Why not just say "who actually cares about the OS anymore?" Sure X is quicker, or Y is more-reliable. But when Sun are pushing blades, and loads of systems run on standard pizza boxes does it matter as you are designing the hardware to fail so often than the OS is irrelevant.
I worked for around 5 years in Air Traffic Control projects, both in delivery of radar processing and displays and in R&D for next generation systems.
Let me give you an overview of the failure approach of just one of those systems.
1) Everything on Unix, ruggedised releases of UNIX
2) Every box must be able to FAIL ON ITS OWN
3) Every box must have a direct replacement, or replacements, which carry the SAME LOAD.
4) ZERO total system downtime allowed, partial systems failures are allowed, but core systems must keep running.
5) 5 stages of power supply failure, double mains, double generation and lastly a great big warehouse of car batteries if all else fails.
6) 4 Years of testing of FULL system before live.
This is what is normal when safety is the primary concern. What the FAA decision sounds like is a cost driven process which chose the cheapest solution that "could" meet the requirements.
The idea of a safety critical (if it fails people could die) system that requires a reboot is fine in only one case... if it can be non-operational on a regular basis, in which case it should be done EVERY non-operational window (say every week) , this is therefore okay for some hospital scanners that are certified for 12 hour runs. Its not okay for a 24/7 system that controls objects flying around at 500 miles an hour.
Welcome to the US... we will be landing slightly quicker than expected.
It's like the soldier who's ordered to commit war crimes. What do you do? It's in no way you're fault - but you're in a lose - lose situation
Err no you aren't this is the classic "not my fault" defence often used by minions or lower ranking soldiers to justify why they did something they KNEW was illegal.
Having been in a situation with an employeer who wanted to do something decidedly dodgy I had no qualms about saying no. Did I get fired ? Strangely no, because WHAT THE FUCK is he going to say at the disciplinary hearing ?
Soldiers commiting war crimes deserve the full punishment of the law, there is no excuse and especially not in a modern era where armed forces should all condemn such acts. Admittedly if it was endemic where the Secretary of Defense and Commander in Chief investigated how far they could go in torturing people and declared the Geneva Convention inappropriate then you have a massive issue. But then in a democracy such people would be utterly condemned and driven from office.
I worked in the US with a large manufacturing client. They had a large group of AS/400s running their ERPs. One night the security guard was drunk on duty and decided, we do not know why, to take out his anger on an AS/400. It was shot twice, front to back. This took out one processor board and an external connection that provided one of two connections to the storage.
In the morning two things happened
1) Security Guard was arrested
2) IBM turned up to put in a new processor board and external connection.
Total downtime : ZERO.
A fault tolerant power supply is nothing, AS/400s really are bullet proof.
I create RTOS OSes and Tools. Linux is moving into the RTOS market. That sucks. Most of my key clients are goverment, that also has the best margin. If Linux was insecure then I'd be okay, therefore I need an reason it is insecure.
Oh I know, because anyone can edit the code then anyone can put in a patch that could be compramised. Just look at the MyDoom virus today, that is a classic example of how closed source is much better from a security perspective.
Personally I'm not sure Linux would be a good RTOS at the very real time edge, there are some pretty specialised threading and timing elements down there. But he couldn't say that because no-one would bother listening.
Any investment analyst will tell you that it's far better to have numerous low-priced shared than a few high-priced ones
Which is why you should FIRE that analyst.
The reason for the many and low is that this makes people feel happier "hey I got lots of shares" and has little or nothing to do about the performance of the stock.
Google may well under go a split in the next 12 months, or even a few splits, but the worry about a high price making the share unstable is completely unfounded.
Think on it this way. If a share is $100 or 100c and it goes up 10% then its the SAME 10%. However a 1c adjustment in a 100c share represents 1% down. For the $100 stock its almost a rounding error. The TOTAL value of stocks in the company represents the important measurement. For mutual funds the value of one share is irrelevant as if you are buying $1bn worth of stock who cares what the number of stock is its the $1bn that counts.
Investment Analysts talk a lot of hooey most of the time. These were the muppets who raved about Boo.com, WebVan, Enron, MCI Worldcom, AOL... need I go on ?
You are ALWAYS completely at the mercy of the share price whether you have a 200 x $1 or 2 x $100, 10% up is the same amount, and 10% down is the same amount.
BTW IANAFA.... but then most analysts do worse than a tracker fund.
Never say never. Sure the current budget and time makes this too expensive. But with things like the X-Prize going on and the on-going march of technology there is no way to say that in 2010 there won't be a different decision for different economic and social reasons.
Err its not really a military tactic when your opponents have
1) All the heavy artillery
2) All the airbourne troops
3) Nuclear Weapons
4) Top Secret Weapons that no-one even knows about
5) So many more troops that they can lose all of your numbers in a freak jello accident.
And that is just IBM in comparison. Add in the guerilla warfare from the likes of Groklaw and the OSS community, season lightly with some of the largest industrial manufacturers in the world and you don't have a war.
Which means the US courts are almost certainly going to have to say "no". Could lead to an interesting case where in Europe Microsoft is a monopoly that has to change its trading rules, Linux is perfectly okay and SCO is a joke. Meanwhile in the US its Microsoft the good corporate citizen, Linux is illegal and SCO is Unix.
Start an orderly queue at the borders please gentlemen and start boarding those boats.
"Buyer beware" really is as old as the hills. Its an interesting challenge in this digital age as you can't see the person, and you can't be sure they are the person they say they are.
Would we buy a laptop off a bloke on the street who "promised to bring us the laptop same time tomorrow" ? Of course not. But on ebay we make a similar decision on a regular basis.
How about an "eBay bond" where sellers have to lodge the cash with eBay until the point at which the seller receives the goods, i.e. the money is in escrow until the whole transaction is complete. The company goes bust or fails to supply within a set period (agreed as part of the sale) then the money is refunded.
But not the companies that are suggested here. What Google could look to do is aim at the "traditional" companies that are currently under-valued to provide it with a solid non-search engine base.
Basically what AOL did when they merged with TimeWarner... who got the best in that deal ?
Those crazy Italians and their wacky ways. You've almost got to admire a group of people who say "With our standard of excellence in wiring and electronics, who should we get to do the software".
Oh and the BMW/SiemensVDO link up is real, not just a strategy.
Always appear to have the most crap on it of any system I see, the bugger is always falling over and its never the same site when I look back a few months later.
And why oh why does the owner of this "localhost" system insist on using non-standard ports all the time.
Cycling also has a "proud" history of "bio-tech" and using the very latest in chemical enhancements. And even on the legal side of the fence the training exercises and regimes are defined down to the last millimetre and measured even more precisely.
I used to like cycling, and the last day of the Tour is still fantastic. But the passion has been replaced by automaton.
Signing that treaty would have been like walking naked into a state prison with no cigarettes
Isn't this part of US prison policy ? At least when applied to non-US citizens.
Its true it would be "frivolous" to have US soliders tried for torture and war crimes. Much better to just have a nice little dis-honourable discharge.
Justice is blind... except in the US where its the Whitehouse.
GSM - European standard for mobile phones adopted everywhere in the world except South Korea, a bit of Japan and the US.
DVB - The international standard for digital TV encoding, adopted everywhere... yup you guessed it.
EAN - Standard built with size in mind... right again.
International Court of Justice - agreed way of trying cross border disputes and crimes against humanity... right again.
Geneva Convention - International standard for the treatment of prisoners... except for Donald "Rum as Hell".
Non proliferation treaty for biological and chemical weapons... how the hell isn't that a good idea.
What the hell is wrong with the US ? On the flip side when the US (e.g. IEEE) comes up with a standard everyone around the world adopts it very quickly... because STANDARDS MAKE SENSE. Whether these are in the field of economics (WTO... love those Vietnamese shrimp), science (love those crazy inches), politics, war or just plain old retailing.
I'm betting on a -1 Flamebait, but there is a serious issue here when you try and do cross-border trade and cross-border technology. The US make the French look like the co-operative bunny brigade when it comes to standardisation.
This is NOT like moving the physical address of a house, its like transfering your cell-phone number from one supplier to another, the phone numbers is actually a virtual address there are network specific addresses that DON'T get transfered. Now part of the issue here is that DNS resolves as a hierachy based on the "."s in the addresses. This means that really the domain name is equivalent to the phone number. But the connection address is actually a MAC Address so maybe we should consider the IP address to be the virtual address that can be changed.
Transfering IP addresses is a matter of DNS configuration, what this would require is old ISPs to contain references to the new ISP for the old IDs. Is that really so technically difficult ? There are many unanswered questions here but I'm not sure there is anything that is as significant an impact as is claimed.
It is NOT like moving a house address, because that is a physical address in a physical network, like MAC. IP and DNS are VIRTUAL addresses on a virtual network.
If phone companies do it, why shouldn't ISPs ?
And think about this when the world goes IPv6, no worry about running out of numbers, but do you want to re-programme your internal house network when you move ?
Looking Glass runs on Java 3D (also open sourced today) which basically goes straight to the wire on Linux, Windows and Solaris. This may come as a suprise to folks out here in Slashdot land, but actually Java is pretty damned fast when implemented well.
Looking Glass will run on a decent (1.8 Ghz+) laptop with a decent laptop graphics card.
Looks fantastic, its also great to use and the funniest bit is all of the Windows and Mac people looking at a GUI which looks cooler than the best efforts of MS and Apple.
So you don't need to upgrade to a top of the line machine with a top of the line GPU. You need a decent machine with a decent card.
No VPN access for 5 months and authentication issues due to an Active Directory migration.
I work in IT, go knows what the poor buggers who just have to work WITH IT have to put up with.
As Computing professionals we should all be ashamed of the quality standards that we have allowed, and continue to allow, to be considered a production ready release. Until we have the same standards of excellence that Engineers have in the construction industry we might as well have arts degrees.
HP abandoned their old App Server and have worked out how to get good mindshare for low investment on a new one.
Pretty smart move by HP as it puts them back in the "solutions" market and tied in with their SI business means they have a real opportunity in the custom build market.
Can someone please explain to me how this is indicative of the principles on which the USA was founded ? On where John Hancock and his mates saw a US goverment with the ability to spy on its own citizens, and on how this all makes sure we have a goverment "of the people, by the people and for the people" ?
I might be a bit depressed having just re-read 1984, but with the US and Airstrip 1... I mean Britain, working together on a strategy underpinned by propoganda and the continual spying on its citizens by the US Goverment you have to ask whether Orwell was just out by 20 years.
Jeb's Big Brother is in the Whitehouse folks, trouble is he kind of looks likes everyones Big Brother right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, why the argument at all ?
Why not just say "who actually cares about the OS anymore?" Sure X is quicker, or Y is more-reliable. But when Sun are pushing blades, and loads of systems run on standard pizza boxes does it matter as you are designing the hardware to fail so often than the OS is irrelevant.
Lob on an App Server, and the OS doesn't matter.
I worked for around 5 years in Air Traffic Control projects, both in delivery of radar processing and displays and in R&D for next generation systems.
Let me give you an overview of the failure approach of just one of those systems.
1) Everything on Unix, ruggedised releases of UNIX
2) Every box must be able to FAIL ON ITS OWN
3) Every box must have a direct replacement, or replacements, which carry the SAME LOAD.
4) ZERO total system downtime allowed, partial systems failures are allowed, but core systems must keep running.
5) 5 stages of power supply failure, double mains, double generation and lastly a great big warehouse of car batteries if all else fails.
6) 4 Years of testing of FULL system before live.
This is what is normal when safety is the primary concern. What the FAA decision sounds like is a cost driven process which chose the cheapest solution that "could" meet the requirements.
The idea of a safety critical (if it fails people could die) system that requires a reboot is fine in only one case... if it can be non-operational on a regular basis, in which case it should be done EVERY non-operational window (say every week) , this is therefore okay for some hospital scanners that are certified for 12 hour runs. Its not okay for a 24/7 system that controls objects flying around at 500 miles an hour.
Welcome to the US... we will be landing slightly quicker than expected.
It's like the soldier who's ordered to commit war crimes. What do you do? It's in no way you're fault - but you're in a lose - lose situation
Err no you aren't this is the classic "not my fault" defence often used by minions or lower ranking soldiers to justify why they did something they KNEW was illegal.
Having been in a situation with an employeer who wanted to do something decidedly dodgy I had no qualms about saying no. Did I get fired ? Strangely no, because WHAT THE FUCK is he going to say at the disciplinary hearing ?
Soldiers commiting war crimes deserve the full punishment of the law, there is no excuse and especially not in a modern era where armed forces should all condemn such acts. Admittedly if it was endemic where the Secretary of Defense and Commander in Chief investigated how far they could go in torturing people and declared the Geneva Convention inappropriate then you have a massive issue. But then in a democracy such people would be utterly condemned and driven from office.
The only thing to try is to shoot it.
I worked in the US with a large manufacturing client. They had a large group of AS/400s running their ERPs. One night the security guard was drunk on duty and decided, we do not know why, to take out his anger on an AS/400. It was shot twice, front to back. This took out one processor board and an external connection that provided one of two connections to the storage.
In the morning two things happened
1) Security Guard was arrested
2) IBM turned up to put in a new processor board and external connection.
Total downtime : ZERO.
A fault tolerant power supply is nothing, AS/400s really are bullet proof.
I create RTOS OSes and Tools. Linux is moving into the RTOS market. That sucks. Most of my key clients are goverment, that also has the best margin. If Linux was insecure then I'd be okay, therefore I need an reason it is insecure.
Oh I know, because anyone can edit the code then anyone can put in a patch that could be compramised. Just look at the MyDoom virus today, that is a classic example of how closed source is much better from a security perspective.
Personally I'm not sure Linux would be a good RTOS at the very real time edge, there are some pretty specialised threading and timing elements down there. But he couldn't say that because no-one would bother listening.
Any investment analyst will tell you that it's far better to have numerous low-priced shared than a few high-priced ones
Which is why you should FIRE that analyst.
The reason for the many and low is that this makes people feel happier "hey I got lots of shares" and has little or nothing to do about the performance of the stock.
Google may well under go a split in the next 12 months, or even a few splits, but the worry about a high price making the share unstable is completely unfounded.
Think on it this way. If a share is $100 or 100c and it goes up 10% then its the SAME 10%. However a 1c adjustment in a 100c share represents 1% down. For the $100 stock its almost a rounding error. The TOTAL value of stocks in the company represents the important measurement. For mutual funds the value of one share is irrelevant as if you are buying $1bn worth of stock who cares what the number of stock is its the $1bn that counts.
Investment Analysts talk a lot of hooey most of the time. These were the muppets who raved about Boo.com, WebVan, Enron, MCI Worldcom, AOL... need I go on ?
You are ALWAYS completely at the mercy of the share price whether you have a 200 x $1 or 2 x $100, 10% up is the same amount, and 10% down is the same amount.
BTW IANAFA.... but then most analysts do worse than a tracker fund.
GWB: Lets just creatify some photographs of those Iraqi WMD
DR: Great plan Mr President
GWB : Dang! It won't work, they'll provify its a fake
DR: Not till after the election George... not till after the election.
Never say never. Sure the current budget and time makes this too expensive. But with things like the X-Prize going on and the on-going march of technology there is no way to say that in 2010 there won't be a different decision for different economic and social reasons.
It isn't never... its just not planned right now.
Err its not really a military tactic when your opponents have
1) All the heavy artillery
2) All the airbourne troops
3) Nuclear Weapons
4) Top Secret Weapons that no-one even knows about
5) So many more troops that they can lose all of your numbers in a freak jello accident.
And that is just IBM in comparison. Add in the guerilla warfare from the likes of Groklaw and the OSS community, season lightly with some of the largest industrial manufacturers in the world and you don't have a war.
You have a butt-kicking contest with a queue.
It gets into the press that matters, I've seen articles in the FT, WSJ and Economist about it. All siding with the idea that the case is a joke.
These are the papers read by the people who make decisions. USA Today covering it wouldn't help anyone.
Fox News would cover it but they can't decide which one is the Republican.
Which means the US courts are almost certainly going to have to say "no". Could lead to an interesting case where in Europe Microsoft is a monopoly that has to change its trading rules, Linux is perfectly okay and SCO is a joke. Meanwhile in the US its Microsoft the good corporate citizen, Linux is illegal and SCO is Unix.
Start an orderly queue at the borders please gentlemen and start boarding those boats.
"Buyer beware" really is as old as the hills. Its an interesting challenge in this digital age as you can't see the person, and you can't be sure they are the person they say they are.
Would we buy a laptop off a bloke on the street who "promised to bring us the laptop same time tomorrow" ? Of course not. But on ebay we make a similar decision on a regular basis.
How about an "eBay bond" where sellers have to lodge the cash with eBay until the point at which the seller receives the goods, i.e. the money is in escrow until the whole transaction is complete. The company goes bust or fails to supply within a set period (agreed as part of the sale) then the money is refunded.
No Developers left....
At the last count there were 4 million and the 2003 figure for Java Services stood at $110bn.
The mobile market shipped 250m devices last year (350m to date) and generated $3.5bn in revenue on that platform alone.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim ?
Or are you just making everything up based on your own experience.
But not the companies that are suggested here. What Google could look to do is aim at the "traditional" companies that are currently under-valued to provide it with a solid non-search engine base.
Basically what AOL did when they merged with TimeWarner... who got the best in that deal ?
Hell, buy Ford and turn them round as a hobby.
BMW chose Siemens and Java.
But then Ford and GM have chosen Java as well.
Those crazy Italians and their wacky ways. You've almost got to admire a group of people who say "With our standard of excellence in wiring and electronics, who should we get to do the software".
Oh and the BMW/SiemensVDO link up is real, not just a strategy.
Agree totally. Speech and singing should also be banned as people often SING copies of songs, WITHOUT PAYING AN ADDITIONAL FEE.
-- Yours the RIAA
Always appear to have the most crap on it of any system I see, the bugger is always falling over and its never the same site when I look back a few months later.
And why oh why does the owner of this "localhost" system insist on using non-standard ports all the time.
Cycling also has a "proud" history of "bio-tech" and using the very latest in chemical enhancements. And even on the legal side of the fence the training exercises and regimes are defined down to the last millimetre and measured even more precisely.
I used to like cycling, and the last day of the Tour is still fantastic. But the passion has been replaced by automaton.
Signing that treaty would have been like walking naked into a state prison with no cigarettes
Isn't this part of US prison policy ? At least when applied to non-US citizens.
Its true it would be "frivolous" to have US soliders tried for torture and war crimes. Much better to just have a nice little dis-honourable discharge.
Justice is blind... except in the US where its the Whitehouse.
GSM - European standard for mobile phones adopted everywhere in the world except South Korea, a bit of Japan and the US.
DVB - The international standard for digital TV encoding, adopted everywhere... yup you guessed it.
EAN - Standard built with size in mind... right again.
International Court of Justice - agreed way of trying cross border disputes and crimes against humanity... right again.
Geneva Convention - International standard for the treatment of prisoners... except for Donald "Rum as Hell".
Non proliferation treaty for biological and chemical weapons... how the hell isn't that a good idea.
What the hell is wrong with the US ? On the flip side when the US (e.g. IEEE) comes up with a standard everyone around the world adopts it very quickly... because STANDARDS MAKE SENSE. Whether these are in the field of economics (WTO... love those Vietnamese shrimp), science (love those crazy inches), politics, war or just plain old retailing.
I'm betting on a -1 Flamebait, but there is a serious issue here when you try and do cross-border trade and cross-border technology. The US make the French look like the co-operative bunny brigade when it comes to standardisation.
Give it up. Its not funny anymore
This is NOT like moving the physical address of a house, its like transfering your cell-phone number from one supplier to another, the phone numbers is actually a virtual address there are network specific addresses that DON'T get transfered. Now part of the issue here is that DNS resolves as a hierachy based on the "."s in the addresses. This means that really the domain name is equivalent to the phone number. But the connection address is actually a MAC Address so maybe we should consider the IP address to be the virtual address that can be changed.
Transfering IP addresses is a matter of DNS configuration, what this would require is old ISPs to contain references to the new ISP for the old IDs. Is that really so technically difficult ? There are many unanswered questions here but I'm not sure there is anything that is as significant an impact as is claimed.
It is NOT like moving a house address, because that is a physical address in a physical network, like MAC. IP and DNS are VIRTUAL addresses on a virtual network.
If phone companies do it, why shouldn't ISPs ?
And think about this when the world goes IPv6, no worry about running out of numbers, but do you want to re-programme your internal house network when you move ?
Looking Glass runs on Java 3D (also open sourced today) which basically goes straight to the wire on Linux, Windows and Solaris. This may come as a suprise to folks out here in Slashdot land, but actually Java is pretty damned fast when implemented well.
Looking Glass will run on a decent (1.8 Ghz+) laptop with a decent laptop graphics card.
Looks fantastic, its also great to use and the funniest bit is all of the Windows and Mac people looking at a GUI which looks cooler than the best efforts of MS and Apple.
So you don't need to upgrade to a top of the line machine with a top of the line GPU. You need a decent machine with a decent card.
Java... its faster than you think.
I'm right in with this. So far this year I've had
2 different PCs
3 complete PC rebuilds
No VPN access for 5 months and authentication issues due to an Active Directory migration.
I work in IT, go knows what the poor buggers who just have to work WITH IT have to put up with.
As Computing professionals we should all be ashamed of the quality standards that we have allowed, and continue to allow, to be considered a production ready release. Until we have the same standards of excellence that Engineers have in the construction industry we might as well have arts degrees.
IBM have WebSphere and DB2
Oracle have 10gAS and Oracle 10g
SAP have Netweaver and SapDB
Microsoft have
HP abandoned their old App Server and have worked out how to get good mindshare for low investment on a new one.
Pretty smart move by HP as it puts them back in the "solutions" market and tied in with their SI business means they have a real opportunity in the custom build market.
Can someone please explain to me how this is indicative of the principles on which the USA was founded ? On where John Hancock and his mates saw a US goverment with the ability to spy on its own citizens, and on how this all makes sure we have a goverment "of the people, by the people and for the people" ?
I might be a bit depressed having just re-read 1984, but with the US and Airstrip 1... I mean Britain, working together on a strategy underpinned by propoganda and the continual spying on its citizens by the US Goverment you have to ask whether Orwell was just out by 20 years.
Jeb's Big Brother is in the Whitehouse folks, trouble is he kind of looks likes everyones Big Brother right now.