756545
submission
BBCWatcher writes:
Rejoice, ye junk food fans of the United Kingdom. A British High Court judge has ruled: Pringles are not potato crisps (chips). Their packaging, "unnatural shape" and the fact that the potato content is less than 50% (a mere 42%) helped Mr. Justice Warren make his crunch decision. As a result, Pringles, in all flavors are free from the 17.5% Value Added Tax (VAT).
Now Fredric Baur can rest easy, and this ruling also slashed the already low price of macro lenses.
651596
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BBCWatcher writes:
CNET interviews IBM's Steve Mills who points out that mainframes have been delivering "cloud computing" for decades, and he challenged his industry peers to deliver true multitenancy if they expect Software as a Service (SaaS) to achieve its full potential. He also urged the IT press to investigate the hype surrounding cloud computing and whether it's really delivering what's promised, especially in terms of qualities of service. Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, admitted that they need "hundreds" of machines to support their customers, but he insisted that each is a mini-cloud supporting a few customers. Mills may have a point as IBM itself collapses 3,900 smaller servers to 33 mainframes and as The New York Times reports that data centers will pollute more than the airline industry by 2020 unless they get smart. Larry Dignan at ZDNet admires IBM's ability to reinvent the mainframe: "The mainframe is like the cockroach. If the world were to end via a nuclear holocaust there would only be two things left: Cockroaches and a mainframe."
553604
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BBCWatcher writes:
Reuters reports that IBM has teamed up with partners VDEL of Austria and LX Polska to offer Microsoft-free personal computers in Eastern European markets, including Russia. IBM cites customer demand, particularly from Russian CIOs at organizations such as the Ministry of Defence, Aeroflot, and Alfa Bank. The PCs, provided by hardware partners of VDEL and LX Polska, will include a Red Hat Linux distribution and Open Document Format support via Lotus Symphony. The Linux-preloaded PCs will be known as the "Open Referent" (?) platform, and IBM says they'll cut desktop computing costs for customers by up to half.
543360
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BBCWatcher writes:
Mainframes are "code accretion machines": they run code written in every decade since the 1950s alongside just-written PHP, Java, Perl, C/C++, or whatever. The design mantra is "don't break the code," and businesses can keep running whatever is valuable. It's horrifically expensive to write billions of lines of bulletproof code, after all. But the Wall Street Journal wonders who will maintain the older code. The Journal interviews Elizabeth Bell, age 23, a computer programming student from Ontario, Canada, who seems to understand labor markets, especially in these recessionary times. She learned the other stuff, but she also taught herself COBOL. Bank of Montreal came to her, and she landed a job without even applying. Elizabeth says she's not competing with many people her age for the managerial positions opening up. "I may be the youngest now," she tells the Journal, "but there are smart, practical kids who are in school because they want a career who realize that the mainframe is the way to go."
542018
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BBCWatcher writes:
Slashdot covered the leaks, but today IBM is announcing — and in a surprise, immediately shipping — their new System z10 Enterprise Class mainframe. There are several announcements, and I'm now digging through just the 391 page (!) tome IBM posted. This is a massively vertically scaled machine, with up to 1.5 TB of main memory and 4.4 GHz cores. Uniprocessor mixed z/OS performance is up a whopping 70% or so compared to the previous fastest, an unusually big jump. One machine has up to 64 main cores, not counting the 2 spares (minimum) and myriad assist processors. Every core has hardware decimal floating point and hardware crypto algorithms including AES256. No one else is building such a massive SMP system with these sorts of clock speeds as far as I know, so this might be the first "mainframe supercomputer." Of course there are the big I/O bandwidth improvements and massive multi-level shared caches, and you can active-active Parallel Sysplex cluster up to 32 of these beasties via InfiniBand up to 150 meters apart (and tens of kilometers with some more kit). The machine can run any combination of five different operating systems (including Linux and z/OS 1.10) across all the 64 processors in n-level virtualized LPARs and z/VM instances. IBM is claiming a single z10 can do the typical work of about 1,500 X86 servers but take 85% less power and space and run 24x365.
492936
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BBCWatcher writes:
Sushen Patel, a precocious 11th grader at Dallas's Highland Park High School, beat 1,749 (mostly) college students to win the Master the Mainframe Contest. He and the next four finishers get Nintendo Wiis for their efforts, although if the past is any guide he'll also get a free trip to Poughkeepsie and a job interview. There's an interesting photo collection of contestants if you'd like to see what new mainframers look like in their native habitats.
412885
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BBCWatcher writes:
It's December 6, 2007, and Lenovo just announced new ThinkPad T61 models preloaded with... Microsoft Windows XP. Ironically they're called ThinkPad T61 "TopSeller" models. Lenovo says they're aimed at small and medium sized businesses. The XP TopSellers are available immediately, and the part numbers are 6465-03U, 7658-04U, and 7664-06U (PDF links). "Lenovo recommends Windows Vista Business"? Not so much.
400757
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BBCWatcher writes:
Sine Nomine Associates, the same team heavily involved in bringing Linux to the IBM mainframe, appeared at Gartner's Data Center Conference in Las Vegas this week to demonstrate publicly OpenSolaris running on IBM System z. Sine Nomine's David Boyes says, after 18 months of work, OpenSolaris for z (codename: Sirius) will be available "soon" and that the open source community will get it all. He says the port is mostly feature-complete and supports the Linux ABI, although they've got more testing to do. Boyes says the primary value is to help companies move their applications (usually C/C++) from large distributed Solaris server farms to a much smaller and more reliable IBM mainframe footprint — he simulates a CPU failure in the demo. However, all their Solaris administrative skills and even disk storage still apply, but they don't have to change their code. They can also avoid expensive data center expansions and reduce energy use. The demonstration is on YouTube in 5 parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
379833
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BBCWatcher writes:
Comedy Central's staff picked series one as a favorite. Now IBM's mainframe sales "trainee" is back, with his "mentor," learning "The Art of the Sale" in series two. In these three new (and even funnier, IMHO) episodes (4, 5, and 6), we learn the importance of a good metaphor, not to surprise trainees before their first customer call, the "mainframe 3 Cs," and the value of ink. Each is roughly 99% entertainment and 1% advertisement (Web address on screen at the end). I searched Google and confirmed that "Bob Hoey" really works for IBM, and his IBM picture matches. If you missed episodes 1, 2, and 3, Slashdot remembers; watch them first.
362709
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BBCWatcher writes:
As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld says IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe, on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?
327355
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BBCWatcher writes:
InformationWeek and CNN among others report that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in August asked server manufacturers to develop "miles per gallon" ratings for their equipment that would provide accurate assessments of energy efficiency. IBM says it is now providing "typical usage ratings" for its line of z9 mainframe computers, in addition to previously available maximum power ratings. More than 1,000 z9s around the world started reporting (with the owners' permission) on May 11th their actual installed power and cooling demands, so IBM can publish statistics such as how much energy is required to turn on an additional processor to run multiple Linux virtual servers (answer: only about 20 total watts). "Over time every vendor is going to be asked to provide typical energy use numbers for their equipment. It's what the EPA wants, and this allows us to move beyond simple performance benchmarking to energy benchmarking."
293269
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BBCWatcher writes:
It's back for its 3rd year, and "no experience necessary": the 2007 Master the Mainframe Contest. Students can register now to try to win t-shirts, $100 cash cards, Nintendo Wii consoles, or free trips to the mainframe factory in Poughkeepsie, New York, also home to Vassar College. (Just sayin'.) Details are sketchy, but in the past two contests students worked through several z/OS-based exercises, including some mainframe haiku. IBM may also feature you in a low budget YouTube video. Almost everybody wins a t-shirt just for showing up, but the stakes may be much higher: a couple of 2005's and 2006's winners are now listed in IBM's employee directory.
(Slashdot also covered last year's contest.)
291857
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BBCWatcher writes:
The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and several other news outlets report that IBM will announce a free, downloadable office suite today in a direct challenge to Microsoft. The news comes only a week after IBM announced it is joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project.
IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony. The new Symphony, based on Open Office, is yet another product to support Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard for universal document interchange. There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free. IBM support will be available for a fee. There are no details yet about platform support, but IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so at least those three are likely.
146035
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BBCWatcher writes:
What happens when you marry the Cell processor to a modern mainframe? The New York Times, Associated Press, and CNET among others report on the new "gameframe." The idea is to take advantage of the IBM mainframe's massive transactional throughput and raw I/O performance while the Cell processors simulate virtual worlds — exactly the type of single hybrid processing system you'd need to support enormous online gaming communities. IBM identified Hoplon Infotainment as the first gameframe customer, although there is no ship date yet. Yes, it appears at least one of the OSes for the gameframe will be Linux.
43384
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BBCWatcher writes:
Ed Moltzen at Computer Reseller News (CRN) picks up on a post at the Mainframe Blog describing setup of a "home mainframe." What's the going price for a real mainframe? Looks like about $50,000 for a full kit — much lower than I expected. For that price you can pick up a real 64-bit IBM mainframe, real operating system (both z/OS and Linux), IBM's corporate-level support service, and even WebSphere. That's about the same price as a PlayStation 3 from eBay, but it's a lot more fun.
