it's not so much that 2D outright sucks, as it is that they put FLAT low quality 2D characters on top of beautifly rich 3D sets. The juxtaposition looked awful.
it's not that the took the shell, shoved a browser into it and took out all the other interfaces. this is taking the browser and stuffing a shell into it. very cool, but not the crap micro$~1 was pulling.
it's Caldera not Corel... truely excellent post otherwise.
Officially worded as: "IBM provides how-to and defect support for the four major distributions of the Linux OS: Red Hat Linux, Caldera OpenLinux, TurboLinux, and SuSE Linux."
Wonder if they'll include smit/smitty or something like that?
I hope not, I really do. smit/smitty are just wrappers (smit is tc/tkl) that exec the real commands anyway, I'd rather have the command lines with better documentation.
Now the new WebSM system would certainly be welcome... especially if they provided the WHOLE thing, instead of just the part for LVMS... that would put linuxconf and all the others into the "also ran" category in no time flat.
yeah, I think that was John Patrick... proving why he gets let out without handlers, as opposed to say Armitage... who's now the sr exec vp in charge of *nix or something like that. She's made a couple of statements internally that clearly showed she *didn't get it*, and pissed of a number of open source developers that happen to also be IBMers in the process.
your second line still groks code? wow... we're convinced ours' head would explode like in that dilbert cartoon. (of course that means he'd have to like, show up once in a while... but that's a different story.)
Anyway, as others have pointed out, this isn't really news, we've been shipping preconfigured machines with Suse, Caldera, Turbo and Redhat for some time now... all you have to do is place your order by phone and ASK for it. (assuming it's supported hardware.) There's a guy down the hall at work that just got a 600E preloaded... personally I'll wait for the a20's price to come down... or for a cruesoe based system... 'cuz I'll bet that 700Mhz mobile PIII will heat up a bit on ac power on your lap, I've already burnt my leg with an old 770... and that was just a 266 Pentium!
IBM's new a20p has the same 15" 1400x1050 SXGA+, but it also has a 700Mhz PIII with speed step (saves power in battery mode). comes with 18 Gb of DASD, and up to 1/2 Gb of RAM. An ATI Rage Mobility with 16Mb capable of 1600x1200@16M colors. Pricewise the a20p is only slightly more expensive than the Dell you mention. and it has pretty much the same feature set. The biggest difference is in the trackpoint versus trackpad.
odds are that most of that space that was not able to be mapped into a partition table (read: MOST of that dasd) is jfs file space dedicated to an AIX installation or two.
because they used to do that... then the government came down on them hard enough to make what Billy boy and company are undergoing right now look like a love pat. One of the big complaints was that IBM would hear about some competeing technology announce plans for something that just blew it out of the water, resulting in the competitor going under 'cause no one was interested, or being bought out by IBM 'cause they all of a sudden became very cheap ('cause no one was interested anymore) then tanking the plans (if there were any) before realsing a product. the old IBM agreed not to do that anymore, even with the transformations it is still the standard opperating proceedure, and you'd better have a damn good reason to go against that when you go to the exec's for permission to break that rule. There are technologies in our labs the like of which/. users would drool over (trust me!) but we can't even think about mentioning them untill they're in a product and it's ready to ship. period. end of discusion.
I did various forms of vision training for the first 10 years of my life... the "improvement" was purely cosmetic. I actually have pretty good muscle control, I can control exactly which eye I'm using at any point in time and switch back and forth between them *very* rapidly (enough to give both me and my eye doctor a headache due to the resulting blur:)
I was wondering if anyone would post that little problem....
I have a bit more than just a "lazy eye", I'm flat out "wall eyed". Each of my eyes looks seperately in it's own direction, whichever one I'm not 'using' at any given point in time tends to wander off in a different direction (loads of trouble with members of the opposite gender) although there is some corelation to the movement (i've watched many hours of tape of my own eyes). Anyway I was born this way, so my eyes have never both focused on any given point - and as a result my brain simply doesn't grok the concept of putting the two signals together into a "3D" world. This was painfully proven when I participated in a reasearch project where they used head mounted displays that were independently positioned for each eye, so that in a non-moving "rest" state each looked directly into the display. The result was a lot of major headaches to say the least.
The bottom line is that "magic-eye" posters, red/blue 3d glasses, vr gogles, and this technology are bloody useless to me and anyone else with monocular vision; but then who cares? I don't. Go for it folks, if you can make this level of technology then just imagine what else you'll be able to do with what you learned trying to make it work.
22. A method for providing end-user access to a database service on a remote host comprising:
remotely accessing a database by
a) initiating a starter client on a local host in response to an indication by an end user of a desire to access the database service;
opening a program when you double click on it's icon that
b) sending an access start request from the starter client on the local host to a remote host;
sends a logon query to
c) receiving the access start request at the remote host;
the server
d) activating a remote object client at the remote host in response to the access start request, wherein the remote object client:
which spins a thread, to service the request
1) translates query information received from the local host in a first format from the first format into a database request format;
by translating from SQL to the native binary query format
2) issues the database request to a database service;
does the query,
3) receives from the database service a response to the database request;
get the data,
4) formats the response into a human interface request; and
puts it together into a response which
5) issues the human interface request to a human interface server on the local host; and
it sends back to the client
e) presenting the human interface from the human interface server to the end user on the local host.
which puts it into a pretty table or something.
ok, now how many programs do THAT? and how many of them have been around a LOT longer than 1996?
but it gets better still....
23. A computer network for providing end user access to a database, the computer network comprising:
I'm not even going to read this one to you....
a plurality of computers, each computer including a user input that includes a keyboard and a pointing device and access input from an end user and includes a user output that includes a display that presents output to the end user, the user input and the user output forming a graphical user interface, each computer executing software to issue a request to initiate communication with a remote computer and executing software to generate commands to the graphical user interface;
a database located remotely from the plurality of computers and platform independent of each of the plurality of computers, the database including a plurality of database entries; and
a server remotely coupled to the plurality of computers, the server executing software to receive a request to initiate communication from one of the computers and, after the communication is initiated, to receive an access request from one of the computers for access to the database and, in response to the access request, translating the access request into a format understandable by the database and querying the database for at least one of the database entries software executing at the server providing the at least one database entry to the user output of the one of the computers.
24. The computer network of claim 23, wherein the database is resident at the server.
25. The computer network of claim 23, wherein the database is remote from the servers.
holly cow. what kinda stones does it take to pattent a friken network....
and as if that wasn't bad enough... check his other two patents: 5,544,320 and 5,544,320
ya know, if eBay actually followed the standards on this here internet thing, instead of just trying to exploit it then maybe I could understand this... in fact I'd even cheer for it. BUT http://www.ebay.com/robots.txt is 404 so the whole thing just lost are respectability.
belgin and timothy are not alone in the fear of where this might lead, that's for sure... I hate spammers with a passion, but I'm not sure if I really want to start down the road this could take.
Anyway, I much perfer Julian's philosophy over at spamcop.net: "Protecting the internet community through technology, not legislation." If you're sick of spam and want a way to slap those responsible, then join up (or don't, there is a free service as well) and parse all your spamage. But please read the intro and the FAQ, we need to preserve the image that spamcop has in the minds of the abuse desks; it's only a tool being put in your hands, YOU are responsible for what you use it for.
and besides, an address like cabbey@spamcop.net, is bound to make a would be spammer queasy.... (note: happy spamcop user, not an admin.)
I did this afternoon. Management was in the room at the time too. One of our important customers is having a wierd problem with out server software, and we're trying to recreate it in the lab. Working on a single network segment wasn't recreating the problem so we wanted to have two with a wan link between them (like the customer)... while we were waiting for the wan people to show up I had one of the guys throw a second ethernet card into a spare lab machine while I disected the hubs. Then installed RH6.2, configuring both ehternet cards in the process, reboot, login and 'cat 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward'. done. While it was copying files from the cd management was on the phone with the CEO of the customer and even TOLD him "one of our developers is seting up a Linux box as a router between two ethernets to see if we can recreate it that way."
actually I think this was a package delivery firm... there was a similar story floating around at work a few months back.
Now if I were the person responsible for implementing this wild hair the FIRST thing I would do is to advise the users... after all, as an IT person the first priority is to keep the users functional, and they should be advised in advance of all planned outages. The way I'd do this is to forward the idiot's email to everyone in the company with the following notice (oh, and make sure you scale up the email node he's on, and give him and his management chain an increase in their mail quota;)
Attention all users: per executive direction (see below), effective midnight tommorow the services listed below will be shutdown untill further notice (and substantial funding).
email (send and recv) internal web services external web proxies network printing (all queues) all file servers (your home directory, your project directory, etc...) the directory server (corp telephone index) ...
JMS always said he was filming in wide screen... I could only hope about the DVD part; but since he's a bit of a perfrectionist I would expect no less. Oh this is good news.... a lot of us in rastb5.mod were asking why the SciFi Channel didn't just go get the rights from WB sooner. Hopefully this'll replace Lexx. It would make for a great double header with Farscape (about to start, so I gotta get going).
did y'all actually take it apart? or were you guestimating from the outside? I heard today at work that some enterprising EEs got together and bought one just to disect it... their estimate at current wholesale costs was about US$300, and I don't think that included the flatpanel. netpliance is definently selling these at a loss and expecting the ISP and other services money to make up for it... I'll bet their IPO prospectus pretty much says that in the risks section.
gee... why does that ISP sound familiar? hmmm.... I wonder.... could it be? at home? uh yupp. from the sounds of things you nailed it, missed a few of the recent additions to the customer service part... especially popular lately is the "blame the user" stage at level 2... a group of trained monkies I can only assume from talking to them on the phone....
here's a real life example of using a shared resource (a 5 1/4" floppy drive) as a communication channel that has worked well for years. In the IS office that this is in (and I'm not naming names cause I know one of their managers reads/.) the main server room is on the far side of a cube farm where the grunts in the IS staff sit. Located in the main server room is a print server with an old 5 1/4" drive that rattles really loudy when you try to access it without a floppy, almost every member of the IS dept has that drive mapped on thier desktop machines. It makes the perfect alarm bell... any time management comes into the cube farm and walks down the side isle then someone will see them and hit refresh on that mapped drive which will ring the alarm in the server room and warn the occupants of the room of managements impending approach... we won't go into why they might need warning... use your imagination.;)
ohh.... I want one... no, make that three... one for work, one for my home office and one for the living room 'cuz it would just be cool for the friends to see when they came over and not have it covered with crap like my real desks. Just one problem:
Poetic Technologies is currently taking orders and will begin shipping AURA modules in February, 1999. Sold at a price of $5500 ($8500 cad.) for the base product[...]
This on a web page not updated since November 1998 is NOT an encouraging sign.
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it's not so much that 2D outright sucks, as it is that they put FLAT low quality 2D characters on top of beautifly rich 3D sets. The juxtaposition looked awful.
it's not that the took the shell, shoved a browser into it and took out all the other interfaces. this is taking the browser and stuffing a shell into it. very cool, but not the crap micro$~1 was pulling.
it's Caldera not Corel... truely excellent post otherwise.
Officially worded as: "IBM provides how-to and defect support for the four major distributions of the Linux OS: Red Hat Linux, Caldera OpenLinux, TurboLinux, and SuSE Linux."
Wonder if they'll
include smit/smitty or something like that?
I hope not, I really do. smit/smitty are just wrappers (smit is tc/tkl) that exec the real commands anyway, I'd rather have the command lines with better documentation.
Now the new WebSM system would certainly be welcome... especially if they provided the WHOLE thing, instead of just the part for LVMS... that would put linuxconf and all the others into the "also ran" category in no time flat.
yeah, I think that was John Patrick... proving why he gets let out without handlers, as opposed to say Armitage... who's now the sr exec vp in charge of *nix or something like that. She's made a couple of statements internally that clearly showed she *didn't get it*, and pissed of a number of open source developers that happen to also be IBMers in the process.
As long as they don't try and give linux the AIX printing system :-)
what's your problem with lpr and postscript? Linux already uses both anyway.
your second line still groks code? wow... we're convinced ours' head would explode like in that dilbert cartoon. (of course that means he'd have to like, show up once in a while... but that's a different story.)
BTW, it's "DB2" and not "DB/2" .. people saying the latter pisses the hell out of folks here :-)
on a related note, is it "DB2 UDB" or "UDB" or "DB2/UDB" or "DB2, UDB Edition" or...? I've seen every one of them out of {y}our marketing folks.
umm... hello?
Been There, Done That.
It was called OS/2, perhaps you remember it?
Anyway, as others have pointed out, this isn't really news, we've been shipping preconfigured machines with Suse, Caldera, Turbo and Redhat for some time now... all you have to do is place your order by phone and ASK for it. (assuming it's supported hardware.) There's a guy down the hall at work that just got a 600E preloaded... personally I'll wait for the a20's price to come down... or for a cruesoe based system... 'cuz I'll bet that 700Mhz mobile PIII will heat up a bit on ac power on your lap, I've already burnt my leg with an old 770... and that was just a 266 Pentium!
IBM's new a20p has the same 15" 1400x1050 SXGA+, but it also has a 700Mhz PIII with speed step (saves power in battery mode). comes with 18 Gb of DASD, and up to 1/2 Gb of RAM. An ATI Rage Mobility with 16Mb capable of 1600x1200@16M colors. Pricewise the a20p is only slightly more expensive than the Dell you mention. and it has pretty much the same feature set. The biggest difference is in the trackpoint versus trackpad.
odds are that most of that space that was not able to be mapped into a partition table (read: MOST of that dasd) is jfs file space dedicated to an AIX installation or two.
because they used to do that... then the government came down on them hard enough to make what Billy boy and company are undergoing right now look like a love pat. One of the big complaints was that IBM would hear about some competeing technology announce plans for something that just blew it out of the water, resulting in the competitor going under 'cause no one was interested, or being bought out by IBM 'cause they all of a sudden became very cheap ('cause no one was interested anymore) then tanking the plans (if there were any) before realsing a product. the old IBM agreed not to do that anymore, even with the transformations it is still the standard opperating proceedure, and you'd better have a damn good reason to go against that when you go to the exec's for permission to break that rule. There are technologies in our labs the like of which /. users would drool over (trust me!) but we can't even think about mentioning them untill they're in a product and it's ready to ship. period. end of discusion.
I did various forms of vision training for the first 10 years of my life... the "improvement" was purely cosmetic. I actually have pretty good muscle control, I can control exactly which eye I'm using at any point in time and switch back and forth between them *very* rapidly (enough to give both me and my eye doctor a headache due to the resulting blur :)
I was wondering if anyone would post that little problem....
I have a bit more than just a "lazy eye", I'm flat out "wall eyed". Each of my eyes looks seperately in it's own direction, whichever one I'm not 'using' at any given point in time tends to wander off in a different direction (loads of trouble with members of the opposite gender) although there is some corelation to the movement (i've watched many hours of tape of my own eyes). Anyway I was born this way, so my eyes have never both focused on any given point - and as a result my brain simply doesn't grok the concept of putting the two signals together into a "3D" world. This was painfully proven when I participated in a reasearch project where they used head mounted displays that were independently positioned for each eye, so that in a non-moving "rest" state each looked directly into the display. The result was a lot of major headaches to say the least.
The bottom line is that "magic-eye" posters, red/blue 3d glasses, vr gogles, and this technology are bloody useless to me and anyone else with monocular vision; but then who cares? I don't. Go for it folks, if you can make this level of technology then just imagine what else you'll be able to do with what you learned trying to make it work.
take a look at a few of the last claims...
22. A method for providing end-user access to a database service on a remote host comprising:
remotely accessing a database by
a) initiating a starter client on a local host in response to an indication by an end user of a desire to access the database service;
opening a program when you double click on it's icon that
b) sending an access start request from the starter client on the local host to a remote host;
sends a logon query to
c) receiving the access start request at the remote host;
the server
d) activating a remote object client at the remote host in response to the access start request, wherein the remote object client:
which spins a thread, to service the request
1) translates query information received from the local host in a first format from the first format into a database request format;
by translating from SQL to the native binary query format
2) issues the database request to a database service;
does the query,
3) receives from the database service a response to the database request;
get the data,
4) formats the response into a human interface request; and
puts it together into a response which
5) issues the human interface request to a human interface server on the local host; and
it sends back to the client
e) presenting the human interface from the human interface server to the end user on the local host.
which puts it into a pretty table or something.
ok, now how many programs do THAT? and how many of them have been around a LOT longer than 1996?
but it gets better still....
23. A computer network for providing end user access to a database, the computer network comprising:
I'm not even going to read this one to you....
a plurality of computers, each computer including a user input that includes a keyboard and a pointing device and access input from an end
user and includes a user output that includes a display that presents output to the end user, the user input and the user output forming a
graphical user interface, each computer executing software to issue a request to initiate communication with a remote computer and executing
software to generate commands to the graphical user interface;
a database located remotely from the plurality of computers and platform independent of each of the plurality of computers, the database
including a plurality of database entries; and
a server remotely coupled to the plurality of computers, the server executing software to receive a request to initiate communication from one of
the computers and, after the communication is initiated, to receive an access request from one of the computers for access to the database and, in
response to the access request, translating the access request into a format understandable by the database and querying the database for at least
one of the database entries software executing at the server providing the at least one database entry to the user output of the one of the
computers.
24. The computer network of claim 23, wherein the database is resident at the server.
25. The computer network of claim 23, wherein the database is remote from the servers.
holly cow. what kinda stones does it take to pattent a friken network....
and as if that wasn't bad enough... check his other two patents: 5,544,320 and 5,544,320
Tim was right, the USPTO is a mess.
ya know, if eBay actually followed the standards on this here internet thing, instead of just trying to exploit it then maybe I could understand this... in fact I'd even cheer for it. BUT http://www.ebay.com/robots.txt is 404 so the whole thing just lost are respectability.
belgin and timothy are not alone in the fear of where this might lead, that's for sure... I hate spammers with a passion, but I'm not sure if I really want to start down the road this could take.
Anyway, I much perfer Julian's philosophy over at spamcop.net: "Protecting the internet community through technology, not legislation." If you're sick of spam and want a way to slap those responsible, then join up (or don't, there is a free service as well) and parse all your spamage. But please read the intro and the FAQ, we need to preserve the image that spamcop has in the minds of the abuse desks; it's only a tool being put in your hands, YOU are responsible for what you use it for.
and besides, an address like cabbey@spamcop.net, is bound to make a would be spammer queasy.... (note: happy spamcop user, not an admin.)
I did this afternoon. Management was in the room at the time too. One of our important customers is having a wierd problem with out server software, and we're trying to recreate it in the lab. Working on a single network segment wasn't recreating the problem so we wanted to have two with a wan link between them (like the customer)... while we were waiting for the wan people to show up I had one of the guys throw a second ethernet card into a spare lab machine while I disected the hubs. Then installed RH6.2, configuring both ehternet cards in the process, reboot, login and 'cat 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward'. done. While it was copying files from the cd management was on the phone with the CEO of the customer and even TOLD him "one of our developers is seting up a Linux box as a router between two ethernets to see if we can recreate it that way."
actually I think this was a package delivery firm... there was a similar story floating around at work a few months back.
;)
Now if I were the person responsible for implementing this wild hair the FIRST thing I would do is to advise the users... after all, as an IT person the first priority is to keep the users functional, and they should be advised in advance of all planned outages. The way I'd do this is to forward the idiot's email to everyone in the company with the following notice (oh, and make sure you scale up the email node he's on, and give him and his management chain an increase in their mail quota
Attention all users: per executive direction (see below), effective midnight tommorow the services listed below will be shutdown untill further notice (and substantial funding).
email (send and recv)
internal web services
external web proxies
network printing (all queues)
all file servers (your home directory, your project directory, etc...)
the directory server (corp telephone index)
...
>It would be interesting to know if what the patent decribes is the technology behind PKZIP.
it is. compare the patent number to the one displayed in the help text.
JMS always said he was filming in wide screen... I could only hope about the DVD part; but since he's a bit of a perfrectionist I would expect no less. Oh this is good news.... a lot of us in rastb5.mod were asking why the SciFi Channel didn't just go get the rights from WB sooner. Hopefully this'll replace Lexx. It would make for a great double header with Farscape (about to start, so I gotta get going).
<*>
did y'all actually take it apart? or were you guestimating from the outside? I heard today at work that some enterprising EEs got together and bought one just to disect it... their estimate at current wholesale costs was about US$300, and I don't think that included the flatpanel. netpliance is definently selling these at a loss and expecting the ISP and other services money to make up for it... I'll bet their IPO prospectus pretty much says that in the risks section.
gee... why does that ISP sound familiar? hmmm.... I wonder.... could it be? at home? uh yupp. from the sounds of things you nailed it, missed a few of the recent additions to the customer service part... especially popular lately is the "blame the user" stage at level 2... a group of trained monkies I can only assume from talking to them on the phone....
here's a real life example of using a shared resource (a 5 1/4" floppy drive) as a communication channel that has worked well for years. In the IS office that this is in (and I'm not naming names cause I know one of their managers reads /.) the main server room is on the far side of a cube farm where the grunts in the IS staff sit. Located in the main server room is a print server with an old 5 1/4" drive that rattles really loudy when you try to access it without a floppy, almost every member of the IS dept has that drive mapped on thier desktop machines. It makes the perfect alarm bell... any time management comes into the cube farm and walks down the side isle then someone will see them and hit refresh on that mapped drive which will ring the alarm in the server room and warn the occupants of the room of managements impending approach... we won't go into why they might need warning... use your imagination. ;)
This on a web page not updated since November 1998 is NOT an encouraging sign.