The net present value of a college degree in the U.S. is greater than $100,000 plus the two years of tuition saved. However, if you were going to drop out anyway, it's a good deal. Or, if you can drop out for a minimum period of time, take the gamble, then go back, it might be a somewhat good deal.
According to press reports, Sun didn't accept IBM's best and final offer, which was only a couple pennies per share below Oracle's eventual winning bid. With hindsight, it appears IBM smelled a rotting corpse. Sometimes losing honorably is the big win.
According to IDC, in the 4th quarter of 2010 Oracle/Sun had $883 million in server hardware revenue. Thus, on a quarter-to-quarter basis, Oracle was down substantially in the 1st quarter of 2011 (to $773 million). Oracle had what's called an "easy compare" -- very easy. I'd really like to see the unit shipment numbers, though, because I strongly suspect Oracle had to raise unit prices substantially to even make that $773M.
IDC also reports that IBM's System z mainframe hardware (only) revenue was $1.0 billion in the first quarter of 2011. From IDC's report it seems that counts only the z/OS machines and not the mainframes running other operating systems (e.g. Linux). Year over year, the IBM mainframe grew the fastest of any server type, up 41.1%. In other words, IBM's mainframe hardware business alone was about one third larger than Oracle's entire hardware business. Impressive and not impressive, respectively. I think IBM is more or less the Apple of the server industry, the only one left doing any substantial R&D and concentrating on qualities of service, which helps to explain why IBM mainframes contain 5.2 GHz CPUs, for example, when nobody else can get into the 4's. (Mainframe folks used to have to explain clock speed discrepancies, with justification. Now they don't even need to do that.) Sun used to be a big innovator, but, very sadly, that was long, long ago.
In other words, IDC is reporting that Oracle raised prices. That strategy works for a quarter or two, maybe. But it's a going out of business strategy.
Well before the Internet you could find as much "alternative" information as you could ever possibly read on all kinds of news events, including the Kennedy assassination, the Moon landing, and the Cold War, as examples. Racists (which is what "birthers" are) have always had their own kooky sources of "information." The Internet adds no new dimension to this ages-old human characteristic to believe something in spite of all evidence. As another example, the world's religions had absolutely no problem promulgating their views before the Internet, and for centuries the sun orbited the earth.
I think NEC has already started to transition ACOS to X86. (Itanium doesn't offer any value-add to ACOS except perhaps avoidance of endian emulation.) But who cares? ACOS is exclusively supported in Japan, is in maintenance mode only (like Hitachi's VOS3 and Fujitsu's MSP and XSP), and has even less marketshare than those Japanese competitors. If you collected all the Itanium chips NEC sold in a year to run ACOS they'd easily fit in a shoebox.
HP has very little software to offer, so with major software vendors (Microsoft, Red Hat, and now Oracle) fleeing Itanium, it certainly isn't good news for HP. Oracle Database is probably the most popular software product running on HP-UX, as a matter of fact, but Oracle's announcement represents the end of the line. Oracle has a lot of other significant products, too, like Tuxedo, WebLogic Application Server, and Siebel, among others. Ironically IBM may now be the biggest vendor of Itanium-compatible software. Of course this Oracle announcement is self-serving, but it's also brutally smart business strategy. Itanium really is dead as a doorstop without popular software. This move also kills HP's aspirations of overtaking IBM any time soon, and it also kills one of HP's more profitable business lines. (Well played, Larry.)
Michael Blaine Faulkner, his wife, and others allegedly fled to Mexico shortly after the 2009 raid. A federal grand jury handed down several felony indictments in January, 2010 (or possibly late 2009). Mexican authorities captured Faulkner and his associates in January, 2010, in Cancun where allegedly they were living under assumed names. They were extradited back to Texas. Faulkner petitioned for release pending trial, but that request was denied in March. The trial date was set for October, 2010, but I've seen no information on any trial yet.
Both standards were defined as exactly (or very close to) half the rate of the alternating current (AC) that powered them. In the U.S. 60 Hz AC is the standard, so NTSC could use a very simple circuit to translate that to 30 frames per second. The rate was decreased very slightly to about 59.94 Hz to assist with color encoding, and by that time the electronics were more advanced anyway.
Microsoft did create HPFS. Well, Gordon Letwin and his colleagues did, and they were working for Microsoft. It took IBM to rescue HPFS, and it got reasonably stable in the IBM OS/2 1.3x stream (i.e. the IBM fork, also known as the first quality OS/2 release). IBM still had to swat HPFS bugs well into the 2.1x stream, though. IBM completely reimplemented HPFS in format-compatible fashion as HPFS386 since HPFS was hopeless for servers. (HPFS had a very low and very static memory cache. HPFS386 at least lifted the very low part, and for file servers a statically sized cache wasn't too much of a problem. But I'm not sure what Letwin was thinking, since dynamic caching wasn't exactly a new idea when he was working.) Since IBM had to pay royalties for the crap anyway they pretty quickly ditched HPFS386 in favor of JFS, which is quite excellent technology. Modern JFS first appeared on OS/2 and then also spread to AIX, which is now the highest marketshare UNIX platform.
Harvard has a variety of final course requirements. A lot of courses require final papers which take a lot more than 3 hours to write. (That includes senior theses, which take a very long time to write.) A few require oral presentations, and some require projects. Still others require passing exams during the course itself. What's been going on for years (decades?) is that Harvard would schedule classrooms and staff to support test-taking only to find that professors had other ideas (and often at the "last minute," administratively speaking). Occasionally even the students didn't get the memo, and a few stranglers might show up only to find out there's no exam. All that said, I wish Harvard would provide professors and students with more guidance on assessments. The College should try to enforce some basic standards more effectively.
Derby Line is a town in Vermont and in Quebec. The town straddles the border. You can hold a (small) conference in the town's public library with some people physically in Canada and others physically in the United States.
The load of one plug-in recharging (about 2 kilowatts) is roughly the same as that of four or five plasma television sets. Plasma TVs hardly brought worries about grid crashes.
Probably because households buying plasma televisions purchase one, maybe two, and they are replacing cathode tube (with shadow mask) televisions which have been consuming electric load since the 1950s. And those plasma TVs are not operating for too many hours (hopefully), never mind that LCD televisions are far more popular. It's not surprising that many people are at least more concerned when typical two-car households each might add the equivalent of 8 to 10 plasma televisions of net new electricity consumption to the grid. Thankfully that consumption should be off-peak, especially if timed chargers and peak electricity pricing are mandated, but the plasma TV analogy breaks down very quickly.
That $663.8B figure is the President's request for FY2010. Congress increased that amount to $680B, and that's now law. But the budget is still short for Iraq and Afghanistan, so there's another $33B supplemental pending for FY2010. (Although Representative Lowey trimmed that to about $30B, so let's go with that.) That brings the total to $710B. And that's just the Department of Defense. Defense-related spending outside the DoD budget is a minimum of $200B. Let's round that total down to a total of $900B. And there you have it: defense spending is about two thirds of discretionary federal spending. The previous poster is correct.
T-Mobile's UMA-enabled phones do look like good choices. Their current line-up of UMA phones includes the BlackBerry Bold 9700, Curve 8520, and the Nokia E73 Mode. Shop around at T-Mobile directly (including any campus discounts), Wirefly.com, Amazon.com, etc.
Social Security has been maintaining records electronically for many decades, primarily using IBM mainframes (now a very few System z machines). Before that, SSA used IBM electromechanical tabulating equipment. Social Security can tell you today how much you earned, to the penny, decades ago. It has to: that's how certain benefits get calculated.
IT really isn't Arlington National Cemetery's core competency, nor should it be. That's often the problem with both public and private sectors: a relatively small organization struggles to implement a solution that dozens of other, larger departments have more or less solved already. I humbly suggest that Congress ought to consolidate IT projects so that a few good agencies can help other agencies. If 100 or more different agencies have to solve their own IT problems on their own, that really would be a waste of money and would achieve sub-optimal (or no) results. Social Security already carefully records all the death-related details of every American. There's even a searchable "death index." SSA just might be able to help Arlington if Congress could set up the organizational structures to foster better inter-agency cooperation.
Light sport aircraft are permitted at major airports in the U.S., including Class B airports. You may be thinking of the modest restrictions on traditional Experimental Category aircraft. Pilots with a sport pilot license must receive additional training and a specific endorsement to fly to/from airports within Class B, C, and D airspace, but there's no restriction on the LSA, assuming it is transponder-equipped.
After 13 years of trying to prove what wasn't true, in 1982 the U.S. Department of Justice dropped its antitrust case against IBM's mainframe business. In 1982, IBM mainframes had a much bigger share of the computing landscape. How could anyone possibly believe in 2010 that IBM's mainframe business is in any way monopolistic? Unless you think that Coca-Cola has a monopoly in Minute Maid-branded orange juice, or Toyota has a monopoly in Prius automobiles. (And that sort of argument ought to go over particularly well in Europe, home of the strongest brand names in the world, like Gucci, Prada, D&G, and Chanel.)
1. This list looks like it only covers the United States. That's too bad.
2. Moreover, most companies on the list don't have much business outside the U.S. Interesting.
3. There's a very wide variation in IT's percentage of the total company workforce, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern to that variability. Considering that the biggest part of the IT budget is typically salaries and benefits, it would be interesting to know why some companies consume so much more IT labor than others, even within the same industries.
4. Do any of these companies' IT workers enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement, or are they "at-will" employees?
5. IT contractors and temporary workers aren't mentioned, nor are outsourcing agreements. Are those workers excluded from the survey? It looks like it. Some (or many) of the company's IT workers may not actually work for the company, and they may be miserable, while IT employees who get paychecks directly from the company might be thrilled.
Benchmarks are for proving whether particular solutions can meet requirements. But you have to start with a weighted list of requirements first, and get agreement on that list, before you benchmark anything. That list of requirements will contain a lot more than the boot-up time or whether you can open a browser window infinitesimally faster. For example, you could equip every user with solid state disks to improve boot-up performance, but could you afford it, would those SSDs provide enough capacity, and would write performance suffer "unacceptably"? It depends on your company's requirements and relative weighting. Speaking of requirements, what are the power consumption requirements (including both direct electrical consumption and indirect cooling energy requirements to combat the generated heat)? PCs vary in that dimension, too, and in how well (and how deeply) they go into power saving modes in the real-world. Energy costs are often important in the lifecycle costs of PCs.
I agree with other commenters about warranties. Self-servicing may be cheaper and better: to keep a small stock of spare PCs and swap machines if there's a failure. It depends to some extent on how physically centralized your users are, though. I also concur with the advice to err on the side of more memory (and memory expandability) versus CPU clock speed, core count, etc.
The Altos 586 was available in 1983 and predated Western Digital's invention of IDE. Most likely the Altos 586 would have used the so-called ST-506 interface (also colloquially known at the time as the MFM or RLL interface), although SASI or a proprietary interface would have been possibilities. If it's ST-506 then you might be able to fire up a old 386 or 486 PC/AT-compatible with an old ST-506 controller and copy the contents of the drive using Linux. But I would agree with essentially everyone else: use one of the serial ports to get the data transferred. Xenix has uucp available, and uucp is also still available for today's operating systems. That'll work.
I don't think AT&T is voiding the cards. Washington, D.C., seems to be asserting that the card numbers should expire after three years. But why 3 years? Why not 5? Or 7? Or 10? Or 50? I assume AT&T will argue that 3 is arbitrary and, of course, too little time. I also assume that AT&T will argue that a certain federal agency in Washington, the FCC, regulates all things telephone, so (dear District), kindly go take it up with them. And, if those two arguments don't work, naturally AT&T would provide the District with about 386,200 calling cards, each with an average of 6 minutes of call time remaining, so that the city government can hold onto the actual unclaimed property until citizens reclaim their cards. After all, those citizens purchased minutes, and that's the unclaimed property in question. There's no cash there any more.
NoSQL? That'd Be DL/I, Right?
on
The NoSQL Ecosystem
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think I've heard of non-relational databases before. There's a particularly famous one, in fact. What could it be? Let's see: first started shipping in 1969, now in its eleventh major version, JDBC and ODBC access, full XML support in and out, available with an optional paired transaction manager, extremely high performance, and holds a very large chunk of the world's financial information (among other things). It also ranks up there with Microsoft Windows as among the world's all-time highest grossing software products.
....You bet non-relational is still highly relevant and useful in many different roles. Different tools for different jobs and all.
Slashdot Mirror
The net present value of a college degree in the U.S. is greater than $100,000 plus the two years of tuition saved. However, if you were going to drop out anyway, it's a good deal. Or, if you can drop out for a minimum period of time, take the gamble, then go back, it might be a somewhat good deal.
According to press reports, Sun didn't accept IBM's best and final offer, which was only a couple pennies per share below Oracle's eventual winning bid. With hindsight, it appears IBM smelled a rotting corpse. Sometimes losing honorably is the big win.
According to IDC, in the 4th quarter of 2010 Oracle/Sun had $883 million in server hardware revenue. Thus, on a quarter-to-quarter basis, Oracle was down substantially in the 1st quarter of 2011 (to $773 million). Oracle had what's called an "easy compare" -- very easy. I'd really like to see the unit shipment numbers, though, because I strongly suspect Oracle had to raise unit prices substantially to even make that $773M.
IDC also reports that IBM's System z mainframe hardware (only) revenue was $1.0 billion in the first quarter of 2011. From IDC's report it seems that counts only the z/OS machines and not the mainframes running other operating systems (e.g. Linux). Year over year, the IBM mainframe grew the fastest of any server type, up 41.1%. In other words, IBM's mainframe hardware business alone was about one third larger than Oracle's entire hardware business. Impressive and not impressive, respectively. I think IBM is more or less the Apple of the server industry, the only one left doing any substantial R&D and concentrating on qualities of service, which helps to explain why IBM mainframes contain 5.2 GHz CPUs, for example, when nobody else can get into the 4's. (Mainframe folks used to have to explain clock speed discrepancies, with justification. Now they don't even need to do that.) Sun used to be a big innovator, but, very sadly, that was long, long ago.
In other words, IDC is reporting that Oracle raised prices. That strategy works for a quarter or two, maybe. But it's a going out of business strategy.
Well before the Internet you could find as much "alternative" information as you could ever possibly read on all kinds of news events, including the Kennedy assassination, the Moon landing, and the Cold War, as examples. Racists (which is what "birthers" are) have always had their own kooky sources of "information." The Internet adds no new dimension to this ages-old human characteristic to believe something in spite of all evidence. As another example, the world's religions had absolutely no problem promulgating their views before the Internet, and for centuries the sun orbited the earth.
I think NEC has already started to transition ACOS to X86. (Itanium doesn't offer any value-add to ACOS except perhaps avoidance of endian emulation.) But who cares? ACOS is exclusively supported in Japan, is in maintenance mode only (like Hitachi's VOS3 and Fujitsu's MSP and XSP), and has even less marketshare than those Japanese competitors. If you collected all the Itanium chips NEC sold in a year to run ACOS they'd easily fit in a shoebox.
HP has very little software to offer, so with major software vendors (Microsoft, Red Hat, and now Oracle) fleeing Itanium, it certainly isn't good news for HP. Oracle Database is probably the most popular software product running on HP-UX, as a matter of fact, but Oracle's announcement represents the end of the line. Oracle has a lot of other significant products, too, like Tuxedo, WebLogic Application Server, and Siebel, among others. Ironically IBM may now be the biggest vendor of Itanium-compatible software. Of course this Oracle announcement is self-serving, but it's also brutally smart business strategy. Itanium really is dead as a doorstop without popular software. This move also kills HP's aspirations of overtaking IBM any time soon, and it also kills one of HP's more profitable business lines. (Well played, Larry.)
How often is partnering with Microsoft the smartest thing anyone's done?
Intel has done OK.
Michael Blaine Faulkner, his wife, and others allegedly fled to Mexico shortly after the 2009 raid. A federal grand jury handed down several felony indictments in January, 2010 (or possibly late 2009). Mexican authorities captured Faulkner and his associates in January, 2010, in Cancun where allegedly they were living under assumed names. They were extradited back to Texas. Faulkner petitioned for release pending trial, but that request was denied in March. The trial date was set for October, 2010, but I've seen no information on any trial yet.
Both standards were defined as exactly (or very close to) half the rate of the alternating current (AC) that powered them. In the U.S. 60 Hz AC is the standard, so NTSC could use a very simple circuit to translate that to 30 frames per second. The rate was decreased very slightly to about 59.94 Hz to assist with color encoding, and by that time the electronics were more advanced anyway.
Microsoft did create HPFS. Well, Gordon Letwin and his colleagues did, and they were working for Microsoft. It took IBM to rescue HPFS, and it got reasonably stable in the IBM OS/2 1.3x stream (i.e. the IBM fork, also known as the first quality OS/2 release). IBM still had to swat HPFS bugs well into the 2.1x stream, though. IBM completely reimplemented HPFS in format-compatible fashion as HPFS386 since HPFS was hopeless for servers. (HPFS had a very low and very static memory cache. HPFS386 at least lifted the very low part, and for file servers a statically sized cache wasn't too much of a problem. But I'm not sure what Letwin was thinking, since dynamic caching wasn't exactly a new idea when he was working.) Since IBM had to pay royalties for the crap anyway they pretty quickly ditched HPFS386 in favor of JFS, which is quite excellent technology. Modern JFS first appeared on OS/2 and then also spread to AIX, which is now the highest marketshare UNIX platform.
Harvard has a variety of final course requirements. A lot of courses require final papers which take a lot more than 3 hours to write. (That includes senior theses, which take a very long time to write.) A few require oral presentations, and some require projects. Still others require passing exams during the course itself. What's been going on for years (decades?) is that Harvard would schedule classrooms and staff to support test-taking only to find that professors had other ideas (and often at the "last minute," administratively speaking). Occasionally even the students didn't get the memo, and a few stranglers might show up only to find out there's no exam. All that said, I wish Harvard would provide professors and students with more guidance on assessments. The College should try to enforce some basic standards more effectively.
Derby Line is a town in Vermont and in Quebec. The town straddles the border. You can hold a (small) conference in the town's public library with some people physically in Canada and others physically in the United States.
Probably because households buying plasma televisions purchase one, maybe two, and they are replacing cathode tube (with shadow mask) televisions which have been consuming electric load since the 1950s. And those plasma TVs are not operating for too many hours (hopefully), never mind that LCD televisions are far more popular. It's not surprising that many people are at least more concerned when typical two-car households each might add the equivalent of 8 to 10 plasma televisions of net new electricity consumption to the grid. Thankfully that consumption should be off-peak, especially if timed chargers and peak electricity pricing are mandated, but the plasma TV analogy breaks down very quickly.
That $663.8B figure is the President's request for FY2010. Congress increased that amount to $680B, and that's now law. But the budget is still short for Iraq and Afghanistan, so there's another $33B supplemental pending for FY2010. (Although Representative Lowey trimmed that to about $30B, so let's go with that.) That brings the total to $710B. And that's just the Department of Defense. Defense-related spending outside the DoD budget is a minimum of $200B. Let's round that total down to a total of $900B. And there you have it: defense spending is about two thirds of discretionary federal spending. The previous poster is correct.
T-Mobile's UMA-enabled phones do look like good choices. Their current line-up of UMA phones includes the BlackBerry Bold 9700, Curve 8520, and the Nokia E73 Mode. Shop around at T-Mobile directly (including any campus discounts), Wirefly.com, Amazon.com, etc.
Social Security has been maintaining records electronically for many decades, primarily using IBM mainframes (now a very few System z machines). Before that, SSA used IBM electromechanical tabulating equipment. Social Security can tell you today how much you earned, to the penny, decades ago. It has to: that's how certain benefits get calculated.
IT really isn't Arlington National Cemetery's core competency, nor should it be. That's often the problem with both public and private sectors: a relatively small organization struggles to implement a solution that dozens of other, larger departments have more or less solved already. I humbly suggest that Congress ought to consolidate IT projects so that a few good agencies can help other agencies. If 100 or more different agencies have to solve their own IT problems on their own, that really would be a waste of money and would achieve sub-optimal (or no) results. Social Security already carefully records all the death-related details of every American. There's even a searchable "death index." SSA just might be able to help Arlington if Congress could set up the organizational structures to foster better inter-agency cooperation.
Light sport aircraft are permitted at major airports in the U.S., including Class B airports. You may be thinking of the modest restrictions on traditional Experimental Category aircraft. Pilots with a sport pilot license must receive additional training and a specific endorsement to fly to/from airports within Class B, C, and D airspace, but there's no restriction on the LSA, assuming it is transponder-equipped.
After 13 years of trying to prove what wasn't true, in 1982 the U.S. Department of Justice dropped its antitrust case against IBM's mainframe business. In 1982, IBM mainframes had a much bigger share of the computing landscape. How could anyone possibly believe in 2010 that IBM's mainframe business is in any way monopolistic? Unless you think that Coca-Cola has a monopoly in Minute Maid-branded orange juice, or Toyota has a monopoly in Prius automobiles. (And that sort of argument ought to go over particularly well in Europe, home of the strongest brand names in the world, like Gucci, Prada, D&G, and Chanel.)
Or Apple's iOS on the "EyeFone."
1. This list looks like it only covers the United States. That's too bad.
2. Moreover, most companies on the list don't have much business outside the U.S. Interesting.
3. There's a very wide variation in IT's percentage of the total company workforce, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern to that variability. Considering that the biggest part of the IT budget is typically salaries and benefits, it would be interesting to know why some companies consume so much more IT labor than others, even within the same industries.
4. Do any of these companies' IT workers enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement, or are they "at-will" employees?
5. IT contractors and temporary workers aren't mentioned, nor are outsourcing agreements. Are those workers excluded from the survey? It looks like it. Some (or many) of the company's IT workers may not actually work for the company, and they may be miserable, while IT employees who get paychecks directly from the company might be thrilled.
Benchmarks are for proving whether particular solutions can meet requirements. But you have to start with a weighted list of requirements first, and get agreement on that list, before you benchmark anything. That list of requirements will contain a lot more than the boot-up time or whether you can open a browser window infinitesimally faster. For example, you could equip every user with solid state disks to improve boot-up performance, but could you afford it, would those SSDs provide enough capacity, and would write performance suffer "unacceptably"? It depends on your company's requirements and relative weighting. Speaking of requirements, what are the power consumption requirements (including both direct electrical consumption and indirect cooling energy requirements to combat the generated heat)? PCs vary in that dimension, too, and in how well (and how deeply) they go into power saving modes in the real-world. Energy costs are often important in the lifecycle costs of PCs.
I agree with other commenters about warranties. Self-servicing may be cheaper and better: to keep a small stock of spare PCs and swap machines if there's a failure. It depends to some extent on how physically centralized your users are, though. I also concur with the advice to err on the side of more memory (and memory expandability) versus CPU clock speed, core count, etc.
The Altos 586 was available in 1983 and predated Western Digital's invention of IDE. Most likely the Altos 586 would have used the so-called ST-506 interface (also colloquially known at the time as the MFM or RLL interface), although SASI or a proprietary interface would have been possibilities. If it's ST-506 then you might be able to fire up a old 386 or 486 PC/AT-compatible with an old ST-506 controller and copy the contents of the drive using Linux. But I would agree with essentially everyone else: use one of the serial ports to get the data transferred. Xenix has uucp available, and uucp is also still available for today's operating systems. That'll work.
I don't think AT&T is voiding the cards. Washington, D.C., seems to be asserting that the card numbers should expire after three years. But why 3 years? Why not 5? Or 7? Or 10? Or 50? I assume AT&T will argue that 3 is arbitrary and, of course, too little time. I also assume that AT&T will argue that a certain federal agency in Washington, the FCC, regulates all things telephone, so (dear District), kindly go take it up with them. And, if those two arguments don't work, naturally AT&T would provide the District with about 386,200 calling cards, each with an average of 6 minutes of call time remaining, so that the city government can hold onto the actual unclaimed property until citizens reclaim their cards. After all, those citizens purchased minutes, and that's the unclaimed property in question. There's no cash there any more.
I think I've heard of non-relational databases before. There's a particularly famous one, in fact. What could it be? Let's see: first started shipping in 1969, now in its eleventh major version, JDBC and ODBC access, full XML support in and out, available with an optional paired transaction manager, extremely high performance, and holds a very large chunk of the world's financial information (among other things). It also ranks up there with Microsoft Windows as among the world's all-time highest grossing software products.
....You bet non-relational is still highly relevant and useful in many different roles. Different tools for different jobs and all.