The most important thing to do is get some experience, then the theory you learnt may become useful. You cannot be a project manager if you you do not understand what the people you manage do. Project management is wide subject, not just gant charts and counting man days. You need to know what the people are doing, what everyone else is doing and what the business is doing. Everything is useful, operations, sys admin, programming. If you do not understand the fundamentals you will not be able to make good decisions. There are too many projects that fail at the moment giving the IT business a bad reputation.
You must understand your subject, not in minutae but enough to have respect and understanding for those working on the project.
Alternatively you could ask the university for your money back. Education costs money and sounds like this really cost you.
Linux has different code from other Unices, so does AIX, so does MACoS, BSD, Solaris and so on. They have lots of common design features. This argument will never end. Too many tribes going to war. Only way to move ahead is for all to back Unix. Some parties outside the Unix (Linux) camp are the only ones to benefit from this. Maybe some large companies that back Linux now, only do so, so they can destroy their competition. Once that is done they will destroy Linux by making it more proprietary. Linux will not rule the world, nor will any other OS. The only OS to rule the market is the one that unites the market. The Linux community has distructive tendancies, in that it must destroy every other OS.
Why do we bother with all this, lets make Linux interoperable and easy to migrate from one kernel to another. Why is it so difficult and costly to migrate from one Linux distribution to another. Why don't Linuxes work together, does the development/community of Linux look and behave similar to the competitors it slanders. You can turn into what you loathe, if you are driven by hatred. Linux could become the next big proprietary lock in. That is what we need to avoid. Lets make Linux into a system that people can use on Laptops & PC's. Throw down this old tribal and aggressive attitude. We saw how fragile leadership and development of open source Reiser FS is, lets hope this never happens to Linux. If we open Linux/Unix to all to be more inclusive it will help a larger group.
Not sure if this article states the obvious but most Linux distributions have already sold out. Look at Red Hat, more expensive than Open Solaris. Red Hat makes a fortune, then proposes to drop deskptop development. If you go into most of the large companies who say they run Linux, and then ask them, well how did you make and adapt Linux to your requirements they do not understand what you are talking about. Most just buy Red Hat.
Also, there really is not much innovation going on in the Linux world, most linuxes cannot scale (thread/memory manage/schedule) to the levels of Solaris and AIX. So people use them for the small servers replacing Windows systems.
We want a really good Linux for the Laptop (Nvidia drivers, power mgmt, wifi) and this seems to be under threat, so please lets encourage those distros that help the laptop/desktop user, Ubuntu is one of the few that is innovating and helping the laptop/desktop user. I am a long time Linux laptop user and would like to stay so. Ubuntu looks like the best one out there, I have used RH, SUSE, Mandrake.
Hopefully people will use tape encryption now, it's been available for years. As I am afraid that tape is still the most efficient for moving large amounts of data. Also the tape encryption is uses very strong algorithms e.g. AES-256 etc.
Some vendors like Sun and IBM give the key management stations away for free if you use encryption. People just do not understand how hi-tech tape is nowadays. Everyones perception of tape is old DAT, people need to look at Sun T10000, IBM TSxxxx or LT04. If you are archiving data for a long time there is no other ecological option than tape. It's longevity (of the quality products) has been proven over the last 20yrs. Tape is not that interesting, but it is like brushing you teeth, you know it is a good thing for the long run.
What is the point of this, Linux is Unix so how does this help the Unix movement. Why can't all the Unix people work together, that was the point of open systems, to be able to work/interoperate. Linux has its benefits and so does Solaris. In a few situations one has a cost, useability, scaleability advantage over the other, but not many. The differences between Linux and Solaris are becoming less and less everyday. Now lets compare Linux to AIX or HP-UX, Sun is putting energy into open source and has done so since before Linux. Why does one gang bash another, very childish.
Every week there is some community or tribe that critices another. Maybe this is caused by jealousy or fear.
The OpenSolaris community is not perfect, nor is the Linux community.
If we do a search for "why I left Linux" there wil l be the exact reasons critising Linux that are used here to criticise OpenSolaris.
http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm
This bashdot article does not do anything positive for the IT industry. It only helps the proprietary vendors laugh and encourage the open companies and organisations to fight one another. Proprietary organisations are the only winners here, causing two like minded communities to fight, Linux and Solaris. Can Linux/Unix put it's efforts into being better than proprietary OSes e.g. Win, AIX, HP-UX etc. Making Linux and OpenSolaris fight is only good for the proprietary non-open source vendors.
Can Linus have dinner with Jonathon Schwartz what is there to be scared of, they might discover a lot in common and who the real enemy is.
Shame about the lack of Linux emphasis on the desktop. Linux has tried to catch up with AIX, Solaris etc. But still ZFS, Dtrace and many other innovations forge ahead and leap ahead of Linux, Linux still struggles to keep up. Linux being Unix should have been the desktop Unix, it warped into a market that already had good Unixes. After 9 years of Linux laptop useage I hate to say it I am using Windows more, XP that is. Expectations were high were are we with desktop Linux now, Linux power management is no so good. Why all this emphasis on the kernel.
Please, make Linux the Unix desktop environment, don't bother re-inventing what AIX and Solaris do better. It is such a pain going from the various Linux flavours, Mandrake, Red Hat, Suse. There seems to be no commonality between them. This is a Linux promise/hope that we have lost. Not the first time in the industry.
The challenge is make Linux the best platform for the desktop. Linux for the server is not adding anything we could not do before. Actually makes it more complicated, any large corporates done a Linux migration from Red Hat to Ubuntu, or Suse to Debian. The cost to migrate from one Linux to another is as big as Win to Mac. Actually, I would call all these distributions proprietary as the are so different, it is in the interests of the distributions that people to not migrate to another Linux. Once you are tied to one Linux, there is near lock-in. Not what I expected in the early days of Linux. Make me a desktop linux with good power management and driver support, drop this server development, help the world.
This is a good example where people and the market do not understand how far large system and OS technology has reached. Sun has been selling and their customers have been running servers with 1TB since the E25K which came out years ago. Present Sun M9000 servers can have up to 2TB of RAM. Solaris has no problem manging this with 128 cores. Sun servers and Solaris is not stopping at these limits. More to come. Some OSes and perceptions need to catch up. NB Solaris is also open (OpenSolaris) and you can run it on a laptop and PC with 200MB of RAM. Solaris is supported on servers from HP, IBM and 1000's of others.
Open source Solaris OS on a Open source SPARC chip is already there.
This is a good example where people and the market do not understand how far large system and OS technology has reached. Sun has been selling and their customers have been running servers with 1TB since the E25K which came out years ago. Present Sun M9000 servers can have up to 2TB of RAM. Solaris has no problem manging this with 128 cores. Sun servers and Solaris is not stopping at these limits. More to come. Some OSes and perceptions need to catch up. NB Solaris is also open (OpenSolaris) and you can run it on a laptop and PC with 200MB of RAM. Solaris is supported on servers from HP, IBM and 1000's of others.
I have worked more than 10yrs with both MVS (Sys Prog) and Unix (Sys Admin, DBA etc). Both have there advantages.
We need a more balanced opinion.
While working for one of the largest Banks in the world the IBM m/f would crash, Bank was top notch and got top Compass rating. So not a local problem, used to go to SHARE conferences, lots of m/f probs outages. While working at another place, CICS would fall over weekly. I have seen many UCB's ripped apart due to MVS sw errors. Many data corruptions and whole departments doing data recovery.
What to check for, why you do not hear about this. "Gagging clauses in contracts", IBM and EMC use these in contracts so that customer 'can not discuss availability or performance with outside parties'. If you buy from EMC or IBM get legal to take these clauses out. If you want to keep them in ask for another 30% off list.
Mainframe people due to the change control and test cycles had good discipline, this is what gave it, it's reliability. Hitachi and Amdahl produced far superior h/w, 90's market figures show this. Market became too small and ROI too little to maintain the businesses. IBM keep it going but quitely move the m/f to AIX. They do not want Sun or HP to move MVS to Solaris or HP-UX. IBM does these stealth migrations.
As MVS skills are hard to get and costs companies money, it is good for IBM to make customers use mainframes then IBM can outsource the services and make more money, look at IBM results. If customers do not use IBM m/f makes it more difficult for IBM outsourcing. IBM m/f market increases as IBM Global Services buy the h/w, but very few new m/f customers.
z/OS (MVS) has good RTM (Recovery Termination Manager) and ABEND/DUMP processing. However, so do others Solaris has DTRACE. HP and AIX are a little behind.
UNIX is not lock-in. You do a RFP to upgrade the m/f. How many competitive bids do you get. Do this with UNIX, you will have Sun, HP and IBM bidding, much more open and competitive. Oracle, SAP, Sybase and all apps can very easily be migrated from one UNIX to another (export the database then import).
Bottom line the mainframe is good but not infaliable, do not put it on a pedestal a computer is a computer, marketeers many spread the fluff seen on this thread.
The mainframe & MVS, z/OS will live as it has IBM behind it and have massive market power. MVS is good as are Solaris and AIX. HP-UX has always seemed to struggle. Linux is just another flavour of UNIX with alternative channel, also good, but problems with backward compatibility. AS/400 not a m/f so lets not go there. Solaris has excellent backwards compatibility, since early 90's, PowerPC4,5,6 caused and still causes problems for AIX backward compatibility, HP-UX and Itanium story also had and still has compatibility issues.
Sun, IBM and HP high end servers all have hot replaceable h/w components equivalent and sometimes better than IBM m/f. Also, built with top quality components, ECC plus more to avoid bit errors referred to here. Put top UNIX servers/mainframes against IBM m/f h/w and compare availability features you will see no difference.
Sun has ZFS which has integrity checking on all data written. So comments about special unique integrity of IBM m/f is not quite true.
What may give MVS the edge is the discipline of the admins. The change management, process and procedures improve the uptime more than the OS and h/w. I am afraid that in a discussion of high end UNIX vs MVS or z/OS there is no differentiating technological superiority anymore.
MVS has a beautiful OS and structure, so do some UNIXes, but technology catches up. Equivalence is here if we avoid the emotions.
Ask yourself these questions:
Would you employ a carpenter that cannot hit a nail into a piece of wood.
Important, even though they may use a automatic nail/hammer driver nowadays.
Would you let a surgeon operate on you who did not know the human bodies internal organs.
Would you let a plumber fix your plumbing if he could no put two pipes together.
Even though nowdays we have plastic push & fit pipes.
Good code generators must be used nowadays to improve productivity, however, when performance goes downhill, must be able to understand assembler and computer architecture to fix it. Otherwise just buy a faster CPU.
Buying faster high Ghz CPU's are just bad for the environment (heat, cooling etc) so the bad coders keep the hardware suppliers in business.
Going back to basics, we can solve the technology problem with faster cheaper technology. The bandwidth/pipe problem can be fixed by using Wave Division Multiplexors (WDMs) to multiplex the light bands, which can increase fibre bandwidth by 10x to 100x. The smaller ones are cheap ($10K for a 10 channel WDM) nowadays. Prices are dropping.
For ISP's, content providers etc Sun's Coolthreads T2000 server with it's 32-core chip, 10GigE, parallel NIC's and low power usage can solve the web/email server issues
We can solve the technology and often have, not the politics or economics.
Why do we talk about producing more, we don't we use less. OK we cannot stop individual developing countries from polutting the shared planet. However, when they cannot see the Sun anymore, have respiratory deseases, can't drink the water etc, as happens in some Sino-Asian towns then they will switch quickly. I used to live in London, history of the town is such that when the city got too bad 100yrs ago, people moved outward e.g Hampstead. When things got better people moved back downtown. History will repeat itself. Some countries are going through the wests industrial revolution.
Personally, computers are a big electricity waste. I design computer systems, I like my company, as we were the first to have low power coomputers (T2000 with niagara Chip) and also can store data in a sustainable fashion. Think about sustainable processing and storage: http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/cool_data_s ustainable_storage
Slashdot Mirror
The most important thing to do is get some experience, then the theory you learnt may become useful. You cannot be a project manager if you you do not understand what the people you manage do. Project management is wide subject, not just gant charts and counting man days. You need to know what the people are doing, what everyone else is doing and what the business is doing. Everything is useful, operations, sys admin, programming. If you do not understand the fundamentals you will not be able to make good decisions. There are too many projects that fail at the moment giving the IT business a bad reputation. You must understand your subject, not in minutae but enough to have respect and understanding for those working on the project. Alternatively you could ask the university for your money back. Education costs money and sounds like this really cost you.
Why do we bother with all this, lets make Linux interoperable and easy to migrate from one kernel to another. Why is it so difficult and costly to migrate from one Linux distribution to another. Why don't Linuxes work together, does the development/community of Linux look and behave similar to the competitors it slanders. You can turn into what you loathe, if you are driven by hatred. Linux could become the next big proprietary lock in. That is what we need to avoid. Lets make Linux into a system that people can use on Laptops & PC's. Throw down this old tribal and aggressive attitude. We saw how fragile leadership and development of open source Reiser FS is, lets hope this never happens to Linux. If we open Linux/Unix to all to be more inclusive it will help a larger group.
Also, there really is not much innovation going on in the Linux world, most linuxes cannot scale (thread/memory manage/schedule) to the levels of Solaris and AIX. So people use them for the small servers replacing Windows systems.
We want a really good Linux for the Laptop (Nvidia drivers, power mgmt, wifi) and this seems to be under threat, so please lets encourage those distros that help the laptop/desktop user, Ubuntu is one of the few that is innovating and helping the laptop/desktop user. I am a long time Linux laptop user and would like to stay so. Ubuntu looks like the best one out there, I have used RH, SUSE, Mandrake.
Some vendors like Sun and IBM give the key management stations away for free if you use encryption. People just do not understand how hi-tech tape is nowadays. Everyones perception of tape is old DAT, people need to look at Sun T10000, IBM TSxxxx or LT04. If you are archiving data for a long time there is no other ecological option than tape. It's longevity (of the quality products) has been proven over the last 20yrs. Tape is not that interesting, but it is like brushing you teeth, you know it is a good thing for the long run.
Every week there is some community or tribe that critices another. Maybe this is caused by jealousy or fear.
The OpenSolaris community is not perfect, nor is the Linux community.
If we do a search for "why I left Linux" there wil l be the exact reasons critising Linux that are used here to criticise OpenSolaris. http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm This bashdot article does not do anything positive for the IT industry. It only helps the proprietary vendors laugh and encourage the open companies and organisations to fight one another. Proprietary organisations are the only winners here, causing two like minded communities to fight, Linux and Solaris. Can Linux/Unix put it's efforts into being better than proprietary OSes e.g. Win, AIX, HP-UX etc. Making Linux and OpenSolaris fight is only good for the proprietary non-open source vendors.
Can Linus have dinner with Jonathon Schwartz what is there to be scared of, they might discover a lot in common and who the real enemy is.
Please, make Linux the Unix desktop environment, don't bother re-inventing what AIX and Solaris do better. It is such a pain going from the various Linux flavours, Mandrake, Red Hat, Suse. There seems to be no commonality between them. This is a Linux promise/hope that we have lost. Not the first time in the industry.
The challenge is make Linux the best platform for the desktop. Linux for the server is not adding anything we could not do before. Actually makes it more complicated, any large corporates done a Linux migration from Red Hat to Ubuntu, or Suse to Debian. The cost to migrate from one Linux to another is as big as Win to Mac. Actually, I would call all these distributions proprietary as the are so different, it is in the interests of the distributions that people to not migrate to another Linux. Once you are tied to one Linux, there is near lock-in. Not what I expected in the early days of Linux. Make me a desktop linux with good power management and driver support, drop this server development, help the world.
This is a good example where people and the market do not understand how far large system and OS technology has reached. Sun has been selling and their customers have been running servers with 1TB since the E25K which came out years ago. Present Sun M9000 servers can have up to 2TB of RAM. Solaris has no problem manging this with 128 cores. Sun servers and Solaris is not stopping at these limits. More to come. Some OSes and perceptions need to catch up. NB Solaris is also open (OpenSolaris) and you can run it on a laptop and PC with 200MB of RAM. Solaris is supported on servers from HP, IBM and 1000's of others. Open source Solaris OS on a Open source SPARC chip is already there.
This is a good example where people and the market do not understand how far large system and OS technology has reached. Sun has been selling and their customers have been running servers with 1TB since the E25K which came out years ago. Present Sun M9000 servers can have up to 2TB of RAM. Solaris has no problem manging this with 128 cores. Sun servers and Solaris is not stopping at these limits. More to come. Some OSes and perceptions need to catch up. NB Solaris is also open (OpenSolaris) and you can run it on a laptop and PC with 200MB of RAM. Solaris is supported on servers from HP, IBM and 1000's of others.
I have worked more than 10yrs with both MVS (Sys Prog) and Unix (Sys Admin, DBA etc). Both have there advantages. We need a more balanced opinion. While working for one of the largest Banks in the world the IBM m/f would crash, Bank was top notch and got top Compass rating. So not a local problem, used to go to SHARE conferences, lots of m/f probs outages. While working at another place, CICS would fall over weekly. I have seen many UCB's ripped apart due to MVS sw errors. Many data corruptions and whole departments doing data recovery. What to check for, why you do not hear about this. "Gagging clauses in contracts", IBM and EMC use these in contracts so that customer 'can not discuss availability or performance with outside parties'. If you buy from EMC or IBM get legal to take these clauses out. If you want to keep them in ask for another 30% off list. Mainframe people due to the change control and test cycles had good discipline, this is what gave it, it's reliability. Hitachi and Amdahl produced far superior h/w, 90's market figures show this. Market became too small and ROI too little to maintain the businesses. IBM keep it going but quitely move the m/f to AIX. They do not want Sun or HP to move MVS to Solaris or HP-UX. IBM does these stealth migrations. As MVS skills are hard to get and costs companies money, it is good for IBM to make customers use mainframes then IBM can outsource the services and make more money, look at IBM results. If customers do not use IBM m/f makes it more difficult for IBM outsourcing. IBM m/f market increases as IBM Global Services buy the h/w, but very few new m/f customers. z/OS (MVS) has good RTM (Recovery Termination Manager) and ABEND/DUMP processing. However, so do others Solaris has DTRACE. HP and AIX are a little behind. UNIX is not lock-in. You do a RFP to upgrade the m/f. How many competitive bids do you get. Do this with UNIX, you will have Sun, HP and IBM bidding, much more open and competitive. Oracle, SAP, Sybase and all apps can very easily be migrated from one UNIX to another (export the database then import). Bottom line the mainframe is good but not infaliable, do not put it on a pedestal a computer is a computer, marketeers many spread the fluff seen on this thread. The mainframe & MVS, z/OS will live as it has IBM behind it and have massive market power. MVS is good as are Solaris and AIX. HP-UX has always seemed to struggle. Linux is just another flavour of UNIX with alternative channel, also good, but problems with backward compatibility. AS/400 not a m/f so lets not go there. Solaris has excellent backwards compatibility, since early 90's, PowerPC4,5,6 caused and still causes problems for AIX backward compatibility, HP-UX and Itanium story also had and still has compatibility issues. Sun, IBM and HP high end servers all have hot replaceable h/w components equivalent and sometimes better than IBM m/f. Also, built with top quality components, ECC plus more to avoid bit errors referred to here. Put top UNIX servers/mainframes against IBM m/f h/w and compare availability features you will see no difference. Sun has ZFS which has integrity checking on all data written. So comments about special unique integrity of IBM m/f is not quite true. What may give MVS the edge is the discipline of the admins. The change management, process and procedures improve the uptime more than the OS and h/w. I am afraid that in a discussion of high end UNIX vs MVS or z/OS there is no differentiating technological superiority anymore. MVS has a beautiful OS and structure, so do some UNIXes, but technology catches up. Equivalence is here if we avoid the emotions.
Ask yourself these questions: Would you employ a carpenter that cannot hit a nail into a piece of wood. Important, even though they may use a automatic nail/hammer driver nowadays. Would you let a surgeon operate on you who did not know the human bodies internal organs. Would you let a plumber fix your plumbing if he could no put two pipes together. Even though nowdays we have plastic push & fit pipes. Good code generators must be used nowadays to improve productivity, however, when performance goes downhill, must be able to understand assembler and computer architecture to fix it. Otherwise just buy a faster CPU. Buying faster high Ghz CPU's are just bad for the environment (heat, cooling etc) so the bad coders keep the hardware suppliers in business.
Aboslutely, good programmers must understand the stack.
For ISP's, content providers etc Sun's Coolthreads T2000 server with it's 32-core chip, 10GigE, parallel NIC's and low power usage can solve the web/email server issues
We can solve the technology and often have, not the politics or economics.
Why do we talk about producing more, we don't we use less. OK we cannot stop individual developing countries from polutting the shared planet. However, when they cannot see the Sun anymore, have respiratory deseases, can't drink the water etc, as happens in some Sino-Asian towns then they will switch quickly. I used to live in London, history of the town is such that when the city got too bad 100yrs ago, people moved outward e.g Hampstead. When things got better people moved back downtown. History will repeat itself. Some countries are going through the wests industrial revolution.
c _environmental_projects
s ustainable_storage
This is what is possible: http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/my_domesti
Personally, computers are a big electricity waste. I design computer systems, I like my company, as we were the first to have low power coomputers (T2000 with niagara Chip) and also can store data in a sustainable fashion. Think about sustainable processing and storage: http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/cool_data_
Less is more.