Oh, and VMS most certainly isn't written in C. There's some bizarre, DEC only, programming languages in there.
Hell, programming in C under VMS was always a PITA, the native VMS APIs were, to put it mildly, somewhat ugly in terms of how they passed data to and from C.
OpenVMS is written in a mix of languanges, including, C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC (yes, BASIC), Bliss, and Macro. When it was ported from VAX to Alpha, many routines were rewritten in C and C++ to improve portability, and even more routines are being rewritten for the current port to IA64.
As far as the VMS API's, they are magnificent. The Uniform Calling Standard allows any system call to be invoked by any language, so one can easily use a mix of languages for differnet modules in one program (in other words, one may easily use the right tool for a given job). Also, strings are only passed to system calls via descriptors, never by null-terminated strings. This enhances the security of the OS (no remote buffer overflow exploits, not that it would matter if a buffer were to overflow, since the data would be discarded instead of being passed to the CLI).
You've got the NT/4 Alpha bit backwards. The NT kernel was stolen from DEC by David Cutler, who did kernel work for DEC and was involved in writing VMS for Alphas, and simply brought over his code base illegally.
There are a couple of errors in this. First of all, Cutler was never involved with the Alpha port of VMS. He was involved with initial development of VMS on the original VAX platform, but was working on Micah/Prism project before the Alpha era started.
Micah/Prism (one was the OS, the other was the hardware - I never can remember which was which) was a new OS/hardware combo that was intended to replace VAX/VMS. Eventually Micah/Prism was axed in favor of persuing VMS on Alpha/AXP. This move upset Cutler enough that it made him easy pickings to be recruited by Microsoft to head the development of OS/2 NT, the intended replacement of OS/2 which went on to become Windows NT.
It is the Micah/Prism code (plus overall aspects of its design), not VMS, that Cutler is alleged to have lifted for use in NT, although no one has ever admitted to this in any official capacity.
Since the OS for the Micah/Prism project was a from-scratch rewrite (borrowing a small number of internal design elements from its VMS ancestor) was still in its early stages when it was killed, still very immature and flawed. Had the VMS kernel formed the basis for NT, Microsoft would have had a robust, secure, and scalable server OS a decade ago, instead of being about 3/4 of the way there only now.
As DIGITAL splashed on its OpenVMS website for a few hours back in the late 90's (before being quietly yanked by management), "OpenVMS 7.0 is today what Microsoft wants NT 8.0 to be."
"I've always wondered why they can't use some type of surface that is sensitive to infrared or ultra violet (or possibly emitting one of those non visible wavelengths). If they could find a way to split the image into a 2nd camera that was sensitive to one of those frequencies, they could then shoot with the actors wearing just about any color and be able to mask out the background perfectly. I guess it's probably too technically involved."
What you are suggesting is very similar to a technique used in the 50's and 60's where the background screens were illuminated with yellow sodium vapor lamps. The film stock used was not sensitive to the extremely narrow band of frequencies emitted by sodium. Among the films which used this technique were Disney's "Mary Poppins" and Ray Harryhausen's "Mysterious Island." I'm not sure why the technique fell out of favor given that it resulted in less work in the film processing lab.
"Why is it unsustainable? Just because it costs $10 for shoes that used to cost 10 cents doesn't mean the system is broken. If the price of everything goes up, then nothing has really changed. Inflationary monetary policy encourages money to move, which encourages exchange of goods & services"
The system IS broken when a typical worker is having to work twice as long to pay for the $10 shoes as their grandfather had to work to pay for the 10 cent shoes. Why do you think two-income families have become essential these days, when they used to be almost unheard of?
But anyway, that's not the part that I'm claiming is unsustainable. Some degree of M3 growth is natural and necessary. The problem is the rate of that growth combined with the fact that the money is unbacked. In short, money is being created out of nothing, and it is being done far to quickly.
"If the goverment didn't increase the money supply things would be worse. A limited supply of money, with increased demand (growing population & more goods/services being exchanged as the economy grows) = deflation. This would discourage investment, spending, and damage the economy."
As I said, some amount of money supply growth is natural. But what of the nature of that money, and the rate at which it is being dropped from the helicopters (to borrow some symbolism from everyone's favorite economics thought experiment)?
As I pointed out in my earlier post, this inflationary money creation slight-of-hand only works so long as foreign central banks are willing to hold dollars as reserve currency and purchase Treasury bonds. As Uncle Sam continues to crank the printing presses, the dollar continues to weaken and looks less and less desireable to those central banks. They are starting to eye other currencies, especially the euro (not that it is any more fundamentally sound). And it doesn't help that OPEC is making noises about switching from dollars to euros for settling oil payments. Add to that, Administration officials making idiotic statements like "deficits don't matter," it's no small wonder that global confidence in the dollar is vanishing.
Without gold or silver to back it (as MANDATED by the Constitution!), the dollar is nothing more than a fiat currency, backed only by the confidence of those who use it that it will maintain its value. But without precious metals backing it, it is guaranteed to loose value, especially at the rate at which it is generated. We might as well be using tree leaves as currency. (Come on. This is Slashdot. A geek reference to Hitchhiker had to slip into this somewhere...)
"I believe this is an intentional strategy, without a solid backing money ALWAYS slowly inflates, so the average person works, gets paid, then gets their effort essentially STOLEN from them by inflation, but the government prints more money so they do not loos in this deal."
Exactly. In this way, inflationary monetary policy is essentially a hidden tax which is used to devalue government debt. It would be an effective strategy for dealing with deficits if they were a rare event which only cropped up in times of crises, but it is a recipe for disaster which deficits are stacked up year after year for as far as the eye can see.
Now this I don't believe is true anymore, but the U.S. Dollar use to be the value of gold that the government owed you. Legal tender, a promissory note that said you had so much gold or what not. Hence the need for Fort Knox.
The idea that the Professor could print money and say will use this to trade commodities is stupid, and he would be voted off the Island real quick. However if he some how said that I will hold something for you and I will give you this dollar which you can trade back for this item. He creates an Promissory Note/I.O.U. That gives value to the money.
Which precisely points out the two biggest problems with our current economic policies:
The U.S. Dollar hasn't been backed by gold since 1971
Uncle Sam DOES print out however much money he needs to pay for deficit spending (not in a literal sense - many dollars are created electronically and are never even represented by physical cash). This print-on-demand money holds it's value only so long as Central Banks around the world are willing to accept dollars and buy Treasury Bonds. (Currently, China is the biggest backer of U.S. dept.)
In short, Alan Greenspan IS the Professor, and he should be voted off the island, and all the other Keynsians with him.
This inflationary monetary policy has had the net result of reducing the buying power of the dollar to only a tiny fraction of what it once was, and in the long run is unsustainable. At some point in the near future, we will be forced by necessity to return to a precious metal standard. The economic collapse leading up to it won't be pretty.
"Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything."
Which is precisely why Austrian-school economists (the Mises Institute is dedicated to the study of Austrian-school economics) and Libertarians derisively refer to dollars as "fiat currency." Prior to Nixon's 1971 withdrawal of the U.S. from the Bretton Woods agreement, U.S. Dollars WERE redeemable for gold (at least for settlement of large international transactions). Since then, the dollar has been essentially nothing more than a glorified IOU (like all other currencies in the world today).
This, combined with out-of-control deficit spending and monetary inflation policies (which essentially constitute a hidden tax on the spending power of working folks), is the cummulative result of almost a century of the dominance of Keynsian economics. Nose around the Mises Institute's site a bit more, folks. It should be an eye-opener.
When I was about 10 or 11 (1985), my mom bought me a book with a title something like "The Future for Kids" or some other cheesy thing. It had all sorts of cool things that we could look forward to in our future. One of them was the construction of underwater habitats using low-voltage grids to let the sea build the walls for you. I remember thinking how cool this was, and fantasizing about building my own habitat in the back yard (I lived on a bay).
One of the people behind this project, Wolf Hilbertz, is actually one of the pioneers of the "seacrete" idea for growing structures underwater using electrolosys-induced accretion.
This is great news but does it support RPC over HTTPS?
This connector does not make Evolution a full-blown MAPI/RPC client. Instead, it relies upon WebDAV/OWA for its connection. If OWA is available, you can get to it... (Or so I've read -- haven't had a chance to try it yet.)
The real reason for this announcement, and its timing, is to put downward pressure on the current rally in silver prices. Every time silver prices jump up, Kodak puts out a press release talking about how film photography is dying and they are transitioning their focus to digital photography (which, by the way, causes consumption of silver as well, via electronics manufacture, CD manufacture, and silver-based paper for photo prints that won't fade after a few years).
And, sure enough, the price of silver was pushed down today as a result of the announcement. Market price manipulation in action...
This announcement is quite misleading. Non-disposable cameras constitute only a tiny fraction of Kodak's business, so it makes sense for them to drop that product line and focus on revenue generators. Film use really hasn't dropped noticably despite digital's incursion, especially overseas, but Kodak has been struggling to compete with Fuji.
The real reason for this announcement, and its timing, is to put downward pressure on the current rally in silver prices. Every time silver prices jump up, Kodak puts out a press release talking about how film photography is dying and they are transitioning their focus to digital photography (which, by the way, causes consumption of silver as well, via electronics manufacture, CD manufacture, and silver-based paper for photo prints that won't fade after a few years).
For a decade and a half, demand for silver has exceded supply, causing a steady drawdown of above-ground stockpiles (there is currently more gold bullion above ground than silver bullion), yet the silver price remains well below where it should be (as viewed in terms of the silver/gold price ratio).
How can such a seeming violation of the law of supply and demand take place? Simple. The market is rigged via massive naked short positions (short contracts not backed by actual physical silver) on the COMEX, while the CFTC looks the other way (the same regulatory body that failed to catch Enron's shenanigans in time), plus leasing of silver stockpiles at giveaway rates from central banks (Uncle Sam's stockpiles are gone, such that silver used to make Silver Eagles is purchased on the open market -- most leased silver comes from China now.)
The members of the Silver Users Association are beginning to feel the crunch. One of these months (within the next two years), a major industrial user is going to try to make their quarterly purchase on the COMEX to meet manufacturing demand, and enough physical metal will not be available. This happened with palladium a handful of years ago, driving the price sky high, and forcing auto manufacturers to switch to platinum-nickel catalytic converters. And I'll be laughing all the way to the bank for buying physical silver at less than $5/oz and watching it go to $50...
It is difficult to develop Mac applications without Mac boxes.
IIRC, Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) has its development offices in the San Francisco Bay area, not Redmond, but still it isn't unprecedented to find Macs at Microsoft. After all, the Longhorn developers have to get their ideas from somewhere. Heck, Bill Gates himself has been reputed to have owned Macintoshes over the years...
Even VAX->Alpha was not binary compatible. All applications which have to run on VMS/IA64 will have to be recompiled.
The poster was probably referring to binary translation via the VEST utility. Just as vest would allow one to run VAX executables on an Alpha, it will allow Alpha code to run on IA64 (or even code that was previously VESTed from VAX to Alpha!)...
First boot was on Jan. 31. An Alpha/IA64 cluster was running by May. Early versions of OpenVMS v8 for IA64 systems have been released to select ISVs...
$150mil is nothing to microsoft, it's not nothing to Apple though, or rather wasn't, it's what saved them from bankruptcy long enough to get the imac to market.
Apple was nowhere near bankruptcy. They had billions in cash reserves (and still do). Microsoft's purchase of $150 million in (nonvoting) Apple stock (along with a commitment to continue developing Mac software) was a symbolic gesture meant to demonstrate to Apple's customers and shareholders that MS had confidence in Apple's future. In short, it was a PR move designed to pull Apple's marketshare and stock prices out of their respective nosedives. (Of course, the rumor mill had it that Jobs got Gates to do this by having him by the cajones over an intellectual property dispute, not that anybody could ever prove it...)
Does exclude our "aerodynamically impossible" flying insect friend from a career in the movies?
The story of some physicist calculating that it is impossible for a bee to fly is an urban legend. Same goes for scientists finding that people only use x% (insert some low number) of our potential brain capacity.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles are needed so we don't depend on fossil fuels (a limited resource), and to reduce pollution. You still gotta replace the batteries or fill the tank, tho.:)
And guess what our primary source of hydrogen is right now: natural gas. More economical and energy efficient than extracting it from water via electrolysis. Either way, it all goes back to traditional energy sources.
Hmmm? I think it's replacement is Entourage. And that was just recently updated to support Exchange calandering, IIRC. That makes OS X a compelling business platform IMO.
Hardly. Assuming that you can get the Exchange integration features to work (which doesn't seem possible here due to our Exchange cluster configuration), Entourage only provides a tiny subset of Exchange feature support. No support for delegates or meeting auto-acceptance for resource accounts. You get better support with OWA, or even the buggy monstrosity known as Outlook:mac. If only Microsoft would carbonize the latter and fix the bugs. But, alas, they have no plans to do so...
There's nothing better than the rush of a multiball or an extra ball, or a freegame. And the two guys mentioned in the leed-in to the article are geniuses. I love Monopoly. There is a new "the Simpson's" pinball game out that is mind boglingling fun. The quotes in it are sweet-assed.
besides that there is only one game that's better, Twilight Zone, because it had "the Power Ball" in it.
Oh and the Episode 1 Starwars game because you get to knock the fuck out of Jar Jar with the steelie in order to advance to fight Darth Maul in a multiball death match
Yep, TZ rocks, one of Lawlor's best. And I'm looking forward to playing Ritchie's new "Terminator 3". (Steve Ritchie is a really nice guy. Got to meat him at a pin con in Dallas last year.)
Of course, if those Swedish researchers really want to impress me, they'll get to work on nano-scale pop-bumpers and drop targets...;)
Accurate accept for the the reference to journalled filesystems. Spiralog was pretty much a failed effort. VMS does however have a very rich file system.
OpenVMS is used in mission-critical applications where maximum security and uptime are essential, when downtime and security breaches are completely unacceptable. Banks, credit unions, stock exchanges, insurance companies, etc. My credit union uses. My city's electric utility uses. Numerous lottary firms use it. The DoD uses it extensively (including in the recently deployed J-STARS system.)
It may not be sexy to the public eye, it may lack the mindshare of *nix, but it is an essential, reliable workhorse underlying much high-end computing infrastructure, utilizing many technologies which other operating systems are still struggling to catch up on, especially clustering.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenVMS is written in a mix of languanges, including, C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC (yes, BASIC), Bliss, and Macro. When it was ported from VAX to Alpha, many routines were rewritten in C and C++ to improve portability, and even more routines are being rewritten for the current port to IA64.
As far as the VMS API's, they are magnificent. The Uniform Calling Standard allows any system call to be invoked by any language, so one can easily use a mix of languages for differnet modules in one program (in other words, one may easily use the right tool for a given job). Also, strings are only passed to system calls via descriptors, never by null-terminated strings. This enhances the security of the OS (no remote buffer overflow exploits, not that it would matter if a buffer were to overflow, since the data would be discarded instead of being passed to the CLI).
There are a couple of errors in this. First of all, Cutler was never involved with the Alpha port of VMS. He was involved with initial development of VMS on the original VAX platform, but was working on Micah/Prism project before the Alpha era started.
Micah/Prism (one was the OS, the other was the hardware - I never can remember which was which) was a new OS/hardware combo that was intended to replace VAX/VMS. Eventually Micah/Prism was axed in favor of persuing VMS on Alpha/AXP. This move upset Cutler enough that it made him easy pickings to be recruited by Microsoft to head the development of OS/2 NT, the intended replacement of OS/2 which went on to become Windows NT.
It is the Micah/Prism code (plus overall aspects of its design), not VMS, that Cutler is alleged to have lifted for use in NT, although no one has ever admitted to this in any official capacity.
Since the OS for the Micah/Prism project was a from-scratch rewrite (borrowing a small number of internal design elements from its VMS ancestor) was still in its early stages when it was killed, still very immature and flawed. Had the VMS kernel formed the basis for NT, Microsoft would have had a robust, secure, and scalable server OS a decade ago, instead of being about 3/4 of the way there only now.
As DIGITAL splashed on its OpenVMS website for a few hours back in the late 90's (before being quietly yanked by management), "OpenVMS 7.0 is today what Microsoft wants NT 8.0 to be."
The system IS broken when a typical worker is having to work twice as long to pay for the $10 shoes as their grandfather had to work to pay for the 10 cent shoes. Why do you think two-income families have become essential these days, when they used to be almost unheard of?
But anyway, that's not the part that I'm claiming is unsustainable. Some degree of M3 growth is natural and necessary. The problem is the rate of that growth combined with the fact that the money is unbacked. In short, money is being created out of nothing, and it is being done far to quickly.
As I said, some amount of money supply growth is natural. But what of the nature of that money, and the rate at which it is being dropped from the helicopters (to borrow some symbolism from everyone's favorite economics thought experiment)?
As I pointed out in my earlier post, this inflationary money creation slight-of-hand only works so long as foreign central banks are willing to hold dollars as reserve currency and purchase Treasury bonds. As Uncle Sam continues to crank the printing presses, the dollar continues to weaken and looks less and less desireable to those central banks. They are starting to eye other currencies, especially the euro (not that it is any more fundamentally sound). And it doesn't help that OPEC is making noises about switching from dollars to euros for settling oil payments. Add to that, Administration officials making idiotic statements like "deficits don't matter," it's no small wonder that global confidence in the dollar is vanishing.
Without gold or silver to back it (as MANDATED by the Constitution!), the dollar is nothing more than a fiat currency, backed only by the confidence of those who use it that it will maintain its value. But without precious metals backing it, it is guaranteed to loose value, especially at the rate at which it is generated. We might as well be using tree leaves as currency. (Come on. This is Slashdot. A geek reference to Hitchhiker had to slip into this somewhere...)
Exactly. In this way, inflationary monetary policy is essentially a hidden tax which is used to devalue government debt. It would be an effective strategy for dealing with deficits if they were a rare event which only cropped up in times of crises, but it is a recipe for disaster which deficits are stacked up year after year for as far as the eye can see.
In short, Alan Greenspan IS the Professor, and he should be voted off the island, and all the other Keynsians with him.
This inflationary monetary policy has had the net result of reducing the buying power of the dollar to only a tiny fraction of what it once was, and in the long run is unsustainable. At some point in the near future, we will be forced by necessity to return to a precious metal standard. The economic collapse leading up to it won't be pretty.
Which is precisely why Austrian-school economists (the Mises Institute is dedicated to the study of Austrian-school economics) and Libertarians derisively refer to dollars as "fiat currency." Prior to Nixon's 1971 withdrawal of the U.S. from the Bretton Woods agreement, U.S. Dollars WERE redeemable for gold (at least for settlement of large international transactions). Since then, the dollar has been essentially nothing more than a glorified IOU (like all other currencies in the world today).
This, combined with out-of-control deficit spending and monetary inflation policies (which essentially constitute a hidden tax on the spending power of working folks), is the cummulative result of almost a century of the dominance of Keynsian economics. Nose around the Mises Institute's site a bit more, folks. It should be an eye-opener.
Others have mentioned the MacQuarium, but let us not forget the original computer recycling hack - the VAXbar!
$ show systemBAR/VMS V1.0 on node VAXBAR 28-JUN-1997 18:11:08.82 Uptime 2190 17:43:42
Pid Process Name State Pri I/O CPU Page flts Pages
00001010 REFRIGERATOR LEF 4 1212 0 00:10:12.23 4125 150
00000800 LIGHTS COM 6 9121 0 00:34:23.11 1231 343
00000412 BLENDER HIB 4 3412 0 00:23:49.32 1341 111
00000169 SINK LEF 3 211 0 00:01:12.66 231 222
$ logout
BARTENDER logged out at 28-JUN-1997 18:11:23.75
This connector does not make Evolution a full-blown MAPI/RPC client. Instead, it relies upon WebDAV/OWA for its connection. If OWA is available, you can get to it... (Or so I've read -- haven't had a chance to try it yet.)
...This is a tricorder...
I did R&D on its mercuric iodide-based predecessor in the early 90's, although that was more of a "luggable" xrf analyzer...
Create Your Own Camera Boom
And, sure enough, the price of silver was pushed down today as a result of the announcement. Market price manipulation in action...
This announcement is quite misleading. Non-disposable cameras constitute only a tiny fraction of Kodak's business, so it makes sense for them to drop that product line and focus on revenue generators. Film use really hasn't dropped noticably despite digital's incursion, especially overseas, but Kodak has been struggling to compete with Fuji.
The real reason for this announcement, and its timing, is to put downward pressure on the current rally in silver prices. Every time silver prices jump up, Kodak puts out a press release talking about how film photography is dying and they are transitioning their focus to digital photography (which, by the way, causes consumption of silver as well, via electronics manufacture, CD manufacture, and silver-based paper for photo prints that won't fade after a few years).
For a decade and a half, demand for silver has exceded supply, causing a steady drawdown of above-ground stockpiles (there is currently more gold bullion above ground than silver bullion), yet the silver price remains well below where it should be (as viewed in terms of the silver/gold price ratio).
How can such a seeming violation of the law of supply and demand take place? Simple. The market is rigged via massive naked short positions (short contracts not backed by actual physical silver) on the COMEX, while the CFTC looks the other way (the same regulatory body that failed to catch Enron's shenanigans in time), plus leasing of silver stockpiles at giveaway rates from central banks (Uncle Sam's stockpiles are gone, such that silver used to make Silver Eagles is purchased on the open market -- most leased silver comes from China now.)
The members of the Silver Users Association are beginning to feel the crunch. One of these months (within the next two years), a major industrial user is going to try to make their quarterly purchase on the COMEX to meet manufacturing demand, and enough physical metal will not be available. This happened with palladium a handful of years ago, driving the price sky high, and forcing auto manufacturers to switch to platinum-nickel catalytic converters. And I'll be laughing all the way to the bank for buying physical silver at less than $5/oz and watching it go to $50...
For more info, see the essays of investment analysts David Morgan and Theodore Butler.
IIRC, Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) has its development offices in the San Francisco Bay area, not Redmond, but still it isn't unprecedented to find Macs at Microsoft. After all, the Longhorn developers have to get their ideas from somewhere. Heck, Bill Gates himself has been reputed to have owned Macintoshes over the years...
Info here.
First boot was on Jan. 31. An Alpha/IA64 cluster was running by May. Early versions of OpenVMS v8 for IA64 systems have been released to select ISVs...
Apple was nowhere near bankruptcy. They had billions in cash reserves (and still do). Microsoft's purchase of $150 million in (nonvoting) Apple stock (along with a commitment to continue developing Mac software) was a symbolic gesture meant to demonstrate to Apple's customers and shareholders that MS had confidence in Apple's future. In short, it was a PR move designed to pull Apple's marketshare and stock prices out of their respective nosedives. (Of course, the rumor mill had it that Jobs got Gates to do this by having him by the cajones over an intellectual property dispute, not that anybody could ever prove it...)
Hardly. Assuming that you can get the Exchange integration features to work (which doesn't seem possible here due to our Exchange cluster configuration), Entourage only provides a tiny subset of Exchange feature support. No support for delegates or meeting auto-acceptance for resource accounts. You get better support with OWA, or even the buggy monstrosity known as Outlook:mac. If only Microsoft would carbonize the latter and fix the bugs. But, alas, they have no plans to do so...
Yep, TZ rocks, one of Lawlor's best. And I'm looking forward to playing Ritchie's new "Terminator 3". (Steve Ritchie is a really nice guy. Got to meat him at a pin con in Dallas last year.)
Of course, if those Swedish researchers really want to impress me, they'll get to work on nano-scale pop-bumpers and drop targets... ;)
Accurate accept for the the reference to journalled filesystems. Spiralog was pretty much a failed effort. VMS does however have a very rich file system.
OpenVMS is used in mission-critical applications where maximum security and uptime are essential, when downtime and security breaches are completely unacceptable. Banks, credit unions, stock exchanges, insurance companies, etc. My credit union uses. My city's electric utility uses. Numerous lottary firms use it. The DoD uses it extensively (including in the recently deployed J-STARS system.)
It may not be sexy to the public eye, it may lack the mindshare of *nix, but it is an essential, reliable workhorse underlying much high-end computing infrastructure, utilizing many technologies which other operating systems are still struggling to catch up on, especially clustering.
Not really. IA64 performance would first need to catch up to that of the Alpha EV7.
Now if only I could remember what time and date I had guessed for my entry in HP OpenVMS boot contest...