The hardware is an IBM 9020 family mainframe, the
application is written in Jovial (one of , if not THE first algebraic language), and BAL assembler (for the monitor mostly). The monitor is the operating system so it effectively is a custom written operating system for this application.
Although MVS is also used for testing. The I/O capabilities of the mainframe are superb which means it can handle 2000+ flights with only 14 Megs of RAM (if I remember rightly).
I believe the NAS application came as a freebee from IBM when the UK purchased the hardware and was the same NAS (national airspace system) application used all over the US. It has been continously developed since then (no mean feat when you consider that all variables are global in Jovial, It uses holleriths instead of ascii, and you are limited to 5 or 6 characters per variable name). The hardware has also been upgraded several times over its lifetime.
It doesn't often go down, last time was 2002 sometime, and you can tell how important it is because everyone screams when it does go down. The people I worked with are extremely dedicated to their job, but one cannot test a system like this for absolutely every eventuality. No doubt some patch was applied and some special case came up that caused a FLOP (functional loss of operation). It happens, Radar is usually unaffected, so the safety implications are not large, but flow is affected.
The UK approach to handling NAS is much different to the US, the US tends to not touch the NAS software and develop external systems that enhance the usage of airspace, where as the UK tends to delve into NAS and improve things directly in NAS. Jovial is a very interesting language it has been used heavily by the US military and exists in such applications as Cruise missiles and many other aircraft and missile systems. Read about Jovial here if you are interested.
I can't say too much about it for various NDA reasons (OSA) I think most of the above is in the public domain.
I used to go to Lancaster Uni where the physical mirror was located and knew some of the guys involved in it when it was known as hensa). It was a valuable service back then in the early internet days and still is, fantastic bandwidth, and a well structured archive of only decent software, no fluff, it was alot more than just a mirror. I can't really understand how they are going to save money or resources this way either, as someone pointed out all its going to do is put pressure on the SuperJanet interconnects.
It depends if it is a long or a short "Å" sound. In Swedish the letter "Å" itself is actually pronounced with a long vowel sound in American English, like the "aw" in awesome (or "ou"ght in British English). The short sound (when used in words is pronounced like 'o' in "ogg").
Anyway, as a Brit living in Sweden I think Swedes demonstrating over a lack of bandwidth is a bit like Saudis protesting over a lack of sand. Get outta it! Most people in the cities have access to 10/100Mbit connections and DSL out of the cities. Note they are after 600Mbit!. No sympathy at all. Spoilt kiddies who don't know they are born syndrome.
Actually I wouldn't say that gcc produces particularly bad code on all computers, it's sorta average, but not bad. Certainly the 3.3.x series are alot better than 2. Pretty good at number crunching and it is more standards compliant than most.
Re:Here's another ancient one that DOES impact you
on
Oldest Supported Software?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have worked on "Host" or NAS as it is formally known (National Airspace System) in the UK. (so yes I know Jovial and BAL assembler). Its REALLY fun programming with nearly every variable being global, using hollerith instead of ascii, and being limited to 7 characters for variable names, and missing many basic programming constructs (no while loop for example). Jovial's memory overlaying techiques were ahead of its time though, and is probably the reason these old systems have been able to keep up performance. We inherited the system from the US buy purchasing the 9020 (or rather its forerunner) and getting the software thrown in for free!. Today NAS still handles the entire UK airspace (including the very busy london sectors).
The approach in the UK is quite different to the States though, we do do changes to the system on a regular basis to improve ATC, and have extra features like automatic DMing, better radar tracking, and recently a way to get rid of PVD in place of a spanking new display system based at Swanwick. The approach in the US i believe has been to build peripheral systems around NAS leaving NAS untouched in the main (I would have thought this was more risky!). Alot of my friends got head hunted to go over to the states in order to make changes to NAS over there due to the high level of competence and knowledge of NAS in the UK, sometimes I wish I would have gone too:)
I don't agree with your assertion that 16MB of RAM as a limitation with NAS though, most ATC tasks are IO bound, things like printing strips, coordinating with adjacent centres and the like. The biggest problem with NAS is even though it is hardware redundant, it is possible to get a complete loss of processing if the internal memory structures are corrupted somehow, the system will restart on the redundant processor but load in the already corrupt memory structures - oops. I think NAS outdates PVD and should be considered one of the oldest surviving pieces of fully maintained software in the world.
There is nothing like the feeling of reading code and comments that was *written before you were born!*
Having been involved with space work a bit the software aspect of the Beagle lander is quite interesting - the reason I know about it is we used the same compiler on the Galileo signal generator project.
ADA is still very popular amongst the European space companies and agencies (for a good reason I think) and particularly the ADA95 Ravenscar profile which gives a miniscule runtime the actual runtime is only about 4-5k which is pretty good considering that contains everything you need to execute the ADA code including tasking.
There is another opensource attempt at a ravenscar compiler called openravenscar funded by ESA here - for Sparc and Intel platforms . Ravenscar is basically a profile that removes the more complex features of the ADA languages to give a mathetmatically provable scheduling - so you can always cater for your worst case scenario. Such small executives are neccessary due to the prohibitive cost of rad hard EEPROMs as most missions have some sort of inflight reprogramming requirements. I think they are using the ERC32 processor which again, is an open source processor, along with its replacement LEON, you can even download the vhdl for the Sparc based leon here
Heres hoping Beagle makes it through the Martian atmosphere and takes some pictures of little green men.
You mentioned Bzflag, I think you would like XPilot also, perfect for team games about 5 a side. It might have been mentioned under this post already but heres some more info..
The official homepage gives you some tips on how to play the game (it DOES takes a little while to learn). It's rated the #11 best game on www.happypenguin.org, works under most Unixes, linux distros and even windows.
It is basically Multi user thrust and while that might sound a bit boring and the graphics look a bit boring, it is actually really great fun, once you have perfected control with the mouse it becomes a game of lightening reactions. Don't let the basic graphics confuse you, but you knew that already right. There are hundreds of game parameters and client parameters you can change, and loads of maps, of different modes, some of them are pure power games where you collect as many power ups as you can, there is also a race mode where its pure speed, and then there is a team play mode where you try to steal each others treasure.
You might want to check out a branch that some of us are working on too which gives the ability to define maps in XML and use polygons and as high an FPS as your machine will allow, and also has an SDL/opengl client in it (much nicer graphics same gameplay). You can find that in the CVS linked from here
It's great just to start a local server in the office on a machine and let the fun ensue. Try out a map called bloods music, where you attempt to steal each others "ball" (same idea as a flag in quake). Warning though it takes time to get into but once into is VERY! addictive.
Whats interesting is they claim they "own" Unics, that UNIX TSS is the parent to OpenServer and that SCO Linux is older than original Linux!For a start i wouldnt say the levenez tree is anything near an official unix family tree, more of a best estimate in some cases. I wonder if they got permission from him to use it?
As far as I recall, The original SCO complaint revoked IBMs license to use and distribute AIX as well (before aiming at Linux also). What has happened since then? SCO filed for an injunction, are they close to getting it? Having worked in the ATC industry I know of atleast two countries who use AIX for their main Air traffic control systems.
I can see several governments being rather "annoyed" if SCO actually managed to succeed in their injunction against IBM and AIX.
If SCO actually did manage to revoke AIX, that would mean a large european country and most of the US's Airspace going down. nice one.
Just to help with their web servers load right now (ahem) this is the original AIX complaint
If like me, your are getting a bit fuzzy on your UNIX history (dating back to '69) you could always check out this. It shows where SCO/Unixware fit into the Unix derivative tree, (and also where Linux got its roots) quite interesting really.. (it claims V7->Minix->Linux).
The code which they are displaying as from linux kernel, is NOT actually from linux kernel. See in the second picture:
if (size == 0)
return) ((ulong_t NULL);
Now, this code doesn't even compile!! The actual code that exists in linux is this:
if (size == 0)
return((ulong_t) NULL);
Moreover, this file is part of only the ia64 port which not even 2% of linux users use. Just why I am supposed to pay SCO ??
You can detect manufactured diamons
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
One thing that the article and comments here fail to mention is that grown diamonds can be detected due to their more perfect structure, they glow when placed under a UV light source (lumino-fluorescence). natural diamonds have a much less regular structure so glow less than the manufactered diamonds.
Also, De-beers has started to put logos on their diamons so that you are sure you are buing the "real" thing.
Interesting technology though, could be a winner in many different areas of technology I think.
You can see the main UK effort here (there are others but they dont seem to have come as far as this one practically).
They have launched a fairly large rocket recently, and have onboard video on the site for you to check out.
I think the X prize is a great competition, and gives people the chance to "think out of the box", there has to be a cheaper way of getting into space (and back!) than the currently over inflated budget of the national space agencies.
(I have worked in the space sectory for quite a few years and seen the absolute waste and paper shuffling of these organisations)
Good luck to all the teams, may the best team win!
Whats your point here? ISO C already has support for unamed bit fields in structures.
also, int pad[3]; doesn't equate to 3 bytes, unless your C implementation defines an int as a byte which is highly unlikely its probably 4 bytes, so its 12 bytes pad in total.
Actually as it's GNU/Linux, I've done a quick grep on this whole comments page and... Not one person has called it GNU/Linux, I hope rms isn't reading this *grin*.
I think if you read the site a bit more you will find that they have evidence that the payout percentages are not being kept at all on some of the machines. For example with the monopoly fruit machine, after taking a net gain of $2000, a high low gamble always fails, even though there has been no win up to that point. The gaming laws have an *agreement* with manufacters that the payout percentages will be met by the 10,000th play. But there are many many machines which do not meet this guideline. The goverment does not check this in the UK, and I think the manufacters have been caught out cheating being the punters backs. That is illegal by anyones definition surely?
Re:Reparenting window managers are for wimps
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 1
I think I can go one better than that Try EvilWM which has NO window decoration at all. Pretty much everything is done via the keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops I lost my link there - Jovial Lives!
The hardware is an IBM 9020 family mainframe, the application is written in Jovial (one of , if not THE first algebraic language), and BAL assembler (for the monitor mostly). The monitor is the operating system so it effectively is a custom written operating system for this application.
Although MVS is also used for testing. The I/O capabilities of the mainframe are superb which means it can handle 2000+ flights with only 14 Megs of RAM (if I remember rightly).
I believe the NAS application came as a freebee from IBM when the UK purchased the hardware and was the same NAS (national airspace system) application used all over the US. It has been continously developed since then (no mean feat when you consider that all variables are global in Jovial, It uses holleriths instead of ascii, and you are limited to 5 or 6 characters per variable name). The hardware has also been upgraded several times over its lifetime.
It doesn't often go down, last time was 2002 sometime, and you can tell how important it is because everyone screams when it does go down. The people I worked with are extremely dedicated to their job, but one cannot test a system like this for absolutely every eventuality. No doubt some patch was applied and some special case came up that caused a FLOP (functional loss of operation). It happens, Radar is usually unaffected, so the safety implications are not large, but flow is affected.
The UK approach to handling NAS is much different to the US, the US tends to not touch the NAS software and develop external systems that enhance the usage of airspace, where as the UK tends to delve into NAS and improve things directly in NAS. Jovial is a very interesting language it has been used heavily by the US military and exists in such applications as Cruise missiles and many other aircraft and missile systems. Read about Jovial here if you are interested.
I can't say too much about it for various NDA reasons (OSA) I think most of the above is in the public domain.
HTH.
I used to go to Lancaster Uni where the physical mirror was located and knew some of the guys involved in it when it was known as hensa). It was a valuable service back then in the early internet days and still is, fantastic bandwidth, and a well structured archive of only decent software, no fluff, it was alot more than just a mirror. I can't really understand how they are going to save money or resources this way either, as someone pointed out all its going to do is put pressure on the SuperJanet interconnects.
It depends if it is a long or a short "Å" sound. In Swedish the letter "Å" itself is actually pronounced with a long vowel sound in American English, like the "aw" in awesome (or "ou"ght in British English). The short sound (when used in words is pronounced like 'o' in "ogg").
Anyway, as a Brit living in Sweden I think Swedes demonstrating over a lack of bandwidth is a bit like Saudis protesting over a lack of sand. Get outta it! Most people in the cities have access to 10/100Mbit connections and DSL out of the cities. Note they are after 600Mbit!. No sympathy at all. Spoilt kiddies who don't know they are born syndrome.
Ho hum.
ought to have better things to be doing than looking at bubbles in beer glasses dammit.
I think you will find them right here
You mean like this portland compiler
Actually I wouldn't say that gcc produces particularly bad code on all computers, it's sorta average, but not bad. Certainly the 3.3.x series are alot better than 2. Pretty good at number crunching and it is more standards compliant than most.
I have worked on "Host" or NAS as it is formally known (National Airspace System) in the UK. (so yes I know Jovial and BAL assembler). Its REALLY fun programming with nearly every variable being global, using hollerith instead of ascii, and being limited to 7 characters for variable names, and missing many basic programming constructs (no while loop for example). Jovial's memory overlaying techiques were ahead of its time though, and is probably the reason these old systems have been able to keep up performance. We inherited the system from the US buy purchasing the 9020 (or rather its forerunner) and getting the software thrown in for free!. Today NAS still handles the entire UK airspace (including the very busy london sectors).
The approach in the UK is quite different to the States though, we do do changes to the system on a regular basis to improve ATC, and have extra features like automatic DMing, better radar tracking, and recently a way to get rid of PVD in place of a spanking new display system based at Swanwick. The approach in the US i believe has been to build peripheral systems around NAS leaving NAS untouched in the main (I would have thought this was more risky!). Alot of my friends got head hunted to go over to the states in order to make changes to NAS over there due to the high level of competence and knowledge of NAS in the UK, sometimes I wish I would have gone too
I don't agree with your assertion that 16MB of RAM as a limitation with NAS though, most ATC tasks are IO bound, things like printing strips, coordinating with adjacent centres and the like. The biggest problem with NAS is even though it is hardware redundant, it is possible to get a complete loss of processing if the internal memory structures are corrupted somehow, the system will restart on the redundant processor but load in the already corrupt memory structures - oops. I think NAS outdates PVD and should be considered one of the oldest surviving pieces of fully maintained software in the world.
There is nothing like the feeling of reading code and comments that was *written before you were born!*
Having been involved with space work a bit the software aspect of the Beagle lander is quite interesting - the reason I know about it is we used the same compiler on the Galileo signal generator project.
ADA is still very popular amongst the European space companies and agencies (for a good reason I think) and particularly the ADA95 Ravenscar profile which gives a miniscule runtime the actual runtime is only about 4-5k which is pretty good considering that contains everything you need to execute the ADA code including tasking.
There is another opensource attempt at a ravenscar compiler called openravenscar funded by ESA here - for Sparc and Intel platforms . Ravenscar is basically a profile that removes the more complex features of the ADA languages to give a mathetmatically provable scheduling - so you can always cater for your worst case scenario. Such small executives are neccessary due to the prohibitive cost of rad hard EEPROMs as most missions have some sort of inflight reprogramming requirements. I think they are using the ERC32 processor which again, is an open source processor, along with its replacement LEON, you can even download the vhdl for the Sparc based leon here
Heres hoping Beagle makes it through the Martian atmosphere and takes some pictures of little green men.
You mentioned Bzflag, I think you would like XPilot also, perfect for team games about 5 a side. It might have been mentioned under this post already but heres some more info..
The official homepage gives you some tips on how to play the game (it DOES takes a little while to learn). It's rated the #11 best game on www.happypenguin.org, works under most Unixes, linux distros and even windows.
It is basically Multi user thrust and while that might sound a bit boring and the graphics look a bit boring, it is actually really great fun, once you have perfected control with the mouse it becomes a game of lightening reactions. Don't let the basic graphics confuse you, but you knew that already right. There are hundreds of game parameters and client parameters you can change, and loads of maps, of different modes, some of them are pure power games where you collect as many power ups as you can, there is also a race mode where its pure speed, and then there is a team play mode where you try to steal each others treasure.
You might want to check out a branch that some of us are working on too which gives the ability to define maps in XML and use polygons and as high an FPS as your machine will allow, and also has an SDL/opengl client in it (much nicer graphics same gameplay). You can find that in the CVS linked from here
It's great just to start a local server in the office on a machine and let the fun ensue. Try out a map called bloods music, where you attempt to steal each others "ball" (same idea as a flag in quake). Warning though it takes time to get into but once into is VERY! addictive.
Regards
Here is something very interesting for you SCO followers. It's interesting to note that SCO have annotated the unix family tree that I posted here.
You can see their L33t photoshop work here
Whats interesting is they claim they "own" Unics,
that UNIX TSS is the parent to OpenServer and that SCO Linux is older than original Linux!For a start i wouldnt say the levenez tree is anything near an official unix family tree, more of a best estimate in some cases. I wonder if they got permission from him to use it?
pass me the crack pipe!
5. Ask them who their crack dealer is because it seems to be doing the job.
It's not the only thing IBM are going to be squashing soon..
As far as I recall, The original SCO complaint revoked IBMs license to use and distribute AIX as well (before aiming at Linux also). What has happened since then? SCO
filed for an injunction, are they close to getting it? Having worked in the ATC industry I know of atleast two countries who use AIX for their main Air traffic control systems.
I can see several governments being rather "annoyed" if SCO actually managed to succeed in their injunction against IBM and AIX.
If SCO actually did manage to revoke AIX, that would mean a large european country and most of the US's Airspace going down. nice one.
Just to help with their web servers load right now (ahem) this is the original AIX complaint
If like me, your are getting a bit fuzzy on your UNIX history (dating back to '69) you could always check out this.
It shows where SCO/Unixware fit into the Unix derivative tree, (and also where Linux got its roots) quite interesting really..
(it claims V7->Minix->Linux).
Not only that the bloody thing doesnt compile!!
:
The code which they are displaying as from linux kernel, is NOT actually from linux kernel.
See in the second picture:
if (size == 0)
return) ((ulong_t NULL);
Now, this code doesn't even compile!! The actual code that exists in linux is this
if (size == 0)
return((ulong_t) NULL);
Moreover, this file is part of only the ia64 port which not even 2% of linux users use. Just why I am supposed to pay SCO ??
One thing that the article and comments here fail to mention is that grown diamonds can be detected due to their more perfect structure, they glow when placed under a UV light source (lumino-fluorescence). natural diamonds have a much less regular structure so glow less than the manufactered diamonds.
Also, De-beers has started to put logos on their diamons so that you are sure you are buing the "real" thing.
Interesting technology though, could be a winner in many different areas of technology I think.
In Sweden you can get 29mbit/sec for 48.6789USD
They have launched a fairly large rocket recently, and have onboard video on the site for you to check out. I think the X prize is a great competition, and gives people the chance to "think out of the box", there has to be a cheaper way of getting into space (and back!) than the currently over inflated budget of the national space agencies. (I have worked in the space sectory for quite a few years and seen the absolute waste and paper shuffling of these organisations) Good luck to all the teams, may the best team win!
Whats your point here? ISO C already has support for unamed bit fields in structures.
also, int pad[3]; doesn't equate to 3 bytes, unless your C implementation defines an int as a byte which is highly unlikely its probably 4 bytes, so its 12 bytes pad in total.
Actually as it's GNU/Linux, I've done a quick grep on this whole comments page and ... Not one person has called it GNU/Linux, I hope rms isn't reading this *grin*.
Well, having worked on it, I know for a fact the UK air traffic control system uses AIX. :)
Can't see them turning that off any time soon
I think if you read the site a bit more you will find that they have evidence that the payout percentages are not being kept at all on some of the machines.
For example with the monopoly fruit machine, after taking a net gain of $2000, a high low gamble always fails, even though there has been no win up to that point. The gaming laws have an *agreement* with manufacters that the payout percentages will be met by the 10,000th play. But there are many many machines which do not meet this guideline. The goverment does not check this in the UK, and I think the manufacters have been caught out cheating being the punters backs.
That is illegal by anyones definition surely?
I think I can go one better than that
Try EvilWM which has NO window decoration at all. Pretty much everything is done via the keyboard.
Sorry about that, I had local problems and didnt test the link in the preview
Dysons Robot Vacuum cleaner