Once you have that VMware cluster you can run your choice of 70+ operating systems and millions of apps on it. Can you run Exchange on a mainframe? Sieble? Your existing billing and accounting app?
Well, you can run whatever runs on Linux on top of a mainframe. And if you're a Fortune 500 corporation, chances are your existing billing and accounting applications are *already* running on a mainframe. That is, after all, what the old girl is built for.
Except that Hilliary voted *against* FISA. So did my other senator, Chuck Schumer. In fact, while I find this whole mess beyond disappointing, I can't complain that my voice isn't being heard: all of my elected representatives voted against the measure.
Wow, what a huge over-generalization on the part of Verizon. I guess that means you would no longer have access to alt.startrek.creative. Gotta keep those dangerous fanfiction writers away from t3h childrens.
It wounds like there's alot of greed flowing around here... you alls wants no taxes, and the "evil" state is going to end the party.
Frankly, New York State is in the hole. Most of its industry went overseas within the last two decades (no more glass from Corning, film from Rochester, shoes from Binghamton, etc.) and at times it seems like the entire economy of the state has shifted to New York City. Much of that work (and a nice chunk of the state's revenues) comes from the financial sector. Which is now in the toilet. So you not only have an ongoing economic collapse in NYC, but the rest of the state's economy got "shanghaied" long ago.
The truth is, the State of New York is facing record deficits this year and needs to make up for the difference (it does not expect to be able to). And while the governor is recommending that municipalities consolidate to reduce costs, taxing internet retailers on sales in NYS is another way to get there.
You can still buy Think pads (or "analog Thinkpads" as I call them) from the IBM logowear store. They're priced at about $1.50 each and are often out of stock...
About 9 months ago I was about to be a college grad and was looking for work. I went down to CitiGroup in Manhattan to interview with one of their IT programs. While some of the work there sounded interesting, what really frightened me were the Blackberries.
That is, we all were taken out to lunch. And while we're eating, our guides (CitiGroup employees already in the program) kept on checking their Blackberries. It was about then that I decided that any situation where my personal time was expected to be preempted by work without notice was not a situation I wanted to be in.
Lenovo's built-in software is pretty bad. I ordered one for my sister and when it came, I had to wipe the thing clean. It runs beautifully now, but its a shame that I had to nuke the hard drive to do it.
I beg to disagree; my company issued me a T60 not all that long ago, and the thing kicks some serious ass. I have a coworker who slipped on the ice last winter with his T60 in his backpack. He hit the ground so hard that he had whiplash. Anyway, as he's going down he flings his bag out to the side to try and save the laptop. Didn't help, the thing smashed on the ground.
Oh, the fall broke it. But the point of the story is that it didn't finally go until a full 6 months after the accident (something got busted and now the thing overheats).
Anywhere you see mainframes and virtualization, you're talking about z/VM (http://www.vm.ibm.com/). Its been kicking around since the early 1970s (I remembered it from a mention in one of Tannenbaum's OS textbooks).
I'll bet you that there were a lot of happy people in Armonk the day they managed to get it running Linux (aka: new workloads).
A little background on SUNY Morrisville. I went there with New York Boy's State back in 2002. I never attended the school as a student so these are my impressions from staying there for a week.
Morrisville is small, technical and farming college located in a really rural part central New York state. I believe that it was a 2-year college five years ago, but may now have a 4-year program. It is largely a farming college and boasts an award-winning dairy farm on campus. Ford also built an auto repair facility on campus, and I have known people go to Morrisville to learn auto mechanics.
According to Wikipedia, there are about 3000 undergraduate students there and an extension campus in Norwich, NY. This makes it roughly the size of my old High School.
I interned at IBM last summer. Going out to "New Blue" dinners, there were these three scruffy-looking guys at the back of the table. They were IGS people, and were in the process of training their replacements in India. The one guy who spoke to me was incredibly bitter and angry and made some interesting (read: extreme) remarks about Sam Palmisano. From the IGS guy's comments, he made it sound like he wasn't even getting a severance package ("Oh, you're in ESD. If they laid you off, at least you'd get a severance package"). And apparently, he came from an old IBM family, with his grandfather working for IBM manufacturing.
On my next one-on-one with my manager, I said that the IGS people were the most bitter and disgruntled people I had ever seen. Their response? "That sounds about right". From everything I heard from the people in my department, IGS sounded like a horrible place to work. There were people there that had left our department and gone to IGS for a promotion or whatever, only to come back after they got burnt out or laid off.
From what I had heard working there, I'm not surprized to see this happening. Last summer it sounded like most of the IGS people were preparing to be laid off.
No, seriously. My family's first computer was a mid-run PS/1 that we got for Christmas 1992. Grandma and Grandpa saw IBM on the label and thought that it would make a good computer.
To this date, that box remains a favorite of mine. The model we got was shipped after IBM moved the power supply back into the machine (the only real issue I had with the series). We got a modem, Prodigy, PS/1 Club, Promenade (the future AOL), MS Works 2.00a and The Print Shop (awesome back in those days). And even though "proprietary" has bad connotations now, I liked the proprietary goodies on the machine. In particular, if you didn't want to, you need never see DOS on that thing; it booted right into Windows 3.11 and on shutdown took you to a himem.sys-based screen from which you could select to restart Windows, run IBM-DOS, DOS shell or System Diagnoses.
When I fouled up the hard drive in 1998, IBM still gave me support; I still have the system disks that some fellow named Kelso sent me (marked "Kelso - IBM Confidential"). The hardware was going strong in 2001 when I shut it down for the last time, with the exception of the now 12-year old monitor. And my discovery of QBASIC on that hard drive is probably why I'm here on/. right now....and yes, before I put the old girl out to pasture, I tried installing Linux on it. And no, it didn't work. Proprietary bus or whatever it was.
The specs:
IBM PS/1 Model G51(?) 25 mHz Intel 80486sx 16 MB RAM 120 MB Maxtor HD IBM-DOS 5.01 (rebranded version of MS-DOS) Windows 3.11 Shipped with 15" IBM PS/1 SuperVGA monitor.
I will not doubt that the PS/1 was a flop; I mean, IBM is gone from the consumer PC market as anything other than a brand name now. But I don't think it was bad technology. That is, once they put the power supply back where it belonged.
I always, always, always recommend "Practical C Programming" by Steve Oualline (O'Reilly, $34.95). In addition to being an awesome introduction to C, it has all sorts of goodness for practical code desin in the first few chapters. What do I mean by "practical"? Well, readable, reusable and well documented. After reading that, I applied it to all of my projects. Sometimes it got me extra credit; once it actually helped land me an internship.
Other books...
"Learning Python" by Mark Lutz & David Ascher (O'Reilly, $39.99); a very nice introduction to Python
"Harley Hahn's Student Guide to UNIX" (McGraw-Hill, $79.99); slightly dated (its from 1996), but he is quite funny and informative. This was my introduction to UNIX and the Linux shell. According to Amazon it's still in print and costs $79.99 new. I purchased my copy off of Half.com for substantially less (~$20)
Also, any book by Andrew Tannenbaum. These are straight-up textbooks, but are wonderfully easy to read and hold my ADD-strained interest. He has books out on Operating Systems, Networking, Computer Organization and Distributed Systems. If you're taking a class on one of these subjects and are really interested by it, I'd say to purchase Tannenbaum's book and use it in conjunction with your class textbook. Of special interest are "Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed." and "Computer Networks, 3rd ed.", both of which I can vouch for. I had the latter as the text for my networking class and I used the former with my assigned OS textbook.
Its hard to say not knowing your program, but I can speak from mine. I'm at the other end of the table from you; a senior in an undergraduate liberal arts program who has just finished his BA in Computer Science.
I found that my program was way too theory-oriented. Way too early on there was an emphasis on intense algorithm efficiency that lasted for the first two years, and then disappeared from the coursework entirely. Similarly, for the first two years all classes were taught using Java, and then afterwards you could use whatever language you wanted to (most used Java). There was no push for learning other languages, which I understand. And there was more than a deemphasis on practicality; our department chair actually thinks that practical knowledge is something bad. The long and the short of it is that simply following the CS curriculum, without putting in any effort on your own time will get you nowhere.
Answering the poster's original question, in the short-term make sure that you know Java and at least one scripting language (it was Python for me). If your CS department is like mine, your first two or three courses (Freeshman-Sophmore year) will be Java intensive. At the very least, a strong knowledge of Java will put your "Intro to Object Oriented Programming" course in the bag for you.
After that, its what I said in the reply post subject; its what you make of it. Your program may not hand you anything you really need on a silver plate; I discovered this about my program very early on. As a freshman (after playing with UNIX somewhat) I realized that I wanted to someday design operating systems. So I taught myself C. Then I wanted to get in some research experience. When nobody in the CS department would take me, I went over to Biology and got into a Biomathematics research group where I coded a theoretical biological model in C. My software design skills there put me above the others in my lab, who were all Bio or Math majors and had no coding experience at all; soon I ended up teaching them a workshop on C programming. I wanted an internship, I had to find it on my own. I wanted a job, I had to find it on my own.
Contrast this with most of the other students in my class. Because it wasn't a big name program, most other students always came off to me as the type in the field for easy money. At the least, few of the students that I ever worked with actually applied themselves or even cared. These people mostly go to work at a local payroll services company after graduation. I start at a Fortune 500 company this summer... doing OS design.
That kind of reminds me of the types of people I've seen working at Scout camps during the summer. Generally, you get both the long haired, Birkenstock-clad crowd, and the bunch whose cars all sport "Abortion is a Sin" bumper stickers.
And forget about the Scoutcraft people. Those guys are usually ready to light something on fire (often themselves).
It's beyond me wy Facebook is doing something like this a a week after pissing of at least a ninth of its active membership. Last week browising all the outrage groups that sprung up, many people said that they felt the site lost its way when it let High School students join.
While allowing outside access to Facebook is quite clearly the best buisness route to take, the question that comes up is whether or not it alienates its original niche? The immediate answer is no; college sutdents still will use Facebook. But what Facebook fails to remember is that college students (and society in general) are fickle. While you may have them all today, if you make a series of wrong moves and then something (better?) comes along, they'll all ditch you like roadkill.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you have that VMware cluster you can run your choice of 70+ operating systems and millions of apps on it. Can you run Exchange on a mainframe? Sieble? Your existing billing and accounting app?
Well, you can run whatever runs on Linux on top of a mainframe. And if you're a Fortune 500 corporation, chances are your existing billing and accounting applications are *already* running on a mainframe. That is, after all, what the old girl is built for.
Meh; they're family (extended, thank God).
...mine don't trust me as a viable reference :-(
"Oh, the Liberals brainwashed him in college. That's what they do." Sure. forget I'm a bloody software engineer.
Except that Hilliary voted *against* FISA. So did my other senator, Chuck Schumer. In fact, while I find this whole mess beyond disappointing, I can't complain that my voice isn't being heard: all of my elected representatives voted against the measure.
Wow, what a huge over-generalization on the part of Verizon. I guess that means you would no longer have access to alt.startrek.creative. Gotta keep those dangerous fanfiction writers away from t3h childrens.
It wounds like there's alot of greed flowing around here... you alls wants no taxes, and the "evil" state is going to end the party.
Frankly, New York State is in the hole. Most of its industry went overseas within the last two decades (no more glass from Corning, film from Rochester, shoes from Binghamton, etc.) and at times it seems like the entire economy of the state has shifted to New York City. Much of that work (and a nice chunk of the state's revenues) comes from the financial sector. Which is now in the toilet. So you not only have an ongoing economic collapse in NYC, but the rest of the state's economy got "shanghaied" long ago.
The truth is, the State of New York is facing record deficits this year and needs to make up for the difference (it does not expect to be able to). And while the governor is recommending that municipalities consolidate to reduce costs, taxing internet retailers on sales in NYS is another way to get there.
You can still buy Think pads (or "analog Thinkpads" as I call them) from the IBM logowear store. They're priced at about $1.50 each and are often out of stock...
About 9 months ago I was about to be a college grad and was looking for work. I went down to CitiGroup in Manhattan to interview with one of their IT programs. While some of the work there sounded interesting, what really frightened me were the Blackberries.
That is, we all were taken out to lunch. And while we're eating, our guides (CitiGroup employees already in the program) kept on checking their Blackberries. It was about then that I decided that any situation where my personal time was expected to be preempted by work without notice was not a situation I wanted to be in.
Lenovo's built-in software is pretty bad. I ordered one for my sister and when it came, I had to wipe the thing clean. It runs beautifully now, but its a shame that I had to nuke the hard drive to do it.
I beg to disagree; my company issued me a T60 not all that long ago, and the thing kicks some serious ass. I have a coworker who slipped on the ice last winter with his T60 in his backpack. He hit the ground so hard that he had whiplash. Anyway, as he's going down he flings his bag out to the side to try and save the laptop. Didn't help, the thing smashed on the ground. Oh, the fall broke it. But the point of the story is that it didn't finally go until a full 6 months after the accident (something got busted and now the thing overheats).
Anywhere you see mainframes and virtualization, you're talking about z/VM (http://www.vm.ibm.com/). Its been kicking around since the early 1970s (I remembered it from a mention in one of Tannenbaum's OS textbooks).
I'll bet you that there were a lot of happy people in Armonk the day they managed to get it running Linux (aka: new workloads).
A little background on SUNY Morrisville. I went there with New York Boy's State back in 2002. I never attended the school as a student so these are my impressions from staying there for a week. Morrisville is small, technical and farming college located in a really rural part central New York state. I believe that it was a 2-year college five years ago, but may now have a 4-year program. It is largely a farming college and boasts an award-winning dairy farm on campus. Ford also built an auto repair facility on campus, and I have known people go to Morrisville to learn auto mechanics. According to Wikipedia, there are about 3000 undergraduate students there and an extension campus in Norwich, NY. This makes it roughly the size of my old High School.
I interned at IBM last summer. Going out to "New Blue" dinners, there were these three scruffy-looking guys at the back of the table. They were IGS people, and were in the process of training their replacements in India. The one guy who spoke to me was incredibly bitter and angry and made some interesting (read: extreme) remarks about Sam Palmisano. From the IGS guy's comments, he made it sound like he wasn't even getting a severance package ("Oh, you're in ESD. If they laid you off, at least you'd get a severance package"). And apparently, he came from an old IBM family, with his grandfather working for IBM manufacturing.
On my next one-on-one with my manager, I said that the IGS people were the most bitter and disgruntled people I had ever seen. Their response? "That sounds about right". From everything I heard from the people in my department, IGS sounded like a horrible place to work. There were people there that had left our department and gone to IGS for a promotion or whatever, only to come back after they got burnt out or laid off.
From what I had heard working there, I'm not surprized to see this happening. Last summer it sounded like most of the IGS people were preparing to be laid off.
No, seriously. My family's first computer was a mid-run PS/1 that we got for Christmas 1992. Grandma and Grandpa saw IBM on the label and thought that it would make a good computer.
/. right now. ...and yes, before I put the old girl out to pasture, I tried installing Linux on it. And no, it didn't work. Proprietary bus or whatever it was.
To this date, that box remains a favorite of mine. The model we got was shipped after IBM moved the power supply back into the machine (the only real issue I had with the series). We got a modem, Prodigy, PS/1 Club, Promenade (the future AOL), MS Works 2.00a and The Print Shop (awesome back in those days). And even though "proprietary" has bad connotations now, I liked the proprietary goodies on the machine. In particular, if you didn't want to, you need never see DOS on that thing; it booted right into Windows 3.11 and on shutdown took you to a himem.sys-based screen from which you could select to restart Windows, run IBM-DOS, DOS shell or System Diagnoses.
When I fouled up the hard drive in 1998, IBM still gave me support; I still have the system disks that some fellow named Kelso sent me (marked "Kelso - IBM Confidential"). The hardware was going strong in 2001 when I shut it down for the last time, with the exception of the now 12-year old monitor. And my discovery of QBASIC on that hard drive is probably why I'm here on
The specs:
IBM PS/1 Model G51(?)
25 mHz Intel 80486sx
16 MB RAM
120 MB Maxtor HD
IBM-DOS 5.01 (rebranded version of MS-DOS)
Windows 3.11
Shipped with 15" IBM PS/1 SuperVGA monitor.
I will not doubt that the PS/1 was a flop; I mean, IBM is gone from the consumer PC market as anything other than a brand name now. But I don't think it was bad technology. That is, once they put the power supply back where it belonged.
In that case, I've got some book recommendations.
I always, always, always recommend "Practical C Programming" by Steve Oualline (O'Reilly, $34.95). In addition to being an awesome introduction to C, it has all sorts of goodness for practical code desin in the first few chapters. What do I mean by "practical"? Well, readable, reusable and well documented. After reading that, I applied it to all of my projects. Sometimes it got me extra credit; once it actually helped land me an internship.
Other books...
"Learning Python" by Mark Lutz & David Ascher (O'Reilly, $39.99); a very nice introduction to Python
"Harley Hahn's Student Guide to UNIX" (McGraw-Hill, $79.99); slightly dated (its from 1996), but he is quite funny and informative. This was my introduction to UNIX and the Linux shell. According to Amazon it's still in print and costs $79.99 new. I purchased my copy off of Half.com for substantially less (~$20)
Also, any book by Andrew Tannenbaum. These are straight-up textbooks, but are wonderfully easy to read and hold my ADD-strained interest. He has books out on Operating Systems, Networking, Computer Organization and Distributed Systems. If you're taking a class on one of these subjects and are really interested by it, I'd say to purchase Tannenbaum's book and use it in conjunction with your class textbook. Of special interest are "Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed." and "Computer Networks, 3rd ed.", both of which I can vouch for. I had the latter as the text for my networking class and I used the former with my assigned OS textbook.
Its hard to say not knowing your program, but I can speak from mine. I'm at the other end of the table from you; a senior in an undergraduate liberal arts program who has just finished his BA in Computer Science.
I found that my program was way too theory-oriented. Way too early on there was an emphasis on intense algorithm efficiency that lasted for the first two years, and then disappeared from the coursework entirely. Similarly, for the first two years all classes were taught using Java, and then afterwards you could use whatever language you wanted to (most used Java). There was no push for learning other languages, which I understand. And there was more than a deemphasis on practicality; our department chair actually thinks that practical knowledge is something bad. The long and the short of it is that simply following the CS curriculum, without putting in any effort on your own time will get you nowhere.
Answering the poster's original question, in the short-term make sure that you know Java and at least one scripting language (it was Python for me). If your CS department is like mine, your first two or three courses (Freeshman-Sophmore year) will be Java intensive. At the very least, a strong knowledge of Java will put your "Intro to Object Oriented Programming" course in the bag for you.
After that, its what I said in the reply post subject; its what you make of it. Your program may not hand you anything you really need on a silver plate; I discovered this about my program very early on. As a freshman (after playing with UNIX somewhat) I realized that I wanted to someday design operating systems. So I taught myself C. Then I wanted to get in some research experience. When nobody in the CS department would take me, I went over to Biology and got into a Biomathematics research group where I coded a theoretical biological model in C. My software design skills there put me above the others in my lab, who were all Bio or Math majors and had no coding experience at all; soon I ended up teaching them a workshop on C programming. I wanted an internship, I had to find it on my own. I wanted a job, I had to find it on my own.
Contrast this with most of the other students in my class. Because it wasn't a big name program, most other students always came off to me as the type in the field for easy money. At the least, few of the students that I ever worked with actually applied themselves or even cared. These people mostly go to work at a local payroll services company after graduation. I start at a Fortune 500 company this summer... doing OS design.
That kind of reminds me of the types of people I've seen working at Scout camps during the summer. Generally, you get both the long haired, Birkenstock-clad crowd, and the bunch whose cars all sport "Abortion is a Sin" bumper stickers.
And forget about the Scoutcraft people. Those guys are usually ready to light something on fire (often themselves).
It's beyond me wy Facebook is doing something like this a a week after pissing of at least a ninth of its active membership. Last week browising all the outrage groups that sprung up, many people said that they felt the site lost its way when it let High School students join. While allowing outside access to Facebook is quite clearly the best buisness route to take, the question that comes up is whether or not it alienates its original niche? The immediate answer is no; college sutdents still will use Facebook. But what Facebook fails to remember is that college students (and society in general) are fickle. While you may have them all today, if you make a series of wrong moves and then something (better?) comes along, they'll all ditch you like roadkill.