Lot of talk, I have a redhat 6.1, db2 server, running IBMHttp server, Websphere 2.03 system with an appliation written in VisualAge 2.0 for Linux ready to go into production. There were minor hiccups with the Java version (1.1.8) but got everything clean out finally. It is good enough for a regular geek (BTW all geeks should learn Java internals henceforth). But not ready for a MS certified (aka brainwashed) professional. There is a lot of "command lines" to play with. Overall I couldnt be more happy. Totally the system costs way way less than any other option we could have come up with. (Around 15K). I am waiting for Websphere 3.0 on Linux. With the EJB engine it would be a screamer on the Linux Box.
(The other option was Sybase 11 - free Open sourced EJB - free and Apache - free Sounds interesting but start playing with them to know their pitfalls )
I still did not get what was wrong about this. It is damned if you did and damned if you didnt for big corps. IBM's embrace is good. It has gives more validity for Linux as a desktop OS. IBM just announced that it would support Linux on all its platforms. Lower costs for small businesses. More products to run on Linux. Life in the Enterprise. Better pay for super geeks. More investment and validity of Op.Src. efforts. I dont see a flip side. In one simple stroke IBM has a million people (and some brilliant minds) working for them - on all their different boxes - not just PowerPCs. No MCSE or bullshit. So you need an enterprise server - Linux for OS/390. Run Zope with PHP with a DB2 backend. Or leverage your investments in AS/400. And all free (hmm. I doubt that - but not surely $1000 CALs). Besides it puts the pressure on SUN, HP and others to do the same or die. And to top it just imagine Linux Hardware Conferences in about a year. With compatibility suites for every Linux release. I don't see anything wrong here.
As for AOL. Too many egos - disparate business focus. Chase would cut Time/Warner into 3 or four pieces, keep the cable and sell of the rest in some meaningful shape and still make money for the rest. Monopoly ? yeah - it has the potential to own the cable and hence the internet service to my house. Imagine Bell Atlantic provides me DSL for $49. It does have other providers (CLECS) who give me the same for slightly more. Who would I go with. Same would be the case for Cable. The surprising outcome could be, that cable industry gets opened up with being able to pick your cable provider - like your long distance provider. (Yeah right !)
If you look at IBM's product lines, their agenda is fairly evident. WebSphere for example.
They have three levels Base, Advanced and Enterprise.
Base = Apache + a few bells and whistles. (Linux, Sun, AIX and NT) Advanced = Base + EJB + Java ORB + DB bells and whistles (no Linux alone) Enterprise = Advanced + CB (again no Linux alone).
They want to keep the fingers on all the pies (nothing wrong with that). But if you need to scale, you need AIX - for which you pay an arm and a leg - of course you get corporate support and the developer base from Linux/Unix.
This is the same strategy IBM would adopt across all product lines. If you see a product from IBM that has "universal feature availability" on all platforms (DB2 for eg - go on correct me) then they either have too much competition in that area or it doesnt have a value a proposition for AIX.
Just look at their Java 1.2 release strategy Linux version in 2nd qt. '00 NT version 1st qt. '00 Aix version last qt. '99
Bottom line AIX and OS/390 are excellent revenue streams. They will never hurt them.
-- The best of my sons ? oh the one setting alight the roof top.
the entire Inprise site is responding with a forbidden message. I guess companies should appoint Slashdot monitors regularly to verify postings about them in/. Very few companies are ready for the sea of/. surfers, who engulf their site regarding any postings. Or maybe/. should mail an advance warning to companies they post info about. That way they will have all their support personnel on call:)
The thought that just because you have a common name and so people would flock to you is so misguided. How common place, say 10 years ago would names like yahoo, lycos, altavista (may be astala vista), or eBullShit have been. This Great Domain names are just milking the hell out of ignorant MBAs who think they know the nerd mind because they have 5 programmers working under them and they have an 'e' in front of their company's name. Nonsense. How many of you go to www.search.com to search for web pages. In the next few years thats how many will go to business.com to do business. There is nothing in a name.
I remember a 'PS' from one of slashdot readers, saying "Microsoft just lowered the standards" for programming.
How true it is. VB Programmers churned out by half baked organizations have enough skills do build a simple ODBC based VB app as shown in the Idiots guide. Thats it. Most of these "programmers " do not have any understanding of complex data structures or OS related issues. I am generalizing. I know a lot of VB programmers out there who do complex stuff, but they all have a decent background in a more low level language. C/C++ and Java are used for enterprise development. Yeah GM does VB so do a lot of other organizations. Then why the hell is CORBA/Java liked by so many developers. Platform independence. To top it all have you looked at VB Error messages, "Path not found" - So what do you do - find a path ! VB is good for small operations. Yeah with good programmers you can scale applications, but my advice dont. Try C++ or Java. Try a class library. Stop coding on the fly and do some analysis and design. If you want your apps to live beyond two years, stop using VB.
MqSQL is a play thing. It has significant limitations starting from the SQL engine. Dont go that route for production SQL engines. I would advise DB2 for Linux. It is the best thing that ever came out of IBM and the most trustworthy name. Besides you can scale your system at a later date using CORBA/EJB to any other *nix platform or maybe even OS/390.
Coding, coding, coding - When you buy a house dont you ask for plans (of course you dont ask for cars but you trust that that the next door (non sleazy) automotive shop knows everything about your car). Ask for the design for the product. What design - i dont know pick up any one of those million models. Ask for their analysis diagrams, the methodology they used - wouldnt you do that if you bought a house - hell they are not giving away their source code. I mean what did they intend when they built a particular aspect. I agree with the quote from/. M$ just lowered the bar for entry into soft. dev. and subsequently all products suck now. A tool is just as good as the hand that it is in.
Look at what Microsoft did. They stepped into everybody else's core business and spoilt it. I guess you are correct but the advise should be for Microsoft.
The last ten years, esp. since NSF decided to wash its hands of the infrastructure has been terrific. I am waiting to see the fruits of todays research. I hope - A gigabit connection for 20$/month or heck even free in the next ten years.
Visbroker the crown jewel of Borland, Not to mention JBuilder. Best of the breed and if open sourced would accelerate the adoption of GPL ed tools at a rapid rate. Both GNOME and K Inc. need not fight over Orbit/MICO. They now would have an industry standard Broker architecture in hand.
Sure they will come across it a thousand instances, but their minds are not impressionable anymore. When I spoke with folks at work, they could not agree whole heartedly with either groups. They said - but the missing link has not been found or some other stupid reason. These are not bigots or fundamentalists, but your regular sunday church going neighbor. How many persons in this world do you think would be ready to accept a different god after being educated all their life about a particular religion. Young minds are impressionable - thats what the Kansas board is going for. Thank goodness there is no concept of "Jihad" in christianity.
NetZero has already completed this free Internet thingy. Their service is good. They cover all states with Local access. They steal a bit of bandwidth for Advt. - Fine by me; every webpage I load, does than (incl. slashdot). Has everyone abandoned their resp. service providers and have jumped onto the NetZero bandwagon. Nope. AOL is correct. Its community approach is formidable. Besides all these (including AOL) are strict Window$/Mac solutions. Netzero is Java based. So theoretically they should be Linux capable but I havent tried. Next - how will M$ get a break here ? The combination of Cable/ADSL based free Internet Access. Now that would be an interesting proposition. Imagine 640K to 1Mbs internet access and all you have to do is buy some trash every year for 10 to 50 bucks from a microsoft approved junk seller. I feel the rush to MS OSes would be dwarfed by this rush. This will be model that every country will try to emulate. M$ will claim that this promotes trade and blah blah blah etc. to shut up DC and monopolize internet access. Coutesy AT&T. What do you think M$ has been doing the past 6 months. They dont intend to provide this "free" thing, thru regular medium(POTS). If they did, Bill might as well throw the billions he invested in Cable companies in the bin.
a few months ago, there was a posting about systems from this company, which was supposed to change the landscape of computing. So far Icaveo search engine is the only vendor who has bought this system (but the site is not built yet). Slashdot was critical about it back then. Let us see
Slashdot Mirror
Lot of talk,
I have a redhat 6.1, db2 server, running IBMHttp server, Websphere 2.03 system with an appliation written in VisualAge 2.0 for Linux ready to go into production. There were minor hiccups with the Java version (1.1.8) but got everything clean out finally. It is good enough for a regular geek (BTW all geeks should learn Java internals henceforth). But not ready for a MS certified (aka brainwashed) professional. There is a lot of "command lines" to play with. Overall I couldnt be more happy. Totally the system costs way way less than any other option we could have come up with. (Around 15K). I am waiting for Websphere 3.0 on Linux. With the EJB engine it would be a screamer on the Linux Box.
(The other option was
Sybase 11 - free
Open sourced EJB - free and
Apache - free
Sounds interesting but start playing with them to know their pitfalls
)
I still did not get what was wrong about this. It is damned if you did and damned if you didnt for big corps. IBM's embrace is good. It has gives more validity for Linux as a desktop OS. IBM just announced that it would support Linux on all its platforms.
Lower costs for small businesses.
More products to run on Linux.
Life in the Enterprise.
Better pay for super geeks.
More investment and validity of Op.Src. efforts.
I dont see a flip side. In one simple stroke IBM has a million people (and some brilliant minds) working for them - on all their different boxes - not just PowerPCs. No MCSE or bullshit. So you need an enterprise server - Linux for OS/390. Run Zope with PHP with a DB2 backend. Or leverage your investments in AS/400. And all free (hmm. I doubt that - but not surely $1000 CALs). Besides it puts the pressure on SUN, HP and others to do the same or die.
And to top it just imagine Linux Hardware Conferences in about a year. With compatibility suites for every Linux release. I don't see anything wrong here.
As for AOL. Too many egos - disparate business focus. Chase would cut Time/Warner into 3 or four pieces, keep the cable and sell of the rest in some meaningful shape and still make money for the rest. Monopoly ? yeah - it has the potential to own the cable and hence the internet service to my house. Imagine Bell Atlantic provides me DSL for $49. It does have other providers (CLECS) who give me the same for slightly more. Who would I go with. Same would be the case for Cable. The surprising outcome could be, that cable industry gets opened up with being able to pick your cable provider - like your long distance provider. (Yeah right !)
If you look at IBM's product lines, their agenda is fairly evident. WebSphere for example.
They have three levels Base, Advanced and Enterprise.
Base = Apache + a few bells and whistles. (Linux, Sun, AIX and NT)
Advanced = Base + EJB + Java ORB + DB bells and whistles (no Linux alone)
Enterprise = Advanced + CB (again no Linux alone).
They want to keep the fingers on all the pies (nothing wrong with that). But if you need to scale, you need AIX - for which you pay an arm and a leg - of course you get corporate support and the developer base from Linux/Unix.
This is the same strategy IBM would adopt across all product lines. If you see a product from IBM that has "universal feature availability" on all platforms (DB2 for eg - go on correct me) then they either have too much competition in that area or it doesnt have a value a proposition for AIX.
Just look at their Java 1.2 release strategy
Linux version in 2nd qt. '00
NT version 1st qt. '00
Aix version last qt. '99
Bottom line AIX and OS/390 are excellent revenue streams. They will never hurt them.
-- The best of my sons ? oh the one setting alight the roof top.
That was a brilliant posting by AC/Roblimo of using the Google Cache. I wish all other postings would do this to avoid /. effects on web sites.
the entire Inprise site is responding with a forbidden message. I guess companies should appoint Slashdot monitors regularly to verify postings about them in /. Very few companies are ready for the sea of /. surfers, who engulf their site regarding any postings. /. should mail an advance warning to companies they post info about. That way they will have all their support personnel on call :)
Or maybe
The thought that just because you have a common name and so people would flock to you is so misguided. How common place, say 10 years ago would names like yahoo, lycos, altavista (may be astala vista), or eBullShit have been. This Great Domain names are just milking the hell out of ignorant MBAs who think they know the nerd mind because they have 5 programmers working under them and they have an 'e' in front of their company's name. Nonsense. How many of you go to www.search.com to search for web pages. In the next few years thats how many will go to business.com to do business. There is nothing in a name.
I remember a 'PS' from one of slashdot readers, saying "Microsoft just lowered the standards" for programming.
How true it is. VB Programmers churned out by half baked organizations have enough skills do build a simple ODBC based VB app as shown in the Idiots guide. Thats it. Most of these "programmers " do not have any understanding of complex data structures or OS related issues. I am generalizing. I know a lot of VB programmers out there who do complex stuff, but they all have a decent background in a more low level language. C/C++ and Java are used for enterprise development. Yeah GM does VB so do a lot of other organizations. Then why the hell is CORBA/Java liked by so many developers. Platform independence. To top it all have you looked at VB Error messages, "Path not found" - So what do you do - find a path ! VB is good for small operations. Yeah with good programmers you can scale applications, but my advice dont. Try C++ or Java. Try a class library. Stop coding on the fly and do some analysis and design. If you want your apps to live beyond two years, stop using VB.
MqSQL is a play thing. It has significant limitations starting from the SQL engine. Dont go that route for production SQL engines. I would advise DB2 for Linux. It is the best thing that ever came out of IBM and the most trustworthy name. Besides you can scale your system at a later date using CORBA/EJB to any other *nix platform or maybe even OS/390.
Does anybody care about MIPS and FLOPS. G4 is lightyears ahead with better starting base. Did anybody see the Power G4 Avt. on TV.
Faster processors - they just wait faster.
Coding, coding, coding - When you buy a house dont you ask for plans (of course you dont ask for cars but you trust that that the next door (non sleazy) automotive shop knows everything about your car). Ask for the design for the product. What design - i dont know pick up any one of those million models. Ask for their analysis diagrams, the methodology they used - wouldnt you do that if you bought a house - hell they are not giving away their source code. I mean what did they intend when they built a particular aspect. I agree with the quote from /. M$ just lowered the bar for entry into soft. dev. and subsequently all products suck now. A tool is just as good as the hand that it is in.
Look at what Microsoft did. They stepped into everybody else's core business and spoilt it. I guess you are correct but the advise should be for Microsoft.
The last ten years, esp. since NSF decided to wash its hands of the infrastructure has been terrific. I am waiting to see the fruits of todays research. I hope - A gigabit connection for 20$/month or heck even free in the next ten years.
I was reeling in pain. This is funny
Visbroker the crown jewel of Borland, Not to mention JBuilder. Best of the breed and if open sourced would accelerate the adoption of GPL ed tools at a rapid rate. Both GNOME and K Inc. need not fight over Orbit/MICO. They now would have an industry standard Broker architecture in hand.
Sure they will come across it a thousand instances, but their minds are not impressionable anymore. When I spoke with folks at work, they could not agree whole heartedly with either groups. They said - but the missing link has not been found or some other stupid reason. These are not bigots or fundamentalists, but your regular sunday church going neighbor. How many persons in this world do you think would be ready to accept a different god after being educated all their life about a particular religion. Young minds are impressionable - thats what the Kansas board is going for. Thank goodness there is no concept of "Jihad" in christianity.
NetZero has already completed this free Internet thingy. Their service is good. They cover all states with Local access. They steal a bit of bandwidth for Advt. - Fine by me; every webpage I load, does than (incl. slashdot). Has everyone abandoned their resp. service providers and have jumped onto the NetZero bandwagon. Nope. AOL is correct. Its community approach is formidable. Besides all these (including AOL) are strict Window$/Mac solutions. Netzero is Java based. So theoretically they should be Linux capable but I havent tried.
Next - how will M$ get a break here ? The combination of Cable/ADSL based free Internet Access. Now that would be an interesting proposition. Imagine 640K to 1Mbs internet access and all you have to do is buy some trash every year for 10 to 50 bucks from a microsoft approved junk seller. I feel the rush to MS OSes would be dwarfed by this rush. This will be model that every country will try to emulate. M$ will claim that this promotes trade and blah blah blah etc. to shut up DC and monopolize internet access. Coutesy AT&T. What do you think M$ has been doing the past 6 months. They dont intend to provide this "free" thing, thru regular medium(POTS). If they did, Bill might as well throw the billions he invested in Cable companies in the bin.
http://www.starbridgesystems.com/home/mainpage.htm
a few months ago, there was a posting about systems from this company, which was supposed to change the landscape of computing. So far Icaveo search engine is the only vendor who has bought this system (but the site is not built yet). Slashdot was critical about it back then. Let us see