IBM has a program called the Academic Initiative, which provides free of charge, course material, hands-on systems and software, to colleges and universities who want to start teaching their students about mainframes. There was also a Mainframe Programming Contest that ran just this last year, where over 700 students from the US and Canada logged into a system and performed various tasks to win prizes. The top five performers were flown out to IBM Poughkeepsie, NY for a tour of the facilities and to meet with some of the higher-ups.
Mainframes aren't going away. There's simply nothing else out there that can handle the amount of data that a mainframe can process. That's simply the way it was built. It doesn't matter if someone comes out with a 25ghz core cpu with fiber interconnects. That doesn't drive business. IBM's mainframes are built for business. Read up on GDPS, Parallel Sysplex, WLM and CICS. Comparing a "omg fast 15ghz dell server" or whatever to a mainframe is like comparing a Ferarri to a freight train. Sure, the Ferarri will smoke the train in the quarter mile, but there's no way you'd want to use one to move coal from one side of the country to the other.
If you're interested in learning the stuff, just ask around a company that uses them. While it is an entirely different world, it is fun to learn, and people are really trying to hire young mainframe system programmers now.
It _is_ a bit disheartening though, to look at the pictures of the three guys at the bottom of the page and thing "these guys could have just swiped a few thousand credit card numbers". While they appear to be fun-loving people with a very original idea, you have to think.... is it really that easy to take advantage of a community like this?
What it comes down to is timing. If people spend two grand on a computer (where the term "computer" means monitor, cpu and operating system, keep in mind) they're not going to change anything within 2 years unless somebody does it for them.
Apple could release the most amazing OS ever, but if it's at a time when there's no interest in the PC market or in a time when America just bought their "new computers" there won't be much profit in the home user market (and as much as we like to say "well what about the servers and graphics guys, it is THE market to go after)
Witness the tremendous success of Windows 2000 (sarcasm). It's MSs best OS to date, but the general market isn't interested in it right now.
I'm not trying to be flamebait, but I think most "hardcore gamers" decide how great a card is before they even try it. If the numbers are high, it rules. 2GB sounds awfully extreme to me, and can the architecture on the card handle all of that? I mean, what kind of game has 2GB of textures in it? I guess you could write several "versions" of each texture, but would that make it much faster than just re-rendering it? I'm curious to see if there's much difference. According to numbers, it should look amazing, but I'm not expecting much.
While it wasn't the smartest thing in the world for the kid to write a story like that, it kind of shows what kind of state our society is in that the authorities would consider a kid a "danger to other students" because he has legitimate fears. But I'm sure that Mosaic 2000 will take care of everything (sarcasm)
It is not an overreaction, and anyone with any foresight ca frightfully see what is happening, here. Rather than individually talking to children that need help, or actually getting involved in a child's life, the people at these schools are choosing to label kids based on what a test computer said about them. And if the advocates say that it's to protect the children so that they can have a better future, think about how messed up you'd feel if you were labeled "wrong" or "troubled" by a computer, then presemably thrown in "special" classes or poked at like a guinea pig. If they are really worried about "geeks", then they'd spend more time with the children, or maybe even (god forbid) try to set a good example by behaving more by how you feel and less by what the neighbors will think. I hate to sound like an after-school special, but the real problem is with bad parents and unhealthy environments.
AOL is going to make OperaMail look like the bad guy in this, when it's their hole that let the whole thing happen. Couldn't the thief use just about any other free email client to do this, or was their something special about OperaMail?
We should keep in mind that in IPv6, there will be longer numbers, hence, your router (whether it be on a campus or your dialup ISP) might find it more convenient to just assign a pseudo-static IP address to your machine (give you the same IP every time you dial up) In the future (a few months), dialup users won't have the same "privacy" that they did with dynamic IP addresses. Good or bad thing, I guess time will tell.
I think it's cool how the patterns created by these machines almost mimics patterns created in fractals. I'm sure some math-person could give a reason for this. Oh gawd... fibonacci numbers all over again. Anybody remember the fractal antenna post?
I saw Weird Al last week in RedBank, New Jersey. The show was taped by VH1, and they showed it monday night. I taped it and grabbed the scenes that I was in. If anyone's interested, check it out at
I would love to hear the nitty-gritty details of the legality behind Seattle's anti-spam laws. As much as I hate sifting through porno ads and tech mags, I wonder just how you would go about drawing the line on such a subject.
What happens if a mass emailing goes out with a valid return address, but the address is just a black hole, or another email repository. It's a difficult line to draw, and even however many years after the invention of the telephone, we still get unsolicited telemarketing calls. I don't see an easy and fair solution just yet. Or how about when your friend tells you about "a hot new way to make money surfing the net!" Are they a spammer?
It's easy to look through your Inbox and find the spam, but getting some sort of architecture or filtering system up for this would be diffucult. I would imagine that legality would be the ultimate solution, but I'm kinda weary of proposing government as a solution. Dahh!!! I'm gonna go run around the block, now.
I like to think of Be as a decent compromise between Windows and Unix. Sure, it's got all the icons, windows, bells and whistles, but it's more than just "Mac on a PC".
What I like about Be is that it is geared towards productivity. You shouldn't have to think about your OS while you're doing work, but if you want to, the option is there. While Be may not be "here's the source code"-open sourced, it is written and engineered by people who are a part of today's computer society. For the most part, they represent the bleeding edge in OS advancements and stability that I'm looking for.
Now if I could only get my damn sound card to work with it, that would be another story.
Music is music, no matter how you slice it, and I love being able to download that rare Ben Folds Five mp3 of Have Nagila or something along those lines, but I doubt that most people will want to commit their listening habits to sitting in front of their PC's just to be a part of this "revolution". When people show me how impressive their MP3 collection is, it's really difficult to take them seriously when their "collection" starts off with several "ABBA" tracks, then several misspellings of "Metallica". When you show off your CD collection, you make sure you hide the MC Hammer and Paula Abdul CD's. It's about the music, not how much of a hard drive you can take up. And unfortunatly, that's where it sits with most of today's MP3 "collectors". Present company excluded, I'm sure.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM has a program called the Academic Initiative, which provides free of charge, course material, hands-on systems and software, to colleges and universities who want to start teaching their students about mainframes. There was also a Mainframe Programming Contest that ran just this last year, where over 700 students from the US and Canada logged into a system and performed various tasks to win prizes. The top five performers were flown out to IBM Poughkeepsie, NY for a tour of the facilities and to meet with some of the higher-ups.
Mainframes aren't going away. There's simply nothing else out there that can handle the amount of data that a mainframe can process. That's simply the way it was built. It doesn't matter if someone comes out with a 25ghz core cpu with fiber interconnects. That doesn't drive business. IBM's mainframes are built for business. Read up on GDPS, Parallel Sysplex, WLM and CICS. Comparing a "omg fast 15ghz dell server" or whatever to a mainframe is like comparing a Ferarri to a freight train. Sure, the Ferarri will smoke the train in the quarter mile, but there's no way you'd want to use one to move coal from one side of the country to the other.
If you're interested in learning the stuff, just ask around a company that uses them. While it is an entirely different world, it is fun to learn, and people are really trying to hire young mainframe system programmers now.
We still love ya' rob... although you scare the holy hell out of us.
It _is_ a bit disheartening though, to look at the pictures of the three guys at the bottom of the page and thing "these guys could have just swiped a few thousand credit card numbers". While they appear to be fun-loving people with a very original idea, you have to think.... is it really that easy to take advantage of a community like this?
Now the question "Is this the latest version of the internet?" will actually be valid.
What it comes down to is timing. If people spend two grand on a computer (where the term "computer" means monitor, cpu and operating system, keep in mind) they're not going to change anything within 2 years unless somebody does it for them.
Apple could release the most amazing OS ever, but if it's at a time when there's no interest in the PC market or in a time when America just bought their "new computers" there won't be much profit in the home user market (and as much as we like to say "well what about the servers and graphics guys, it is THE market to go after)
Witness the tremendous success of Windows 2000 (sarcasm). It's MSs best OS to date, but the general market isn't interested in it right now.
sosumi! (if you don't get it, read an Apple history book)
I'm not trying to be flamebait, but I think most "hardcore gamers" decide how great a card is before they even try it. If the numbers are high, it rules. 2GB sounds awfully extreme to me, and can the architecture on the card handle all of that? I mean, what kind of game has 2GB of textures in it? I guess you could write several "versions" of each texture, but would that make it much faster than just re-rendering it? I'm curious to see if there's much difference. According to numbers, it should look amazing, but I'm not expecting much.
While it wasn't the smartest thing in the world for the kid to write a story like that, it kind of shows what kind of state our society is in that the authorities would consider a kid a "danger to other students" because he has legitimate fears. But I'm sure that Mosaic 2000 will take care of everything (sarcasm)
But whatever you do, don't cross the beams.
It is not an overreaction, and anyone with any foresight ca frightfully see what is happening, here. Rather than individually talking to children that need help, or actually getting involved in a child's life, the people at these schools are choosing to label kids based on what a test computer said about them.
And if the advocates say that it's to protect the children so that they can have a better future, think about how messed up you'd feel if you were labeled "wrong" or "troubled" by a computer, then presemably thrown in "special" classes or poked at like a guinea pig.
If they are really worried about "geeks", then they'd spend more time with the children, or maybe even (god forbid) try to set a good example by behaving more by how you feel and less by what the neighbors will think. I hate to sound like an after-school special, but the real problem is with bad parents and unhealthy environments.
AOL is going to make OperaMail look like the bad guy in this, when it's their hole that let the whole thing happen. Couldn't the thief use just about any other free email client to do this, or was their something special about OperaMail?
Sneakers was my favorite movie, too
We should keep in mind that in IPv6, there will be longer numbers, hence, your router (whether it be on a campus or your dialup ISP) might find it more convenient to just assign a pseudo-static IP address to your machine (give you the same IP every time you dial up) In the future (a few months), dialup users won't have the same "privacy" that they did with dynamic IP addresses. Good or bad thing, I guess time will tell.
P.S.- Happy Birthday Janeane Garafalo
I think it's cool how the patterns created by these machines almost mimics patterns created in fractals. I'm sure some math-person could give a reason for this. Oh gawd... fibonacci numbers all over again. Anybody remember the fractal antenna post?
And Disney. Then we could have a whole net-tech-media-tainment conglomerate. Whoopie!
I saw Weird Al last week in RedBank, New Jersey. The show was taped by VH1, and they showed it monday night. I taped it and grabbed the scenes that I was in. If anyone's interested, check it out at
http://bisti.schulte.org/VH1/VH1.shtml
Can I get hazard pay if I have to use a mouse and keyboard at work?
I would love to hear the nitty-gritty details of the legality behind Seattle's anti-spam laws. As much as I hate sifting through porno ads and tech mags, I wonder just how you would go about drawing the line on such a subject.
What happens if a mass emailing goes out with a valid return address, but the address is just a black hole, or another email repository. It's a difficult line to draw, and even however many years after the invention of the telephone, we still get unsolicited telemarketing calls. I don't see an easy and fair solution just yet. Or how about when your friend tells you about "a hot new way to make money surfing the net!" Are they a spammer?
It's easy to look through your Inbox and find the spam, but getting some sort of architecture or filtering system up for this would be diffucult. I would imagine that legality would be the ultimate solution, but I'm kinda weary of proposing government as a solution. Dahh!!! I'm gonna go run around the block, now.
I like to think of Be as a decent compromise between Windows and Unix. Sure, it's got all the icons, windows, bells and whistles, but it's more than just "Mac on a PC".
What I like about Be is that it is geared towards productivity. You shouldn't have to think about your OS while you're doing work, but if you want to, the option is there. While Be may not be "here's the source code"-open sourced, it is written and engineered by people who are a part of today's computer society. For the most part, they represent the bleeding edge in OS advancements and stability that I'm looking for.
Now if I could only get my damn sound card to work with it, that would be another story.
I think it's time to break out the SpiroGraph set and see what other designs we can come up with... heh heh
From the "You're into computers, let me ask you something" file:
"If I put an MP3 on a CD, it has CD quality, right?"
Music is music, no matter how you slice it, and I love being able to download that rare Ben Folds Five mp3 of Have Nagila or something along those lines, but I doubt that most people will want to commit their listening habits to sitting in front of their PC's just to be a part of this "revolution". When people show me how impressive their MP3 collection is, it's really difficult to take them seriously when their "collection" starts off with several "ABBA" tracks, then several misspellings of "Metallica". When you show off your CD collection, you make sure you hide the MC Hammer and Paula Abdul CD's. It's about the music, not how much of a hard drive you can take up. And unfortunatly, that's where it sits with most of today's MP3 "collectors". Present company excluded, I'm sure.