Not all of them. The one sitting here next to me is 900Mhz, and very much analog. Thus I can - and yes I've tried it, it worked - listen to it on a cheapo RadShack scanner.
yep, 25Mhz is used for RC planes etc, can have some real fun with old 25 Mhz machines though... great error injector for systems' test labrats. I'd like to find something convienent in the 33/66Mhz range to screw with PCI...;>
I've seen this ploy play out a time or three... you've got a nice view of how it would work if MS played fair... too bad they don't.
First this deal is going to have to be approved by the head of the IT/CS department,
You're assuming they are even asked... micros~1 tends to bypass them if they're *nix heads and go straight to the board or president. Once they've got them hooked on the idea it's too late for the MIS department that runs the place, or the CS department that teaches in it.
then the students (who would have to learn a whole different OS to keep their jobs)
most schools view their students employees as trained monkeys; if this happens and the monkeys don't want to play along then they will happily fire off all the cli heads who don't know what a mouse is and go over to the art department and hire a bunch of mac heads who only know point&click - afterall you don't need any special skills to admin a winblows domain...
and finally - the budget committe or otherwise accounting (once they see what an MCSE goes for they will simply put a denied stamp on it).
ahh... but that's the beauty of this.. winblows is so easy that you don't need any programmer/anaysists; everyone can write their own macros in Office. The micros~1 solution will litterally show 0 head count for programming, combined with the free software they're giving out this will appear to SAVE money so again the board or the president will overrule (and fire) anyone in accounting that tries to de-rail this.
So yes, it will work... then it will be a matter of internal politics to get it situation fixed, and depending on how deeply the hook is set before they try to start reeling in it may actually do some serious long term harm. But I predict there will be some havens of *nix scattered around and that this will only make them stronger, as more good people get forced out of the schools micros~1 takes over.
>start a "3.0 experimental" tree with major new features like clustering
Actually that "tree" exists in every OS lab on every college campus, and in every corporate R&D lab in the world, and in the mind of every kernel hacker on the net. The "experimental" tree you want needs to start from an stable kernel and attempt to add some specific feature to it from the outside - not part of the kernel development, but part of a standalone function development. Then the knowledge and experience that is gained from that endeavor comes back into the next release level (major or minor - depending on how big it is) and gets re-implemented (well, hopefully... in reality there will be some copy and paste-ism). Any time you're playing with cutting edge stuff the first draft is ususally less than optimal for general use... but oh the lessons you learned! How many times have you been involved in something to come back after several months and have to fix a bug only to ask "why did I structure it like this??"
There are actually even more reasons why mWave technology is good... one of them being seamless - software - upgrades. I had a loaner 600E last week and was able to change back and forth from a 56K modem to a 33.6 modem without even loging out of Winblows NT. On the TP755CDX I used to have I was able to upgrade from a 28.8 to 33.6 to 56K without any expense; that was great. mWave technology has also made it into a few other IBM products btw, including the craptiva line of desktops... so develop it once and you make a LOT of hardware more friendly to Linux.
Now if only we could get people to STOP calling it a WinMODEM! Oh, and I suspect the reason the lawyers wont let the code out the doors are patent issues... IBM tends to protect it's patents....
Alan, thanks first for taking the time to do this "interview" with/.
I'm wondering what you think about the recent "competing" Unix vendors decisions to jump on the Linux bandwagon? I'm thinking of IBM, SGI, HP, and Sun for example... all of them have unices they sell with thier boxen, yet they've started jumping in and trying to support/ship Linux? I've heard the opinions of the folks who develop one of those unices... so I'm interested in yours for comparison.
[Truth in advertising: I work for one of these companies, but not anywhere near our Linux efforts; sigh.]
Is it that far behind in R&D? I'd think not, since they have it, and it works, etc.. but, if they're claiming that much time to make it commercially available (how long does it really take to mass produce them?).. I wonder....
Remember that the announcment of the technology and the announcement of the application of the technology are not the same thing. For all we know based on the released material the working technology demonstrator might be the size of a buick to hold all the supporting gear and require a supply of 10Kv @ 400GHz or something. Now they know they can do it, the challenge is to figure out how to put it on your desktop.
Having said that, and IBM being who we are, I some how doubt if the researchers were allowed to even submit their paper to Science without having a very good start on turning this into a deliverable technology. (just imagine what they get to put in the "W" accomplishment section of their PBCs now....:)
I keep seeing people looking at the barage of IBM announcements regarding support for, or partnerships with this distro or that distro as a sign that they've exclusivly allied with a given distro. Damn it people, wake up and smell the bit rot!/rant IBM supports the four major distros equally. See the official position at www.software.ibm.com/linux, from which I quote:
IBM will work with four commercial distributors of Linux -- Caldera Systems Inc., Pacific HiTech Inc., Red Hat Software Inc. and S.u.S.E. Holding AG -- to pave the way for co-marketing, development, training and support initiatives that will help customers deploy Linux solutions in their enterprises.
For some IBM accounts Linux is a viable platform in the small to medium business situation where NT is trying to compete. Even MS is saying that Linux is a threat to NT. (odds are they view that as lip service for the beneifit of the DOJ, but/.ers know better, and so does IBM.) That is exactly the market IBM is chasing with Linux on it's NetFinity machines.
If NT can capture the small-to-mid market from the likes of Sun, HP, Reliant and IBM then they'll have a foothold into the midrange computing market and leverage to try getting into the big iron that made IBM who they are today. This must not be allowed to happen.
How can anyone compete? Bundle a fast, robust, and accepted operating system onto "top of the line comodity hardware" (that isn't an oxymoron... it's a description of the NetFinity line of servers and the Intellistation line of workstations.) With the savings in OS by choosing Linux, you can afford the extra for the hardware when you're on the kind of shoestring budgets many in the small-to-mid market have.
Add to that the support and backing that IS IBM and customers will be checking the "OS upgrade to Linux (from Windows NT Server)" box on their order forms in droves... and we all know what that means: work for those who grok.
Supporting Linux in this way (at least) slows M$'s domination of the small IT departments in the world, and therefore protects IBM's assets. IBM has announced and will continue to announce new deals, partnerships, support statements, products, etc for quite a while. You need only look at the whole picture instead of any one given press release to see that this is a strategic move for IBM and it will not/can not/should not be one that happens overnight. If you think we've seen anything come out of this so far, you're in for an eye-opening surprise I suspect.
With the ill-concieved death of OS/2 commited by some clueless half wit in a suit in Poughkipsee IBM needs a midrange OS on Intel platforms, with Linux they get one that they them sleves don't own, so M$ has even less ground to screw them on license fees for Winblows than they did while OS/2 was alive. I see Linux taking the place of OS/2 as the IBM prefered OS in the small-to-mid market where they currently have NO operating system available for new deployments. I do not speak for IBM. IBM does not speak for me. It's better that way...
"!ErrorBookmarkNotDefined" raised a couple of issues that I think need to be addressed, but haven't been yet.
"I'm dubious about the need for another JDK 1.1.x port."
Let's look at who released this JVM... I.B.M. As we all know the 'B' stands for Business. In the business world no one has applications ready for Java2 yet, and the companies who are deploying mission critical apps want the maturity of the 11 systems. IBM didn't release this for philantropic reasons, rather they have several products in the market today and announced for tommorow that require a good, fast, stable, serviceable JVM under them. This same thought path can explain the release of the "IBM Developer Kit for Windows(R), Java(TM) Technology Edition". Why else would big blue want to make a JVM for the M$ desktop? Because they needed one to support their products. They couldn't use M$'s because it wasn't compliant and therefore broke a lot of stuff. They couldn't rely on the Sun reference implmentaion because it simply can't handle "enterprise" level usage. (try to keep an RMI based server up under load for more than a few hours on Sun's 117B... I dare you. Then try it on IBM's JVM.)
IBM is the biggest player in the industry, having created dozens of different architectures over they years, and they still support a very wide variety of those hardware platforms. They have customers who are still DEPLOYED on System 34s (1960s technology) which will become permanently obsolete in about 200 days. Faced with this historical dead weight IBM is the corporation with the most to gain from leveraging Java's crossplatform nature.
"Particularly one with such a low version number."
IBM's unix VMs have typically skipped the odd release numbers... any AIX Java user will confirm that they went from a112 to a114 to a116... each of which had at least four refreshes over it's life via IBM's PTF mechanism. I doubt a118 is finished yet, so 116 is the current IBM Unix JVM.
Three other points raised by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined were:
automatic non-classpath byte code verification.
RMI that doesn't hog port 1099, and can be tweaked with a security policy
speaking of security, the boolean sandbox model in 1.1.x is either too restrictive or too liberal for e-ware. JDK 1.2's fine-grained policies are needed to do anything non-trivial in Linux java.
Well, the answers to those are
use -verify... if you don't want to forget it "fix" the wrapper script.
Moving the RMI registry off port 1099 is trivial so don't give me that crap.
the boolean sandbox isn't meant for real security... neither is the fine grained headache that is introduced by Java2. Real security needs to take place at the application layer as well as at the comm layer. Applications which need security, or other complex issues such as transactional processing, or distributed process/thread scopes will extend RMI, or reimplement it.
"IXX" said "Its funny that I see info on IBM software releases here before I see them on the IBM internal web site.:)" yup that's an understatement... someone inside the JTC laughed when I asked if the rummors were true, just a week ago. I get the feeling this was kept hush-hush and done quickly. Ixx continued "When I can start developing for Linux (at IBM) instead of just using it as a desk top I will be very happy:)" to which an AC responded... "Just grab the source of the project you're working on and start porting it in your free time. If you can get a working prototype, your managers will love you for it." Umm... don't be so sure. sigh.
I don't speak for IBM, IBM doesn't speak for me. It's better that way.
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(a). 900 Mhz phones are digital.
... great error injector for systems' test labrats. I'd like to find something convienent in the 33/66Mhz range to screw with PCI... ;>
Not all of them. The one sitting here next to me is 900Mhz, and very much analog. Thus I can - and yes I've tried it, it worked - listen to it on a cheapo RadShack scanner.
yep, 25Mhz is used for RC planes etc, can have some real fun with old 25 Mhz machines though
Access the disk drive (LOAD "*",8,1 [return]).
Eh gads! the memories that brings back. . . .
honorary or otherwise, when you receive a PhD your "name" becomes "John Doe, PhD" not "Dr. John Doe".
"Linus Torvalds, PhD." -- that just sounds cool.
So yes, it will work... then it will be a matter of internal politics to get it situation fixed, and depending on how deeply the hook is set before they try to start reeling in it may actually do some serious long term harm. But I predict there will be some havens of *nix scattered around and that this will only make them stronger, as more good people get forced out of the schools micros~1 takes over.
>start a "3.0 experimental" tree with major new features like clustering
Actually that "tree" exists in every OS lab on every college campus, and in every corporate R&D lab in the world, and in the mind of every kernel hacker on the net. The "experimental" tree you want needs to start from an stable kernel and attempt to add some specific feature to it from the outside - not part of the kernel development, but part of a standalone function development. Then the knowledge and experience that is gained from that endeavor comes back into the next release level (major or minor - depending on how big it is) and gets re-implemented (well, hopefully... in reality there will be some copy and paste-ism). Any time you're playing with cutting edge stuff the first draft is ususally less than optimal for general use... but oh the lessons you learned! How many times have you been involved in something to come back after several months and have to fix a bug only to ask "why did I structure it like this??"
This was the "insightful" post... not the half witted rant that preceded it.
There are actually even more reasons why mWave technology is good... one of them being seamless - software - upgrades. I had a loaner 600E last week and was able to change back and forth from a 56K modem to a 33.6 modem without even loging out of Winblows NT. On the TP755CDX I used to have I was able to upgrade from a 28.8 to 33.6 to 56K without any expense; that was great. mWave technology has also made it into a few other IBM products btw, including the craptiva line of desktops... so develop it once and you make a LOT of hardware more friendly to Linux.
Now if only we could get people to STOP calling it a WinMODEM! Oh, and I suspect the reason the lawyers wont let the code out the doors are patent issues... IBM tends to protect it's patents....
Alan, thanks first for taking the time to do this "interview" with /.
I'm wondering what you think about the recent "competing" Unix vendors decisions to jump on the Linux bandwagon? I'm thinking of IBM, SGI, HP, and Sun for example... all of them have unices they sell with thier boxen, yet they've started jumping in and trying to support/ship Linux? I've heard the opinions of the folks who develop one of those unices... so I'm interested in yours for comparison.
[Truth in advertising: I work for one of these companies, but not anywhere near our Linux efforts; sigh.]
Did any of them graduate? ;)
It's been done: AS/400 Architectural Overview.
I'd love to see it in Linux 4.x though
Is it that far behind in R&D? I'd think not, since they have it, and it works, etc.. but, if they're claiming that much time to make it commercially available (how long does it really take to mass produce them?).. I wonder....
Remember that the announcment of the technology and the announcement of the application of the technology are not the same thing. For all we know based on the released material the working technology demonstrator might be the size of a buick to hold all the supporting gear and require a supply of 10Kv @ 400GHz or something. Now they know they can do it, the challenge is to figure out how to put it on your desktop.
Having said that, and IBM being who we are, I some how doubt if the researchers were allowed to even submit their paper to Science without having a very good start on turning this into a deliverable technology. (just imagine what they get to put in the "W" accomplishment section of their PBCs now.... :)
title should have been...
(IBM && Linux); !(IBM && (this || that).distro);
I keep seeing people looking at the barage of IBM announcements regarding support for, or partnerships with this distro or that distro as a sign that they've exclusivly allied with a given distro. Damn it people, wake up and smell the bit rot! /rant IBM supports the four major distros equally. See the official position at www.software.ibm.com/linux, from which I quote:
For some IBM accounts Linux is a viable platform in the small to medium business situation where NT is trying to compete. Even MS is saying that Linux is a threat to NT. (odds are they view that as lip service for the beneifit of the DOJ, but /.ers know better, and so does IBM.) That is exactly the market IBM is chasing with Linux on it's NetFinity machines.
If NT can capture the small-to-mid market from the likes of Sun, HP, Reliant and IBM then they'll have a foothold into the midrange computing market and leverage to try getting into the big iron that made IBM who they are today. This must not be allowed to happen.
How can anyone compete? Bundle a fast, robust, and accepted operating system onto "top of the line comodity hardware" (that isn't an oxymoron... it's a description of the NetFinity line of servers and the Intellistation line of workstations.) With the savings in OS by choosing Linux, you can afford the extra for the hardware when you're on the kind of shoestring budgets many in the small-to-mid market have.
Add to that the support and backing that IS IBM and customers will be checking the "OS upgrade to Linux (from Windows NT Server)" box on their order forms in droves... and we all know what that means: work for those who grok.
Supporting Linux in this way (at least) slows M$'s domination of the small IT departments in the world, and therefore protects IBM's assets. IBM has announced and will continue to announce new deals, partnerships, support statements, products, etc for quite a while. You need only look at the whole picture instead of any one given press release to see that this is a strategic move for IBM and it will not/can not/should not be one that happens overnight. If you think we've seen anything come out of this so far, you're in for an eye-opening surprise I suspect.
With the ill-concieved death of OS/2 commited by some clueless half wit in a suit in Poughkipsee IBM needs a midrange OS on Intel platforms, with Linux they get one that they them sleves don't own, so M$ has even less ground to screw them on license fees for Winblows than they did while OS/2 was alive. I see Linux taking the place of OS/2 as the IBM prefered OS in the small-to-mid market where they currently have NO operating system available for new deployments. I do not speak for IBM.
IBM does not speak for me.
It's better that way...
"!ErrorBookmarkNotDefined" raised a couple of issues that I think need to be addressed, but haven't been yet.
Let's look at who released this JVM... I.B.M. As we all know the 'B' stands for Business. In the business world no one has applications ready for Java2 yet, and the companies who are deploying mission critical apps want the maturity of the 11 systems. IBM didn't release this for philantropic reasons, rather they have several products in the market today and announced for tommorow that require a good, fast, stable, serviceable JVM under them. This same thought path can explain the release of the "IBM Developer Kit for Windows(R), Java(TM) Technology Edition". Why else would big blue want to make a JVM for the M$ desktop? Because they needed one to support their products. They couldn't use M$'s because it wasn't compliant and therefore broke a lot of stuff. They couldn't rely on the Sun reference implmentaion because it simply can't handle "enterprise" level usage. (try to keep an RMI based server up under load for more than a few hours on Sun's 117B... I dare you. Then try it on IBM's JVM.)
IBM is the biggest player in the industry, having created dozens of different architectures over they years, and they still support a very wide variety of those hardware platforms. They have customers who are still DEPLOYED on System 34s (1960s technology) which will become permanently obsolete in about 200 days. Faced with this historical dead weight IBM is the corporation with the most to gain from leveraging Java's crossplatform nature.
IBM's unix VMs have typically skipped the odd release numbers... any AIX Java user will confirm that they went from a112 to a114 to a116... each of which had at least four refreshes over it's life via IBM's PTF mechanism. I doubt a118 is finished yet, so 116 is the current IBM Unix JVM.
Three other points raised by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined were:- automatic non-classpath byte code verification.
- RMI that doesn't hog port 1099, and can be tweaked with a security policy
- speaking of security, the boolean sandbox model in 1.1.x is either too restrictive or too liberal for e-ware. JDK 1.2's fine-grained policies are needed to do anything non-trivial in Linux java.
Well, the answers to those are"IXX" said "Its funny that I see info on IBM software releases here before I see them on the IBM internal web site. :)" yup that's an understatement... someone inside the JTC laughed when I asked if the rummors were true, just a week ago. I get the feeling this was kept hush-hush and done quickly. Ixx continued "When I can start developing for Linux (at IBM) instead of just using it as a desk top I will be very happy :)" to which an AC responded... "Just grab the source of the project you're working on and start porting it in your free time. If you can get a working prototype, your managers will love you for it." Umm... don't be so sure. sigh.
I don't speak for IBM,IBM doesn't speak for me.
It's better that way.