries' respective governments.
I remember the post "My Operating System finances Al-Queda", I thought it was a splendid troll and very funny. Sorry, I didn't realise that it was serious. Still it gives an alternative to "My operating system stops warships dead in the water - Ours!!"
Lastly, haven't you heard about Foreign Sales Companies? Microsoft pays very little taxes anyway and all foreign profits are filtered through offshore companies as a tax avoidance scam.
Win95 didn't really takes computers out of the hands of the 'technological elite'. That was Win98 which was somewaht more stable. With WIn95, you said goodbye to the mainfarme expert and found yourself buying a PC expert instead.
It sounds very much like you never ran somthing like an autoconfigure on a big machine. Guess what? It found all those IRQs and DMA channels for you.
Believe it or not those very professions you mentioned were already served by systems that didn't require professionals to use them. The Nurse didn't want a system to go down every five minutes while inputting patient data and the lawyer didn't want case files to be opened by all and sundry. Maybe it helped them at home run new games, but it certainly didn't do much in the workspace. In any case, you are right in one respect, it took the machine out of the hands of the technological elite and put them in the hands of a "Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert".
Gates and Ballmer may be rich, but this did not come from technological prowess, it came from being a little too hard in the business.
Now even governemnts are realising the fallacy of choosing expensive, closed source implementations. Software licenses are expensive and the "Bill and Steve Show" want to push us towards a rental model. This is very expensive and their customers are seeing the danger. Server licenses are just too expensive (you pay for the base system that you are running on plus per seat for the server). As I said, this now makes Microsoft as expensive as the big boys, but without the depth of support.
Support for major systems is expensive. I have seen problems that require the resources of a major company to fix. Do you really want to be dependent upon a single company with no reputation for customer service to get you going?
I like plurality, worms and viruses have harder times when you have multiple architectures. However, I really don't like a closed source server - it can close me out of fixing it. It seems India and Germany seem to agree. Interestingly enough that although we know that India is tainted by corruption, Linux can't pay bribes, because it isn't a single company.
It sounds like (at the press conference today)they are getting a lot of military involved in the investigation panels. Why military? I would rather have some more independent people there (esp. with O'Keefe's Navy connections).
This is a nice idea, but continental Europe uses a different gauge. Again, some of the original road infrastructure was built by the Romans, but they have a slightly different width between the wheels. I can't imagine the Romans having different chariots for England than the rest of their conquests.
This was one thing when an OS cost $50, but it isn't really excusable when you have a $5000+ system.
I know how it happened, the engineers were told to go off and produce wonderous things but there was no overriding concept. Once those things were produced they had to have the software equivalent of a file and hammer to fit them together.
Did MS innovate? Well no not really. A lot of what MS came up with is based on technology acquired from other companies. Some of the stuff they have produced has been very good, i.e., the Win2K kernel, but there is a lot of rubbish around it that isn't. It is that rubbish, incidentally that is hard to configure and either crashes or lets the intruders in.
I have worked on some big closed source projects, one as big as Win 2K with over 30 million LOC in the backend alone. It works quite well and is quite secure, despite being written in a hodge-podge of languages and having spanned 5 architectures. It just takes a lot of work and something called QA.
Lastly, I don't have a chair of inflated superiority because I don't dance in the clouds with the developers. I generally end up with my feet firmly on the ground having to work with the things and to promise clients that they are not going to be down. I don't really care about what is put in front of me, but I prefer it when I can look at the source to figure out why it is going wrong. MS is at a disadvantage there.
I have a 7200 with LiIon, and I think that you are right. I always take my battery out when I'm on AC, but I may go through weeks of not travelling. In that case, I switch to battery about once every couple of weeks and run it down/recharge.
MS nominally put their products on hold for a month, but that is all. The OpenBSD design philosopy is paranoid - Microsoft need to have the same for their core components, and to make sure that other layers can't just quietly bypass security measures for performance.
A fast webserver doesn't really do you much good if it is 0wn3d by some H4k0rz. The wird thing is that the underlying security mechanisms (identifiers, rights and objects)in NT/2K are really quite good. Regrettably, usability sucks and support for the security mechanisms by applications (especially Microsoft's own) was non-existant. Once you have busted an app with "Functions as part of the operating system", you own the kernel.
Personally, I believe in plurality and I like spreading an app between different Linux dists, FreeBSD or OpenBSD. I would also include Win2K on thatm except that essentially you pay based on connections, which can make it really pricey. However, the idea is that one system may be broken into, but not all.
Facing the external internet though, I still prefer OpenBSD.
If you really want security, go and buy OpenVMS!!!!
Forget about security through obscurity, this is security through paranoia. Sometimes, it is justified.
I've been playing with some much simpler stuff which was working somewhere between Gnome 1.4 and 2 and I still can't get it right so that it will cleanly build a binary rpm.
I use rpm (far from perfect) but with apt4rpm - normally it is great at fetching prerequisites. If it finds something that clashes with what you have, it tells you. MPlayer's bits created a few problems there, I can tell you, but oh, so much better than WinDLL hell.
Apple is on quicksand if they want to stop you calling the provided DLLs directly. Note that no code modification is taking place so what is the problem? If Apple didn't want you to do this, they could give you a staticly linked binary.
Your last point shows that really don't understand. If I take a Codec and reverse engineer it to produce a copy, I'm on difficult ground (unless I split the reverse engineering from the programming as with the original Phoenix BIOS) and employ a team of lawyers. Invoking a DLL is quite safe because I'm using the original code. In my particular situation, I haven't even removed Windows, so neither Micrsoft nor Apple can complain.
MPlayer is far from perfect, but its flexibility (given a rebuild or two), means that it, alone of all my media players copes with every video format I throw at it. If I want DVD menus, ok I go to Ogle. For the rest, I use MPlayer.
Interestingly enough, at the time other companies had no problems to give out the full specs of any chipset that was shipping.
Without a detailed spec on the processor, it is difficult to write a good compiler, and night on impossible to write an operating system. If Sun are scared to give out the specs of a shipped product in public, maybe they are worried about something.
With an Open Source driver it is difficult to sign an NDA (it has been done). With an open source operating system it is impossible because too many people need real info about the behaviour of the hardware. Info will be reflected in comments and variable names. It is very difficult to agree not to disclose the information.
Other systems are more distributed and the open source clients do not contain spyware/advertising this is much more difficult. You can only chase after the users, many of which are in other countries.
Regrettably in some countries such as Germany, lawyers can freelance to protect copyright. A lawyer may approach a user directly and apply a fine, of which he keeps part and forwards the rest to the IP owner. If you want to challenge this in court, you can but that costs money unless you are a lawyer. Some scumbags in Germany have been applying this trick on everything from domain names to kids swapping games.
What we need is a better "Freenet" with anonymity and the ability to transfer files in bulk like ed2k.
OTOH, if you patch just two bytes in the SRM for Win2K , you can take over the machine. TCPA isn't about encrypting the operating system, it is about protecting code, whether Linux or Win, or whatever.
The public-private key pair thing is addressing the problem of ensuring that the private key never gets where it might be read. For example, a private key on a passive dongle must be read and used by the processor, so it may be intercepted by an eavesdropper It is harder if the key is only seen by a dedicated processor (GSM SIM cards work a little like that but the encyption is shit).
Of course, a hardware protected SRM may be used for a number of different things, validating the OS, encrypted file systems and SSL but unfortunately also DRM.
It features cloned humans who are brought up being indoctrinated via programmed learning, the so called "azi". It also features a human clone of a genius who is carefully raised in an almost identical environment (similar family, etc), producing another genius, but one who is similar but subtly different. Like the cats described above, it is very difficult to clone behaviour.
I reread the book this Christmas because of the Raelians and Clonaid. The book was quite prophetic. The author isn't a scientist (I think she teaches history) but she seems to have done one of the best writups wince Huxley's "Brave New World".
Is there anything public on this? I am fighting a rearguard action trying to convince management that Alphas are still relevant. It is the total absence of marketing that has really upset me with even in the Digital era, an Alpha that was off the shelf today would be compared unfavourably with a Sun or whatever that was due to be built in a year's time. Digital didn't know how to market, Compaq never understood what they had and HP just wants to kill asap so they can realise their Itanium investment with Intel.
Our remote cluster is far enough away that it is safe but remains close enough to participate in the main clusters (about 40Km).
Our primary worry is RMS Journalling and the VMS Distributed lock manager, If these work, then failovers are a doddle.
Note that when the company went to Alpha from VAX, Digital were extremely generous with testing facilities. The application supports two processor architectures with two executable directories left over from the VAX migration. As long as the lock manager performs well our app will quite happily fail over.
Some applications are very involved. They are not intentionally coded in a dependant way but to squeeze the last bit of performance out, you must use some architectural features, whether explicitly or depending upon their implementation in the underlying operating system. For example, VMS applications tend to use cluster services a lot to ensure high availability. The lock manager is so tuned that architecture moves can and will impact it which in turn impacts the applications (particularly databases).
is the man to watch for. He was the head of the team that designed Alpha and was ex Cray, hence the multiprocessor friendly nature of Alpha. Any idea where he is now? Is he at AMD?
The sad news is no EV8. Itanium is far from being debugged and doesn't seem to be a particularly clean architecture compared with Alpha and Intel aren't particularly innovative.
The app here may be over ten years old, but it has been continually updated.
With the numbers planned for the Iraq conflict, relatively few will be special forces. The rest are not so well trained and some of them are, to be frank, a little lazy. As someone else replied, compass navigation in a desert isn't the easiest of tasks with not so many reference points. With dead reckoning, you can go very wrong, very quickly.