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Comment Re:Sister company (Score 1) 178

This is true- but it is also important to remember that any nonprofit that chooses this approach has to be able to demonstrate that the for-profit entity is tied into the mission and program of the organization in a substantive way- not just an unconnected business which provides revenue.The risk is running afoul of 'unrelated business income tax', and possibly cause a loss of the federal 501(c)(3) exempt status.

Comment Nonprofits use more than grants for sustainability (Score 1) 178

Anyone who thinks grants have anything more than a minimal role in nonprofit sustainability does not understand how noprofit businesses work, unless they are supported by a unit of government as an agent for the provision of human services, like Chicago Area Project which gets the bulk of its revenue from state grants.

Nonprofits generally earn the preponderance of their revenue on a continuing basis from donations by individuals and/or organizations/businesses. They work to develop large networks of interested donors by having a properly constituted board of directors- meaning that board members designated as 'money people', whose primary purpose on the board is to assist in fundraising, must meet annual donation requirements- either directly from that board member's pocket, or through the network of pockets that board member is able to access. The combination of a good set of 'money' board members, a savvy development director, events, charged services, grants, and systematic/consistently applied overhead costs all lead to sustainability. Schools and hospitals have an additional tool- they can actually earn the bulk of their revenue from investment income, which other nonprofits are not allowed to do.

Comment Hire veteran COBOLers, retirements won't matter. (Score 5, Insightful) 318

It is a bromide perpetrated by ITAA and business groups that we can't find enough programmers to replace the ones who are retiring.

The simple truth is that no one wants to PAY what people are worth, and there is rampant age discrimination:

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/tennant/yes-age-discrimination-is-worse-in-it-than-in-other-fields/?cs=38549

Be willing to hire, retrain, or do whatever it takes to employ people over 35 and this so-called problem will be
shown to be the chimera that it really is.

Comment graphic arts, printing, and color management (Score 1) 1880

It is sad to have to say this, but color management as required by graphic arts applications is very poorly implemented under Linux. There is no universally agreed-upon CMM(color management module), and applications do not uniformly implement and respect color management. Also, creating and maintaining ICC profiles under Linux is a difficult proposition at best. The best profile generation package, Argyll, is an open source command line product that is unable to work directly with scanning tables like the i1io, Barbieri, or Colorpartner units. Argyll's UI approach is not anywhere as convenient as products like profilemaker, monacoprofiler, or i1profiler. For those who need to use a RIP, there is exactly one offering available- Caldera.

I wish Linux could support graphic arts and printing for professional printers as well as Win and OS/X.

Comment Ever run a mainframe? Try looking at LPARs. (Score 1) 239

Sadly the PC world has unitl recently ignored yet another lesson from mainframes- logical partitioning.

The concept is a minimal bare-metal hypervisor which in mainframes is built into the hardware and is integrated with a robust set of configuration tools. It's nice to see at least a shadow of this concept being implemented in something.

Comment Re:Alternative ways to develop? (Score 5, Informative) 262

Actually, the process Kodachrome uses to produce the color is still based on the fundamental instability which plagues all chromogenic systems- even though the dye coupler is not in the emulsion(as would be the case with Kodacolor and Ektachrome), the fact is that the process is still the same. A dye coupler combines with developing agent by-products in proportion to the amount of underlying silver that is developed. I've always wondered how Kodachrome achieved greater archival permanence; maybe it is because the coupler/developing agent byproduct reaction happens only in processing and the dye coupler does not have a chance to become spoiled while unused sitting in an emulsion.

Comment Don't do it. You can't color manage your monitor. (Score 1) 384

None of the virtualization environments allow for applying color profiles to the virtual graphics display.

As a photographer, you will be concerned with proper color management of your monitor, and so you
need a base environment which properly supports this. That base environment regrettably needs to be
a Windows desktop or server operating system.

Comment Mainframe-based HVTP Systems Don't use SQL (Score 1) 444

For well over 30 years, airline reservation, hotel reservation, and other high volume transaction processing(HVTP) systems that are mainframe-based have not used SQL in the core transaction processing system. They use either the built-in key/value subsystem of TPF/ZTPF, or a slightly more sophisticated subsystem known as TPFDB. Using facilities similar to zOS, failover and recovery happen in record time should it be necessary. This successful real-world system and approach deserves the attention of those who would like to learn how this stuff really works.

Comment Too bad they dont about TPF/ZTPF and TPFDB/ACPDB (Score 1) 157

It's always funny to read things written by people who obviously are inexperienced with high volume transaction processing in the mainframe environment. The systems behind airline, rail, and hotel reservations as well as emergency response messaging often are built on IBM mainframes using TPF/ZTPF as the operating system and
TPFDB(formerly known as ACPDB) as the underlying database. If someone would take the time to study TPFDB, they would notice its nonrelational character, as well as some interesting similarities to what the Cassandra developers unknowingly chose to do. By the way, these systems are happily handling 10K-12K transactions per second without bunny farm racks of servers.

Sometimes progress is not always about what will be done, but understanding the benefits of older things that have been done.

Comment This is just a variation on municipal bonds. (Score 1) 140

You are essentially talking about what government does when they float a bond to create infrastructure, but instead your concept is a voluntary association of homeowners who agree to enter into an agreement to loan money to the phone company. You could more effectively do this by having the residents form a 501(c)(12) telecommunications cooperative and use that cooperative entity to negotiate with the phone company to fiber up your block, for example. You are still doing the finance, but you do it under a recognized legal entity.

Of course, the best thing would be for municipalities to take over telecommunications pipes to the home as a public service like water, sewers, and roads, but that would require us to remind ourselves of how government is not evil and exists to serve the people. In this kind of scenario, telecommunication companies could become hired help under contract to government to provide maintenance, content, and other things.

Comment Common carrier law needs to be enforced (Score 1) 140

It used to be that the conflict of interest was resolved by enabling those who agreed only to provide the pipe to be covered for liability by a concept known as 'common carrier'. If you were simply providing the pipe, and no content, you couldn't be held liable for what went through the pipe. Essentially through corruption and a lack of public awareness, we are not properly enforcing common carrier law through lawsuits against content providers who try to have their cake and eat it too.

Comment Public actitivities need to break even, not profit (Score 1) 140

Unfortunately, due to the corruption of the public sense and understanding by an MBA-dominated concept of service, many people are under the misunderstanding that the fiscal goal of public service or nonprofit organizations is to fiscally produce excess revenue over expenses, otherwise known as profit. The pre-MBA-dominated understanding of the fiscal goal of public service and nonprofit organizations is that they are to produce the maximum utilization by the public of their programs and services at a balanced budget where revenue and expenses are equal.

Why do we let idiots with MBA degrees tell people in government and public service how to manage their finances and operations using fiscal principles that don't apply?

Comment Re:zVM, zOS, TPF/zTPF are better than Linux. (Score 1) 251

No revisit is necessary after 8 years. The structural issues with linux on the mainframe are exactly that- structural. How aboout this- go into real mainframe shops in mainframe-committed businesses like insurance, transit reservations, banking, and so on, and find out what the core business transaction systems run on. It won't be linux, and for manifold good reasons, mostly related to RAS. Linux has nothing even remotely resembling the abilities in Parallel Sysplex(zOS), but there's no need to escalate to that- even the most basic device error recovery management in a mainframe operating system is better handled than in Linux.

And by the way, the assumption that with the progression of years comes inherent improvement in technology is by no means a certainty, especially in computing. Ask someone who knows anything about Keykos whether today's operating systems have incorporated even half the concepts they got right. Oh wait- let me not forget- Keykos and many other earlier operating systems aren't covered in a typical CS operating systems course, but that must be because the 'experts' have deemed them irrelevant. The same 'experts' ignore TPF/zTPF as well, which have been happily doing transit reservation systems for over 40 years. So much for progress inherent in the march of years.

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