Oh, I didn't know *you've* said that all along. I apologize.
And you're both wrong, then. The last mile should be considered infrastructure like the street outside of your home. Imagine a toll plaza ten yards from your front door -- and everyone else's front door -- to get an idea of what a non-neutral last mile would mean.
In short, your communication line is no more than infrastructure -- and no less. The argument that competition can somehow spring forth out of the last mile is based upon the fallacy that someone will string a whole new set of lines to homes. Verizon would argue that they alone own the telephone poles (they do not) and tie up the whole mess in the court system. Or that someone could blanket the nation with fixed wireless (Project Angel of AT&T); of course, the only entity that could it effectively is a local gov't and Verizon blocked that as well.
Someone mentioned corporations act in their best interests, and that is true. As citizens -- because after all corporations are considered entities somewhat like people -- corporations would be psychotic sociopaths who in all honesty would be sentenced to life in a mental institution.
Expecting these entities to act fairly is itself stupid. The only way to deal with them is harshly and unfairly, on the side of people and not the corporate interest. We know how that goes, too.
Net neutrality is something we absolutely must have, not just as Americans but as free people. No corporate interest should take precedence, ever, for any reason. If they cry poverty, so be it. Let them find another way to make money. Really, if we pushed them hard enough, what could they really do?
I've wondered about the AIX/ Linux strategy for IBM, because I design systems using p-series machines from IBM. From what I can tell, IBM is making money better than anyone in services, which explains the SUSE Linux as well as Red Hat Linux work that they do. The top two Linux distros are those, and IBM wants to be your preferred service provider; they will happily settle for backup at a premium.
AIX exists, though, because it can utterly exploit power CPUs. What I can have my sysadmin do with a p595 and AIX puts any Linux or MS solution to shame, on any x86 platform. Buy any VM you want, I can get partitioning that blows it away, at finer levels, with more CPU left over for processing. And my benchmarks will make you blink.
All of this comes at a cost, of course, and I'm fortunate to have at least the money component of the classic tradeoff available: you can have it fast, cheap, or robust, but you can only pick two. AIX is for those who pick fast and robust.
Y'know, seeing as how it's an Apple product, they can rebrand the whole of their catalog (usher in the new era of Apple Inc). That way you can own aMac and aPhone and aServer with aWirelessLAN. Of course, you could also get aLife...
Mod my parent up +1 Insightful. That's exactly the point here. If you live in a neighborhood where more than one social retard is letting their dogs shit on well-kept lawns, blocking sidewalks with their Hondas, having fistfights at 1am, then video is not just a shaming tool, but a means to present the local inept police department to heel, and start writing summonses and doing their jobs.
Sometimes, the only way to get someone to stop being a jackass is to take a hard stance on it. The slippery slope of a neighborhood's decline starts with apathy towards quality of life issues. Maybe the majority of slashdotters aren't homeowners with families, but those of you who are, understand my point intrinsically.
Fire bricks are usually rated for 2200F, within your range limit. I like the idea of reflecting back some of that heat, assuming you can find a reflector that won't be affected by the temps. Mounted against a wall of fire brick, and the other side should be well within temp limits for off-the-shelf gear.
How do I know this? My father owns a home in the Poconos, with a real nice fireplace. The fire bricks keep the house from burning down, even when the fire gets a few chunks of dry wood. Heck, the fireplace glass itself does a pretty fair job.
I own a handful of domains, and I have little if any problem setting up autoreject for invalid email addresses. The only problem I can't easily handle is when a valid email account is used by a spammer. I think you should strongly consider changing your domain host if you've got these issues in 2007.
Linux is an operating system. Mainframes are complete hardware solutions, which, by the way, can run Linux better than nearly any other hardware setup. I/O on a mainframe is probably the biggest advantage it has over any other solution, and will continue to have, because IBM has been refining it for 40 years.
As for the knocks on COBOL, write some non-trivial solutions with it and get back to me. You'll change your tune, I'm sure. I've written BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, Assembler for 390s and x86, Java, and a bucketful of scripting language solutions. The COBOL apps all crushed the other 3GLs simply because you can't beat an Amdahl mainframe for running through 16 million records each night during a production run. The COBOL compilers from IBM are probably the best compilers in the business, again benefiting from something like 35 years of refinement.
But hey, go out and buy 30 servers. Patch them, power them, rack them, cool them. Manage that. Meanwhile, the mainframe will stay up and running. Much more job security for me, and I'm still 15 years from retirement.
I took the liberty of rewriting this slightly to see if I misunderstood it:
--------- This is a pharmaceutical company, not an academic institution. They patent the cure so that
1. Any monies derived from it can be fed back into further research
2. Another pharma can't steal the idea and patent it for themselves
Pharmas have budgets to manage and need to behave in a business like way just like everyone else but they are not academic institutions. ---------
Hmmm, seems okay to me. Unless you've been living under a rock since, I dunno, the early 15th century, you'd know that the merchant class and capitalism in general has been running the world. All those nostalgic for the gentler, simpler times of yore need some bubonic plague to refresh their memories.
Threading is PRECISELY what's lacking in any web-based forum. That, and the unequalled ability to read threads offline. Granted, I come from a batch processing origin, so the ideal situation for me is to automate the download of all probable content, and read it at my leisure.
This, of course, is the clearest difference between 1994 and 2006. In 1994 download speeds were much slower and access not as widespread, so the concept of browsing and finding within ten seconds was near impossible. You brought down all of comp.databases (or the unread msgs), etc, and let it get everything while you did something else (or went to sleep). Downloads complete, your modem hung up (because it still cost eight cents a minute if the ISP wasn't local) and eventually you read your new threads. If you had money, you copied it over to your Palm Pilot or Handspring and read messages on the bus to work or school.
In some ways I still try to bundle up content to read offline. My favorite utility is a web crawler that pulls down pages for me to read while waiting on something else.
... any mention of newsgroups (cancelbots and thread pointers are hilarious) and ISDN (especially its ubiquity), odd-numbered port assignments (browse to this.place.com port 5000). I was a big fan of ISDN until DSL came to fore, and (thankfully) newsgroups have once again gone well underground, leaving it for old farts and half-assed spammers.
... because AllofMP3 does what Napster and Rhapsody and iTunes cannot: offer a comprehensive music catalog at reasonable rates. To wit: if you really like jazz, this is the only place to find nontrivial Art (or Chet!) Baker, Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich, Charles Mingus, or Dave Brubeck.
Is it illegal according to US law? Sure. Do I care? No. This is the modern equivalent of civil disobedience. Call it corporate disobedience: the ad infinitum extensions of copyright protection for works of long-dead artists, as a benefit to corporate parents, says the balance of power is most assuredly in the hands of the sociopathic corporate citizenry and not the voting public. The weapons I have against Big Business are economic, and this is just the first of many conflicts to come, all along the same lines.
Just mull it over. Corporate disobedience might be the only option now.
... but isn't this old news? Hacking (plaintext) cookies is about as innovative as hacking URLs or telnetting into your office SMTP server to write fake CEO emails to the new guy.
Still.. I'm off to get my $4 off coupons from Restaurant.com, ad-free weather from Wunderground.com, and free schools data from GreatSchools.net...
This is expected news, if you step back objectively.
AMD loses and will continue to lose the manufacturing race with Intel. Intel will likely continue to develop smaller and smaller dies, and AMD could never hope to leapfrog them for lack of cash to do so. Of course, give Intel their due: they employ some pretty smart people as well.
Ultimately, making your CPU do more specialized tasking, or capable of programmatic specialized tasking (think FPGA) is the right kind of innovation for them. I would also look to see more RISC-based operations, and wouldn't be at all surprised if they went off in that direction in some way. If they do, IBM has something to worry about...... which brings me to the POWER CPUs. Where I work, I can architect a solution in a variety of ways, and currently I choose to build p550s with POWER5s (later POWER6s) with all the nice dynamic partitioning and micro-partitioning that you cannot get (at that level) from anyone else. I wonder how comfortable IBM would be feeling if they saw AMD start to offer the same kinds of partitioning elements in their CPUs and architectures?
This is one of those interim solutions for early adopters who have more disposable income than capacity for delayed gratification.
Here's an "Ask Slashdot" moment though: why do the heads need to move at all? Why isn't WD or Samsung or Hitachi building a long, length-of-radius head over each platter? Then the only motor needed is for the platter, and the head is merely a fixed unit? This would probably reduce most HDD crashes too, since the arm would no longer traverse the drive plane.
I dunno, there's better ways to describe what I mean but I know there's something good in the creamy center of that idea.
By your logic, Oracle should have avoided Sleepycat and Innobase, and yet they bought both. Market consolidation is one factor, but IBM making a strong push to co-opt open source to provide more fuel for its services arm is the real driver here.
IBM will help create the storage engine for MySQL, then buy it, then give it away and sell support.
DB2 has its mainframe niche well established, but I think we can all agree that mainframes aren't the growth industry they once were.
Honestly, the human race is like a sugared-up two year old in an electronics store sometimes, without the parent saying "Don't touch that" eleventeen times.
I have a few lists, and one of them is quite large (3000+ subscribers) and extremely technical. It's also hosted by Yahoo, who would necessarily have an interest in keeping themselves out of trouble. All it would take is one message from one dope to fly across "unreported" to end seven years of free technical support to the planet Earth.
Nice job, McCain. This will help, big time. and by help, I mean help me decide who else I'm voting for in 2008.
Outsourcing is neither good nor evil, but the motivation behind outsourcing tends to be overwhelmingly merciless and short-term. Taking a knowledge activity and attempting to turn it into a commodity or near-assembly line function is, I suppose, a managerial Holy Grail worth undertaking in different guises each decade.
Consider H1B visas. Is there a shortage of IT workers in the US, or a shortage of *cheap* IT workers in the US? Most major media publications are overwhelmingly guilty of dropping the telling adjective, and the quotes they gather all support a lack of IT talent, no qualifiers added.
We who work in this space, live in the space, can confirm some of this. It *is* hard to find a superior talent for an IT position above entry level. However, it's not impossible if you have a salary and excellent position to offer.
So, when I read about outsourcing arbitrage and the chase for ever-cheaper talent, I just wait it out. Eventually, all of the talent, cheap or not, will come to fore and then the real shoot-out over quality and reliability can begin. Does anyone truly believe there's a hidden cachet of Polish supercoders who haven't been discovered because they lack the Internet connectivity? Does anyone see the inherent flaw in that premise, and by extension, any argument like it?
I'm not overly impressed with a single outsourced individual or group in my eleven pro years of IT, and that includes old Anderson Consulting of 1995 up to Patel Consulting of 2006. The prestige of the firm should only get them an interview: talent and not cost is what you'll need to survive.
As a final note, what, if anything, will the US do if it successfully outsources all of its IT functions? Does anyone expect anyone to major in CS in this country, knowing that electricians make far more and took less formal schooling? I think not. You can't outsource a physical service.
POPFile used to be 98.7% accurate in classifying email. I'm lucky to get 67% these days, even with a simple binary filter (spam/notspam). What I'm going to need to do -- and do not relish -- is start looking at the ones making it through and manually updating the word lists to tag them properly.
Why don't I want to do this? Because I remember the Bad Old Days of Spam, when I was forced to create Byzantine layers of regexp in Pegasus to snag all the bad people. Bayesian classifiers have been mitigated for now...
ODF, then, is how I remember working with another OASIS spec for Datastream 7i. The parsing will be simple, at least for a computer program (tedious walkdown by hand).
True, they are not the same and I apologize for implying that they are. I think I was jumping the gun a little by assuming support for this as a writeable option (Save As) would make its way into the Office suite.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I didn't know *you've* said that all along. I apologize.
And you're both wrong, then. The last mile should be considered infrastructure like the street outside of your home. Imagine a toll plaza ten yards from your front door -- and everyone else's front door -- to get an idea of what a non-neutral last mile would mean.
-BA
This is the canonical link to the issue: http://isen.com/stupid.html
In short, your communication line is no more than infrastructure -- and no less. The argument that competition can somehow spring forth out of the last mile is based upon the fallacy that someone will string a whole new set of lines to homes. Verizon would argue that they alone own the telephone poles (they do not) and tie up the whole mess in the court system. Or that someone could blanket the nation with fixed wireless (Project Angel of AT&T); of course, the only entity that could it effectively is a local gov't and Verizon blocked that as well.
Someone mentioned corporations act in their best interests, and that is true. As citizens -- because after all corporations are considered entities somewhat like people -- corporations would be psychotic sociopaths who in all honesty would be sentenced to life in a mental institution.
Expecting these entities to act fairly is itself stupid. The only way to deal with them is harshly and unfairly, on the side of people and not the corporate interest. We know how that goes, too.
Net neutrality is something we absolutely must have, not just as Americans but as free people. No corporate interest should take precedence, ever, for any reason. If they cry poverty, so be it. Let them find another way to make money. Really, if we pushed them hard enough, what could they really do?
-BA
I've wondered about the AIX/ Linux strategy for IBM, because I design systems using p-series machines from IBM. From what I can tell, IBM is making money better than anyone in services, which explains the SUSE Linux as well as Red Hat Linux work that they do. The top two Linux distros are those, and IBM wants to be your preferred service provider; they will happily settle for backup at a premium.
AIX exists, though, because it can utterly exploit power CPUs. What I can have my sysadmin do with a p595 and AIX puts any Linux or MS solution to shame, on any x86 platform. Buy any VM you want, I can get partitioning that blows it away, at finer levels, with more CPU left over for processing. And my benchmarks will make you blink.
All of this comes at a cost, of course, and I'm fortunate to have at least the money component of the classic tradeoff available: you can have it fast, cheap, or robust, but you can only pick two. AIX is for those who pick fast and robust.
-BA
mod parent +1 informative, this is the explanation necessary for the thread.
-BA
Y'know, seeing as how it's an Apple product, they can rebrand the whole of their catalog (usher in the new era of Apple Inc). That way you can own aMac and aPhone and aServer with aWirelessLAN. Of course, you could also get aLife...
-BA
Mod my parent up +1 Insightful. That's exactly the point here. If you live in a neighborhood where more than one social retard is letting their dogs shit on well-kept lawns, blocking sidewalks with their Hondas, having fistfights at 1am, then video is not just a shaming tool, but a means to present the local inept police department to heel, and start writing summonses and doing their jobs.
Sometimes, the only way to get someone to stop being a jackass is to take a hard stance on it. The slippery slope of a neighborhood's decline starts with apathy towards quality of life issues. Maybe the majority of slashdotters aren't homeowners with families, but those of you who are, understand my point intrinsically.
-BA
Fire bricks are usually rated for 2200F, within your range limit. I like the idea of reflecting back some of that heat, assuming you can find a reflector that won't be affected by the temps. Mounted against a wall of fire brick, and the other side should be well within temp limits for off-the-shelf gear.
How do I know this? My father owns a home in the Poconos, with a real nice fireplace. The fire bricks keep the house from burning down, even when the fire gets a few chunks of dry wood. Heck, the fireplace glass itself does a pretty fair job.
-BA
I own a handful of domains, and I have little if any problem setting up autoreject for invalid email addresses. The only problem I can't easily handle is when a valid email account is used by a spammer. I think you should strongly consider changing your domain host if you've got these issues in 2007.
-BA
Linux is an operating system. Mainframes are complete hardware solutions, which, by the way, can run Linux better than nearly any other hardware setup. I/O on a mainframe is probably the biggest advantage it has over any other solution, and will continue to have, because IBM has been refining it for 40 years.
As for the knocks on COBOL, write some non-trivial solutions with it and get back to me. You'll change your tune, I'm sure. I've written BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, Assembler for 390s and x86, Java, and a bucketful of scripting language solutions. The COBOL apps all crushed the other 3GLs simply because you can't beat an Amdahl mainframe for running through 16 million records each night during a production run. The COBOL compilers from IBM are probably the best compilers in the business, again benefiting from something like 35 years of refinement.
But hey, go out and buy 30 servers. Patch them, power them, rack them, cool them. Manage that. Meanwhile, the mainframe will stay up and running. Much more job security for me, and I'm still 15 years from retirement.
-BA
I took the liberty of rewriting this slightly to see if I misunderstood it:
---------
This is a pharmaceutical company, not an academic institution. They patent the cure so that
1. Any monies derived from it can be fed back into further research
2. Another pharma can't steal the idea and patent it for themselves
Pharmas have budgets to manage and need to behave in a business like way just like everyone else but they are not academic institutions.
---------
Hmmm, seems okay to me. Unless you've been living under a rock since, I dunno, the early 15th century, you'd know that the merchant class and capitalism in general has been running the world. All those nostalgic for the gentler, simpler times of yore need some bubonic plague to refresh their memories.
-BA
Threading is PRECISELY what's lacking in any web-based forum. That, and the unequalled ability to read threads offline. Granted, I come from a batch processing origin, so the ideal situation for me is to automate the download of all probable content, and read it at my leisure.
This, of course, is the clearest difference between 1994 and 2006. In 1994 download speeds were much slower and access not as widespread, so the concept of browsing and finding within ten seconds was near impossible. You brought down all of comp.databases (or the unread msgs), etc, and let it get everything while you did something else (or went to sleep). Downloads complete, your modem hung up (because it still cost eight cents a minute if the ISP wasn't local) and eventually you read your new threads. If you had money, you copied it over to your Palm Pilot or Handspring and read messages on the bus to work or school.
In some ways I still try to bundle up content to read offline. My favorite utility is a web crawler that pulls down pages for me to read while waiting on something else.
-BA
... any mention of newsgroups (cancelbots and thread pointers are hilarious) and ISDN (especially its ubiquity), odd-numbered port assignments (browse to this.place.com port 5000). I was a big fan of ISDN until DSL came to fore, and (thankfully) newsgroups have once again gone well underground, leaving it for old farts and half-assed spammers.
Hurrah, progress!
-BA
... because AllofMP3 does what Napster and Rhapsody and iTunes cannot: offer a comprehensive music catalog at reasonable rates. To wit: if you really like jazz, this is the only place to find nontrivial Art (or Chet!) Baker, Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich, Charles Mingus, or Dave Brubeck.
Is it illegal according to US law? Sure. Do I care? No. This is the modern equivalent of civil disobedience. Call it corporate disobedience: the ad infinitum extensions of copyright protection for works of long-dead artists, as a benefit to corporate parents, says the balance of power is most assuredly in the hands of the sociopathic corporate citizenry and not the voting public. The weapons I have against Big Business are economic, and this is just the first of many conflicts to come, all along the same lines.
Just mull it over. Corporate disobedience might be the only option now.
-BA
... but isn't this old news? Hacking (plaintext) cookies is about as innovative as hacking URLs or telnetting into your office SMTP server to write fake CEO emails to the new guy.
Still.. I'm off to get my $4 off coupons from Restaurant.com, ad-free weather from Wunderground.com, and free schools data from GreatSchools.net...
-BA
This is expected news, if you step back objectively.
... which brings me to the POWER CPUs. Where I work, I can architect a solution in a variety of ways, and currently I choose to build p550s with POWER5s (later POWER6s) with all the nice dynamic partitioning and micro-partitioning that you cannot get (at that level) from anyone else. I wonder how comfortable IBM would be feeling if they saw AMD start to offer the same kinds of partitioning elements in their CPUs and architectures?
AMD loses and will continue to lose the manufacturing race with Intel. Intel will likely continue to develop smaller and smaller dies, and AMD could never hope to leapfrog them for lack of cash to do so. Of course, give Intel their due: they employ some pretty smart people as well.
Ultimately, making your CPU do more specialized tasking, or capable of programmatic specialized tasking (think FPGA) is the right kind of innovation for them. I would also look to see more RISC-based operations, and wouldn't be at all surprised if they went off in that direction in some way. If they do, IBM has something to worry about...
This is all good news for me.
-BA
This is one of those interim solutions for early adopters who have more disposable income than capacity for delayed gratification.
Here's an "Ask Slashdot" moment though: why do the heads need to move at all? Why isn't WD or Samsung or Hitachi building a long, length-of-radius head over each platter? Then the only motor needed is for the platter, and the head is merely a fixed unit? This would probably reduce most HDD crashes too, since the arm would no longer traverse the drive plane.
I dunno, there's better ways to describe what I mean but I know there's something good in the creamy center of that idea.
-BA
By your logic, Oracle should have avoided Sleepycat and Innobase, and yet they bought both. Market consolidation is one factor, but IBM making a strong push to co-opt open source to provide more fuel for its services arm is the real driver here.
IBM will help create the storage engine for MySQL, then buy it, then give it away and sell support.
DB2 has its mainframe niche well established, but I think we can all agree that mainframes aren't the growth industry they once were.
-BA
SUSE and RedHat are also the only IBM supported distros. Is IBM going for MySQL, ala Oracle grabbing Innobase and Sleepycat?
-BA
Honestly, the human race is like a sugared-up two year old in an electronics store sometimes, without the parent saying "Don't touch that" eleventeen times.
-BA
I have a few lists, and one of them is quite large (3000+ subscribers) and extremely technical. It's also hosted by Yahoo, who would necessarily have an interest in keeping themselves out of trouble. All it would take is one message from one dope to fly across "unreported" to end seven years of free technical support to the planet Earth.
Nice job, McCain. This will help, big time. and by help, I mean help me decide who else I'm voting for in 2008.
-BA
...for which I offer no apology.
Outsourcing is neither good nor evil, but the motivation behind outsourcing tends to be overwhelmingly merciless and short-term. Taking a knowledge activity and attempting to turn it into a commodity or near-assembly line function is, I suppose, a managerial Holy Grail worth undertaking in different guises each decade.
Consider H1B visas. Is there a shortage of IT workers in the US, or a shortage of *cheap* IT workers in the US? Most major media publications are overwhelmingly guilty of dropping the telling adjective, and the quotes they gather all support a lack of IT talent, no qualifiers added.
We who work in this space, live in the space, can confirm some of this. It *is* hard to find a superior talent for an IT position above entry level. However, it's not impossible if you have a salary and excellent position to offer.
So, when I read about outsourcing arbitrage and the chase for ever-cheaper talent, I just wait it out. Eventually, all of the talent, cheap or not, will come to fore and then the real shoot-out over quality and reliability can begin. Does anyone truly believe there's a hidden cachet of Polish supercoders who haven't been discovered because they lack the Internet connectivity? Does anyone see the inherent flaw in that premise, and by extension, any argument like it?
I'm not overly impressed with a single outsourced individual or group in my eleven pro years of IT, and that includes old Anderson Consulting of 1995 up to Patel Consulting of 2006. The prestige of the firm should only get them an interview: talent and not cost is what you'll need to survive.
As a final note, what, if anything, will the US do if it successfully outsources all of its IT functions? Does anyone expect anyone to major in CS in this country, knowing that electricians make far more and took less formal schooling? I think not. You can't outsource a physical service.
-BA
POPFile used to be 98.7% accurate in classifying email. I'm lucky to get 67% these days, even with a simple binary filter (spam/notspam). What I'm going to need to do -- and do not relish -- is start looking at the ones making it through and manually updating the word lists to tag them properly.
Why don't I want to do this? Because I remember the Bad Old Days of Spam, when I was forced to create Byzantine layers of regexp in Pegasus to snag all the bad people. Bayesian classifiers have been mitigated for now...
-BA
... I might take a shot on the Ubuntu Internet. I hear it's real purty and revs often.
-BA
ODF, then, is how I remember working with another OASIS spec for Datastream 7i. The parsing will be simple, at least for a computer program (tedious walkdown by hand).
-BA
True, they are not the same and I apologize for implying that they are. I think I was jumping the gun a little by assuming support for this as a writeable option (Save As) would make its way into the Office suite.
-BA