don't hold your breath. they killed off all non windows clients with r5... including AIX. If the internal IBMers that screamed bloody murder over the loss of the AIX client couldn't bring it back there isn't much we can do.
Domino is the server side to notes. Notes is a middleware product to enable collaboration. When properly used it can be excellent at this; when poorly used it just frustrates and annoys people. Some of the features include: email, calendar, addressbook, databases and custom applications. Of course EVERYTHING is implemented as a database, and is designed from the ground up as a collabroative network application (yes, even email and addressbook - actually a GOOD thing for some, say I move my office, I tell my sales rep who updates one entry and shipping has got current information immediately, as does tech support, etc. The strong point are the database and applications arenas, anyone can develop a notes database and put it to use within their team, department, area, division, group, company, enterprise, etc. Applications are a tad harder, but not by much. Much like the web, this does have the unfortunate side effect that any IDIOT can put up a database/application even without haveing a clue what they're doing and as a result you can get some very bad designs out there... which for some reason people blame Notes/Domino for. Like I should blame Netscape for all those hideous home pages that start with a picture of someone's cat??
He was of course basing that on the fact that the Micros~1 server operating system cannot function properly on desktop hardware, thus you need to buy substantially greater power hardware.
and unless it's changed in latter versions: you can't. Acroread is intended as a viewer only, to cut and paste out you need the fullblown acrobat software.
perhaps I've just been thinking about the Hacker's Tarot too much (some day I hope to illustrate them) but I can't help but think this is the kinda thing they're waiting for. For those not familiar I've tossed a copy on my homepage; I don't know the original author but they're truely a classic.
general idea design idea basically the power of Linux is the open nature of the code, the distributed peer review, the flexibility of the development style and the wide range of people in the community. That's the secret to Linux... the community. the many hands of the community make lite work of the otherwise daunting.
so then... here's my idea for the cover....
center: an old cast iron vault stands open, it's contents - thick reams of printout - spilling out in bathed in a soft golden light. the smashed remains of various insectoid life forms litter the floor upon which the vault sits.
surounding it: a diverse group of people surround the vault, they all view the revealed source with avid gazes. Streams of code flow between them to form a web of thought; which swats at a still remaining flying insect that has emerged from the source of revelation.
bordering them: iconic representations of the various tasks performed in Linux are depicted as jigsaw puzzels, the pieces are being placed by many different hands. Some pieces come from the people; some from out of frame.
background: montage of various pieces of code blends together into abstraction behind details, crystalizes into focus elsewhere.
a lower corner: beaten up old double hung casement window, paint peeling sits in shadows. cob webs have formed clearly showing neglect and lack of use, one pane is cracked - the shards lie below. The windows is chained shut with rusty chains, locked with a large padlock. the glass has slight tints of red, blue, green and yellow - it is dirty and opaque: none of the code in the background shows through.
some various details:
the printouts in the vault are source code - given sufficient resolution it could be various portions of Linux. It is also possible that it could be in mixed media: hardcopy, tape, disk, CD, an editor window...
the people suroundding it should be recognizable... Linus must be there, as well as Alan, Eric and other luminaries of the Linux, Gnu, OSS world; equally important are complete anonymous unknown "Jon Q. Public" types. probably can go from shoulders up or so. folks like Bill Gates and Steve Balmer must not in any way be possible interpretations of any of them. There should be a good cross of gendre, ethnic and socio faces. (especially a good scarry biker beard and dark sunglass wearing Alan, and the mild manered geek next door-ish Linus in his specs).
the icons should be pixelated before being sliced into jigsaw pieces...they should also be generic enough to NOT look like any specific product. (the opposite would also be an idea... but then you're bound to leave someone out....) ideas for logos as follows:
an envelope with an email address on it
that "no clouds" picture of earth wrapped around a sphere, with "HTTP://" glowing like a firebrand
an abacuss
a typewritter
a painter's easle
a terminal window
a file cabinet
some documents on a silver tray
a brick wall with flames on one side and a scroll on the other (or a theif on one side and a pile of gold coins on the other)
. . .
the various mascots could go with either the people or the puzle pieces. tux, the bsd daemon, the gimp, shadow man, the suse gecko, the perl camel, the gnu...
The hands assembling the pieces, like the people should be a mix of people; a dainty feminine hand with manacured nails next to a knuckle sandwich maker with grime under the nails and hair on the knuckles; everything in between. (a robotic arm? a prosthetic hand?)
the code streams between the people should be both ascii and binary (hex??)
who said it was ethernet over ATM? the offerings I've seen are IP over ATM... nothing even remotely looking like ethernet.
You would need a native ATM stack/driver to take the cells from the DSL card and pull out the IP packets, then hand them over to the IP stack in the kernel. In otherwords you're back at needing a dedicated driver... although it may be able to share a lot of code with the drivers for the native ATM cards - especially since in a way this is nothing more than an ATM card with a single, specific hardware link.
OK, let me give you a different example to prove linux_penguin's point. I work with a group of very good software engineers, they all came from systems engineering - so they are all low level bit twiddlers by mentality; but they also all came from an 100% OO based system - so they truely know when to use an object and when not to. In the good old days they all wrote in C/C++ were they all produced really good code, with great performance.
Part of this group were early adopters of this thing called Java (back in the 1.0 days) the other part of the group didn't move over to Java untill very recently and started right out on IBM's JDK. The new guys are still good developers (they didn't rust while still working in C/C++) but they have no problems at all coding something like: String foo; ... if (foo.equals("")) { ...
while the original java people become violently ill at even seeing that code and replace it with: String foo; ... if (foo.length == 0) { ...
There really isn't much difference, and from a purely OO standpoint the first is better. But those who remember the pain of running under 1.0 without a JIT won't waste even that small amount of overhead.
When it comes to java, if you want a fast product at the end of the release cycle: FORCE the developers to run in interpreted mode ONLY. (let test, performance and marketing groups use the JIT - just not the developers.)
The Mojave Desert is less than 6 hours from "the valley". It took a nice little 7.1 this weekend and did/. notice . . . no. There's a helluvalot more Si in that desert than in all of the valley and Taiwan combined. (just not in the chip format)
I really think this kind of thing does not belog on/.
first you don't buy just one of these babies... you buy several and put them together in a mirrored RAID array. After all, at a mere US$3000/each (wild guess based on cost of 36PL drives) these are "inexpensive discs". By having two RAIDs mirrored off each other you no longer need to do backups, and you can capitalize on paralellism for reads. Writes are another story... but with that much DASD farmed out you'll never have time to write anyting... you're going to be too busy looking for what you already have.
(put your flame throwers away while I pull my tounge out of my cheek;)
Fibre Channel is one option... the data sheet for the 72ZX also lists two impls of Ultra3 SCSI - Ultra160 and Ultra160+.
The fact that some marketing schmuck listed FC instead of SCSI on the PR shouldn't surprise anyone... these are the same idiots who use 10^3x instead of 2^10x for their capacity measurements.
Oh, and the height for those that wondered is 41.6 mm. (~2 in).
Actually, I had a couple people tell me RAM prices were on their way up a few days BEFORE the earthquake.
yeah, that's for damn sure... I'm piecing a box together for a friend and made the mistake of holding off on ordering the RAM over the prior weekend.... I'm kicking my self right now.
I work in the guts of a distributed object infrastructure project, so this is the kind of discussion that my fellow geeks and I would spend HOURS on if management didn't walk by that offten. I think you clearly see the empty spot on the scatter diagram you drew out there, and are obviously on the right track to fill it in.
I also think you're reinventing the wheel. (don't we all at some point?;)
What you've described is the message passing protocols that existed before IPC. This is the style of programming that was taught by having to "run" your programs by carrying a shoe box of punched cards to the window by the machine room and giving it to an operator who would run it and give you back a stack of cards. This stack of cards of course might itself be a program which could then be fed back to the operator in one or more additional shoe boxes and the cycle began again.... I still write scripts that end by enqueing several more scripts for batch processing - and I WASN'T actively part of that era of computing. This style of communications is also still the big winner in the mainframe world of Transaction Monitors, ERPs, etc . . . look at IBM's hugely successful MQ Series for example. (here is a better read for the un-initiated.)
There are several implementations of frameworks for messaging protocols out there. One of my favorites in uni was the Paralell Virtual Machine architecture. Another was the Message Passing Interface. Many forms of paralell computation use the messaging model.
Messaging is also being brought into the Java world with JMS (no, not the great maker) the Java Messaging System.
wow. This is the kind of discusion that makes me proud to login to/. why can't there be more? Why aren't there? hrmm.
that I don't see mentioned much yet... DB2 and Sybase. For a functional example of Sybase in serious action check out Distributed.net's Statistics. DISCLAIMER: I work for IBM, but not on Linux or DB2.
No, the fight has been over the fact that Jon is first of all a relatively poor writer. Suffering through some of his muddle-mind and meandering posts has truly be a harrowing experience at times.
I'm ever so glad someone else got here first with that comment... No offense Jon, but I couldn't agree more.
Writers are imprecise, uncertain and backwards-looking.
Good ones aren't. Take a look at J . Michael Straczynski. He is one of the best in the genre; he is very precise, seems fairly certain of him self and is forward thinking enough to know the last scene of a five years story arch before begining production of day one... not to mention I think he said details 15 years in each direction and generalitiles thousands of years in each direction. Now it's true that he's a fiction writer, and I'm sure you meant non-fiction... but there isn't a difference when it comes down to good writing. The Marine Corps 7Ps come in handy: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
Their relationship with technology is uncertain, a means, never an end.
There is nothing uncertain about it. Computer technology is a tool (a means as you call it). Nothing more. Nothing less. It is a tool on par with the pencil and paper, or the quill, parchment and ink pot.
Well, to begin with, I meant that comment as a reference to extensively huge code that you couldn't hold in your head anyway. That said..
14,000+ source files last I checked - some build as many as two dozen classes, 262Mb worth of sources in the build tree before compilation/generation begins. At that point... yeah encapsulation, modularization, anything to help....
One problem I've noticed with a lot of C++ programmers (and hopefully they are still novices when they outgrow this mentality) has to do with the following.. C was a hammer, and C++ is a sledge.
They aren't... they're novices when they LEARN it... it won't be for a couple years in TRW untill they catch on. Java then is the giant Acme(tm) mallot used by Willey Coyote.
We have C++ because there were a few railroad spikes that C just couldn't nail down as elegantly as we would like. Unfortunately, now some people always bust out the heavy ammunition.. But to be honest, not every problem is a railroad spike.;)
But look how the schools teach them (at least everything I've seen).... they start them out with procedural gorp in basic or pascal (C if they've got a clue), then move on to some "real world language" which will depend on what other department CS has to kiss up to in order to get funding... FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG or some similar form of brain damage will be inflicted. Then they'll get into some kind of real CS languages... Lisp, Forth, Ada, SmallTalk, C++, etc... but by then it's graduation. So what's the overall progression.... from little teenie hammers up the scale to the 25lbs sledge; with promises of bigger and heavy machinery in grad school....
Then they get out and what do all the industry mags plaster on the covers? C++, C++, C++, Java, Java, Java, Objects, Objects, Objects. So what do they pull out of the tool box to hang a picture with? a 2p nail and a 25lbs sledge... sure a week later when you notice the holes in the schedule -er wall- you'll suggest a pushpin -er shell script- eventually they'll catch on.
very true. and yes you can write modular code in assembly... and if you've got a good macro interpreter first you'll still be sane when you're done.:)
I think though that you're binding a given language to a given paradigm, as this statement refering to C, C++, Python and Scheme alludes:
those cover about as wide a range of programming paradigms as I can think of.
and then saying that a concept such as modularization and encapsulation can be bound to any paradigm/language pairing.
At least that's how I read your statment.
I disagree on which level the 1-1 binding is... I think there is a binding between the concept (such as modularization and encapsulation) and the paradigm (here OO). And that paradigms can be bound to any language. For example: OO-RPG (try not to laugh... it exists) and functional Java.
I would never for example expect a procedural/functional paradigm design to encorporate encapsulation and modularization under the same concept as OO.
I'm going to kill whoever thought it was a good idea to have the ads reload every 10-15 seconds on the site that article is on. Grr.
take a deep breath... get in line... right-click->Open Frame in New Window... move on with life....;)
I would imagine that a greal deal of commercial stuff is actually good and relatively bug free.
Once upon a time... yeah. But the lemmings in the industry are dragging everyone else with them. Even the Blue Giant has moved up their release cycles, products that used to ship a version every couple years now ship on a 3 quarter cycle... and these are things far removed from the.com hype. The products caught up in the thick of it are quarterly.
Encapsulation and modularization are your friends..
OO is a fairly good paradigm yes, but it has some glaring problems. Especially in the realm of this discussion....
There is a piece of code I own that was written with entirely too much OO on the brain... every thing is an object, and everything is encapsulated. A simple trace through the section for one invocation involves something like 25 instances of about 40 classes (this is when inheritance sucks) on three threads. It has taken me over a year to have even a marginal feel for this code... and I understand it at the high level, and have full design docs at my disposal. This code by the way, is well under a KLOC in total... closer to 1/2 that. It doesn't need to be this complex; I've redrawn it on paper down to as few as 8 objects in the process of understanding it.
Managers view programmers as a resource, programmers are considered plug replaceable. I watched recently as a wet behind the ears college kid was plopped into place replacing a veteran of almost 20 years in the industry, who had inherited the code several years ago from another who had been around as long as he had. This poor kid is in over her head... and we all try to help her out... but she doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell: that component is just plain fsck'd, the first three new features management pushed down her throat resulted in the component being completely broken - not just a little flaky - completely broken.
Andreessen's quote: "We have, historically, definitely prioritized features over time and time over quality," describes near all of the industry by now.
It's all about the deadlines... psychotic as the auther called them. My management recently respun the "final" build about 8 times after giving it to the test organization, each time promising it would be the last one... never once did they push the ship date. Final testing happened in a couple days, instead of a couple weeks it was originally planed for, or the couple months asked for to do it right.
At the level of the programmer, it's all in the person. There are some who take immense pride in the quality of their work; they view bugs in thier own code as an afront to their engineerring ability. There are those who only seek to work on the new/popular/fun stuff; their code often contains half completed implementations with comments like "this is uninteresting". (actual quote from actual shipping code from that last reference!). I count myself lucky to work with the former rather than the later.
The concept of a network based on quantized data with a possibility of all kinds of ugly things happening in transit like out of order delivery and quanta loss is "nuke-tolerant". The implementation of the Internet is not such a network, and for cost reasons will never be.
That is not to say that there are no such implementations; there are. I've a cousin who admins one such network... her CSU/DSUs are designed to failover the signal pulse from EMP with opto-isolation (for those links that aren't optical to begin with). Her network is redundantly routed and cross-connected. Her software is fault tolerant like you wouldn't beleive. Considering who she works for I suspect most of the important nodes are sheilded quite well from EMP. The only element of the whole mess Joe Consumer can't buy off a shelf is the EMP sheilding.
The only people who should be embarrased are people who think that The Internet meets DARPA's original specs - or even comes close.
ARGH! Further proof that: Chris should not be allowed to code after dark. Neither should Eric for that matter....
I just went and looked at the last time I had to code that algorythm and sure enough... I had remembered (yeah right... looked up) the third rule then... don't know how I could possibly have forgotten it last night. (well, ok the fact that it is a fsck'ing exception to an exception to an exception to a rule might have helped;)
I don't grok your concern... he's right after all, Y2K is not a leap year. I suspect that March 1st will be much worse than January 1st 2000 because more systems are going to see it as February 29th 2000 than will see it as March 1st 1900. (of course the *really* messed up folks will see February 29th, 1900.....)
yup... that they do... I just spent WAY too much time fighting with my post for the same reason... too bad Rob wouldn't put & symbols in the allowed HTML, or at least < and > - I asked some time ago and he basically blew off the suggestion.
On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, Chris Abbey wrote:
> Rob, would it be possible to add & constructs (> é " etc...) > to the allowed html formating list for comments? Thx. -=Chris
I think if you post your messages in "Plain Text" mode, those charachters are encoded for you. You can't really mix and match, but it works if you need those charachters.
There've been a few posts on this topic already, and they seem to be headed only down one path from this... "html blah blah blah". Well, yeah that is one path this could take; but not the only, and in fact not the most important.
Browsers are *one* target recipient, but by no means the ONLY one... palm pilots for example have very little use for full blown HTML 3.x - let alone CSS and Embeded frames, but this technology can target them*. [ *note: I am assuming that this is the same technology that was demonstrated by the SanFrancisco project at javaOne this past June, where both a palm pilot and a browser recieved the same content tailored to their UI and ran the same application logic. If it is then what it can really do will blow your socks off.... if it isn't then I can't wait to see what Research has up it's sleave. ('cause ya's just KNOW us developers don't get license to play with stuff this cool on corp's time...). ]
Think about this as an *Information Developer* (not an HTML developer, or a "webdesigner")... what do you really want to accomplish? Seperation of content from format? Yes. Targeted formating for a wide variety of presentation systems? Yes! Maintenance of sanity in the process? YES!
OK, so let's play a hypothetical... you need to put up a simple content component (the building block of a larger information presentation). Let's say you want this component to be called a slashdot poll. So you script up the first polls content:
[topic name="best PHB tormentor" code="phbtorm" choice1="frabble-do-hickie" choice2="whakka-loofla" choice3="nimrod-doodle" choice4="source code to current project"]
(yeah, totally made up grammer... I'm sure it doesn't look anything like that.)
then you write the first conversion sheet, with a target of text/html...
of course you'd really need a lot more (just look at what really is wrapping up the poll) and also be a tad more generic so that you could have a counter that says how many options, and a loop to ittereate and build the form and all that presentation gorp that means nothing to INFORMATION DEVELOPERS. Then you'd turn around and create a second conversion sheet that tells your phonemail system how to present this as a VRS. "Today's slash dot poll is $name. Press or say one for $choice1. Press or say two for $choice2. [...]" (I can already hear the voice of Stephen Halking asking what the past tense of ping is....)
Now once you've written all those conversion sheets, you're done with them. (unless you want to change you display style for a given target) From then on you can update your information in one form and gaurentee that it will be "properly" presented in all your target platforms.
Some of you may start down that tired old line that this is what HTML is for, and that new features like CSS give you this. Well yeah, HTML _was_intended_ for this kind of thing - then the "webdesigners" got their hands on it. At that point you have to resort to half assed hacks like CSS to even attempt to preserve the format independent nature of any SGML.
HTML is OK for the role it has been lead into, but it isn't fullfilling some of the niches people hoped it would because it has been bent to far into another "niche" - the web. Some of the varied devices (in addition to html and VRS mentioned above) that are potential targets include:
(*> our old friend the green screen - no, it is NOT dead! (*> page readers - enabling tech. for the blind (*> custom viewers - imagine having the poll as a captive tk/tcl app on your enlightenment docking bar? (*> translation systems - the I in IBM is never forgotten... imagine the hassles in translating a billion web pages from English to say Hebrew (right to left) or Kanji (top to bottom, and (I think) right to left) (*> PDAs - for those who think PDAs will consume HTML lay off the frapacinno for a while and get a firm grip on reality. Without trying to much to sound like the Linus sound byte about the Nokia 9000s 'mediocre phone, lousy PDA, miserable web browser' - try reading/. on one of those things... trust me when I say the experience sucks rotten eggs.
But will anyone use it? Well, let's take two case studies of places that COULD have used it... for the first let's look at a major hardware company that lost out on a $250K deal because their web site people had "revamped" their entire corp. web presence to use all the nifty new toys and didn't have the time/resource to update all the old product datasheets... so they dumped them off the servers completely instead: "so they wouldn't clash" with their "consistent face to the consumer".
For a second let's take good ole Hollerith's Analytical Legacy... last spring they decided to change their page design for all external pages... just stop and consider the sheer volume that is... the largest computer company in the WORLD needs to *overnight* revamp their entire site. The process took months to pull off, with entire teams of managers herding the cats, er um... designers, around to get it all accomplished on schedule and make the release date. Every page was copied to an internal server and modified with automated tooling, then every update that was made outside, got mirrored inside untill FINALLY, one night all the server masters did a big remount and moved all that content out to the public. You can still see the results of this on many of thier pages by viewing the source and looking for html comments like this: !--Left Navigation here... --
Now that I've written my content I want to go back and reformat it for HTML... but alas I gotta choose either to show html tags (Extrans) or use html tags... but not both... and all three options are destroying my formating... and Rob wouldn't give me ampersand-l-t-semicolon or ampersand-g-t-semicolon in HTML markup when I asked a few months ago... hhrmmm... let's see what I can do with plain old ascii...... well, after several trips through the preview button and a lot of reworking this looks better...it still looks like crap, and I've now spent more time on FORMAT than on CONTENT... ##*^_@&^!)&@$%^!#)&^$#^$ HTML
Slashdot Mirror
don't hold your breath. they killed off all non windows clients with r5... including AIX. If the internal IBMers that screamed bloody murder over the loss of the AIX client couldn't bring it back there isn't much we can do.
Domino is the server side to notes. Notes is a middleware product to enable collaboration. When properly used it can be excellent at this; when poorly used it just frustrates and annoys people. Some of the features include: email, calendar, addressbook, databases and custom applications. Of course EVERYTHING is implemented as a database, and is designed from the ground up as a collabroative network application (yes, even email and addressbook - actually a GOOD thing for some, say I move my office, I tell my sales rep who updates one entry and shipping has got current information immediately, as does tech support, etc. The strong point are the database and applications arenas, anyone can develop a notes database and put it to use within their team, department, area, division, group, company, enterprise, etc. Applications are a tad harder, but not by much. Much like the web, this does have the unfortunate side effect that any IDIOT can put up a database/application even without haveing a clue what they're doing and as a result you can get some very bad designs out there... which for some reason people blame Notes/Domino for. Like I should blame Netscape for all those hideous home pages that start with a picture of someone's cat??
oh yeah... "I AM"
He was of course basing that on the fact that the Micros~1 server operating system cannot function properly on desktop hardware, thus you need to buy substantially greater power hardware.
and unless it's changed in latter versions: you can't. Acroread is intended as a viewer only, to cut and paste out you need the fullblown acrobat software.
general idea design idea
basically the power of Linux is the open nature of the code, the distributed peer review, the flexibility of the development style and the wide range of people in the community. That's the secret to Linux... the community. the many hands of the community make lite work of the otherwise daunting.
so then... here's my idea for the cover....
some various details:
I know there are more details floating in my head... but it's been a long week and I'm tired... I'll post others tommorow if the thread's alive.
who said it was ethernet over ATM? the offerings I've seen are IP over ATM... nothing even remotely looking like ethernet.
You would need a native ATM stack/driver to take the cells from the DSL card and pull out the IP packets, then hand them over to the IP stack in the kernel. In otherwords you're back at needing a dedicated driver... although it may be able to share a lot of code with the drivers for the native ATM cards - especially since in a way this is nothing more than an ATM card with a single, specific hardware link.
OK, let me give you a different example to prove linux_penguin's point. I work with a group of very good software engineers, they all came from systems engineering - so they are all low level bit twiddlers by mentality; but they also all came from an 100% OO based system - so they truely know when to use an object and when not to. In the good old days they all wrote in C/C++ were they all produced really good code, with great performance.
Part of this group were early adopters of this thing called Java (back in the 1.0 days) the other part of the group didn't move over to Java untill very recently and started right out on IBM's JDK. The new guys are still good developers (they didn't rust while still working in C/C++) but they have no problems at all coding something like:
String foo;
...
if (foo.equals("")) {
...
while the original java people become violently ill at even seeing that code and replace it with:
String foo;
...
if (foo.length == 0) {
...
There really isn't much difference, and from a purely OO standpoint the first is better. But those who remember the pain of running under 1.0 without a JIT won't waste even that small amount of overhead.
When it comes to java, if you want a fast product at the end of the release cycle: FORCE the developers to run in interpreted mode ONLY. (let test, performance and marketing groups use the JIT - just not the developers.)
can anyone say "quake skins"? add a flight recorder and whamo! instant ads and loads of fun.
transparent ipv6 would be:
~> telnet localhost
connecting to localhost (::1)...
but that's a long way off.
The Mojave Desert is less than 6 hours from "the valley". It took a nice little 7.1 this weekend and did /. notice . . . no. There's a helluvalot more Si in that desert than in all of the valley and Taiwan combined. (just not in the chip format)
/.
I really think this kind of thing does not belog on
check out the latest tya at ftp://gonzalez.cyberus.ca/pub/Linux/java/ it isn't exactly a stelar performer, but it holds up reasonable well, and is OSS.
ahh... but these are easily surmounted problems :)
;)
first you don't buy just one of these babies... you buy several and put them together in a mirrored RAID array. After all, at a mere US$3000/each (wild guess based on cost of 36PL drives) these are "inexpensive discs". By having two RAIDs mirrored off each other you no longer need to do backups, and you can capitalize on paralellism for reads. Writes are another story... but with that much DASD farmed out you'll never have time to write anyting... you're going to be too busy looking for what you already have.
(put your flame throwers away while I pull my tounge out of my cheek
Fibre Channel is one option... the data sheet for the 72ZX also lists two impls of Ultra3 SCSI - Ultra160 and Ultra160+.
The fact that some marketing schmuck listed FC instead of SCSI on the PR shouldn't surprise anyone... these are the same idiots who use 10^3x instead of 2^10x for their capacity measurements.
Oh, and the height for those that wondered is 41.6 mm. (~2 in).
Actually, I had a couple people tell me RAM prices were on their way up a few days BEFORE the earthquake.
yeah, that's for damn sure... I'm piecing a box together for a friend and made the mistake of holding off on ordering the RAM over the prior weekend.... I'm kicking my self right now.
wow.
;)
/. why can't there be more? Why aren't there? hrmm.
long? yes. well tought out? yes.
I work in the guts of a distributed object infrastructure project, so this is the kind of discussion that my fellow geeks and I would spend HOURS on if management didn't walk by that offten. I think you clearly see the empty spot on the scatter diagram you drew out there, and are obviously on the right track to fill it in.
I also think you're reinventing the wheel. (don't we all at some point?
What you've described is the message passing protocols that existed before IPC. This is the style of programming that was taught by having to "run" your programs by carrying a shoe box of punched cards to the window by the machine room and giving it to an operator who would run it and give you back a stack of cards. This stack of cards of course might itself be a program which could then be fed back to the operator in one or more additional shoe boxes and the cycle began again.... I still write scripts that end by enqueing several more scripts for batch processing - and I WASN'T actively part of that era of computing. This style of communications is also still the big winner in the mainframe world of Transaction Monitors, ERPs, etc . . . look at IBM's hugely successful MQ Series for example. (here is a better read for the un-initiated.)
There are several implementations of frameworks for messaging protocols out there. One of my favorites in uni was the Paralell Virtual Machine architecture. Another was the Message Passing Interface. Many forms of paralell computation use the messaging model.
Messaging is also being brought into the Java world with JMS (no, not the great maker) the Java Messaging System.
wow. This is the kind of discusion that makes me proud to login to
that I don't see mentioned much yet... DB2 and Sybase. For a functional example of Sybase in serious action check out Distributed.net's Statistics.
DISCLAIMER: I work for IBM, but not on Linux or DB2.
http://enlightenment.org/rant.html
I'm ever so glad someone else got here first with that comment... No offense Jon, but I couldn't agree more.
Good ones aren't. Take a look at J . Michael Straczynski. He is one of the best in the genre; he is very precise, seems fairly certain of him self and is forward thinking enough to know the last scene of a five years story arch before begining production of day one... not to mention I think he said details 15 years in each direction and generalitiles thousands of years in each direction. Now it's true that he's a fiction writer, and I'm sure you meant non-fiction... but there isn't a difference when it comes down to good writing. The Marine Corps 7Ps come in handy: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
There is nothing uncertain about it. Computer technology is a tool (a means as you call it). Nothing more. Nothing less. It is a tool on par with the pencil and paper, or the quill, parchment and ink pot.
14,000+ source files last I checked - some build as many as two dozen classes, 262Mb worth of sources in the build tree before compilation/generation begins. At that point... yeah encapsulation, modularization, anything to help....
They aren't... they're novices when they LEARN it... it won't be for a couple years in TRW untill they catch on. Java then is the giant Acme(tm) mallot used by Willey Coyote.
But look how the schools teach them (at least everything I've seen).... they start them out with procedural gorp in basic or pascal (C if they've got a clue), then move on to some "real world language" which will depend on what other department CS has to kiss up to in order to get funding... FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG or some similar form of brain damage will be inflicted. Then they'll get into some kind of real CS languages... Lisp, Forth, Ada, SmallTalk, C++, etc... but by then it's graduation. So what's the overall progression.... from little teenie hammers up the scale to the 25lbs sledge; with promises of bigger and heavy machinery in grad school....
Then they get out and what do all the industry mags plaster on the covers? C++, C++, C++, Java, Java, Java, Objects, Objects, Objects. So what do they pull out of the tool box to hang a picture with? a 2p nail and a 25lbs sledge... sure a week later when you notice the holes in the schedule -er wall- you'll suggest a pushpin -er shell script- eventually they'll catch on.
very true. and yes you can write modular code in assembly... and if you've got a good macro interpreter first you'll still be sane when you're done. :)
I think though that you're binding a given language to a given paradigm, as this statement refering to C, C++, Python and Scheme alludes:
and then saying that a concept such as modularization and encapsulation can be bound to any paradigm/language pairing.At least that's how I read your statment.
I disagree on which level the 1-1 binding is... I think there is a binding between the concept (such as modularization and encapsulation) and the paradigm (here OO). And that paradigms can be bound to any language. For example: OO-RPG (try not to laugh... it exists) and functional Java.
I would never for example expect a procedural/functional paradigm design to encorporate encapsulation and modularization under the same concept as OO.
I'm going to kill whoever thought it was a good idea to have the ads reload every 10-15 seconds on the site that article is on. Grr.
take a deep breath... get in line... right-click->Open Frame in New Window... move on with life.... ;)
I would imagine that a greal deal of commercial stuff is actually good and relatively bug free.
Once upon a time... yeah. But the lemmings in the industry are dragging everyone else with them. Even the Blue Giant has moved up their release cycles, products that used to ship a version every couple years now ship on a 3 quarter cycle... and these are things far removed from the .com hype. The products caught up in the thick of it are quarterly.
Encapsulation and modularization are your friends..
OO is a fairly good paradigm yes, but it has some glaring problems. Especially in the realm of this discussion....
There is a piece of code I own that was written with entirely too much OO on the brain... every thing is an object, and everything is encapsulated. A simple trace through the section for one invocation involves something like 25 instances of about 40 classes (this is when inheritance sucks) on three threads. It has taken me over a year to have even a marginal feel for this code... and I understand it at the high level, and have full design docs at my disposal. This code by the way, is well under a KLOC in total... closer to 1/2 that. It doesn't need to be this complex; I've redrawn it on paper down to as few as 8 objects in the process of understanding it.
Managers view programmers as a resource, programmers are considered plug replaceable. I watched recently as a wet behind the ears college kid was plopped into place replacing a veteran of almost 20 years in the industry, who had inherited the code several years ago from another who had been around as long as he had. This poor kid is in over her head... and we all try to help her out... but she doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell: that component is just plain fsck'd, the first three new features management pushed down her throat resulted in the component being completely broken - not just a little flaky - completely broken.
Andreessen's quote: "We have, historically, definitely prioritized features over time and time over quality," describes near all of the industry by now.
It's all about the deadlines... psychotic as the auther called them. My management recently respun the "final" build about 8 times after giving it to the test organization, each time promising it would be the last one... never once did they push the ship date. Final testing happened in a couple days, instead of a couple weeks it was originally planed for, or the couple months asked for to do it right.
At the level of the programmer, it's all in the person. There are some who take immense pride in the quality of their work; they view bugs in thier own code as an afront to their engineerring ability. There are those who only seek to work on the new/popular/fun stuff; their code often contains half completed implementations with comments like "this is uninteresting". (actual quote from actual shipping code from that last reference!). I count myself lucky to work with the former rather than the later.
The concept of a network based on quantized data with a possibility of all kinds of ugly things happening in transit like out of order delivery and quanta loss is "nuke-tolerant". The implementation of the Internet is not such a network, and for cost reasons will never be.
That is not to say that there are no such implementations; there are. I've a cousin who admins one such network... her CSU/DSUs are designed to failover the signal pulse from EMP with opto-isolation (for those links that aren't optical to begin with). Her network is redundantly routed and cross-connected. Her software is fault tolerant like you wouldn't beleive. Considering who she works for I suspect most of the important nodes are sheilded quite well from EMP. The only element of the whole mess Joe Consumer can't buy off a shelf is the EMP sheilding.
The only people who should be embarrased are people who think that The Internet meets DARPA's original specs - or even comes close.
ARGH! Further proof that: Chris should not be allowed to code after dark. Neither should Eric for that matter....
... don't know how I could possibly have forgotten it last night. (well, ok the fact that it is a fsck'ing exception to an exception to an exception to a rule might have helped ;)
I just went and looked at the last time I had to code that algorythm and sure enough... I had remembered (yeah right... looked up) the third rule then
at least I know I'm in good company on this....
?
I don't grok your concern... he's right after all, Y2K is not a leap year. I suspect that March 1st will be much worse than January 1st 2000 because more systems are going to see it as February 29th 2000 than will see it as March 1st 1900. (of course the *really* messed up folks will see February 29th, 1900.....)
yup... that they do... I just spent WAY too much time fighting with my post for the same reason... too bad Rob wouldn't put & symbols in the allowed HTML, or at least < and > - I asked some time ago and he basically blew off the suggestion.
On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, Chris Abbey wrote:
> Rob, would it be possible to add & constructs (> é " etc...)
> to the allowed html formating list for comments? Thx. -=Chris
I think if you post your messages in "Plain Text" mode, those charachters
are encoded for you. You can't really mix and match, but it works if you
need those charachters.
There've been a few posts on this topic already, and they seem to be headed only down one path from this... "html blah blah blah". Well, yeah that is one path this could take; but not the only, and in fact not the most important.
...
/. on one of those things... trust me when I say the experience sucks rotten eggs.
... just stop and consider the sheer volume that is ... the largest computer company in the WORLD needs to *overnight* revamp their entire site. The process took months to pull off, with entire teams of managers herding the cats, er um... designers, around to get it all accomplished on schedule and make the release date. Every page was copied to an internal server and modified with automated tooling, then every update that was made outside, got mirrored inside untill FINALLY, one night all the server masters did a big remount and moved all that content out to the public. You can still see the results of this on many of thier pages by viewing the source and looking for html comments like this:
... but not both ... and all three options are destroying my formating ... and Rob wouldn't give me ampersand-l-t-semicolon or ampersand-g-t-semicolon in HTML markup when I asked a few months ago... hhrmmm... let's see what I can do with plain old ascii...... well, after several trips through the preview button and a lot of reworking this looks better...it still looks like crap, and I've now spent more time on FORMAT than on CONTENT... ##*^_@&^!)&@$%^!#)&^$#^$ HTML
Browsers are *one* target recipient, but by no means the ONLY one... palm pilots for example have very little use for full blown HTML 3.x - let alone CSS and Embeded frames, but this technology can target them*. [ *note: I am assuming that this is the same technology that was demonstrated by the SanFrancisco project at javaOne this past June, where both a palm pilot and a browser recieved the same content tailored to their UI and ran the same application logic. If it is then what it can really do will blow your socks off.... if it isn't then I can't wait to see what Research has up it's sleave. ('cause ya's just KNOW us developers don't get license to play with stuff this cool on corp's time...). ]
Think about this as an *Information Developer* (not an HTML developer, or a "webdesigner")... what do you really want to accomplish? Seperation of content from format? Yes. Targeted formating for a wide variety of presentation systems? Yes! Maintenance of sanity in the process? YES!
OK, so let's play a hypothetical... you need to put up a simple content component (the building block of a larger information presentation). Let's say you want this component to be called a slashdot poll. So you script up the first polls content:
[topic name="best PHB tormentor"
code="phbtorm"
choice1="frabble-do-hickie"
choice2="whakka-loofla"
choice3="nimrod-doodle"
choice4="source code to current project"]
(yeah, totally made up grammer... I'm sure it doesn't look anything like that.)
then you write the first conversion sheet, with a target of text/html
[b]Slashdot Poll[/b]
[FORM action="http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl"]
[B]$name[/B][BR]
[INPUT type=hidden name=topic value=$code]
[INPUT type=radio name=aid value=1]$choice1[BR]
[INPUT type=radio name=aid value=2]$choice2[BR]
[INPUT type=radio name=aid value=3]$choice3[BR]
[INPUT type=radio name=aid value=4]$choice4[BR]
[INPUT type=submit value=Vote>[/FORM]
of course you'd really need a lot more (just look at what really is wrapping up the poll) and also be a tad more generic so that you could have a counter that says how many options, and a loop to ittereate and build the form and all that presentation gorp that means nothing to INFORMATION DEVELOPERS. Then you'd turn around and create a second conversion sheet that tells your phonemail system how to present this as a VRS. "Today's slash dot poll is $name. Press or say one for $choice1. Press or say two for $choice2. [...]" (I can already hear the voice of Stephen Halking asking what the past tense of ping is....)
Now once you've written all those conversion sheets, you're done with them. (unless you want to change you display style for a given target) From then on you can update your information in one form and gaurentee that it will be "properly" presented in all your target platforms.
Some of you may start down that tired old line that this is what HTML is for, and that new features like CSS give you this. Well yeah, HTML _was_intended_ for this kind of thing - then the "webdesigners" got their hands on it. At that point you have to resort to half assed hacks like CSS to even attempt to preserve the format independent nature of any SGML.
HTML is OK for the role it has been lead into, but it isn't fullfilling some of the niches people hoped it would because it has been bent to far into another "niche" - the web. Some of the varied devices (in addition to html and VRS mentioned above) that are potential targets include:
(*> our old friend the green screen - no, it is NOT dead!
(*> page readers - enabling tech. for the blind
(*> custom viewers - imagine having the poll as a captive tk/tcl app on your enlightenment docking bar?
(*> translation systems - the I in IBM is never forgotten... imagine the hassles in translating a billion web pages from English to say Hebrew (right to left) or Kanji (top to bottom, and (I think) right to left)
(*> PDAs - for those who think PDAs will consume HTML lay off the frapacinno for a while and get a firm grip on reality. Without trying to much to sound like the Linus sound byte about the Nokia 9000s 'mediocre phone, lousy PDA, miserable web browser' - try reading
But will anyone use it? Well, let's take two case studies of places that COULD have used it... for the first let's look at a major hardware company that lost out on a $250K deal because their web site people had "revamped" their entire corp. web presence to use all the nifty new toys and didn't have the time/resource to update all the old product datasheets... so they dumped them off the servers completely instead: "so they wouldn't clash" with their "consistent face to the consumer".
For a second let's take good ole Hollerith's Analytical Legacy... last spring they decided to change their page design for all external pages
!--Left Navigation here... --
Now that I've written my content I want to go back and reformat it for HTML... but alas I gotta choose either to show html tags (Extrans) or use html tags