iPaul so iBlog

After your register with Encompass/DECUS, it takes a little while for the member number to set up on the license registration and media ordering tools.  About one week.  I’ve ordered my media and have installed personal alpha on my laptop.  On EBay I’ve seen a number of DS10L’s available for about 250 USD to 350 USD.  I’m avoiding buying hardware for two reasons. The first is a matter of space.  I’ve got enough stuff and don’t need more clutter.  The second is I would rather sink money into the more modern Itanium systems.  

A roundup on the DailyKos of opinions about Hillary’s white support comments runs the gamut of reasons why this is a bad thing for her.  I think her comments might actually be a kind of moment for West Virginia and Kentucky voters, and all Democratic voters.  There has been a degree of speculation as to how many Indiana voters, or Ohio voters, voted for Hillary in part because Barack is African American.  At least anecdotally that’s come up in some of the exit interviews and some estimates are as high as 15% of voters just didn’t feel comfortable with an African American nominee.  That’s why Hillary’s overt comments regarding race and support might actually be a net good for Obama.

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I recently caught this snippet on Geek.com about Mac 10.5.2 issues.  When I worked as an admin for a small office I can say that even Windows 3.1 was stable enough - as long as Windows was the only thing running. I’m not saying I know what this fellow’s PC is like, having never seen it, but I can speak to what I have seen in the past.  Generally, my desktops are stable.  I generally don’t have many problems with Mac OS or Windows, except when I chew up too much memory (mostly this seems to be a problem for Windows).  Generally the problems I have come down to:

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I have a huge deadline looming.  I need something to do on the side to take the stress off.  In this case I decided to try installing OpenSolaris on a Compaq Presario R3000Z that’s my Windows/Linux machine.  A little history - I got that particular model of the R3000Z because it was a full 64 bit Athlon - not one of the crippled Athlons HP originally put in the R3000Z.  It comes with a built in Broadcom WiFi and Broadcom Ethernet adapter.  The WiFi is a lost cause outside of 32 bit windows.  Even under Ubuntu’s restricted driver for that Broadcom chip, it would only kinda sorta work and would eventually lock up the machine.  There is no 64 bit Windows driver for it, either.  So, I bought an Atheros based Netgear WiFi card.

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On the one hand there’s Java.  It’s the write once and (pretty much) run anywhere tool.  You can develop on your Windows laptop and deploy to an HP Superdome.  Or vice-versa if you happen to have an HP Superdome lying around.  The irony is that it makes the operating system less relevant.  I don’t mean to say irrelevant, since a good foundation is important in any infrastructure, but definitely less relevant.  Sun has even ported a lot of their software infrastructure offerings, such as Web Server, Directory Server and Access Manager to a variety of non-Sun platforms.  On the one hand Sun is the cross-platform, vendor neutral provider of technology.
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Hillary Clinton suggested that she knew better than just about every economist in the nation, claiming she could do the stupid gas tax holiday right[2]. Just like George Bush and Dick Cheney knew better than all the military and civil service experts regarding what it would take to invade Iraq. Just like Rep John Duncan claims that scientists, experts and doctors are elitist when they show that abstinence only education is a fraud. It’s becoming the standard response that politicians go to when their policies are challenged by people who are intelligent and knowledgeable on the subjects in question.  These experts are being ‘elitist.’  Politicians attempt to defuse all those years of thinking about law, medicine, science, or whatever their field of expertise with that one label.

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I recently reviewed the TPM-C benchmarks, looking for evidence of software bloat.  What initially surprised me was clear evidence Moore’s law was alive and well.  Was bloat not sucking up the excess capacity?  On further examination, however, I think I may have found an eloquent argument in favor of minimalist and efficient code.  For those not familiar with TPM-C, it’s a benchmark that tries to simulate an environment where new orders are coming into a system.  The entire system is logically built around the older model of a green-screen app (although some use HTML) that accesses a database.  The clients are not real people, of course, but programs that access this theoretical green-screen app, sending it requests based on somewhat stochastic wait times and think times.  It’s a mix of database statements that simulate what happens when you call those operators “standing by” to take your Enzyte order.

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Here’s another snippet from Ars Technica about greening data centers.  A lot of work is going into making servers more efficient and in server consolidation.  Low power versions of CPUs, CPU throttling, even spinning down unused processors helps reduce power consumption.  Power is a real issue for data centers.  Not just because of cost, but in some cases because of availability.  A number of people talk about issues like virtualization as a way to consolidate under-used servers, but that’s just a side issue.  Power is even only one symptom of a larger problem - of resource usage.  The real problem is we’ve had an explosion in processing power but it’s been completely masked by an explosion in software bloat.  Even though the available memory, CPU cycles, network bandwidth and hard drive space are growing like gangbusters, it seems like software has an uncanny ability to suck it all up.
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This little snippet from Computer World illustrates the position companies large, small and mid-sized are in regarding Vista.  Microsoft will push them toward Vista weather they want to or not.  Continuing on XP is not just a support problem.  That company won’t even be able to buy replacement machines without Vista.  They will have to field Vista desktops when they replace existing computers.  What’s a company to do?

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Enough politics!  Back to technology.  It seems like we achieved a kind of homogeneity in computer operating systems for x86.  Namely, Windows, Mac OS X and variations on Unix.  I was looking for an ‘interesting’ operating system that I could run on my PC where I could see how other people looked at computing.  That’s when I entered the weird and wonderful world of PDP emulators, namely simh.  The first OS I tried out was TOPS-20, a PDP 10 operating system, like the cool retro computer Paul Allen runs.  It didn’t take long before I came across OpenVMS. I thought OpenVMS (or VMS) had died quietly sometime in the bowels of Compaq.  I had heard almost nothing about it since I read “In Search of Clusters.”  I used to see OpenVMS as an option on a number of open source projects and products, but stopped seeing the OpenVMS versions a long time ago.  I assumed it was deceased, done, expired, an ex-operating system.

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