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On 09/06/2011 03:50 PM, Warp wrote:
> The vast majority of people who had (and have) Vista in their PCs had
> no choice. It's not like Vista became "the second most popular OS" by
> people's choice. It became the second most popular because computer vendors
> made the choice for their customers
Heh, yeah.
Sometimes I wonder if red sports cars are *actually* more popular, or
whether it's just that most sports cars available happen to be red...
> It's a bit like arguing that OPEC is a great organization because the
> vast majority of the world's oil comes from them. That would be one of
> the dumbest arguments in existence.
What, dumber than arguing that the supreme improbability of complex life
existing is explained by the pre-existence of something far more improbable?
Or perhaps you meant dumber than arguing that 0.002 cents is actually
the same thing as 0.002 dollars?
Sorry, I couldn't resist... ;-)
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On 6/8/2011 5:14 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>>>>> Why would it be a surprise that IBM is more profitable than Apple?
>>>>
>>>> Because, last I heard, the company was in severe financial trouble and
>>>> was close to being liquidated. To go from that to being one of the most
>>>> profitable companies on Earth is a pretty big turn-around.
>>>
>>> "Last you heard" was in the 80s, and you heard wrong.
>>
>> OK, fair enough. But given that they were once a big name that everybody
>> knew and talked about, and now nobody ever mentions their name, it's not
>> surprising that I got the impression that they weren't doing so well.
>
> They're still a pretty big name. Just because you haven't heard from
> them doesn't mean no one has. You've heard of Thinkpad latops, haven't
> you? They spun off that division 5 years ago because, while it was
> profitable, it wasn't profitable enough... This means their server
> divisions, application divisions, as well as their service offerings
> were even more succesful.
>
> Every single developped country's government uses IBM mainframes.
> Every single bank in the world still uses IBM mainframes.
> Every single insurance compnay in the world still uses IBM mainframes.
> Every single airline in the world still uses IBM mainframes.
> Most of the Fortune 1000 companies have IBM mainframes (Google is
> probably one of the very few exceptions)
>
> Most of the above will have hundreds of P-Series (AIX) servers, AS/400s,
> And intel-based servers made by IBM. Not to mention use various Tivoli
> monitoring tools, Websphere applications platforms, and in many case,
> Lotus Notes for internal e-mail.
>
> Also, watch this, when you have 15 minutes of spare time.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jtNUGgmd4
>
The reason for that is that its often cheaper to keep running
mainframes, than go to blade servers. Mind, blades are IBM too, in some
cases, so.. lol But, in general, too much software, archaic file
systems, no easy means to convert, even if you can run the application
on a new system, etc.
>>
>>> Survived what? The Exxon Valdez disaster was a mere footnote in their
>>> history.
>>
>> One of the worst, most infamous ecological catastrophes in human
>> history, and it's a "mere footnote"?? How did it not end their
>> existence? How did they not get sued off the face of creation?
>>
>
> You've heard of appeals courts? Exxon has yet to pay a single cent of
> what they were fined, and even when they finally do, it will not harm
> them in the long run. Their fine has been capped at $507M, which is
> roughly their profits for one week (they made $30B in profits last year).
>
> Oh, and by the way, the Bhopal disaster hadn't killed Union Carbide
> before they were bought out by Dow Chemicals, and last summer's
> Deepwater Horizon tragedy will not kill BP, either. It's sad, but it's
> the truth.
>
Gee, and it couldn't be because of the vast number of Rethuglicans
trying their damnedest to a) stop them paying what they **offered** to
pay themselves, never mind, b) pay more, instead of being left free and
clear by the government.
The thing that pisses me off though is the morons, like some at work,
who fail to grasp that the "small companies" in the US that actually do
their own refining (in theory), and don't funnel all their oil through
foreign systems first (this is legal, under the agreements we have to do
precisely that?), provide a stupidly small amount of the oil in the
country (or certainly a stupidly small amount), and haven't the
equipment, personnel, or the financial resources, even with billions in
government help, which they don't currently get, unlike the
multi-nationals, to have a hope in hell of making up the other 90%
(yeah, made up number), if we "drilled more". Oh, and that is without
even mentioning that 90% of the "prime" oil production areas are
licensed to/owned by, the multinationals, so you would have to divest
them of those assets, to give them to the small US companies. Oh, yeah,
and the even more stupid fact that all those multi-nationals, and really
big ones, are **sitting on** thousands of unused licenses, even as they
whine about needing more of them, so they can drill more wells.
Its like claiming that house hold farmers, with less than 10 square feet
of land, can "replace" 500 acre farm lands, if those same farmers where
busy only planting 20 acres, sitting on the rest, and whining that they
didn't have 1,000 acres.
Its completely mad, and the people that believe we can just drill more,
to fix the problem, are complete morons. The first thing we would have
to do, before anything else, is build more refineries, so we are not
being overcharged for fuel, because they have to retool every bloody 3
months to "change which sort they make". Second, throw out all non-US
drilling companies. Finally, stop selling oil to the outside markets *at
all*, by which point we might be self sufficient, for at least until we
end up having to squeeze it out of the ground, like someone getting the
last drop of water from a damn sponge, while the foreign sources are
still able to scoop the shit up in buckets, because they can't keep it
from leaking out of the damn ground, without even drilling for it.
We need to reduce its use to shit where we have no other options, not
sell 50 more licenses to companies that are not using the ones they
have, and drill more holes in the ground, so that we are producing 2
times almost nothing from *purely* local companies, instead of merely
almost nothing.
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> On 6/8/2011 5:14 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>>
>> Every single developped country's government uses IBM mainframes.
>> Every single bank in the world still uses IBM mainframes.
>> Every single insurance compnay in the world still uses IBM mainframes.
>> Every single airline in the world still uses IBM mainframes.
>> Most of the Fortune 1000 companies have IBM mainframes (Google is
>> probably one of the very few exceptions)
>>
>> Most of the above will have hundreds of P-Series (AIX) servers, AS/400s,
>> And intel-based servers made by IBM. Not to mention use various Tivoli
>> monitoring tools, Websphere applications platforms, and in many case,
>> Lotus Notes for internal e-mail.
>>
>> Also, watch this, when you have 15 minutes of spare time.
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jtNUGgmd4
>>
> The reason for that is that its often cheaper to keep running
> mainframes, than go to blade servers. Mind, blades are IBM too, in some
> cases, so.. lol But, in general, too much software, archaic file
> systems, no easy means to convert, even if you can run the application
> on a new system, etc.
>
There's also the question of performance. One needs a metric ton of
bladeservers to be able to match the performance under load of a 20 year
old mainframe sysplex. I've worked for many years in the airline
industry IT and came across a few system "upgrades" where transactions
took 3-4 seconds to complete on the mainframe, but required upwards of
15 minutes, in some cases*, on the new client-server, web-enabled,
buzzword-compliant system that was supposed to replace the green screens.
*This one was bad SQL queries due to the default behavior of the RADD
tool used to design the front-end piece of the software, and was
eventually fixed.
>>>
>>>> Survived what? The Exxon Valdez disaster was a mere footnote in their
>>>> history.
>>>
>>> One of the worst, most infamous ecological catastrophes in human
>>> history, and it's a "mere footnote"?? How did it not end their
>>> existence? How did they not get sued off the face of creation?
>>>
I read today that the oil operations in Nigeria spill the equivalent of
one Exxon Valdez per year and it goes unfixed because it's actually
cheaper to lose the oil than to fix the leaks, and no one cares because
... it's Africa.
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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On 6/9/2011 18:34, Francois Labreque wrote:
> There's also the question of performance. One needs a metric ton of
> bladeservers to be able to match the performance under load of a 20 year old
> mainframe sysplex.
The main difference between mainframes and smaller systems is that
mainframes are optimized for I/O. Even the mainframe I used 30 years ago
could do several I/O operations simultaneously faster than the CPU could
handle it. For example, you could be swapping in/out three processes, as
well as accessing the data and an index page of a database, while the CPU is
running full speed. There were four IOPs for each CPU, and each IOP could
handle two DMA channels.
Sort of like how video cards nowadays do all kinds of processing without the
CPU's involvement other than setting them up.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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On 6/9/2011 20:27, Darren New wrote:
> The main difference between mainframes and smaller systems is that
> mainframes are optimized for I/O. Even the mainframe I used 30 years ago
Another example: The mainframe knew which disks were fast (having multiple
heads per platter, for example) and which were slower, and it put the
indexes of databases and directories and such (etc) on the fast disk and the
bulk data and actual file contents on the slow disks. It also allocated
random-access files on cylinder boundaries.
Nowadays, the blades and desktop machines don't even know what the cylinder
boundaries of their disks are.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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Le 2011-06-09 23:27, Darren New a écrit :
> On 6/9/2011 18:34, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> There's also the question of performance. One needs a metric ton of
>> bladeservers to be able to match the performance under load of a 20
>> year old
>> mainframe sysplex.
>
> The main difference between mainframes and smaller systems is that
> mainframes are optimized for I/O. Even the mainframe I used 30 years ago
> could do several I/O operations simultaneously faster than the CPU could
> handle it. For example, you could be swapping in/out three processes, as
> well as accessing the data and an index page of a database, while the
> CPU is running full speed. There were four IOPs for each CPU, and each
> IOP could handle two DMA channels.
Yep, or having separate front-end processors dealing with keeping the
user sessions alive, etc. Leaving the CPUs deal with important stuff.
>
> Sort of like how video cards nowadays do all kinds of processing without
> the CPU's involvement other than setting them up.
>
Or some high-end server network cards implement the basic functionality
of the IP stack, or SSL encryption in hardware.
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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Le 2011/06/10 00:39, Darren New a écrit :
> On 6/9/2011 20:27, Darren New wrote:
>> The main difference between mainframes and smaller systems is that
>> mainframes are optimized for I/O. Even the mainframe I used 30 years ago
>
> Another example: The mainframe knew which disks were fast (having
> multiple heads per platter, for example) and which were slower, and it
> put the indexes of databases and directories and such (etc) on the fast
> disk and the bulk data and actual file contents on the slow disks. It
> also allocated random-access files on cylinder boundaries.
>
> Nowadays, the blades and desktop machines don't even know what the
> cylinder boundaries of their disks are.
>
You effectively can't know where the boundaries are when the drive never
tels you the truth about it. The drive's organisation have been
virtualised a prety long time ago, and each true cylinders may not have
the same number of sectors as it's neibors. The OS sees all cylinders as
having the same capacity. It also see a sectors, cylinders and heads
count that don't have anything to do with the actual values.
Alain
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On 6/10/2011 10:52, Alain wrote:
> It also see a sectors, cylinders and heads count that don't have
> anything to do with the actual values.
Yep. That's what I said. Of course the drive knows which sectors are where.
THe interfaces might not, and the OS can't see it, and that's exactly one
reason why people still use mainframes where important information like this
isn't hidden from the OS.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> On 6/10/2011 10:52, Alain wrote:
> > It also see a sectors, cylinders and heads count that don't have
> > anything to do with the actual values.
>
> Yep. That's what I said. Of course the drive knows which sectors are where.
> THe interfaces might not, and the OS can't see it, and that's exactly one
> reason why people still use mainframes where important information like this
> isn't hidden from the OS.
>
> --
> Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
> "Coding without comments is like
> driving without turn signals."
That's not quite true anymore, at least with IBM mainframes. That was true with
the early IBM drives like the 3330, 3350, 3380, and 3390 drives. But the last
several generations of IBM disk drives have been raid devices. The legacy 3390
disk drive format is emulated by heavily cached controllers, backed by hi-speed
scsi drives. What appears to the mainframe as a cylinder is really data blocks
spread across several scsi drives. The model ds8100 I work with emulates about
1200 3390 virtual drives with a total capacity of 15TB. The actual data is
contained on a hundred or so 10000 RPM scsi drives. All the time I once spent
trying to optimize disk performance by placing system datasets at specific
locations on the drives to minimize head movement is no longer necessary.
Isaac.
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> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> On 6/10/2011 10:52, Alain wrote:
>>> It also see a sectors, cylinders and heads count that don't have
>>> anything to do with the actual values.
>>
>> Yep. That's what I said. Of course the drive knows which sectors are where.
>> THe interfaces might not, and the OS can't see it, and that's exactly one
>> reason why people still use mainframes where important information like this
>> isn't hidden from the OS.
>>
>> --
>> Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
>> "Coding without comments is like
>> driving without turn signals."
>
> That's not quite true anymore, at least with IBM mainframes. That was true with
> the early IBM drives like the 3330, 3350, 3380, and 3390 drives. But the last
> several generations of IBM disk drives have been raid devices. The legacy 3390
> disk drive format is emulated by heavily cached controllers, backed by hi-speed
> scsi drives. What appears to the mainframe as a cylinder is really data blocks
> spread across several scsi drives. The model ds8100 I work with emulates about
> 1200 3390 virtual drives with a total capacity of 15TB. The actual data is
> contained on a hundred or so 10000 RPM scsi drives. All the time I once spent
> trying to optimize disk performance by placing system datasets at specific
> locations on the drives to minimize head movement is no longer necessary.
>
> Isaac.
>
All this talk makes me wonder... has there ever been a mainframe port of
POV-Ray?
/Sorry for veering on-topic
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
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/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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