Travel for work is not like holiday travel; all you see is the inside of another identikit hotel and another identikit office, and the little you see of your exotic location is the taxi between them.
Bravo, well said. Business travel sucks - you get all those frequent flyer points that allow you to -- fly more? Yep.
But you missed an essential discovery - it really is the same hotel room, it just lives in a space-time anomaly. They only change the paintings when you're away to fool you.
And bring a mouse mat, too. Glass tables suck as a working surface.
What about those of us who were never told by our parents we were good at anything, rather below average than precious snowflakes. Where do we get our sense of exelence and whatever else makes us think we should be paid huge amounts of moneys?
If you want an edge, pay attention to spelling and grammar. It works amazingly well as a differentiator.
I'm serious. Practice it everywhere; email, Warcraft guild chat, even Slashdot comments. It's surprising how many senior execs equate the quality of one's written language output with intelligence or the ability to do. If you apply a bit of polish in everything you do, then you end up looking polished yourself. When everyone you know can write 1337 code just like you, the only thing that will advance your software career better than fluency in Hindi is fluency in English. Rise to the top -- use a spell checker at the very least.
Blizzard makes a few handy billion per year. I imagine they could front a defense that would make the SCO epic look like a parking infringement notice.
It is only power users who really know Excel that will struggle to relearn those tasks in Calc.
Whups (Ding!) Right on many counts, wrong on the implication there.
In the business world, at least among the top 10 banks, Excel is a defacto standard -- not just for moving spreadsheets, but for moving software between companies. An absolutely huge amount of business is transacted via business rules living entirely in spreadsheet VBA. I know, I developed some of it (contemptable, perhaps, but a guy has to eat). Throw the spreadsheet across the hall to the next company and they can run it irrespective of what infrastructure the other company is running.
It's ugly, I know, but it's the rule. There's more than intellectual inertia keeping people from shifting to FOSS. I'm just really glad that some organisations are making the shift despite the huge embedded world of VBA.
It's apparently a known path for MS in maintaining their monopoly that they'll lock a provider into 'promising' more product than they can really sell and then 'rolling that over' on top of their projections for the next year...
That sounds remarkably like bait-and-switch. But I suppose when billions of dollars and product lifecycles are involved, it couldn't be that...
I meant it as a joke, to point out the sillyness of using a merchandising model with something as abstract as a string of bits. But you're right, definitely right.
I agree with some of your post, but not all of it. SUN mainframes are not all that power heavy - I did a set of sums recently for a bid (rationalising about 200 servers) and compared to the equivalent in stand alone servers, they perform very well with regard to power. You can drive each blade on about 80 watts (compare that to stand alone servers of 350+) and with a fairly common 20:1 virtualisation ratio (that's what our solution used, I've seen 40:1 on low utilisation farms. It works out you can drive the equivalent of an old SA server on about four watts.
And TPC scores are anything but a crock of dung. Each transaction is pretty comprehensively well-rounded and is multi-step. And unless you're building a Google-style bigtables sort of highly complex database, you're best off scaling up for database servers rather than out. And for that, the TPC measurements are quite real. If you're interested in contesting this, you'd best actually go to the link and offer criticism on just exactly what sort of imbalance you think they represent. If you can do that I'll listen to your arguments, at least.
Just to nail it down, I started reading E.E.Smith when I was about ten, about the same time I started reading Heinlein. I've worn out at least seven full sets of the paperbacks, and still live in hope that some day I will develop a "precisionist-grade mind".
Companies have been making exoskeletons ever since the "Hardiman" of the 1960...
As with so many innovations, Heinlein came up with it almost first -- Kimball Kinneson greased Helmuth in one in Smith's Galactic Patrol, but Heinlein's powered suit was more accurate and interesting. Mobile Infantry, powered suits. Read "Starship Troopers". The book, not the fun-but-not-faithful movie.
I live in a city so the light pollution messes up any chances I have at looking at a starry sky. I have as a child always found it incomprehensible that people said that you couldn't count all the stars because I can surely do it where I live.
Ahh, yes, Los Angeles, city of one season with minor variations in sky color. I'm from there. I grew up thinking that stars were things that were embedded in the sidewalk in Hollywood. It was when I realised that concrete is not naturally orange in its native state that I figured it was time to go.
It's been nearly thirty years and I still don't take the clear Australian skies for granted.
Sky glow is a tragedy. The fact that Griffith Park is little more than a steampunk museum is a tragedy. Yes, I know it's been a long time since their scientific instruments were useful astronomical tools, but as a symbol of encroach it's sadly indicative.
At least there's a lot of night once you go up a bit.
As for no salesmen = no sales, it's commonly accepted that Microsoft is a de facto monopoly. If we take that to be true, then there may not be much cost to MS in hanging the MCPs out to dry. The MCP's customer still needs the MS product, and a new MCP undoubtedly will fill in the void when times get better.
Exactly correct. Whereas there is an effective water monopoly in place as a supplier, resellers are infinitely replaceable. One man goes to the wall, another will take their place. No martyrs, only failures.
Mainframes have followed Moore's Law just like the rest of the chip vendors. You buy a new mainframe, you get new chips.
But the main difference is essentially their slightly different design philosophy. Reliability is built into the price, for one thing -- part of the reason it costs more is that conservative design - not the most cost effective in terms of power -- as you often lose power per component from the "underclocking" attitude that a focus on reliability will engender (and they're tested to buggery before delivery, too). You also get a much higher standard of module connectivity and far more robust power supplies and inbuilt hardware redundancy.
They also tend to support and address much more memory than you'll see on the smaller servers.
The other main point in favour of mainframes is their orientation toward massive IO. Really massive IO. With the scale out design of i86 processors a lot of IO happens between network cards; on mainframes a lot of that interprocessor data flow happens on the backplane, and significant investment in optimising data channels means you're paying for that IO more than raw computation. The network interfaces on mainframes are pretty massive too, and can support fairly impressive tube bandwidth.
Mainframes using the IBM architecture for a long time have been represented in the TPCC transaction processing top ten, although the trend lately at the very high end is to run AIX on top of P5 architecture. Have a look, it's illuminating, and Red Hat gets a look in too. You can see the numbers at: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/ .
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to pass a law permitting transcendental numbers to cross the border. You'd get so many interesting riders...
Travel for work is not like holiday travel; all you see is the inside of another identikit hotel and another identikit office, and the little you see of your exotic location is the taxi between them.
Bravo, well said. Business travel sucks - you get all those frequent flyer points that allow you to -- fly more? Yep.
But you missed an essential discovery - it really is the same hotel room, it just lives in a space-time anomaly. They only change the paintings when you're away to fool you.
And bring a mouse mat, too. Glass tables suck as a working surface.
My generation is afflicted entitlement mentalities and an aversion to actually doing anything to better themselves. It's sad.
Don't feel bad, you're just witnessing Sturgeon's Law among the populace.
Nice post, by the way. It's pretty clear your communications skills are up there with the best. You'll succeed.
What about those of us who were never told by our parents we were good at anything, rather below average than precious snowflakes. Where do we get our sense of exelence and whatever else makes us think we should be paid huge amounts of moneys?
If you want an edge, pay attention to spelling and grammar. It works amazingly well as a differentiator.
I'm serious. Practice it everywhere; email, Warcraft guild chat, even Slashdot comments. It's surprising how many senior execs equate the quality of one's written language output with intelligence or the ability to do. If you apply a bit of polish in everything you do, then you end up looking polished yourself. When everyone you know can write 1337 code just like you, the only thing that will advance your software career better than fluency in Hindi is fluency in English. Rise to the top -- use a spell checker at the very least.
-- The Scottish Play
It worked as humour, Chas. I've been reading Groklaw since early blog and your summary caused me sinus damage.
You should check out Novell's fork of OpenOffice, at go-oo.org. It has support for VBA, Micorsoft Office macros, Works file formats, etc.
Would someone please mod this guy +5 "paradigm shift" please?
Blizzard makes a few handy billion per year. I imagine they could front a defense that would make the SCO epic look like a parking infringement notice.
It is only power users who really know Excel that will struggle to relearn those tasks in Calc.
Whups (Ding!) Right on many counts, wrong on the implication there.
In the business world, at least among the top 10 banks, Excel is a defacto standard -- not just for moving spreadsheets, but for moving software between companies. An absolutely huge amount of business is transacted via business rules living entirely in spreadsheet VBA. I know, I developed some of it (contemptable, perhaps, but a guy has to eat). Throw the spreadsheet across the hall to the next company and they can run it irrespective of what infrastructure the other company is running.
It's ugly, I know, but it's the rule. There's more than intellectual inertia keeping people from shifting to FOSS. I'm just really glad that some organisations are making the shift despite the huge embedded world of VBA.
It's quite possible to support thousands of programmers without filtering the effort through Microsoft.
Yes, by default Ubuntu includes several more games other than Windows
Is this what you meant? I was a little confused by the word omission.
It's apparently a known path for MS in maintaining their monopoly that they'll lock a provider into 'promising' more product than they can really sell and then 'rolling that over' on top of their projections for the next year ...
That sounds remarkably like bait-and-switch. But I suppose when billions of dollars and product lifecycles are involved, it couldn't be that...
Was that 25,000 Watt-seconds?
I meant it as a joke, to point out the sillyness of using a merchandising model with something as abstract as a string of bits. But you're right, definitely right.
And TPC scores are anything but a crock of dung. Each transaction is pretty comprehensively well-rounded and is multi-step. And unless you're building a Google-style bigtables sort of highly complex database, you're best off scaling up for database servers rather than out. And for that, the TPC measurements are quite real. If you're interested in contesting this, you'd best actually go to the link and offer criticism on just exactly what sort of imbalance you think they represent. If you can do that I'll listen to your arguments, at least.
I'll just sit here until you do...
Just to nail it down, I started reading E.E.Smith when I was about ten, about the same time I started reading Heinlein. I've worn out at least seven full sets of the paperbacks, and still live in hope that some day I will develop a "precisionist-grade mind".
Thank you for noticing the qualifier.
Companies have been making exoskeletons ever since the "Hardiman" of the 1960...
As with so many innovations, Heinlein came up with it almost first -- Kimball Kinneson greased Helmuth in one in Smith's Galactic Patrol, but Heinlein's powered suit was more accurate and interesting. Mobile Infantry, powered suits. Read "Starship Troopers". The book, not the fun-but-not-faithful movie.
Although the shower scene was very cool...;)
I live in a city so the light pollution messes up any chances I have at looking at a starry sky. I have as a child always found it incomprehensible that people said that you couldn't count all the stars because I can surely do it where I live.
Ahh, yes, Los Angeles, city of one season with minor variations in sky color. I'm from there. I grew up thinking that stars were things that were embedded in the sidewalk in Hollywood. It was when I realised that concrete is not naturally orange in its native state that I figured it was time to go.
It's been nearly thirty years and I still don't take the clear Australian skies for granted.
Sky glow is a tragedy. The fact that Griffith Park is little more than a steampunk museum is a tragedy. Yes, I know it's been a long time since their scientific instruments were useful astronomical tools, but as a symbol of encroach it's sadly indicative.
At least there's a lot of night once you go up a bit.
As for no salesmen = no sales, it's commonly accepted that Microsoft is a de facto monopoly. If we take that to be true, then there may not be much cost to MS in hanging the MCPs out to dry. The MCP's customer still needs the MS product, and a new MCP undoubtedly will fill in the void when times get better.
Exactly correct. Whereas there is an effective water monopoly in place as a supplier, resellers are infinitely replaceable. One man goes to the wall, another will take their place. No martyrs, only failures.
Oh, wait...
2. Users doing nefarious things like printing out company secrets.
I would never do such a thing any more!
Besides, that's what thumb drives are for.
ok, so make it twelve.
Whats so special/magical about a mainframe?
Mainframes have followed Moore's Law just like the rest of the chip vendors. You buy a new mainframe, you get new chips.
But the main difference is essentially their slightly different design philosophy. Reliability is built into the price, for one thing -- part of the reason it costs more is that conservative design - not the most cost effective in terms of power -- as you often lose power per component from the "underclocking" attitude that a focus on reliability will engender (and they're tested to buggery before delivery, too). You also get a much higher standard of module connectivity and far more robust power supplies and inbuilt hardware redundancy.
They also tend to support and address much more memory than you'll see on the smaller servers.
The other main point in favour of mainframes is their orientation toward massive IO. Really massive IO. With the scale out design of i86 processors a lot of IO happens between network cards; on mainframes a lot of that interprocessor data flow happens on the backplane, and significant investment in optimising data channels means you're paying for that IO more than raw computation. The network interfaces on mainframes are pretty massive too, and can support fairly impressive tube bandwidth.
Mainframes using the IBM architecture for a long time have been represented in the TPCC transaction processing top ten, although the trend lately at the very high end is to run AIX on top of P5 architecture. Have a look, it's illuminating, and Red Hat gets a look in too. You can see the numbers at: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/ .
Who says anything about Linux, how do you know we aren't all running VMS?
I have lost SETPRV you insensitive clod!
These guys really want all the top notch 100% stability of Windows Vista... on their mainframe?
Very good point.
On the other hand, a fully configured z/OS mainframe might be able to handle many instances of Vista. Dozens, even.