If you would like to point out where the flaws are in this system (certainly there are flaws)....
Simple, easy, flaw (which I'm sure you've already thought of) -- human error. Like the time the construction worker started digging a hole next to my house right on top of the orange paint mark specifying the location of my phone line.
The funniest thing was the foreman trying to fix the line, since the phone company (thank you, SBC) said they'd take a day or two to get there. He was shocked (literally) to find out that phone lines carry electricity.:-)
Any saying otherwise completely disregard both facts and how easy/hard it can in be done on such and such system.
Hmmm....let's see. What part of:
Is this an "extreme minimum install"? Probably not to the OP, but then that definition would vary depending on the circumstances, wouldn't it?
I have also dealt with a number of other Linux distros, and I think they all have easy & hard parts, too.
didn't you read? I never said, nor do I think, that RHEL is the only Linux distro out there. I also noted that our definitions were probably different. I guess that part was right, huh?:-)
The GP post of mine (the one to which you were originally replying) was talking about the corporate environment. I think it's safe to say that the majority of Linux distros, and certainly the majority of those that would typically be used for corporate workstations or servers, come with lots and lots of peripheral software. That needs to be not installed in my case.
You seem to be more concerned with "router-on-a-floppy" or "boot-from-my-USB-key" distros. Great, and no problem. There's no way I'd argue that it's easy to put AIX or Solaris in such a situation. But that's not what I was talking about, and I said so.
You DON'T HAVE TO USE RHEL unless you want to play the blame game or have your hand hold like a blabbering fool.
You're right, and I don't need my hand held, thanks. Even when I'm using RHEL, or when I blabber. However, the part of my corporate environment that I support requires formal vendor support for everything, even when it doesn't make sense to us techies -- and it often doesn't. However, they continue to pay me to do this, and it's not bad work. Since Oracle and it's ilk don't seem to care about Damn Small Linux, our choices of a Linux distro, for our environment, are limited. Fortunately, ours is not the only environment.
IBM or SUN is A LOT HARDER to setup in an extreme minimum install than a GNU/Linux or *BSD machine.
I have to disagree. I'm an AIX & Linux system administrator in a large, anal-retentive US corporation, who's been responsible for building and automating standard installation configurations for both AIX and Red Hat Enterprise operating systems.
Our goal was to provide a standard set of installation packages such that A) we took care of the majority of systems, while B) not installing so much that we needlessly complicated patching, administration, & security. Is this an "extreme minimum install"? Probably not to the OP, but then that definition would vary depending on the circumstances, wouldn't it?
Both OS's have easy and hard parts (go figure!), but in general I'd say it was about a wash between the two. I'm sure someone will go on about how [insert your random, favorite, Linux distribution here] is sooooo much easier than RHEL. I don't care. I still think it's about a wash; I have also dealt with a number of other Linux distros, and I think they all have easy & hard parts, too.
While I've not done the same work myself with Solaris or HP-UX, we do have other folks that I work directly with that do the same thing. There are differences in specifics there, too. But overall, not appreciably different in overall magnitude, imho.
Stellarium & Celestia are on pretty much every PC I own or use regularly [cough] work laptop.... And I don't start my day without APOD (and Dilbert, but that's another thread). However, the SW list can't be considered complete without Sky Charts (http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/index.html). Unfortunately Windows-only, but if you want to plan observation sessions & make charts, it's excellent.
You would have to have some serious equipment to be able to see something that Sky Charts doesn't have available.
I'll agree that there are more, brighter, stars in the south. And I'll also agree that we're above the plane of our galaxy's equator -- but only by about 20 light years. I fail to see how that orients us so that "The Northern Hemisphere faces away from the Milky Way...".
The center of our galaxy lies roughly in Sagittarius, which, as a Zodiacal constellation, is visible in most of the northern hemisphere. Maybe not as directly, and maybe not as often, but it's visible. See http://www.seds.org/messier/more/mw.html for more information.
Were you possibly referring to the Magellanic clouds?
In any case, there's lots & lots of Good Stuff to see in the night sky, regardless of the hemisphere in which you live. Given the choice of some super-dark area of northern Canada or Alaska or a static location in the center of downtown [pick your large, southern hemisphere city, here], I'd take the north.
Of course, an ulimited travel budget would be even better....:-)
Unless he finds out 2 years from now. Or when the kid goes to school & starts learning new, exciting, ways to interact with his/her peers, parents, and siblings. Or at various other un-fun stages of development.
otoh, it's all worth it when A) your 2-year old runs screaming "Daddy" & hugs you when you get home from work; B) when the kid turns into a mature human; and C) when you're presented with grandkids, and you get to hand them back when they have dirty diapers. And a whole bunch of other times, too.
Do you know the difference between a 2-year old & a 13-year old?
When the 2-year old throws a tantrum in the grocery store, you can pick them up & carry them out.
I never said it would require a rectangular punch; I was disagreeing with a single, specific, implement -- an ice pick. Any ice pick I've ever seen is much too thick, and they tend to get thicker as you get further from the pointy end. Said thickness being much bigger than the narrow width of the holes in our voting cards, which would therefore cause visible distortion of the card.
It sounds like you use the same system we do. I agree that a coat hanger would work, but I'm not sure it'd work very well on a stack of cards; it seems it would be tough to push the chads all the way through the stack and out of the way.
As for chads, I wouldn't expect those people to complain about them. If your job depends on using punchcards every day, you're going to learn how to punch them correctly very quickly. If you only use them once a year (or every 4 years), the odds of you making a mistake are much higher.
Also, voting "chads" (or is the the holes that are important?:-) are generated via a manual process. You punch out a pre-perforated chad with a little pushing device. Computer punch cards were (are?) punched with a machine, which is obviously going to be much more consistent.
Chads were a problem with punch cards; they'd sometimes not go where they were supposed to & could clog the machine. What I don't remember is if we called them "chads" or not; I didn't work with punch cards that long. I'm old, but not that old....
From what I understand, the hanging chads were most likely the result of voter fraud by the election officials in charge.
Bullshit. While I happen to suspect that there was some fraud in the 2000 election (in Florida along with a bunch of other places) this sounds like nothing more than a Conspiracy Theory, knee-jerk, reaction.
We use the same ballot system here in my little corner of Missouri, and I assure you that it's very possible to leave a chad hanging, even with the "approved" punch device that's part of the voting station. No icepick required.
If you did use an icepick in the manner described in the parent, you couldn't do very many cards at once; there would be quite obvious damage around the hole, as the icepick would be significantly bigger than the chad hole. And the wrong shape (round vs. rectangular).
I don't remember if I'm making this up, but I believe our instructions include a step having you check to make sure all the chads have been totally punched out. If we do have such an instruction, I don't know if it was there before 2000. But I've always checked, instruction or not; it's not that complicated.:-)
Also to add an on-topic comment; Wisconsin's law is a great step, but I agree with other posters that a much better system would be to make the vote generation device separately from the vote counting device.
The main KDE app I probably use is kstars, because there isn't much available in the way of open source astronomy software.
Have you looked at XEphem? It's certainly open source; I haven't looked at kstars in a while so I don't know how the current features list/ease of use/etc. compares between the two. See http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/
Our school district, which consistently is recognized as one of the best in the state, has lots of great resources for our teachers & kids. The computer in my wife's classroom (she teaches 3rd grade) is some Dell Pentium II model running Windows 95.
Now, this is the United States, not Australia. But still....
Actually, no. IBM makes more money off services than either HW or SW. I didn't find their 2005 annual report quickly, but the trend toward services (vs. HW) has been going for several years now; here are the 2004 revenue numbers:
Services: $42.6 B
HW: $28.2 B
SW: $14.3 B
Financing: $ 2.8 B
Other: $ 1.1 B
Adding that up, it looks like services top HW & SW combined.
I believe IBM's use of OSS to leverage their services business is quite relevant. I do suspect that the majority of their services don't have anything to do with OSS, but my (uninformed) opinion says the % is growing, and will continue to grow for a while.
Maybe the code-checking part of the article is relevant, but lots of the rest is obsolete. Particularly the part you chose to quote.
The ferrite cores were replaced in the early 90s, when the computers were updated. The old computers were model AP-101, while the "new" are AP-101S. Faster CPUs, more & semiconductor memory, etc.
The AP-101S's were delivered from the factory (IBM in Owego, NY) to NASA 4 or 5 years before they first flew. What took so long was all of that testing under discussion.
Back in the late 70s, I was in college & had a job in the school computer center. Big operation -- 2 full-time programmer/analysts, the director (who spent as much time as possible programming) and a couple of student workers. I had to learn COBOL & RPG-II after getting the job -- I knew FORTRAN from programming classes, but the school didn't teach the "business" languages.
One of the few RPG-II programs I wrote took information from one of the student data bases & printed it on pre-printed, multi-part, forms. Said forms were used for student pre-registration; they had to fill out courses & get their advisor's signature.
Years later, I went back for a visit. They were still using the same forms, and that same RPG-II program to fill out the student data. I seriously doubt it's still being used, but I'm too scared to ask, in case it is.
...a language whose youngest programmers are in the late 40's age range?
I'm only in my early 40's, and FORTRAN was the first language I learned. That would have been 1976-77.
On a more serious note, FORTAN is still used in certain niche areas, I guess. I have a friend who learned it in college a couple of years ago. He was studying astronomy.
Interesting. I never knew (or, quite possibly, had forgotten) that RPG had anything to do, specifically, with IBM. I first encountered RPG-II while in college, on our HP minicomputer -- I believe a 3000, but the memories are a bit fuzzy...:-(
Now that I read these posts (and the Wikipedia article -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG_programming_langu age -- it makes sense. I believe the school had an IBM S/3 before the HP, and they probably still had old RPG programs that worked Well Enough & wanted to keep.
I could wax on in Oldtimer Mode some more, and talk about carrying my coding forms uphill in the snow (both directions) but I'll spare you youngsters. Shoot, this was the late 70's; some of you think the Oldies songs on the radio are newer than that....
Thanks; I learned something today. The fact that it was trivia is irrelevant; I'm calling it a day.:-)
It's illegal to murder - are you more likely to do it?
Let's flip this, since -- where I live -- it's already illegal to murder folks. Try "It's now legal to murder -- am I more likely to do it?". My answer is a clear "no", since it's well outside my built-in and learned-in code to murder someone. This has nothing to do with the law, in my particular case. YMMV.
Laws are *extremely* important for defining the boundaries of what is right and wrong. Without them you get everyone making up their own rules.
There are plenty of counterexamples to this kind of logic. It's illegal to manipulate corporate books, but executives have been known to do that from time to time; they bend the rules because They Want To.
Since laws aren't universal, there's no rational way to determine What's Right based on said laws. I live in a country that has a legal death penalty(1) for certain crimes; most of the world's countries do not. Is that Right?
(1) Please note that I am *not* arguing for or against the death penalty, and am not implying *any* personal stance either for or against it. It's an example, folks.
So, no, whatever dependencies there were on ODM weren't fixed at that time.
Nice misdirection. I never said the system didn't depend on ODM; I said ODM's overriding of the text config files in/etc went away. As for filling up disk, what happened to Solaris (or HP-UX or AIX or....) in 1998 when / or/var filled up? Sorry, but I don't consider mismanagement of a system to allow OS-dependent file systems to fill up to be a "common state". Did/does it happen? Yep. But it shouldn't have been and shouldn't be common.
That, too, is just BS. LVM is rarely used even on Linux....
LVM as in volume management, not IBM's LVM contribution to Linux. You know, dynamically being able to increase disk allocations, and having the underlying file system expandable? Like what Veritas has made Sagans of dollars selling since Solaris before 2.whatever had some capability included? I'm curious -- what's the technically superior way to manage disk space on your enterprise servers, since an LVM is stupid?
I'm sorry I wasn't clear -- I wasn't trying to give credit to IBM for the invention of GUI management or dynamic kernels or anything else; I said such features were in AIX & has since been added to other Unices. I wasn't even trying to imply that Sun or HP or SuSE or anyone else developed such things *because* of IBM. All I said was they were in AIX, and such differences were some of the "non-Unix" complaints back in the day, and they since have proliferated.
AIX has always been incompatible in ways that range from merely annoying to seriously bad.
Yep. And HP-UX has incompatibilities, as does Solaris, and.... Again, what's your point? One of the problems with the Unix wars. Things like AIX's system call incompatibilities made it a PITA to port some SW; I know IBM has been cleaning up some of that recently, but I'm sure there are still problems. I don't care.
Way the heck back in 1993-95 I was part of a team that wrote graphics code that ran on 2 different embedded systems (one without an OS other than what we wrote, the other with an embedded version of DOS) and AIX. 3 CPU architectures, common code base, different compile options. I later ported a bunch of that to Linux, and it wasn't easy. Based on the logic that I keep seeing, I should bitch about how hard it is to write code for Linux, right? The fact that 10+ years has changed things should make no difference, right? [/sarcasm]
Many of their decisions were indeed driven by the desires of their mainframe customers, but that still doesn't make those features good ideas.
True. But that doesn't make them bad ideas, either.
Trying to portray the p.o.s. that AIX was/is as some kind of progenitor of modern UNIX or Linux systems is ridiculous.
Why? In 1999, when I supported AIX, my co-workers were still using a freaking compiler to change some HP-UX kernel parameters; we either changed a config file or used some command like 'chsys'. My Solaris buddies were taking full file systems off line, allocating a new file system, & copying data from the full one; we used 'extendlv' and moved on. Don't even get me started about what I had to do to manage Linux of that vintage.
This stuff hardly proves (and I'm not even *trying* to imply) that AIX *caused* such features to be included in other Unices. Heck, this stuff probably existed in other OSs at the time -- that's not the point. All I said was that AIX had particular features, some people complained at the time that they "weren't really Unix" features, and those same features are now in other Unices. And I find that humorous.
Do I think AIX was or is the perfect OS? Not even close. There was plenty about AIX that I didn't like, too. OTOH, now that I'm supporting Linux, there are several times a month part of my brain goes "well, if this was AIX, you could easily fix that by....".
From what I know about modern Solaris, I probably would be having similar thoughts if I'd been a Solaris guy moving to Linux.
I think a lot of the problem is what you're used to. Since I learned AIX first, it all seems normal to me. Solaris, OTOH -- trying to figure out an NFS export was a PITA. Device naming, and setting up slices -- a bigger PITA. And that whole/export/home business....:-)
Hating smit -- I always thought smit sucked, but smitty rocks. X11 (lack of) speed vs. a nice tty interface. Not to mention the stupid little running man. But the tool itself was a great way to learn to admin the OS, while learning the real commands in order to *not* have to use the menus. But even then, having the menus around to do something that you do once a year, and can't remember the parms for -- that's a great help.
DBAs hating AIX -- interesting; I've worked with DBAs who couldn't stand Solaris, and loved AIX. I've also talked to DBAs who felt like yours. Again, I suspect it's mostly what you learned first, or have worked with the most. With Oracle, I suspect that a lot of that was that Solaris used to be their primary development platform, and AIX was a ported afterthought. Now that Linux is Oracle's primary, I wonder how long it'll be before Solaris has issues?
I thought they said that the files in/etc, got output for compatibility, but that there was a binary backend that was authoratitive.... Like I said, it was that (BAD) way in very early AIX, but the ODM priority over the text files has been gone for around 10 years. AIX 3.2.5 had almost all of that problem fixed, that was 1993 or so, if I can recall my career correctly.
I've found that shipping two sets of commands is a recipe for disaster.... Wasn't your post the one that mentioned including/usr/ucb? Same thing in the "Linux compatibility" in AIX -- don't put the directory in your path, you only have one set of commands. Anyway, if you always put the full path to commands in scripts, you know they'll work despite someone else's weird PATH preferences. So I don't see the problem.
Most of them [long list of Unices referenced], I can't even recall, but I remember the AIX goop quite clearly, as it never sounded very UNIX'y to me.
Pshaw. What the heck is "UNIX'y"? POSIX compliance? AIX and probably most of your list have it. Open Group UNIX certification? AIX, HP-UX, and IRIX from your list (maybe others?) have it. Or is it just some fuzzy "what I'm used to dealing with" feeling?
I've never used AIX, but from what I've been told, everything runs thru some admin tool that edits binary files for configuration instead of the standard human readable text files used under Linux.
You've been given the wrong information. The admin tool in question is SMIT (Systems Management Interface Tool? I don't remember for sure, but that's probably close) which presents a menu heirarchy & (eventually) just calls the appropriate CLI command to do the work. The vast majority of the config files are text, just like any "normal" Unix. Anything that isn't text probably wasn't in "normal" Unix anyway (although I'm sure someone will have a conter-example to prove me wrong -- go ahead).
AIX does have the Object Data Manager (ODM) where a lot of config info is also stored. Many of the commands update both the text & ODM data; a lot of what the ODM contains is device & driver information, which is part of what allows so much in AIX to be updated dynamically.
Back in the day (*early* versions of AIX) some things came from the ODM instead of the text files; this caused Bad Things to happen when someone familiar with another Unix changed/etc & not the ODM. AFAIK, those effects have been gone for years; I stopped encountering them sometime in the mid- to late- 90s.
AIX does have a number of commands that update config information, but their use is not always required. There are also some annoying differences, like/etc/filesystems instead of/etc/fstab (and it's in a different format) but other versions of Unix also have differences. Thank you, BSD vs SysV....
One of the nice things about SMIT is that you can see the actual command line incantation do do whatever it was you asked SMIT to do via the menus & filling out fields. This allows one to actually learn the command line, and save time later.
Please note that I haven't been working with AIX for a couple of years now (all Linux) so some of my info may be old. If IBM has changed AIX 5.3 back to some of the old behavior I don't know -- I stopped with 5.2. But the history should be right.
AIX is so different to administer, I'm shocked you include it as "Linux-like". (Note, I've never used AIX....
This isn't meant to be a flame, but I've gotta ask: if you've never used AIX, how would you know? The "Linux compatibility" that IBM's been putting into AIX since late 4.3 & early 5.x versions has been inclusion of GNU toolsets (so you can -- for example -- use the "Linux" version of make if you wish, or the AIX version) and addition of library routines that make it easier to compile common OS SW on AIX.
I always find it amusing that some of the things IBM originally put into AIX to "industrialize" it were things that folks complained Aren't The Unix Way, but they've ended up in other Unices as the years go on. LVM, enhanced security, dynamic kernel, a systems management interface, etc. Yet, 15+ years later, I still hear complaints about how different & not-nomral-Unix AIX is. Whatever.
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Simple, easy, flaw (which I'm sure you've already thought of) -- human error. Like the time the construction worker started digging a hole next to my house right on top of the orange paint mark specifying the location of my phone line.
The funniest thing was the foreman trying to fix the line, since the phone company (thank you, SBC) said they'd take a day or two to get there. He was shocked (literally) to find out that phone lines carry electricity. :-)
Hmmm....let's see. What part of:
- Is this an "extreme minimum install"? Probably not to the OP, but then that definition would vary depending on the circumstances, wouldn't it?
- I have also dealt with a number of other Linux distros, and I think they all have easy & hard parts, too.
didn't you read? I never said, nor do I think, that RHEL is the only Linux distro out there. I also noted that our definitions were probably different. I guess that part was right, huh?The GP post of mine (the one to which you were originally replying) was talking about the corporate environment. I think it's safe to say that the majority of Linux distros, and certainly the majority of those that would typically be used for corporate workstations or servers, come with lots and lots of peripheral software. That needs to be not installed in my case.
You seem to be more concerned with "router-on-a-floppy" or "boot-from-my-USB-key" distros. Great, and no problem. There's no way I'd argue that it's easy to put AIX or Solaris in such a situation. But that's not what I was talking about, and I said so.
You DON'T HAVE TO USE RHEL unless you want to play the blame game or have your hand hold like a blabbering fool.
You're right, and I don't need my hand held, thanks. Even when I'm using RHEL, or when I blabber. However, the part of my corporate environment that I support requires formal vendor support for everything, even when it doesn't make sense to us techies -- and it often doesn't. However, they continue to pay me to do this, and it's not bad work. Since Oracle and it's ilk don't seem to care about Damn Small Linux, our choices of a Linux distro, for our environment, are limited. Fortunately, ours is not the only environment.
I have to disagree. I'm an AIX & Linux system administrator in a large, anal-retentive US corporation, who's been responsible for building and automating standard installation configurations for both AIX and Red Hat Enterprise operating systems.
Our goal was to provide a standard set of installation packages such that A) we took care of the majority of systems, while B) not installing so much that we needlessly complicated patching, administration, & security. Is this an "extreme minimum install"? Probably not to the OP, but then that definition would vary depending on the circumstances, wouldn't it?
Both OS's have easy and hard parts (go figure!), but in general I'd say it was about a wash between the two. I'm sure someone will go on about how [insert your random, favorite, Linux distribution here] is sooooo much easier than RHEL. I don't care. I still think it's about a wash; I have also dealt with a number of other Linux distros, and I think they all have easy & hard parts, too.
While I've not done the same work myself with Solaris or HP-UX, we do have other folks that I work directly with that do the same thing. There are differences in specifics there, too. But overall, not appreciably different in overall magnitude, imho.
You would have to have some serious equipment to be able to see something that Sky Charts doesn't have available.
Also, for completness (for Palm OS-based PDA users), Planetarium (http://www.aho.ch/pilotplanets/) is also a Must Have.
The center of our galaxy lies roughly in Sagittarius, which, as a Zodiacal constellation, is visible in most of the northern hemisphere. Maybe not as directly, and maybe not as often, but it's visible. See http://www.seds.org/messier/more/mw.html for more information.
Were you possibly referring to the Magellanic clouds?
In any case, there's lots & lots of Good Stuff to see in the night sky, regardless of the hemisphere in which you live. Given the choice of some super-dark area of northern Canada or Alaska or a static location in the center of downtown [pick your large, southern hemisphere city, here], I'd take the north.
Of course, an ulimited travel budget would be even better.... :-)
Unless he finds out 2 years from now. Or when the kid goes to school & starts learning new, exciting, ways to interact with his/her peers, parents, and siblings. Or at various other un-fun stages of development.
otoh, it's all worth it when A) your 2-year old runs screaming "Daddy" & hugs you when you get home from work; B) when the kid turns into a mature human; and C) when you're presented with grandkids, and you get to hand them back when they have dirty diapers. And a whole bunch of other times, too.
Do you know the difference between a 2-year old & a 13-year old?
When the 2-year old throws a tantrum in the grocery store, you can pick them up & carry them out.
It sounds like you use the same system we do. I agree that a coat hanger would work, but I'm not sure it'd work very well on a stack of cards; it seems it would be tough to push the chads all the way through the stack and out of the way.
Also, voting "chads" (or is the the holes that are important?
Chads were a problem with punch cards; they'd sometimes not go where they were supposed to & could clog the machine. What I don't remember is if we called them "chads" or not; I didn't work with punch cards that long. I'm old, but not that old....
Bullshit. While I happen to suspect that there was some fraud in the 2000 election (in Florida along with a bunch of other places) this sounds like nothing more than a Conspiracy Theory, knee-jerk, reaction.
We use the same ballot system here in my little corner of Missouri, and I assure you that it's very possible to leave a chad hanging, even with the "approved" punch device that's part of the voting station. No icepick required.
If you did use an icepick in the manner described in the parent, you couldn't do very many cards at once; there would be quite obvious damage around the hole, as the icepick would be significantly bigger than the chad hole. And the wrong shape (round vs. rectangular).
I don't remember if I'm making this up, but I believe our instructions include a step having you check to make sure all the chads have been totally punched out. If we do have such an instruction, I don't know if it was there before 2000. But I've always checked, instruction or not; it's not that complicated. :-)
Also to add an on-topic comment; Wisconsin's law is a great step, but I agree with other posters that a much better system would be to make the vote generation device separately from the vote counting device.
...lots of fun parties with naked strippers....
If they're naked, what are they stripping?
----
No survivors? Then where do the stories come from, I wonder? - Capt. Jack Sparrow
when is the last time you ever used calculus?
Having kids, I've learned the answer to that question that used to hound my teachers when I was in school:
Q: Why are we learning this? When are we going to use this?
A: When your kids need help.
So, the last time *I* used calculus was when my son -- at the time a high school senior -- needed consultation on a problem a couple of months ago.
The main KDE app I probably use is kstars, because there isn't much available in the way of open source astronomy software.
Have you looked at XEphem? It's certainly open source; I haven't looked at kstars in a while so I don't know how the current features list/ease of use/etc. compares between the two. See http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/
My favorite for a long time has been Sky Charts, though: http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/index.html. This is the stable, free-but-not-Open-Source version for Windows only. There's a development version that's GPLd that also runs on Linux; see http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/index.php
I've had extensive experience with use of FOSS in Victorian Schools
/. is interesting, though -- where did you get the time machine?
Cool -- I didn't realize 19th century England had an open-source community.
Posting to
Our school district, which consistently is recognized as one of the best in the state, has lots of great resources for our teachers & kids. The computer in my wife's classroom (she teaches 3rd grade) is some Dell Pentium II model running Windows 95.
Now, this is the United States, not Australia. But still....
That sounds like a good thing. More people watching kids be creative, as opposed to watching a bunch of over-paid thugs playing with a ball.
Adding that up, it looks like services top HW & SW combined.
I believe IBM's use of OSS to leverage their services business is quite relevant. I do suspect that the majority of their services don't have anything to do with OSS, but my (uninformed) opinion says the % is growing, and will continue to grow for a while.
Maybe the code-checking part of the article is relevant, but lots of the rest is obsolete. Particularly the part you chose to quote.
The ferrite cores were replaced in the early 90s, when the computers were updated. The old computers were model AP-101, while the "new" are AP-101S. Faster CPUs, more & semiconductor memory, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP-101 might help.
The AP-101S's were delivered from the factory (IBM in Owego, NY) to NASA 4 or 5 years before they first flew. What took so long was all of that testing under discussion.
Sure, I can add to my previous post (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138147&ci d=11558336). I said I'd spare you, but you went & asked.....
Back in the late 70s, I was in college & had a job in the school computer center. Big operation -- 2 full-time programmer/analysts, the director (who spent as much time as possible programming) and a couple of student workers. I had to learn COBOL & RPG-II after getting the job -- I knew FORTRAN from programming classes, but the school didn't teach the "business" languages.
One of the few RPG-II programs I wrote took information from one of the student data bases & printed it on pre-printed, multi-part, forms. Said forms were used for student pre-registration; they had to fill out courses & get their advisor's signature.
Years later, I went back for a visit. They were still using the same forms, and that same RPG-II program to fill out the student data. I seriously doubt it's still being used, but I'm too scared to ask, in case it is.
...a language whose youngest programmers are in the late 40's age range?
I'm only in my early 40's, and FORTRAN was the first language I learned. That would have been 1976-77.
On a more serious note, FORTAN is still used in certain niche areas, I guess. I have a friend who learned it in college a couple of years ago. He was studying astronomy.
Interesting. I never knew (or, quite possibly, had forgotten) that RPG had anything to do, specifically, with IBM. I first encountered RPG-II while in college, on our HP minicomputer -- I believe a 3000, but the memories are a bit fuzzy... :-(
u age -- it makes sense. I believe the school had an IBM S/3 before the HP, and they probably still had old RPG programs that worked Well Enough & wanted to keep.
:-)
Now that I read these posts (and the Wikipedia article -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG_programming_lang
I could wax on in Oldtimer Mode some more, and talk about carrying my coding forms uphill in the snow (both directions) but I'll spare you youngsters. Shoot, this was the late 70's; some of you think the Oldies songs on the radio are newer than that....
Thanks; I learned something today. The fact that it was trivia is irrelevant; I'm calling it a day.
It's illegal to murder - are you more likely to do it?
Let's flip this, since -- where I live -- it's already illegal to murder folks. Try "It's now legal to murder -- am I more likely to do it?". My answer is a clear "no", since it's well outside my built-in and learned-in code to murder someone. This has nothing to do with the law, in my particular case. YMMV.
Laws are *extremely* important for defining the boundaries of what is right and wrong. Without them you get everyone making up their own rules.
There are plenty of counterexamples to this kind of logic. It's illegal to manipulate corporate books, but executives have been known to do that from time to time; they bend the rules because They Want To.
Since laws aren't universal, there's no rational way to determine What's Right based on said laws. I live in a country that has a legal death penalty(1) for certain crimes; most of the world's countries do not. Is that Right?
(1) Please note that I am *not* arguing for or against the death penalty, and am not implying *any* personal stance either for or against it. It's an example, folks.
So, no, whatever dependencies there were on ODM weren't fixed at that time.
/etc went away. As for filling up disk, what happened to Solaris (or HP-UX or AIX or ....) in 1998 when / or /var filled up? Sorry, but I don't consider mismanagement of a system to allow OS-dependent file systems to fill up to be a "common state". Did/does it happen? Yep. But it shouldn't have been and shouldn't be common.
.... Again, what's your point? One of the problems with the Unix wars. Things like AIX's system call incompatibilities made it a PITA to port some SW; I know IBM has been cleaning up some of that recently, but I'm sure there are still problems. I don't care.
Nice misdirection. I never said the system didn't depend on ODM; I said ODM's overriding of the text config files in
That, too, is just BS. LVM is rarely used even on Linux....
LVM as in volume management, not IBM's LVM contribution to Linux. You know, dynamically being able to increase disk allocations, and having the underlying file system expandable? Like what Veritas has made Sagans of dollars selling since Solaris before 2.whatever had some capability included? I'm curious -- what's the technically superior way to manage disk space on your enterprise servers, since an LVM is stupid?
I'm sorry I wasn't clear -- I wasn't trying to give credit to IBM for the invention of GUI management or dynamic kernels or anything else; I said such features were in AIX & has since been added to other Unices. I wasn't even trying to imply that Sun or HP or SuSE or anyone else developed such things *because* of IBM. All I said was they were in AIX, and such differences were some of the "non-Unix" complaints back in the day, and they since have proliferated.
AIX has always been incompatible in ways that range from merely annoying to seriously bad.
Yep. And HP-UX has incompatibilities, as does Solaris, and
Way the heck back in 1993-95 I was part of a team that wrote graphics code that ran on 2 different embedded systems (one without an OS other than what we wrote, the other with an embedded version of DOS) and AIX. 3 CPU architectures, common code base, different compile options. I later ported a bunch of that to Linux, and it wasn't easy. Based on the logic that I keep seeing, I should bitch about how hard it is to write code for Linux, right? The fact that 10+ years has changed things should make no difference, right? [/sarcasm]
Many of their decisions were indeed driven by the desires of their mainframe customers, but that still doesn't make those features good ideas.
True. But that doesn't make them bad ideas, either.
Trying to portray the p.o.s. that AIX was/is as some kind of progenitor of modern UNIX or Linux systems is ridiculous.
Why? In 1999, when I supported AIX, my co-workers were still using a freaking compiler to change some HP-UX kernel parameters; we either changed a config file or used some command like 'chsys'. My Solaris buddies were taking full file systems off line, allocating a new file system, & copying data from the full one; we used 'extendlv' and moved on. Don't even get me started about what I had to do to manage Linux of that vintage.
This stuff hardly proves (and I'm not even *trying* to imply) that AIX *caused* such features to be included in other Unices. Heck, this stuff probably existed in other OSs at the time -- that's not the point. All I said was that AIX had particular features, some people complained at the time that they "weren't really Unix" features, and those same features are now in other Unices. And I find that humorous.
Do I think AIX was or is the perfect OS? Not even close. There was plenty about AIX that I didn't like, too. OTOH, now that I'm supporting Linux, there are several times a month part of my brain goes "well, if this was AIX, you could easily fix that by....".
From what I know about modern Solaris, I probably would be having similar thoughts if I'd been a Solaris guy moving to Linux.
I think a lot of the problem is what you're used to. Since I learned AIX first, it all seems normal to me. Solaris, OTOH -- trying to figure out an NFS export was a PITA. Device naming, and setting up slices -- a bigger PITA. And that whole /export/home business.... :-)
/etc, got output for compatibility, but that there was a binary backend that was authoratitive....
/usr/ucb? Same thing in the "Linux compatibility" in AIX -- don't put the directory in your path, you only have one set of commands. Anyway, if you always put the full path to commands in scripts, you know they'll work despite someone else's weird PATH preferences. So I don't see the problem.
Hating smit -- I always thought smit sucked, but smitty rocks. X11 (lack of) speed vs. a nice tty interface. Not to mention the stupid little running man. But the tool itself was a great way to learn to admin the OS, while learning the real commands in order to *not* have to use the menus. But even then, having the menus around to do something that you do once a year, and can't remember the parms for -- that's a great help.
DBAs hating AIX -- interesting; I've worked with DBAs who couldn't stand Solaris, and loved AIX. I've also talked to DBAs who felt like yours. Again, I suspect it's mostly what you learned first, or have worked with the most. With Oracle, I suspect that a lot of that was that Solaris used to be their primary development platform, and AIX was a ported afterthought. Now that Linux is Oracle's primary, I wonder how long it'll be before Solaris has issues?
I thought they said that the files in
Like I said, it was that (BAD) way in very early AIX, but the ODM priority over the text files has been gone for around 10 years. AIX 3.2.5 had almost all of that problem fixed, that was 1993 or so, if I can recall my career correctly.
I've found that shipping two sets of commands is a recipe for disaster....
Wasn't your post the one that mentioned including
Most of them [long list of Unices referenced], I can't even recall, but I remember the AIX goop quite clearly, as it never sounded very UNIX'y to me.
Pshaw. What the heck is "UNIX'y"? POSIX compliance? AIX and probably most of your list have it. Open Group UNIX certification? AIX, HP-UX, and IRIX from your list (maybe others?) have it. Or is it just some fuzzy "what I'm used to dealing with" feeling?
I've never used AIX, but from what I've been told, everything runs thru some admin tool that edits binary files for configuration instead of the standard human readable text files used under Linux.
/etc & not the ODM. AFAIK, those effects have been gone for years; I stopped encountering them sometime in the mid- to late- 90s.
/etc/filesystems instead of /etc/fstab (and it's in a different format) but other versions of Unix also have differences. Thank you, BSD vs SysV....
You've been given the wrong information. The admin tool in question is SMIT (Systems Management Interface Tool? I don't remember for sure, but that's probably close) which presents a menu heirarchy & (eventually) just calls the appropriate CLI command to do the work. The vast majority of the config files are text, just like any "normal" Unix. Anything that isn't text probably wasn't in "normal" Unix anyway (although I'm sure someone will have a conter-example to prove me wrong -- go ahead).
AIX does have the Object Data Manager (ODM) where a lot of config info is also stored. Many of the commands update both the text & ODM data; a lot of what the ODM contains is device & driver information, which is part of what allows so much in AIX to be updated dynamically.
Back in the day (*early* versions of AIX) some things came from the ODM instead of the text files; this caused Bad Things to happen when someone familiar with another Unix changed
AIX does have a number of commands that update config information, but their use is not always required. There are also some annoying differences, like
One of the nice things about SMIT is that you can see the actual command line incantation do do whatever it was you asked SMIT to do via the menus & filling out fields. This allows one to actually learn the command line, and save time later.
Please note that I haven't been working with AIX for a couple of years now (all Linux) so some of my info may be old. If IBM has changed AIX 5.3 back to some of the old behavior I don't know -- I stopped with 5.2. But the history should be right.
AIX is so different to administer, I'm shocked you include it as "Linux-like". (Note, I've never used AIX....
This isn't meant to be a flame, but I've gotta ask: if you've never used AIX, how would you know? The "Linux compatibility" that IBM's been putting into AIX since late 4.3 & early 5.x versions has been inclusion of GNU toolsets (so you can -- for example -- use the "Linux" version of make if you wish, or the AIX version) and addition of library routines that make it easier to compile common OS SW on AIX.
I always find it amusing that some of the things IBM originally put into AIX to "industrialize" it were things that folks complained Aren't The Unix Way, but they've ended up in other Unices as the years go on. LVM, enhanced security, dynamic kernel, a systems management interface, etc. Yet, 15+ years later, I still hear complaints about how different & not-nomral-Unix AIX is. Whatever.
Don't worry -- it only runs in IE anyway.