These days you may know them as a wholly-owned subsidiary of "LM Ericsson" (ERIC). B-) They were a high-flier during the bubble, got burned badly but survived the pop, came back on the strength of their tech (passing Juniper), and were bought for a couple billion at the end of last year.
Got DSL? Try a traceroute. (Many of the ISPs name their Redback boxes in an identifiable way.) If your ISP is deploying "triple play" (Internet, VoIP, Video) and you're on it I'll bet you even money you hit a Redback box before your packets leave your carrier - and clean up on such bets. Even if you're not on 3P yet it's still a decent chance your subscription is managed and/or your packets handled by one or more of their products.
Not to mention things non-mainframes don't attempt
on
The Mainframe Still Lives!
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Of course it lives, and in fact it has done things in 20+ years ago the the PC is just now approaching.
Mainframes aren't just about capacity. Mainframes are about reliability. They keep running - even as broken pieces are repaired or replaced, and equipment is upgraded. They use error correction to insure that the overall machine never drops a bit or makes an error, even though the individual components do. And so on.
It's not just IBM either. For instance there's Amdahl (now wholly owned by Fujitsu). Last time I looked (a few years back) ALL the baby bells did their real-time call accounting on Amdahl mainframes. Keeping them running was important - because if you had to reboot all the calls on the network were free. That's several million per hour down the drain - but NOTHING compared to a similar problem in a server supporting a brokerage's trading.
There's a lot of stuff you can do on networks of comodity machines. But when you truly need a "no bit shall fall" environment there's still no substitute for a mainframe.
For whatever reason, the vast majority of Americans do not seem to particularly favor staying in school for grad school.
Americans generally have to get student loans at interest. College administrators generally reserve scholarship grants for "more needy" foreign students (often the children of the foreign power structure, Rolex, sports-car, and all.)
So Americans tend to drop out of the system as soon as they have accumulated enough sheepskin to start earning money and paying off the student loans, rather than hanging on for a couple more abbreviations to hang after their names and a LOT more debt to pay off.
Further, when picking a major they tend to avoid those fields which are in the news mainly in articles that include the word "outsourcing". That word has been attached to hi-tech for more than four years now. Thus a shortage of American grads with both four-year and higher degrees. B-(
Ask yourself, why are they moving to Canada and not India/China if low wages is all they are after?
[Several politically-correct suggestions, mostly based on the idea of non-Canadian workers in Canada, deleted.]
As someone who has been liaison with developers in India I can suggest other possibilities:
Canada has people who:
- Speak English understandably and understand us when we speak it.
- Are working in the same time zone rather than offset by a shift or more.
- Are working where administrators can easily visit.
- Have a work ethic.
- Have been known to deliver working code, rather than something you have to rework locally anyhow.
- Have a casteless society within the work force, drastically reducing barriers to communication between workers, the incidence of "drones" who expect the lower castes to do their work for them, and other pathologies (such as women who MUST leave at office closing time rather than being able to work overtime like the rest of high tech).
- Are much less likely to humor you until the project is almost due then quit (leaving you with no product) and start their own company (using local workers) to compete with you using your own IP (under local laws that won't be enforced against them).
- Yet still can be paid a lot less than workers in the US while enbding up with a comparable standard of living.
Didn't mean to rain on your parade. The image of a horde of ambulance chasers going after the xxAA as the logical fallout of open source legal briefs was too hard to resist. B-)
Let's say your laptop is stolen. Let's say you had a program that reported IP addresses. Someone buys your laptop from the thief for a stupid low price and hooks it up. It reports their IP. You turn the evidence over to a cop who goes to get your laptop.
In addition to the objections others have pointed out, the situations are not analogous. Stealing your laptop is a criminal offense. Despite their propaganda, unlicensed copying of a RIAA member organization's content is a civil matter AND not theft.
I expect we'll shortly see television ads from the law offices of James Sokolove asking whether you have received a settlement request from the RIAA [...]
Well, her lawyer knew enough to discover this information and file this anyway...
You'll recall from an earlier article that Tanya Anderson's lawyer (in Oregon) http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDFfull.asp?filename= andersen_riaa_070622complaint">found a number of grounds on which to countersue. One of those was using an unlicensed private investigator to get the IP number of alleged private-party infringers.
Texas has a similar requirement for private investigators to be licensed. So THIS granny's attorney is filing a copycat countersuit. This is the second buffalo in the stampede.
I expect we'll shortly see television ads from the law offices of James Sokolove asking whether you have received a settlement request from the RIAA, which is about to be nibbled to death by ducks. B-)
The fact is, most people don't seem to care. King George was reelected.
King George was reelected because the Democrats ran someone so much WORSE that conservatives and moderates who hated his guts held their noses and voted for the lesser demon.
The Democrats got the congress because the Republicans in congress didn't use their time in control to advance the agendas of the voters who elected them, but instead went along with the Democrats on enough issues that they decided "What's the point?" and "spanked" the party by abandoning them at the polls. (You're seeing that with the likes of McCain in the primary race, too.)
There are (at least) two problems with a de facto two-party system:
- You are generally left with the choice of the lesser evil in the final race. (Voting for either is voting for evil.) Meanwhile the machine has enough of a lock on the nominating process that even activity in the primary is impractical for anyone not already fully employed by it.
- "Bipartisan" means that the politicians of the two parties have gotten together to run it their way and denied the voters ANY choice.
Just show me what security YOU run before i give you my money to take care of;P
Seems to me it's a reasonable request.
If they're dumping responsibility for security breaches on their customers, I'd be they're having trouble on their end of the comm line, too. This sort of thing would not make me confident in their operation.
Alternatively, they may be having a LOT of fraud costs from software targeting their particular customers. If they were reduced to announcing that the users with infected computers are now going to pay for the resulting fraud, they're probably losing a LOT of money to fraudsters. So their pooled assets are being shrunk badly enough to hurt and they're trying to head off a run. Again not the sort of thing that would encourage me to trust them with my money.
Clearly, Prince gets it. Digital Content... is merely an attraction to attract consumers to purchase other things....
He isn't giving away his content for free. he's sold it to a newspaper company that will give it away to get people to buy (physical) newspapers, and he's giving them away to people who buy physical tickets to his concert.
And what's particularly subversive about this is that it is an RIAA-less distribution model that may work for other, less established, artists as well.
With the major labels the bands mainly make their money from tours and spinoffs, essentially nothing from record sales and airplay (thanks to RIAA's creative accounting). So bands have little to lose by just focusing their efforts on the tour - using the recording as a value-add for ticket purchases and finding other ways to give it away as advertising, in substitution for industry-controlled airplay.
Prince's action just showed the music-making world a business model that is doable by any competent band and which entirely cuts out the old-school industry while perhaps matching or exceeding the band's returns under the old system. No WONDER the RIAA exec was foaming. B-)
I want to scream in these executive's faces: "The value of music is not monetary."
If it's desirable it has value. If it has value it's usually possible to monetize it, which tends to enable and/or streamline the exchange of it for other things of value, encouraging production and better satisfaction of demand (read "desire") for the thing of value.
The RIAA wants to take advantage of the monetization of the value of something they don't themselves create, taking a cut of the resulting cash flow from fans to creators, without contributing perceptibly to anything but roadblocking the flow.
If I have the economic jargon right that sort of extortion on commerce is called "rent-seeking behavior" and is frowned upon by economic theoreticians as a parasitic drain on productivity and standards of living.
I don't particularly like his music, but I'm inclined to buy a CD just to support him.
I, on the other hand, haven't been buying (or downloading) much if any music for years. But not long ago I hit a Prince video on the cable and was impressed by how good (IMHO) the music was. (The stage show was a separate issue - but doesn't come across on the audio-only CD. B-) ) Tastes vary.
This gives me an excuse to go out and buy a CD I can expect to be decent, supporting a good artist AND tweaking the RIAA's nose simultaneously.
... now these company's will have 2 choices go out of bussines or move overseas!
Try that with building construction.
Non-union illegals have replaced virtually all the domestic construction workers - union or otherwise - except crane operators. (Those are very closely watched because a foulup with a crane is easy to do and can take out a lot of surrounding buildings and people.)
They identified a site in HIV similar to the cre binding motif, but which cre was not able to bind. They created intermediate sequences to bridge the gap between the cre binding site and this HIV sequence.
And now that the concept is proved they can do the same, perhaps with more steps, for a strongly-conserved section of HIV's genome and make an enzyme that targets all, or a very broad range of, HIV strains.
Sadly, it's because the viral diseases you mentioned tend to happen to poor people, where as the middle and upper classes get the lifestyle diseases.
Garbage. Viruses don't care about class barriers and eventually become problems for people of all income levels. Further, a large number of even the early AIDS victims were quite rich. As for federal funding, the "great unwashed" are a LARGE pool of voters.
The major impediment to vaccine research and production is legal and political attacks. It's too much trouble to be worth it for profit-seeking corporations to play anymore.
A case in point is the end of Bubonic Plague vaccine production after the animal rightists harrassed the LAST lab making it - in Berkeley CA - out of doing business in their city - and they decided just to fold it rather than move it elsewhere. But a host of anti-vaccine-maker suits have driven other companies into curtailing their research into ANY vaccine. In such an environment there are more profitable things to do with that money.... this would be less of a problem if the United States had socialized medical care like the rest of the modern world.
And then, like the rest of the modern world, they would reduce the cost to the treasury by rationing the health care and letting the very sick die, rather than spending MORE resources developing vaccines that would let them live to become older and more of a burden on the system.
Millions of illegal people with jobs in this country and I can't find one
That's because YOU have to obey the laws, as does an employer who hires you. Not necessarily true for the illegals and their employers (who are both already breaking at least one law just for starters).
Minimum wage. Workplace safety. Health benefits. Union activity. Mandatory overtime. I could go on for paragraphs.
Point is that an employer can't get away with paying you as little as he can pay an illegal. The government won't let him.
Further, employers who chose only to hire legals - residents and citizens - are at a competitive disadvantage relative to those who hire illegals. In some industries (such as construction) the disadvantage is massive - often leaving the employer with the choice of hiring illegals or going out of business. (This is the fault of the government, for failing to enforce the law on his competitors.)
Slashdot Mirror
These days you may know them as a wholly-owned subsidiary of "LM Ericsson" (ERIC). B-) They were a high-flier during the bubble, got burned badly but survived the pop, came back on the strength of their tech (passing Juniper), and were bought for a couple billion at the end of last year.
Got DSL? Try a traceroute. (Many of the ISPs name their Redback boxes in an identifiable way.) If your ISP is deploying "triple play" (Internet, VoIP, Video) and you're on it I'll bet you even money you hit a Redback box before your packets leave your carrier - and clean up on such bets. Even if you're not on 3P yet it's still a decent chance your subscription is managed and/or your packets handled by one or more of their products.
Your arguments would also apply to Mexico.
Several of them would not. One is enough. B-)
Of course it lives, and in fact it has done things in 20+ years ago the the PC is just now approaching.
Mainframes aren't just about capacity. Mainframes are about reliability. They keep running - even as broken pieces are repaired or replaced, and equipment is upgraded. They use error correction to insure that the overall machine never drops a bit or makes an error, even though the individual components do. And so on.
It's not just IBM either. For instance there's Amdahl (now wholly owned by Fujitsu). Last time I looked (a few years back) ALL the baby bells did their real-time call accounting on Amdahl mainframes. Keeping them running was important - because if you had to reboot all the calls on the network were free. That's several million per hour down the drain - but NOTHING compared to a similar problem in a server supporting a brokerage's trading.
There's a lot of stuff you can do on networks of comodity machines. But when you truly need a "no bit shall fall" environment there's still no substitute for a mainframe.
For whatever reason, the vast majority of Americans do not seem to particularly favor staying in school for grad school.
Americans generally have to get student loans at interest. College administrators generally reserve scholarship grants for "more needy" foreign students (often the children of the foreign power structure, Rolex, sports-car, and all.)
So Americans tend to drop out of the system as soon as they have accumulated enough sheepskin to start earning money and paying off the student loans, rather than hanging on for a couple more abbreviations to hang after their names and a LOT more debt to pay off.
Further, when picking a major they tend to avoid those fields which are in the news mainly in articles that include the word "outsourcing". That word has been attached to hi-tech for more than four years now. Thus a shortage of American grads with both four-year and higher degrees. B-(
3. Pretty decent high tech industry already present in Vancouver, but no major presence from the big boys yet.
Redback doesn't count?
Ask yourself, why are they moving to Canada and not India/China if low wages is all they are after?
[Several politically-correct suggestions, mostly based on the idea of non-Canadian workers in Canada, deleted.]
As someone who has been liaison with developers in India I can suggest other possibilities:
Canada has people who:
- Speak English understandably and understand us when we speak it.
- Are working in the same time zone rather than offset by a shift or more.
- Are working where administrators can easily visit.
- Have a work ethic.
- Have been known to deliver working code, rather than something you have to rework locally anyhow.
- Have a casteless society within the work force, drastically reducing barriers to communication between workers, the incidence of "drones" who expect the lower castes to do their work for them, and other pathologies (such as women who MUST leave at office closing time rather than being able to work overtime like the rest of high tech).
- Are much less likely to humor you until the project is almost due then quit (leaving you with no product) and start their own company (using local workers) to compete with you using your own IP (under local laws that won't be enforced against them).
- Yet still can be paid a lot less than workers in the US while enbding up with a comparable standard of living.
I COULD go on...
Didn't mean to rain on your parade. The image of a horde of ambulance chasers going after the xxAA as the logical fallout of open source legal briefs was too hard to resist. B-)
Two buffaloes don't make a stampede... not quite, no...
Every stampeed has to start somewhere.
Does that mean the attorney can expect a threatening letter from the LIAA (Legal Industry Association of America)?
Attornies are SUPPOSED to plagarize each other's successful pleadings. It's called "precedent" and it's part of the "equal justice for all" ideal.
It also results in a landslide of identical cases when a new precedent is set.
Think of it as open source law, with rapid adoption of new projects and updates. B-)
It brings a whole new meaning to "debriefing".
Let's say your laptop is stolen. Let's say you had a program that reported IP addresses. Someone buys your laptop from the thief for a stupid low price and hooks it up. It reports their IP. You turn the evidence over to a cop who goes to get your laptop.
In addition to the objections others have pointed out, the situations are not analogous. Stealing your laptop is a criminal offense. Despite their propaganda, unlicensed copying of a RIAA member organization's content is a civil matter AND not theft.
Should have previewed. Here's the fixed links:
You'll recall from an earlier article that Tanya Anderson's lawyer (in Oregon) found a number of grounds on which to countersue.
[...]
I expect we'll shortly see television ads from the law offices of James Sokolove asking whether you have received a settlement request from the RIAA [...]
... and the lawyer stampede has begun.
= andersen_riaa_070622complaint">found a number of grounds on which to countersue. One of those was using an unlicensed private investigator to get the IP number of alleged private-party infringers.
Well, her lawyer knew enough to discover this information and file this anyway...
You'll recall from an earlier article that Tanya Anderson's lawyer (in Oregon) http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDFfull.asp?filename
Texas has a similar requirement for private investigators to be licensed. So THIS granny's attorney is filing a copycat countersuit. This is the second buffalo in the stampede.
I expect we'll shortly see television ads from the law offices of James Sokolove asking whether you have received a settlement request from the RIAA, which is about to be nibbled to death by ducks. B-)
The fact is, most people don't seem to care. King George was reelected.
King George was reelected because the Democrats ran someone so much WORSE that conservatives and moderates who hated his guts held their noses and voted for the lesser demon.
The Democrats got the congress because the Republicans in congress didn't use their time in control to advance the agendas of the voters who elected them, but instead went along with the Democrats on enough issues that they decided "What's the point?" and "spanked" the party by abandoning them at the polls. (You're seeing that with the likes of McCain in the primary race, too.)
There are (at least) two problems with a de facto two-party system:
- You are generally left with the choice of the lesser evil in the final race. (Voting for either is voting for evil.) Meanwhile the machine has enough of a lock on the nominating process that even activity in the primary is impractical for anyone not already fully employed by it.
- "Bipartisan" means that the politicians of the two parties have gotten together to run it their way and denied the voters ANY choice.
Still, I guess it just goes to show that now, perjury is OK!
Hey, Clinton got away with it - on his own perjury. Why shouldn't one of Bush's underlings?
Tit for tat.
Isn't that bribery?
More like extortion.
It was sarcasm. Laugh.
Just show me what security YOU run before i give you my money to take care of ;P
Seems to me it's a reasonable request.
If they're dumping responsibility for security breaches on their customers, I'd be they're having trouble on their end of the comm line, too. This sort of thing would not make me confident in their operation.
Alternatively, they may be having a LOT of fraud costs from software targeting their particular customers. If they were reduced to announcing that the users with infected computers are now going to pay for the resulting fraud, they're probably losing a LOT of money to fraudsters. So their pooled assets are being shrunk badly enough to hurt and they're trying to head off a run. Again not the sort of thing that would encourage me to trust them with my money.
Clearly, Prince gets it. Digital Content ... is merely an attraction to attract consumers to purchase other things. ...
He isn't giving away his content for free. he's sold it to a newspaper company that will give it away to get people to buy (physical) newspapers, and he's giving them away to people who buy physical tickets to his concert.
And what's particularly subversive about this is that it is an RIAA-less distribution model that may work for other, less established, artists as well.
With the major labels the bands mainly make their money from tours and spinoffs, essentially nothing from record sales and airplay (thanks to RIAA's creative accounting). So bands have little to lose by just focusing their efforts on the tour - using the recording as a value-add for ticket purchases and finding other ways to give it away as advertising, in substitution for industry-controlled airplay.
Prince's action just showed the music-making world a business model that is doable by any competent band and which entirely cuts out the old-school industry while perhaps matching or exceeding the band's returns under the old system. No WONDER the RIAA exec was foaming. B-)
I want to scream in these executive's faces: "The value of music is not monetary."
If it's desirable it has value. If it has value it's usually possible to monetize it, which tends to enable and/or streamline the exchange of it for other things of value, encouraging production and better satisfaction of demand (read "desire") for the thing of value.
The RIAA wants to take advantage of the monetization of the value of something they don't themselves create, taking a cut of the resulting cash flow from fans to creators, without contributing perceptibly to anything but roadblocking the flow.
If I have the economic jargon right that sort of extortion on commerce is called "rent-seeking behavior" and is frowned upon by economic theoreticians as a parasitic drain on productivity and standards of living.
I don't particularly like his music, but I'm inclined to buy a CD just to support him.
I, on the other hand, haven't been buying (or downloading) much if any music for years. But not long ago I hit a Prince video on the cable and was impressed by how good (IMHO) the music was. (The stage show was a separate issue - but doesn't come across on the audio-only CD. B-) ) Tastes vary.
This gives me an excuse to go out and buy a CD I can expect to be decent, supporting a good artist AND tweaking the RIAA's nose simultaneously.
... now these company's will have 2 choices go out of bussines or move overseas!
Try that with building construction.
Non-union illegals have replaced virtually all the domestic construction workers - union or otherwise - except crane operators. (Those are very closely watched because a foulup with a crane is easy to do and can take out a lot of surrounding buildings and people.)
They identified a site in HIV similar to the cre binding motif, but which cre was not able to bind. They created intermediate sequences to bridge the gap between the cre binding site and this HIV sequence.
And now that the concept is proved they can do the same, perhaps with more steps, for a strongly-conserved section of HIV's genome and make an enzyme that targets all, or a very broad range of, HIV strains.
Sadly, it's because the viral diseases you mentioned tend to happen to poor people, where as the middle and upper classes get the lifestyle diseases.
... this would be less of a problem if the United States had socialized medical care like the rest of the modern world.
Garbage. Viruses don't care about class barriers and eventually become problems for people of all income levels. Further, a large number of even the early AIDS victims were quite rich. As for federal funding, the "great unwashed" are a LARGE pool of voters.
The major impediment to vaccine research and production is legal and political attacks. It's too much trouble to be worth it for profit-seeking corporations to play anymore.
A case in point is the end of Bubonic Plague vaccine production after the animal rightists harrassed the LAST lab making it - in Berkeley CA - out of doing business in their city - and they decided just to fold it rather than move it elsewhere. But a host of anti-vaccine-maker suits have driven other companies into curtailing their research into ANY vaccine. In such an environment there are more profitable things to do with that money.
And then, like the rest of the modern world, they would reduce the cost to the treasury by rationing the health care and letting the very sick die, rather than spending MORE resources developing vaccines that would let them live to become older and more of a burden on the system.
Millions of illegal people with jobs in this country and I can't find one
That's because YOU have to obey the laws, as does an employer who hires you. Not necessarily true for the illegals and their employers (who are both already breaking at least one law just for starters).
Minimum wage. Workplace safety. Health benefits. Union activity. Mandatory overtime. I could go on for paragraphs.
Point is that an employer can't get away with paying you as little as he can pay an illegal. The government won't let him.
Further, employers who chose only to hire legals - residents and citizens - are at a competitive disadvantage relative to those who hire illegals. In some industries (such as construction) the disadvantage is massive - often leaving the employer with the choice of hiring illegals or going out of business. (This is the fault of the government, for failing to enforce the law on his competitors.)