I think there'll be some Vaxen clusters out there until cockroaches are extinct. We had a cluster once where I worked and no one could figure out what it did but were afraid to turn them off. We just moved the boxes around and rebooted them when they got in inconvenient spots. They'd just keep running and running. I'm sure there are factories running Vaxes that would shutdown if they stopped but its been so long they needed attention no one would know what to do if they died. Truly amazing reliability. Nothing's come close to them despite years of trying. VMS is ugly and slow but it's rock solid compared to its bastard step-child Windows.
RMS isn't in the Gates Building. He's in the "warehouse" section. I've a friend who works on His Majesty's floor. The place might be dramatic to look at, but it's a pain to work in. When I visited it there were way more bizarre problems than any other half-constructed building I've ever seen. And it's really, really easy to get lost in it. I haven't gotten really lost at MIT for over 20 years until I set foot on the main floor of the Stata Center. The building's denizens are hiring architects to help fix it. I think that's part of Gehry's plan for participatory design. Leave it so unfinished that the inhabitants have to make their own nests!
I think he's in the Dreyfoos Building not the Gates Building according to the map. The Stata Center has a bunch of buildings (reduced irony quotient). And the AI Lab has merged with LCS as CSAIL so they're all together now.
If they're using RFID security that will surely be a step down from the old Building 20 days of random interdisciplinary wonderfulness. They've gone from a basic barracks that no cares about so you can do whatever to Pritzker Prize winner (Gehry) hyper-designed everything must be just so. RMS is a pain but he's usually right. I expect much lower real creativity there. But it will look cool, a monument to the dot bomb years.
The form factor is outstanding. Inside is a little snug and they aren't all that expandable but they make great workstations and small servers and they aren't space or energy hogs. I bought one because it was relatively cheap and customizable and love it for its quality. They are really well engineered. Nothing in excess about them but plenty of capacity.
Now shipping with Linux (and it installs easier than XP)! Holy cow! How did the future sneak up on us like that?
Yes, indeed. I was struck at how similiar to a garden-variety remote system administration problem it was and how well they had designed the rover and planned its fallbacks to solve it. Very, very nicely done NASA. I'm beginning to believe the robot guys can do it better than the human spaceflight guys. I'm also hoping it trickles down to the hardware we have to manage everyday.
I worked in a restaurant on a grill where the waitresses had to cross behind me in a 3 foot space. I had to be pretty careful about swinging a burger around to the counter on the other side. That was annoying but the real hole was that the "break" room was in the basement which was dark, fetid, and filled with roaches who were well fed.
I am not making this up!
One of those suckers trundled up to the takeout counter once. As I was giving some tourist directions I noticed it crawling across the counter from the corner of my eye. Picking up a napkin I had to wait until the tourist turned away to snatch the bug. He turned back and gave me a quizzical look wondering why I had moved so fast. The managers were mercenary Neanderthals, too. That company is in much reduced circumstances now.:-)
Apologies to Dave Barry for stealing his line. Please don't sue.
SparcStation5 -- built like tank. 32 bits. SBUS cards.
SparcUltra5 -- built like cheap PC. 64 bits. PCI cards.
Used both, Used both as servers. Getting cards into the Sparc5 could be a real pain. But once in there they'd never give you any trouble. The Ultra5 struck me as a bit cheap, construction-wise. Which was a total 180 from their traditional "drop it on a concrete floor and the connectors stay stuck togeher. While Dells and such had snap-in parts the Ultra5 has little screws and sharp edges. Felt kind of loose.
Linux on a good PC pretty much killed my desire for Solaris. Never liked CDE, never like premium prices for simple add-ons like memory. Maybe useful for a special workstations but the Ultra5 was an attempt to steal into the PC market. I'm nostalgic for Sparc5 but not the Ultra5.
Let's see Friday is court day on IBM's case. I smell a pretty bad debacle for SCO there.
Novell's been doing a pretty good job harrying SCO's flanks to the point where SCO is probably getting nowhere selling "licenses". They HAD to sue Novell to keep the pretense up.
I've noticed that their PR releases don't list a PR agency anymore. I used to work for a PR firm and usually they'll handle or coordinate media queries. Being done in house now. Hmmmm.... Maybe they can't find a flack who'll touch them.
My guess is that it's all about the stock price now but... The PR machine is losing steam. Like a junkie they need more drugs/PR to keep going.
Don't worry about the stock price, that's trailing news. There's so little stock being traded relative to amount outstanding that it doesn't take much to support it and the press releases are getting less effective. It'll crash rather spectacularly when there's a completely adverse opinion in one of the cases.
I don't think they got the Mac right until the Mac SE came out in '86 or so. The original 128K Mac was too slow and small for its ambitions. The other funky thing about them was their power supply. It was cooled by convection, which made sure the power supplies died easily and often. I think the other forgotten aspect of the Mac was the LaserWriter which made the WYSIWYG metaphor work.
And let's not forget the Apple Lisa which started the mouse/icon/desktop thing for Apple. That puppy was way ahead of its time. The Mac simply brought it down (relatively speaking. a Lisa was $10K) to where mere wealthy mortals could afford it.
I believe one of the manned lunar missions recovered a piece of the one of the lunar Surveyors. By the time we get it back we'll likely have figured out how to harden remote vehicles without having to do forensics. OTOH, it'll would be a really cool museum piece.
Must be discouraging for SCO. The latest press releases aren't pumping the stock up anymore. Down again today... Cry wolf a few times too many and people begin to catch on.
I remember hearing that rhymes, rhythmn, and songs were used as part of keeping the oral versions consistent. In fact, I think it using verbal techniques ensures better long term accuracy than transcription to paper. They're kind of like sonic checksums. Homer's Iliad and Odessey probably changed little until they were written down several handred years after they were composed.
Until printing came along the accuracy of hand copied manuscripts was rather suspect. Scholars spent much time trying to divine the original content of many manuscripts, documenting their sources and the differences to justify their particular transcription.
Actually, the tracks split in the Allston Rail Yards near BU. Still, for trains it's a PIA. They did leave some space under the Big Dig for a future train connection. I don't think we'll see it anytime soon, though. The sticker shock of the Big Dig is making any new big civil engineering projects kind of a hot potato around here.
I think the project has been fairly successful overall. I used to ride to my grandmother's house in Quincy in the early '60's and the ride was fairly smooth even around rush hour. When I started to drive you stayed as far away from it as possible.
The cool thing will be the network effects. Roads that connect to the Big Dig will be the better for it.
I went to Linux World a couple of years ago. I like NYC generally but the credit card takes a beating. And at the Javits you're hostage to the ridiculously expensive, horrible food.
Macworld used to be here and had its best attendance here before it went to NYC.
You probably won't need a car. If it's at the Hynes (rather than the new Convention Center in South Boston) the food court at the Prudential is OK and there's tons of other fun, distracting things to do in the neighborhood. If it's in the new Convention Center you'll probably be staying in hotels near the Prudential anyway and the shuttles will bring you back. And Boston is a walking town. (Tho' I did walk back from the Javits up to B'way and 52nd once just for the color on Seventh Ave.)
I'll definitely be there. Of course, I live in Boston. This saves me buckets of dough.:-)
It's interesting that it wasn't even seen as a possible internal project. I could understand deciding not to make it an internal project but I don't think it was even discussed. They just took the money and handed the technical piece off the some MS partners. They kind of passed on doing anything technically interesting with it. A missed opportunity if you ask me.
The most important computer to me was the Adage Ambilog 200. First machine I ever saw that digitized sound and could control the video with a joy stick in 1964. The Apple II was just a knock-off.:-)
It was my dad's company's design and primary product. Later he couldn't understand why anyone would want anything better than a Commodore 64.
My vote for most important personal computer would be an IBM 1130. No one would have wanted personal computers unless smaller machines like the 1130 were available to take over during the dead of night for essentially unlimited computing time. That was addictive stuff.
Management cluefulness matters...
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 1
Does business need more tech? Geeks say no... PHBs say yes. Let's look at the incentives. PHBs: bigger budgets, shiny toys, drooling sales droids to entertain them. Geeks: Smaller budgets mean more challenges, creativity, less hassles "integrating" useless stuff.
My experience: Went to work for company that implemented nice large finance system because business plan anticipated huge growth. Started just before they lost biggest client, 9/11, and terrible business environment. Business plan useless. Budget cutbacks, no new projects, eventually outsourcing nice finance system. Me laid off.
Ideal situation: PHBs don't care much about IT as glamour department but have decent business sense and fund good, well justified projects. Me do challenging creative useful stuff and don't worry about making datacenter pretty for PHBs.
During the Apollo era they spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to shave in space. They spent oodles of $$ designing vacuum assisted electric razors and such. Finally on one of the Apollo missions just before landing they bravely tried their experiment. Turned out regular shaving cream and razors worked just fine. Doh! The moral of the story is that MS Word is a word processor written to NASA specs...
I'd have to say that the article is in accord with my experience. I was all excited about SSH being in Solaris 9 but found the default install just too tedious to clean up from a security standpoint. I never really liked CDE, either. Ugly and insecure. In my last job, RedHat went on my 500mHz IBM desktop and the Ultra 5 gathered dust in the corner.
On the other hand, Solaris is really meant for large machines and the Sparc architecture. It works good there and still has the advantage in the mainframe-ish category. The gap is closing fast, though. Sun can continue the argue the "value" proposition for Solaris/Sparc but that's making sense in a smaller and smaller section of the market.
Once the 2.6 series gets going Linux is poised to push the proprietary Unices into extremely niche oriented markets. The resources that Open Source bring to bear on the software development problem is simply going to overwhelm any corporate attempt to keep up. The corporate choice is going to be lead or get out of way.
Ouch! But I tend to agree with you. DSpace is the 12 year old fruit of some projects that, when they were cooked up, were rather forward looking and technically demanding. They've kind of drifted along in fits and starts since then simply absorbing any changes in the computing environment. What was once a collection of technical challenges has evolved into an integration of now existing technologies. It's basically been continued primarily as a PR exercise to make it appear that the MIT Libraries are on the cutting edge.
DSpace and Open Courseware (OCW) are different projects attempting to solve different problems. DSpace is trying to create and durable archive of electronic documents (mostly of a technical nature). The original problem was how to preserve electronic documents in a archival time scale. The issues are file format durability and management.
OCW is simply creating a uniform way to publish course materials. There isn't much new there, either. The commitment to do all of MIT's courses is new.
Copyright clearance has always been the biggest problem with both projects. Getting the clearance is amenable to technical solutions but paying for it and regulating access to the copyright stuff is expensive and ugly.
I was there when this got started. If you expect all of the materials from every class online you're going to be disappointed. They decided that they couldn't do distance learning well enough to have the MIT brand on it (and make money) so this was the next best move.
The Copyright Law (partly) gets in the way of putting all the course materials online. The other problem is sheer volume. It's going to take awhile before they figure out how to get all the stuff up there. Some subjects will work better than others. Math will probably do well, history will probably be not so good because of percentage of copyrighted stuff used in history courses versus math courses.
It will get better and richer as they figure it out. It'll definitely be a good resource but it'll never be an MIT (TM) education.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there'll be some Vaxen clusters out there until cockroaches are extinct. We had a cluster once where I worked and no one could figure out what it did but were afraid to turn them off. We just moved the boxes around and rebooted them when they got in inconvenient spots. They'd just keep running and running. I'm sure there are factories running Vaxes that would shutdown if they stopped but its been so long they needed attention no one would know what to do if they died. Truly amazing reliability. Nothing's come close to them despite years of trying. VMS is ugly and slow but it's rock solid compared to its bastard step-child Windows.
RMS isn't in the Gates Building. He's in the "warehouse" section. I've a friend who works on His Majesty's floor. The place might be dramatic to look at, but it's a pain to work in. When I visited it there were way more bizarre problems than any other half-constructed building I've ever seen. And it's really, really easy to get lost in it. I haven't gotten really lost at MIT for over 20 years until I set foot on the main floor of the Stata Center. The building's denizens are hiring architects to help fix it. I think that's part of Gehry's plan for participatory design. Leave it so unfinished that the inhabitants have to make their own nests!
If they're using RFID security that will surely be a step down from the old Building 20 days of random interdisciplinary wonderfulness. They've gone from a basic barracks that no cares about so you can do whatever to Pritzker Prize winner (Gehry) hyper-designed everything must be just so. RMS is a pain but he's usually right. I expect much lower real creativity there. But it will look cool, a monument to the dot bomb years.
Now shipping with Linux (and it installs easier than XP)! Holy cow! How did the future sneak up on us like that?
Yes, indeed. I was struck at how similiar to a garden-variety remote system administration problem it was and how well they had designed the rover and planned its fallbacks to solve it. Very, very nicely done NASA. I'm beginning to believe the robot guys can do it better than the human spaceflight guys. I'm also hoping it trickles down to the hardware we have to manage everyday.
Same thing happened with my car. Rats got in and chewed up the wires to the fuel injectors. Mars is full of them, I tell you. Send the exterminators!
I worked in a restaurant on a grill where the waitresses had to cross behind me in a 3 foot space. I had to be pretty careful about swinging a burger around to the counter on the other side. That was annoying but the real hole was that the "break" room was in the basement which was dark, fetid, and filled with roaches who were well fed.
I am not making this up!
One of those suckers trundled up to the takeout counter once. As I was giving some tourist directions I noticed it crawling across the counter from the corner of my eye. Picking up a napkin I had to wait until the tourist turned away to snatch the bug. He turned back and gave me a quizzical look wondering why I had moved so fast. The managers were mercenary Neanderthals, too. That company is in much reduced circumstances now.:-)
Apologies to Dave Barry for stealing his line. Please don't sue.
SparcStation5 -- built like tank. 32 bits. SBUS cards.
SparcUltra5 -- built like cheap PC. 64 bits. PCI cards.
Used both, Used both as servers. Getting cards into the Sparc5 could be a real pain. But once in there they'd never give you any trouble. The Ultra5 struck me as a bit cheap, construction-wise. Which was a total 180 from their traditional "drop it on a concrete floor and the connectors stay stuck togeher. While Dells and such had snap-in parts the Ultra5 has little screws and sharp edges. Felt kind of loose.
Linux on a good PC pretty much killed my desire for Solaris. Never liked CDE, never like premium prices for simple add-ons like memory. Maybe useful for a special workstations but the Ultra5 was an attempt to steal into the PC market. I'm nostalgic for Sparc5 but not the Ultra5.
Let's see Friday is court day on IBM's case. I smell a pretty bad debacle for SCO there.
Novell's been doing a pretty good job harrying SCO's flanks to the point where SCO is probably getting nowhere selling "licenses". They HAD to sue Novell to keep the pretense up.
I've noticed that their PR releases don't list a PR agency anymore. I used to work for a PR firm and usually they'll handle or coordinate media queries. Being done in house now. Hmmmm.... Maybe they can't find a flack who'll touch them.
My guess is that it's all about the stock price now but... The PR machine is losing steam. Like a junkie they need more drugs/PR to keep going.
Don't worry about the stock price, that's trailing news. There's so little stock being traded relative to amount outstanding that it doesn't take much to support it and the press releases are getting less effective. It'll crash rather spectacularly when there's a completely adverse opinion in one of the cases.
Friday will be fun to watch!
I don't think they got the Mac right until the Mac SE came out in '86 or so. The original 128K Mac was too slow and small for its ambitions. The other funky thing about them was their power supply. It was cooled by convection, which made sure the power supplies died easily and often. I think the other forgotten aspect of the Mac was the LaserWriter which made the WYSIWYG metaphor work.
And let's not forget the Apple Lisa which started the mouse/icon/desktop thing for Apple. That puppy was way ahead of its time. The Mac simply brought it down (relatively speaking. a Lisa was $10K) to where mere wealthy mortals could afford it.
I believe one of the manned lunar missions recovered a piece of the one of the lunar Surveyors. By the time we get it back we'll likely have figured out how to harden remote vehicles without having to do forensics. OTOH, it'll would be a really cool museum piece.
Must be discouraging for SCO. The latest press releases aren't pumping the stock up anymore. Down again today... Cry wolf a few times too many and people begin to catch on.
I remember hearing that rhymes, rhythmn, and songs were used as part of keeping the oral versions consistent. In fact, I think it using verbal techniques ensures better long term accuracy than transcription to paper. They're kind of like sonic checksums. Homer's Iliad and Odessey probably changed little until they were written down several handred years after they were composed.
Until printing came along the accuracy of hand copied manuscripts was rather suspect. Scholars spent much time trying to divine the original content of many manuscripts, documenting their sources and the differences to justify their particular transcription.
I think the project has been fairly successful overall. I used to ride to my grandmother's house in Quincy in the early '60's and the ride was fairly smooth even around rush hour. When I started to drive you stayed as far away from it as possible.
The cool thing will be the network effects. Roads that connect to the Big Dig will be the better for it.
Macworld used to be here and had its best attendance here before it went to NYC.
You probably won't need a car. If it's at the Hynes (rather than the new Convention Center in South Boston) the food court at the Prudential is OK and there's tons of other fun, distracting things to do in the neighborhood. If it's in the new Convention Center you'll probably be staying in hotels near the Prudential anyway and the shuttles will bring you back. And Boston is a walking town. (Tho' I did walk back from the Javits up to B'way and 52nd once just for the color on Seventh Ave.)
I'll definitely be there. Of course, I live in Boston. This saves me buckets of dough. :-)
It's interesting that it wasn't even seen as a possible internal project. I could understand deciding not to make it an internal project but I don't think it was even discussed. They just took the money and handed the technical piece off the some MS partners. They kind of passed on doing anything technically interesting with it. A missed opportunity if you ask me.
The most important computer to me was the Adage Ambilog 200. First machine I ever saw that digitized sound and could control the video with a joy stick in 1964. The Apple II was just a knock-off. :-)
It was my dad's company's design and primary product. Later he couldn't understand why anyone would want anything better than a Commodore 64.
My vote for most important personal computer would be an IBM 1130. No one would have wanted personal computers unless smaller machines like the 1130 were available to take over during the dead of night for essentially unlimited computing time. That was addictive stuff.
My experience: Went to work for company that implemented nice large finance system because business plan anticipated huge growth. Started just before they lost biggest client, 9/11, and terrible business environment. Business plan useless. Budget cutbacks, no new projects, eventually outsourcing nice finance system. Me laid off.
Ideal situation: PHBs don't care much about IT as glamour department but have decent business sense and fund good, well justified projects. Me do challenging creative useful stuff and don't worry about making datacenter pretty for PHBs.
Oh, and PROFIT!!
During the Apollo era they spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to shave in space. They spent oodles of $$ designing vacuum assisted electric razors and such. Finally on one of the Apollo missions just before landing they bravely tried their experiment. Turned out regular shaving cream and razors worked just fine. Doh! The moral of the story is that MS Word is a word processor written to NASA specs...
I'd have to say that the article is in accord with my experience. I was all excited about SSH being in Solaris 9 but found the default install just too tedious to clean up from a security standpoint. I never really liked CDE, either. Ugly and insecure. In my last job, RedHat went on my 500mHz IBM desktop and the Ultra 5 gathered dust in the corner.
On the other hand, Solaris is really meant for large machines and the Sparc architecture. It works good there and still has the advantage in the mainframe-ish category. The gap is closing fast, though. Sun can continue the argue the "value" proposition for Solaris/Sparc but that's making sense in a smaller and smaller section of the market.
Once the 2.6 series gets going Linux is poised to push the proprietary Unices into extremely niche oriented markets. The resources that Open Source bring to bear on the software development problem is simply going to overwhelm any corporate attempt to keep up. The corporate choice is going to be lead or get out of way.
DSpace and Open Courseware (OCW) are different projects attempting to solve different problems. DSpace is trying to create and durable archive of electronic documents (mostly of a technical nature). The original problem was how to preserve electronic documents in a archival time scale. The issues are file format durability and management.
OCW is simply creating a uniform way to publish course materials. There isn't much new there, either. The commitment to do all of MIT's courses is new.
Copyright clearance has always been the biggest problem with both projects. Getting the clearance is amenable to technical solutions but paying for it and regulating access to the copyright stuff is expensive and ugly.
The Copyright Law (partly) gets in the way of putting all the course materials online. The other problem is sheer volume. It's going to take awhile before they figure out how to get all the stuff up there. Some subjects will work better than others. Math will probably do well, history will probably be not so good because of percentage of copyrighted stuff used in history courses versus math courses.
It will get better and richer as they figure it out. It'll definitely be a good resource but it'll never be an MIT (TM) education.