Actually, the kernel being under GPL is not the reason RMS claims the Linux is GNU/Linux. He claims that becuase Linux distrobutions use so much GNU software (in fact they woundn't be usable without GNU software), it is not a Linux distrobution but a GNU/Linux distrobution. ie Linux kernel GNU software. That being said I will never refer to it as GNU/Linux simply out of principle.
As much as I hate it JavaScript is pretty helpfull in making a site feel responsive and interactive. You just have to be extreamly carefull in using only the very basic Javascript so that it works in most browsers. It is also handy to only use it in non critical areas, so that if it doesnt work it doesn't directly effect the usability of the site. Admitidly most web 'coders' dont follow these suggestions.
The only problem with this solution (robotic cars) is that it does absolutly nothing for the environment. I realize, this is a side goal of mass transit systems, but it is a valid goal none the less. So I hope the robotic cars idea doesn' t get popular before we have much more efficient automobiles.
You really need to make sure of your facts when spouting them as doctrine. Ada was in fact not designed by committee, Ada was design by a single individual with support from a group of very smart people to give suggestions. Ada95 was designed by Tucker Taft, I forget the designer of Ada83, I am pretty sure that he would not be real happy with you calling him a committee. As a side note, Ada is one of the easiest and most productive languages I have every worked with (these include in order of use Java, C++, C, Perl, tcl, Ocaml). The syntax is very Pascal like and many C/C++ programmers don't like that, but it does lend itself to readability. Its threading model is very intuitive, its use of generic is well thought out, memory management is very simple even though there is no garbage collector. In any case, look into something before you make snap judgments.
Try IBM's JVM for linux. It has a built in jit compiler and a very nice garbadge collection scheme. Overall I have found it to run various Java Apps very well. Even eclipse is none too bad under it.
I have used it for a little while now and I have to say it is pretty nice. It includes allot of the best features of Visual Age for Java and makes those available for other langauges. It is a bit slow, but as Java apps go its not bad at all. Compared to JBuilder or Forte its veritable speed deamon (althow start up is rather slow).
I have seen allot of posts here telling this guy to go ahead and take the three or four years. What I have not seen is anyone explaining how he will pay his bills while he is not working or hwo he will support his family for that amount of time.
This is a problem that I have as well. I have six years in IS. I love it and spend serveral hours each evening studing on my own. I would love to take three or four years off and spend it in school, but there is no way I could survive without getting a regular check. So for all of you who are saying take the time and go, please provide an explaination of how to go about that. Otherwise you are just blowing smoke.
Good Lord people, stop talking about how impossible it is an welcome it as a good thinng. If nothing else then it will, at the very least, foster some additional research into a promising area of clean, renewable energy sources. At the best they come up with a light, clean, cheap, powerfull fuel cell that could have applications in many other areas. Its a win win situation for everyon except boing (if it fails it could lose money). Any way even if it is impossible that just makes it more attractive. Since when did progress rely only on what was possible?
I work with java every day and for client side apps it is slow. There is not way around it, the vm startup time alone is enough to frustrate most users. Of course, none of this applies on the server side.
Actually 1.1. On the gcj issue, I thought that was deprecated in the same way g++ was...but no big deal.
Nope, according the gnu's gcj website it is the 1.0 specification, not 1.1. And Gnu is still calling it gcj so I guess I can too.
And you base this on what evidence? Arkanae would seem to be an existence proof that works against you. JDK 1.4 should improve things much more, mainly through the DirectBuffer mechanism.
I base it on personal experience, I code java full time mostly server side but occasionally gui as well, and as yet I have never seen any java based gui app perform to a resonable degree. As far as Arkanae goes, it looks interesting but I will reserve judgement until I get a chance to play.
This is an argument made often, the only problem with this is that java seems to bloat in proportion to the speed of the machine. Java was slow when it came out in 1995 and its still slow, explain that one under this conjecture.
There are only a few problems with this, primarily gcc (3.0 or otherwise) does not support graphics at all, they have yet to implement even the awt much less swing or java3D. In fact, gcc, or more correctly gjc, only supports java 1.0. These being the facts, it is very unlikly that you will be able to do a game using java and gcc. As for the VM, even with jit technologies Java is still no where near fast enough to do any modern style of game.
Now dont get em wrong, java is a good choice for server side apps, its just not there yet for the client side.
I am not a big rebol fan, but claiming the it is crap becuase it deviates from C syntax is just stupid. C-family syntax is probably the worst syntax ever devised for a production language (production guys, brainf**k doesn't count). Like many of the unwashed open source masses (of which I am one) you believe that just becuase it is popular it must be the best choice. Well, I have never known a mob to make the best choice in anything, and the popularity of C just proves my point. I my opinion C syntax is nearly unreadable and horrible to maintain. It is a writers language not a readers, so it is terse and cryptic. This makes it really fast to type the code but going back and reading it six months later is a nightmare. There are alot better languages out there, my personal favorite is Ada95, but there are quite a few others.
I realize that there are quite a few coders out there who will probably respond with flames to this. I only ask that you objectivly evaluate some of the other syntaxes before flaming me here. You may just be suprised at the power some of these languages bring in the area of readability and maintainability. Also remember that writing the code is probably the shortest aspect of its entire life cycle, and therefore targeting that aspect in langauge design or in the choosing a langauge for a project is probably not a good choice.
This is what people who have never truly grasped OOP always say. It seams to be 'I don't know how to use it so it must be bad!'. This is, of course, utterly false. OOP projects take a bit longer to create but maintainability and extensablity more then make up for it.
As for the speed issue, that argument was made when programmers moved from C to Assembler. I am sure there are still a few assembler programmers out there saying
'What's this shit with Procedural Programming? PP is a sinking ship, it's been already demonstrated a hundred times that it shows no advantages (except for morons who don't know what they're doing) and is always 5-500 times slower, take C for example.'
So your argument is worthless. I would say pick up and OOP book and spend the next six months or so tring to come up to speed. When the 'Aha' moment strikes you may take back your post.
Killing another person in defense of your life is not murder.
Killing another person in defense of your family is not murder.
Killing another person in defense of your nieghbor is not murder.
Killing another person in defense of your country is not murder.
Military men and women are there to protect you and I. In my case it happens to be the US military in other cases it may be someone elses military. Don't call them murderers simply becuase they have to kill people at times. That is the same as calling cops murderers or prison executioners murders.
This is not to say that they are not used for wrong purposes at times by the government. In those situations it is the government who commit murder not the military men and women on the ground.
I agree standardization is a good thing, unfortunatly the GPL and LGPL will probably not be that platform for many people. Although both of these licenses are well thought out and purposefull, the social agenda bound up with them is anathma to many open source developers. That being said, please realize that though I disagree fundamentally with the agenda I do respect the FSF, its licenses and its adherants.
Much of the arguments to date seem to stem from the fact that most users will not be willing to string together the tools into a coherent custom whole. I think this is a non-issue, will users do this? no not at all. But this does leave a gap open for other companies/inidivuals to easily pack of the inidividual peaces and produce custom works based on the client/targets area of need. I can see this being a big seller in certain areas. If nothing else it would make development of large systems much simpler
This tech is in use in a buch of places like, INS (US), Vegas, various places in britan etc. It seems to be almost common. The register has an article here
There is a better term. "Skill". IT is a skill-based industry, similar to journalism, civil engineering, or facilities maintenance. There's no reason to seek you in particular over anyone else in the industry who can do the same work.
Talent, on the other hand, implies that you have an artistic flair and that only your performance could possibly do. Anyone with a password is equivalent, as far as the computer is concerned.
I disagree, IT is a talent based industry. If it was just skill then anyone would be able to pick up a C++ book and acquire the skill to code well. This is not how it happens. Skill, in this instance, is a result of talent.
Unless your company decides to subcontract your job out to some substandard Java consultancy in India that uses == to compare Strings. Or hires someone from abroad on a work visa because they're cheaper than you are.
In either case I can still get work at another company. As you point out, the quality of the work you describe is lacking. If I have talent, I can produce quality code. There will always be a demand for quality.
Well, that's tough shit, boy, you're paid based on supply and demand. You don't have talent, you have skill. You'll be paid exactly what you're worth in the market at any given time. As soon as someone finds a way to pipe your job to someplace else for cheaper, your rate will also drop, if you want to stay employed. Did you see the comment a few days back in another article where investors only wanted to pay $45k for a CCIE certified network admin?
Demand, of course, drives need. But two peoples rates in the same job will vary depending on their talent, this is something a union does not support. As you said, I will be paid what I am worth and my talent dictates what I am worth.
Why not? Keeping up-to-date with the latest tools only feeds the marketing hype machine. In hiring a sysadmin, for example, knowing the minutiae of Red Hat 9.3's particular flavor of init scripts is probably far less important than having the problem-solving skills to dig into them and find the needed information.
I suspect your fixation on staying "hip" has to do with your own position being dependent on the upgrade treadmill? Problem solving is not a purchasable skill.
I agree that understanding the underlying technology is extremely useful, however, knowing new technology is a requirement in this industry. For example, how much work is there for a FORTRAN programmer or a System 36 admin. A little, but not much. Technology changes, its a fact of life in IT so we have to be conversant in the new technologies. As for problem solving skills, that is all bound up under the talent heading.
As for you little personal quip there, I program in Java, C/C++, Lisp, Perl, Python and a few other obscure languages. I've done everything from automation control projects to simple business applications to ecommerce webapps. None of these required up to the second knowledge of technology but the did require somewhat current skills.
Then why are you not a consultant? You want the entrepreneurial endorphin buzz, you start the consultancy or the startup and stop ruining the industry for those of us who like to go home before the stars come out.
Actually, I am a consultant. I do both packages in house for sale and I am contracted out to companies who need my expertise. When I consult at a company I generally work on site for a length of time. In the interim I provide a stable maintainable application and train the employees in OO techniques, version control etc. How is this ruining the industry?
Then why all the emphasis on "team play" in this industry? Why are cowboys so frowned upon? Why does your supposed "talent" never get recognized as individually your contribution? Because it isn't talent. If you want to exercise your bloody talents, drag your PHB grandstanding "mememememe" ass into sales and leave us scientists alone.
Once again you seem to have missed the point and attacked me personally in your misunderstanding. Projects do not get done without team players. Cowboy coders are detrimental to a stable maintainable code base. Does that mean that because I work in a team I shoud be paid the same as everyone else in that team? No.
Unions are built on the premise that workers rights need to be protected, and workers need to be compensated fairly. These are very laudable ideals and, in many industries, are still needed. IT, however, is not one of those industries.
For lack of a better term, IT is a talent based industry. You move ahead by knowing more or doing better then those others around you. You negotiate contracts that are individual to you and that compensates you for your skill level. If working conditions become harsh you may leave and get work somewhere else, usually pretty easily.
This concept of an individual worker being responsible for himself is the antithesis of what the unions are about. Unions are about the collective, about everyone being treated the same, about making it difficult to fire people, about contract negotiations en mass. These are concepts that are foreign to IT, and rightfully so.
As an IT worker I want to be paid based on my talent. If there is someone that has been with a company for 30 years and is mediocre at his job then I want to be promoted passed him and compensated better. Seniority means nothing if the person does not retain their edge and continually keep updated.
I also want to negotiate my contract. I do not want to share a contract with every other IT person in the company. Then the contract is based on the lowest common denominator. So if I was in a union I might get a 3% or 4% raise where if I negotiated myself I would probably get between 8% and 12%.
Unions support the collective, IT is based around individuals and individual talent. They are mutually exclusive in my opinion.
Actaully the Blue LED problem has been recently solved by a scientist in Japan. details are here and here. These are the same document, the second is just pre tagged text.
This isn't really a new concept unfortunately. It makes me wonder just about everything has changed in the last century (the time QWERTY has been out), why has this not changed? There must be a better way to type then this. People had the same problem some years ago with manual writing (paper and pencil) and came up with shorthand. I am surprised that nothing similar has happened with the keyboard.
A century with no new developments makes me think we are missing something.
This may be obvious but...
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
The GPL and BSD style licenses represent to basic differences in thought. Mr. Stallman and those who support the GPL are trying to make a social change. The other side of the coin, the BSD style licenses, are simply trying to provide software that people will use. Generally both sides code for the love of coding, it's just the GPL supports want an additional end result beyond that (social change). This not a bad thing, it just produces variety.
I personally subscribe more to the BSD style of licenses then the GPL. I could care less about social change (hey I'm a programmer), but I do want people to use and improve my code. I generally avoid using any GPLed code in my own projects because I do not want to have to release code under the GPL.
Believe it or not guys, OS/390 is there running in the background. It serves as the conroller for all of these LPARs. The ISeries 400 works the same way. ie OS/400 controlls the partitions and the vms. SO in effect you are always working on OS/390. lol
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the kernel being under GPL is not the reason RMS claims the Linux is GNU/Linux. He claims that becuase Linux distrobutions use so much GNU software (in fact they woundn't be usable without GNU software), it is not a Linux distrobution but a GNU/Linux distrobution. ie Linux kernel GNU software. That being said I will never refer to it as GNU/Linux simply out of principle.
As much as I hate it JavaScript is pretty helpfull in making a site feel responsive and interactive. You just have to be extreamly carefull in using only the very basic Javascript so that it works in most browsers. It is also handy to only use it in non critical areas, so that if it doesnt work it doesn't directly effect the usability of the site. Admitidly most web 'coders' dont follow these suggestions.
The only problem with this solution (robotic cars) is that it does absolutly nothing for the environment. I realize, this is a side goal of mass transit systems, but it is a valid goal none the less. So I hope the robotic cars idea doesn' t get popular before we have much more efficient automobiles.
You really need to make sure of your facts when spouting them as doctrine. Ada was in fact not designed by committee, Ada was design by a single individual with support from a group of very smart people to give suggestions. Ada95 was designed by Tucker Taft, I forget the designer of Ada83, I am pretty sure that he would not be real happy with you calling him a committee. As a side note, Ada is one of the easiest and most productive languages I have every worked with (these include in order of use Java, C++, C, Perl, tcl, Ocaml). The syntax is very Pascal like and many C/C++ programmers don't like that, but it does lend itself to readability. Its threading model is very intuitive, its use of generic is well thought out, memory management is very simple even though there is no garbage collector. In any case, look into something before you make snap judgments.
Try IBM's JVM for linux. It has a built in jit compiler and a very nice garbadge collection scheme. Overall I have found it to run various Java Apps very well. Even eclipse is none too bad under it.
I have used it for a little while now and I have to say it is pretty nice. It includes allot of the best features of Visual Age for Java and makes those available for other langauges. It is a bit slow, but as Java apps go its not bad at all. Compared to JBuilder or Forte its veritable speed deamon (althow start up is rather slow).
I have seen allot of posts here telling this guy to go ahead and take the three or four years. What I have not seen is anyone explaining how he will pay his bills while he is not working or hwo he will support his family for that amount of time.
This is a problem that I have as well. I have six years in IS. I love it and spend serveral hours each evening studing on my own. I would love to take three or four years off and spend it in school, but there is no way I could survive without getting a regular check. So for all of you who are saying take the time and go, please provide an explaination of how to go about that. Otherwise you are just blowing smoke.
Good Lord people, stop talking about how impossible it is an welcome it as a good thinng. If nothing else then it will, at the very least, foster some additional research into a promising area of clean, renewable energy sources. At the best they come up with a light, clean, cheap, powerfull fuel cell that could have applications in many other areas. Its a win win situation for everyon except boing (if it fails it could lose money). Any way even if it is impossible that just makes it more attractive. Since when did progress rely only on what was possible?
I work with java every day and for client side apps it is slow. There is not way around it, the vm startup time alone is enough to frustrate most users. Of course, none of this applies on the server side.
Actually 1.1. On the gcj issue, I thought that was deprecated in the same way g++ was...but no big deal.
Nope, according the gnu's gcj website it is the 1.0 specification, not 1.1. And Gnu is still calling it gcj so I guess I can too.
And you base this on what evidence? Arkanae would seem to be an existence proof that works against you. JDK 1.4 should improve things much more, mainly through the DirectBuffer mechanism.
I base it on personal experience, I code java full time mostly server side but occasionally gui as well, and as yet I have never seen any java based gui app perform to a resonable degree. As far as Arkanae goes, it looks interesting but I will reserve judgement until I get a chance to play.
This is an argument made often, the only problem with this is that java seems to bloat in proportion to the speed of the machine. Java was slow when it came out in 1995 and its still slow, explain that one under this conjecture.
There are only a few problems with this, primarily gcc (3.0 or otherwise) does not support graphics at all, they have yet to implement even the awt much less swing or java3D. In fact, gcc, or more correctly gjc, only supports java 1.0. These being the facts, it is very unlikly that you will be able to do a game using java and gcc. As for the VM, even with jit technologies Java is still no where near fast enough to do any modern style of game.
Now dont get em wrong, java is a good choice for server side apps, its just not there yet for the client side.
I am not a big rebol fan, but claiming the it is crap becuase it deviates from C syntax is just stupid. C-family syntax is probably the worst syntax ever devised for a production language (production guys, brainf**k doesn't count). Like many of the unwashed open source masses (of which I am one) you believe that just becuase it is popular it must be the best choice. Well, I have never known a mob to make the best choice in anything, and the popularity of C just proves my point. I my opinion C syntax is nearly unreadable and horrible to maintain. It is a writers language not a readers, so it is terse and cryptic. This makes it really fast to type the code but going back and reading it six months later is a nightmare. There are alot better languages out there, my personal favorite is Ada95, but there are quite a few others.
I realize that there are quite a few coders out there who will probably respond with flames to this. I only ask that you objectivly evaluate some of the other syntaxes before flaming me here. You may just be suprised at the power some of these languages bring in the area of readability and maintainability. Also remember that writing the code is probably the shortest aspect of its entire life cycle, and therefore targeting that aspect in langauge design or in the choosing a langauge for a project is probably not a good choice.
This is what people who have never truly grasped OOP always say. It seams to be 'I don't know how to use it so it must be bad!'. This is, of course, utterly false. OOP projects take a bit longer to create but maintainability and extensablity more then make up for it.
As for the speed issue, that argument was made when programmers moved from C to Assembler. I am sure there are still a few assembler programmers out there saying
'What's this shit with Procedural Programming? PP is a sinking ship, it's been already demonstrated a hundred times that it shows no advantages (except for morons who don't know what they're doing) and is always 5-500 times slower, take C for example.'
So your argument is worthless. I would say pick up and OOP book and spend the next six months or so tring to come up to speed. When the 'Aha' moment strikes you may take back your post.
Killing another person in defense of your life is not murder.
Killing another person in defense of your family is not murder.
Killing another person in defense of your nieghbor is not murder.
Killing another person in defense of your country is not murder.
Military men and women are there to protect you and I. In my case it happens to be the US military in other cases it may be someone elses military. Don't call them murderers simply becuase they have to kill people at times. That is the same as calling cops murderers or prison executioners murders.
This is not to say that they are not used for wrong purposes at times by the government. In those situations it is the government who commit murder not the military men and women on the ground.
It's comments like this that make me hang my head in shame to be the same color as people such as yourself
I agree standardization is a good thing, unfortunatly the GPL and LGPL will probably not be that platform for many people. Although both of these licenses are well thought out and purposefull, the social agenda bound up with them is anathma to many open source developers. That being said, please realize that though I disagree fundamentally with the agenda I do respect the FSF, its licenses and its adherants.
Much of the arguments to date seem to stem from the fact that most users will not be willing to string together the tools into a coherent custom whole. I think this is a non-issue, will users do this? no not at all. But this does leave a gap open for other companies/inidivuals to easily pack of the inidividual peaces and produce custom works based on the client/targets area of need. I can see this being a big seller in certain areas. If nothing else it would make development of large systems much simpler
Just my 2cts
This tech is in use in a buch of places like, INS (US), Vegas, various places in britan etc. It seems to be almost common. The register has an article here
I disagree, IT is a talent based industry. If it was just skill then anyone would be able to pick up a C++ book and acquire the skill to code well. This is not how it happens. Skill, in this instance, is a result of talent.
Unless your company decides to subcontract your job out to some substandard Java consultancy in India that uses == to compare Strings. Or hires someone from abroad on a work visa because they're cheaper than you are.In either case I can still get work at another company. As you point out, the quality of the work you describe is lacking. If I have talent, I can produce quality code. There will always be a demand for quality.
Well, that's tough shit, boy, you're paid based on supply and demand. You don't have talent, you have skill. You'll be paid exactly what you're worth in the market at any given time. As soon as someone finds a way to pipe your job to someplace else for cheaper, your rate will also drop, if you want to stay employed. Did you see the comment a few days back in another article where investors only wanted to pay $45k for a CCIE certified network admin?Demand, of course, drives need. But two peoples rates in the same job will vary depending on their talent, this is something a union does not support. As you said, I will be paid what I am worth and my talent dictates what I am worth.
Why not? Keeping up-to-date with the latest tools only feeds the marketing hype machine. In hiring a sysadmin, for example, knowing the minutiae of Red Hat 9.3's particular flavor of init scripts is probably far less important than having the problem-solving skills to dig into them and find the needed information. I suspect your fixation on staying "hip" has to do with your own position being dependent on the upgrade treadmill? Problem solving is not a purchasable skill.I agree that understanding the underlying technology is extremely useful, however, knowing new technology is a requirement in this industry. For example, how much work is there for a FORTRAN programmer or a System 36 admin. A little, but not much. Technology changes, its a fact of life in IT so we have to be conversant in the new technologies. As for problem solving skills, that is all bound up under the talent heading.
As for you little personal quip there, I program in Java, C/C++, Lisp, Perl, Python and a few other obscure languages. I've done everything from automation control projects to simple business applications to ecommerce webapps. None of these required up to the second knowledge of technology but the did require somewhat current skills.
Then why are you not a consultant? You want the entrepreneurial endorphin buzz, you start the consultancy or the startup and stop ruining the industry for those of us who like to go home before the stars come out.Actually, I am a consultant. I do both packages in house for sale and I am contracted out to companies who need my expertise. When I consult at a company I generally work on site for a length of time. In the interim I provide a stable maintainable application and train the employees in OO techniques, version control etc. How is this ruining the industry?
Then why all the emphasis on "team play" in this industry? Why are cowboys so frowned upon? Why does your supposed "talent" never get recognized as individually your contribution? Because it isn't talent. If you want to exercise your bloody talents, drag your PHB grandstanding "mememememe" ass into sales and leave us scientists alone.Once again you seem to have missed the point and attacked me personally in your misunderstanding. Projects do not get done without team players. Cowboy coders are detrimental to a stable maintainable code base. Does that mean that because I work in a team I shoud be paid the same as everyone else in that team? No.
Unions are built on the premise that workers rights need to be protected, and workers need to be compensated fairly. These are very laudable ideals and, in many industries, are still needed. IT, however, is not one of those industries.
For lack of a better term, IT is a talent based industry. You move ahead by knowing more or doing better then those others around you. You negotiate contracts that are individual to you and that compensates you for your skill level. If working conditions become harsh you may leave and get work somewhere else, usually pretty easily.
This concept of an individual worker being responsible for himself is the antithesis of what the unions are about. Unions are about the collective, about everyone being treated the same, about making it difficult to fire people, about contract negotiations en mass. These are concepts that are foreign to IT, and rightfully so.
As an IT worker I want to be paid based on my talent. If there is someone that has been with a company for 30 years and is mediocre at his job then I want to be promoted passed him and compensated better. Seniority means nothing if the person does not retain their edge and continually keep updated.
I also want to negotiate my contract. I do not want to share a contract with every other IT person in the company. Then the contract is based on the lowest common denominator. So if I was in a union I might get a 3% or 4% raise where if I negotiated myself I would probably get between 8% and 12%.
Unions support the collective, IT is based around individuals and individual talent. They are mutually exclusive in my opinion.
Actaully the Blue LED problem has been recently solved by a scientist in Japan. details are here and here. These are the same document, the second is just pre tagged text.
This isn't really a new concept unfortunately. It makes me wonder just about everything has changed in the last century (the time QWERTY has been out), why has this not changed? There must be a better way to type then this. People had the same problem some years ago with manual writing (paper and pencil) and came up with shorthand. I am surprised that nothing similar has happened with the keyboard.
A century with no new developments makes me think we are missing something.
The GPL and BSD style licenses represent to basic differences in thought. Mr. Stallman and those who support the GPL are trying to make a social change. The other side of the coin, the BSD style licenses, are simply trying to provide software that people will use. Generally both sides code for the love of coding, it's just the GPL supports want an additional end result beyond that (social change). This not a bad thing, it just produces variety.
I personally subscribe more to the BSD style of licenses then the GPL. I could care less about social change (hey I'm a programmer), but I do want people to use and improve my code. I generally avoid using any GPLed code in my own projects because I do not want to have to release code under the GPL.
That being said, to each his own.
Believe it or not guys, OS/390 is there running in the background. It serves as the conroller for all of these LPARs. The ISeries 400 works the same way. ie OS/400 controlls the partitions and the vms. SO in effect you are always working on OS/390. lol