October 6th, 2008
Data Processing scores big success! Linux loses, again!
On September 29, 2008, just about all major newscasts across Canada carried something about our new national copy of the American do not call line - and virtually every TV station and newspaper web site had a prominent link to www.dnlc.gc.ca.
The supporting legislation passed late in 2005 and the contract to IBM loyalist Bell ICT out-sourcing was formalized only two years later: in December of 2007.
Here’s a bit from a a CBC piece announcing that contract:
The CRTC has picked Bell Canada to operate the National Do Not Call List, giving the company a five-year mandate to block calls from telemarketers for customers who request the service.
Bell will be responsible for registering numbers, providing telemarketers with up-to-date versions of the list and receiving customer complaints about telemarketing calls. The CRTC said it has not yet been decided how those complaints will be resolved, but that should be determined early in the new year.
Phone customers can register their numbers with Bell at no extra charge, and telemarketers are required to subscribe to the list, which the CRTC said must be operational by Sept. 30. Telemarketers must pay Bell to operate the list.
And here’s a bit from the Financial Post’s write-up for the site’s operational success nine months later - on September 30th:
By Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News Service Published: Tuesday, September 30, 2008
OTTAWA — Consumers eager to add their phone numbers to the newly launched national Do Not Call list to block telemarketers ran into trouble on Tuesday when the Web site crashed on its first day and the telephone sign-up number was not accessible.
The online service went down Tuesday morning within nine hours of the launch at midnight. Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission spokesman Denis Carmel chalked up early glitches to a “very higher volume that’s causing a few initial problems.”
About 157,000 people were able to register online (www.LNNTE-DNCL.gc.ca) before the site crashed Tuesday morning. It remained unstable for most of the working day, during which time nearly another 100,000 were able to register. More than 1.5 million people tried to call the toll-free number, but only 74,445 people got through to register.
Really? and only two days after the Chinese communists released audio tape of their astronauts conversing in space - several hours before their launch?
At 8:30 AM in our national capital (Ottawa) on September 30th, the only response available from the https://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca site was that: “The site is down for planned maintenance.”
(By the way, the site has no obvious user identification controls: when the site was finally working on October 5th it cheerfully let me register one of the the CRTC’s own complaint line numbers - but note the politically correct use of https.)
| According to netcraft on September 28: | |
| Netblock Owner | Bell ICT Outsourcing Solutions 671 La Gauchetiere Ouest Montreal QC CA |
| IP address | 207.35.39.20 |
| OS | Linux |
| Web Server | unknown |
| Last reboot | 28-Sep-2008 |
At 9:30 AM the front page worked and you could enter your phone number, but when you did and hit return you got the informative “The service is not available. Please try again later.”
By 10:45AM that helpful note had been replaced; by this:
The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Please try the following:
- Make sure that the Web site address displayed in the address bar of your browser is spelled and formatted correctly.
- If you reached this page by clicking a link, contact the Web site administrator to alert them that the link is incorrectly formatted.
- Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Technical Information (for support personnel)
- Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 404.
- Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative Tasks, and About Custom Error Messages.
An hour later, the number entry page had been replaced too - by the Microsoft error message.
By 11:45AM the front page
looked like this
but if you clicked on “Register My Number” you got the “The service is not available. Please try again later” message.
By 12:45, you could again see the number registration page (complete with a “Last modified on 07/07 2008″ claim) - but filling it in and clicking their “Continue” button still produced the Microsoft server error message.
At 2:15PM it took over a minute to load the front page message: “The service is not available. Please try again later”.
At 3:15 the second page loaded - in 82 seconds - but there was a new error message:
Please correct the following errors:
* We are experiencing a temporary technical problem. Please call one of the numbers below for registration, or try again later.
This seems to refer to a CAPTCHA code because it asks you to input one, but doesn’t show one - and when you click the line headed “Can’t read? Try another” you get “The service is not available. Please try again later.”
And, finally, at 9:00 PM on the 30th.. “The connection was refused when attempting to contact https://www.dnlc.gc.ca/” - and that was still happening at 9:00 AM on October 1st.
According to the press release, however “About 157,000 people were able to register online before the site crashed Tuesday morning. It remained unstable for most of the working day, during which time nearly another 100,000 were able to register.”
So my first question is simple: if 257,000 successful registrations makes the site a contract conforming success, just when and how did these lucky few get through?
And my second question? Well, at 2:30 PM on Friday, October 2nd it still refused connection attempts but the record at Netcraft had changed:
| According to Netcraft on October 2nd: | |
| Netblock Owner | unknown |
| IP address | unknown |
| OS | Unknown |
| Web Server | Unknown |
| Last reboot | Unknown |
So here’s what I think happened: sometime in June or July they assigned someone to develop this site, loaded it on mainframe Linux, and declared it ready. Then when the PR blitz hit on September 29th a lot of journalists and web people testing their links hit it - and problems appeared. In response they opted to rehost on Windows, declared the contract a success - and hung (at least) most of the people who responded to the PR blitz by trying to register out to dry.
And here’s a bet: this project will eventually appear on dozens of resumes as an enormous personal success pulled off against overwhelming odds, under unbelievably tight deadlines, and with nothing, absolutely nothing, but the user’s welfare and the taxpayer’s dollars in mind throughout.
October 4th, 2008
More on wikipedia abuse
Here’s a bit from an article by Cade Metz for the register
In the wake of the SEC’s crackdown, the mainstream financial press has acknowledged that widespread and deliberate naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices, flooding the market with what amounts to counterfeit shares. But for years, The [Wall Street] Journal and so many other news outlets ignored Byrne’s warnings, with some journalists - most notably a Forbes.com columnist and former BusinessWeek reporter named Gary Weiss - painting the Overstock CEO as a raving madman.
Byrne has long argued that the press dismissed his views at least in part because Weiss - hiding behind various anonymous accounts - spent years controlling the relevant articles on Wikipedia, the “free online encyclopedia anyone can edit.”
“At some level, you can control the public discourse from Wikipedia,” Byrne says. “No matter what journalists say about the reliability of Wikipedia, they still use it as a resource. I have no doubt that journalists who I discussed [naked shorting] with decided not to do stories after reading Wikipedia - whose treatment [of naked short selling] was completely divorced from reality.”
As recently as last week, Weiss told us he’s never even edited Wikipedia. But emails shared with Byrne and The Register show that Weiss has in fact edited the encyclopedia’s article on naked shorting. And they indicate he’s behind an infamous Wikipedia account known as “Mantanmoreland,” an account that - with the backing of the site’s brain trust - ruled the articles on naked shorting, Patrick Byrne, and Overstock from January 2006 to March 2008.
A single Wikipedia edit also links the Mantanmoreland account to a PC inside the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). Owned by Wall Street investment banks that may have benefited from naked shorting schemes, the DTCC oversees the delivery of stocks on Wall Street.
As I’ve said before, the problems we’re now seeing with wikipedia foreshadow larger concerns affecting a wide range of shared knowledge, social networking, sites.
Since I do not believe in regulation - and find recent moves by the Obama campaign to use law enforcement to coerce acceptance of their view of “the truth” utterly repugnant- I think the solution has to start with awareness and end with some combination of technical change and education based social change.
In effect, the technical problem is that these networks combine extremely powerful manipulative tools with very weak controls, and the social problem is that people may be too busy, too uneducated, or too emotionally committed to fairly evaluate the information these sites provide.
The examples are all around us: most of what most readers of this blog believe about x86 reflects what they’ve been told by people paid to tell them - and is simply wrong; most of what most people now believe about global climate change is equally wrong -for the same reasons; Bryne has been excerised about the use of Wikipedia to distort the public’s perception of the value of numerous corporate equities; and the list goes on and on - and it’s not just the distortions we know about either.
Let me invent two examples of future threats whose reality we really can’t assess today: imagine a claim that social sites like LinkedIN can, have, and will be, used to unfairly blacklist some people while promoting others, and then ask yourself: is there a way to verify or debunk such a claim? Similarly, imagine that thirty years from now one of today’s teenagers takes on the role of Cassandra with respect to some then pressing issue - and has his credibility utterly destroyed when paid PR attackers flood the media with utube videos from 2008 showing him behaving badly as a teenager -and then ask yourself: do we have controls against this in place now?
The answer, in both cases, is that we do not and we cannot - and that the blind trust we put in social sites from wikipedia to twitter exposes us all to threats we’re not even beginning to understand yet.
October 3rd, 2008
From Chapter Two: The appliance computing culture
This is the 21st excerpt from the second book in the Defen series: BIT: Business Information Technology: Foundations, Infrastructure, and Culture
Note that the section this is taken from, on the evolution of appliance computing, includes numerous illustrations and note tables omitted here.
The iSeries data center tour
This is a tour of a data center built around an IBM iSeries mini-computer. The important things to note here are:
- How much smaller and more focused this is than the mainframe data center seen earlier;
- The degree of centralized processing control;
- The focus on delivering packaged applications with only minor local tweaking; and,
- The high reliability, and relatively low overall cost, of the system.
The People
The data center has 110 budgeted positions, of which 98 are currently filled. Of these:
- One is the director of information systems. He reports to the vice president for finance and operations.
- One is a Lotus Domino support programmer;
- Two are administrative assistants (for budget and library/licensing respectively);
- Two support external network access and related security equipment;
- Four support the internal network;
- Four are Windows software development programmers;
- Four are role managers; (production, networking, desktop support, and administration, respectively);
- Eight are dedicated to supporting remote customer access and spend most of their time at, or between, customer sites;
- Nine are working on the company’s e-commerce site re-development initiative;
- Thirteen are Windows support and help desk personnel dedicated to working with the remote users, mainly sales people, and the Windows desktop users in finance and marketing;
- Eighteen provide direct internal user support primarily on ad hoc reporting, training, or mechanical issues; and,
- Thirty-two are dedicated to supporting the AS/400 operation. Of these, twenty-four, half of them support programmers, work regular office hours while the other eight work either from 3:00 PM to 10PM weekdays or 8:30 AM to 1:30 on weekends.
HR currently has openings posted for people with the following major skills:
- Team Leader for retail system enhancements, support and modernization ($69,300);
- E-commerce project manager with retail POS, Web sphere, and AS/400 experience ($93,500)
- Information security specialist (PC environment) ($64,243);.
- AS/400 support and maintenance programmer. Must have AS/400, PC, OS/400, RPG 400 / 3 / 2, CL, OS/400 Query, SDA, DDS, DFU, with SYNON, AS/SET, LSAMS and at least one major financial package such as JD Edwards Financials or Lawson Financials (2 positions) ($62,600);
- Web sphere development programmer with significant OS/400 and secure electronic commerce implementation experience (2 positions) ($71,300); and,
- Microsoft Terminal Server Client Access services support programmer (2 positions) ($51,000)
Typical programmer-analyst credentials (taken from resumes)
General:
- Extensive experience with: IBM AS/400, RPG ILE/400/III, J.D.Edwards One World, PowerBuilder, Gentran/Sterling. JDE OneWorld Report Writer Certified.
- Project Management experience, particularly in conversion management.
- JDE Technical Project Lead, OneWorld Developer
- Financial and distribution industry experience particularly on inventory, receiving, and shipping orders.
- Expert with all major Microsoft Office tools including Visio and Project.
- Domino Server administration support experience including secure access tools.
Specific Examples of work history (taken from staff resumes):
- Gentran Supported EDI function for parts warehouse. Customized code and created/supported X.400 interfaces.
- OneWorld Report designer for a parts manufacturing operation; helped with Upgrade to B73.2.
- Functioned as a technical resource during post merger addition of new company to JDE Financials. Worked on conversions and interfaces for partner software from AMS.
- Modified JDE Financials System Setup to allow processing of Check Reconciliation Procedures and Inventory reporting.
- Implemented JDE 7.3 Financials and acted as technical team lead in consultant led conversion. Including writing the purchasing interfaces to GL and conversion programs, as well as modifying the Address Book maintenance program.
- Added Triggers to JDE to access legacy payroll.
- Developed JDE interface to Oracle/Unix system with merger partner.
Notice the contrasts with the mainframe data center in terms of the broader roles assigned staff, the higher level of individual achievement, and the absence of the distinction between “customer facing” and purely internal roles.
Some notes:
- These excerpts don’t (usually) include footnotes and most illustrations have been dropped as simply too hard to insert correctly. (The wordpress html “editor” as used here enables a limited html subset and is implemented to force frustrations like the CPM line delimiters from MS-DOS).
- The feedback I’m looking for is what you guys do best: call me on mistakes, add thoughts/corrections on stuff I’ve missed or gotten wrong, and generally help make the thing better.
Notice that getting the facts right is particularly important for BIT - and that the length of the thing plus the complexity of the terminology and ideas introduced suggest that any explanatory anecdotes anyone may want to contribute could be valuable.
- When I make changes suggested in the comments, I make those changes only in the original, not in the excerpts reproduced here.
October 2nd, 2008
The open source opportunity in web advertising
Companies like zdnet which depend on advertising for their revenues often embed links to either, or both, ads and counters, on internally hosted or third party sites.
One immediate consequence of this is that when ads.doubleclick.com, cache.blogads.com, ads.adbrite.com, i2.ytmg.com, or i.i.com.com have a problem, so do readers waiting for page loads.
There are two main things going on there. On the internal side companies which run many different web “properties” usually prefer to host ads and images intended for multiple channels in one place. This reduces complexity, and thus both work and risk. On the external side some advertisers demand third party page read information.
In my own case, for example, I sometimes embed images hosted on my own site in these blogs just so I can track readership independently. Over the last eleven months, for example, I’ve accumulated 110,683 records like this one showing someone reading my blog for April 7, 2006:
XXX.XX.219.27 - - [26/Sep/2008:09:19:15 -0600] “GET /images/apl.gcd.jpg HTTP/1.0″ 200 10740 “http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=568″ “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0″
Some of the security directions, specifically those with respect to cross site scripting limitations, anti-phishing filters, and non recording modes, being taken in the IE8 betas suggest to me that this kind of thing has a limited future - because we’re clearly headed toward a future in which any page not wholly loaded from the same server at the same time isn’t trusted.
If so, there’s an obvious big system solution for publishers and advertisers: split the properties as Apache virtual servers but actually use one big machine for everything - and meet advertiser needs by having it write the appropriate log records directly to third party remote hosts.
Right now, however, I don’t know of a small system solution that would actually work well - and that, I think, suggests a hot little niche for someone willing to take it on.
September 30th, 2008
Nintendo and the Windows Mindset
I’ve been playing the Tiger Woods PGA golf game on Nintendo/Wii lately and some things about it strike me as stunningly indicative of what happens to good ideas when they get filtered through the mindsets of people devoted to Windows programming. Thus the game orginator, Steve Cartwright, actually started with a sparse and even elegant product for the Atari - but over time Activision’s pursuit of higher volume markets led to what is now EA Sports and a focus on the Microsoft world markets -with the Nintendo and PlayStation ports almost incidental.
A native Nintendo game, like the golf game that comes with the console, starts when you power up the machine and select golf from the menu. Similarly, game shutdown is a one step process followed by power down or the selection of whatever you want to play next.
Not so with the EA Sports product. Here’s how you start the Tiger Woods game:
- Put the CD in, and power up the Nintendo
- Press the “A” key on the Wii to acknowledge Nintendo boot
- Use the Wii to locate the Tiger Woods image on screen, click “A”
- When the Tiger Woods game screen comes up, use the Wii to choose “Start”
- When the EA sports screen comes up, press “+” on the Wii to start
- When the golf menu comes up, use the Wii to pick what you want, and press “A” again.
Almost everything in the game suffers from this kind of replicative redundancy. For example, the “Tiger Challenge” games allow your character to build experience points - but only if you save your character after each round. And that takes five steps:
- Press “-” on the Wii to back out of the challenge menu
- use the Wii to select “yes” on save user, click “A”
- use the Wii to select “yes” on save to system memory, click “A”
- use the Wii to select “yes” on over ride existing user, click “A”
- Click “A” to acknowledge “Save” successful
Since you can have up to four players in a game, simply shutting down and saving player stats can take 17 separate steps - all of which could be bypassed through a single “Save and Quit” choice.
All of this block and prompt nonsense became the one right way to do programming soon after Microsoft Windows 3.0 came out - and has been obsolete pretty much since Windows 2000. What happened then was that Microsoft leveraged a human perceptual bug in its Windows 3.0 design: putting up sharply delineated window frames quickly and in primary colors while taking considerable time to fill those in with pastels and text made people think their computers were much faster than they really were.
As a result programmers quickly learned that popping up small boxes asking for user input made their applications seem “snappy” to reviewers and other deeply committed PC people who wouldn’t regularly use them -and so today we have an otherwise fun Nintendo game that takes five steps to start and either four or five to save a character before shutdown.
It’s terribly wasteful of the user’s time, it’s wasteful of system resources, and it’s completely alien to the underlying Wii technology -but it’s so perfectly consistent with the Windows mindset that most people don’t even notice.
And it’s that inurement to pointless repetition, or more precisely our collective failure to notice the obvious, that points to the real bottom line impact: because the overwhelming majority of business applications, including many never intended to run on Windows at all, have similar, time wasting, inefficiencies built in at every step.
September 30th, 2008
Thinking about Oracle Fusion applications
It seems to me that one of the things that came clear through last week’s Oracle openworld conference is the extent to which the company is preparing itself for directional change with the fusion applications.
Originally Oracle was a company dedicated to making and licensing data management software. Then, basically since 7.3, it became a company almost wholly devoted to selling almost anything it could hang a company label on - and now, I think, it’s about to transition to a new focus as a compelling business applications developer.
The fusion applications were originally intended to reduce the costs and complexities of supporting about 37,000 enterprise customers by integrating the lessons learnt from Oracle’s own enterprise suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and the J.D. Edwards stuff into one consistent package. Now, however, I think they’re intended to save the company - because it’s simply not going to be possible to sell most of the database, management, and BI products once forthcoming MySQL and Postgres benchmarks running on cheap Solaris/SPARC gear have been transformed, through a year or two of actual customer use, into industry standard expectations.
In other words, think three years out and by present trends an open source database running on SPARC/CMT can be expected to outperform a grid based proprietory system by a factor of ten on throughput and two on cost - meaning that customers choosing between licensing something like Oracle’s database management software and mySQL will have compelling incentives to go with the open source solution.
To a company like Oracle that means the handwriting’s on the wall with respect to RDBMS and related revenues -and it seems to me that the strategic option they’ve chosen in response has been to move up the food chain by concentrating on producing a complete applications stack. That works because enterprise application customers care about the total cost of using the application - not whether Oracle internally uses some of that money to support an inefficient database/hardware paradigm.
I hope that’s right because my bottom line on this is that it could be great: I’ve long been a big fan of both Oracle’s enterprise applications and Peoplesoft’s and so think that if fusion combines and advances both while leaving more of the general infrastructure market to open source, it could work out well for everybody.
September 29th, 2008
Escalation in the storage wars
Over the last year or so we’ve seen some opening skirmishes in the coming storage wars: Netapps’s lawsuit against Sun over ZFS and the consequent counter-charges, enhanced storage announcements from both EMC and IBM, Sun’s decision to buy out MySQL’s founders, and the recent publication of work Sun’s been doing on integrating flash memory in the Solaris/ZFS performance equation.
This week, at Oracle OpenWorld, we saw the beginnings of round two: HP’s presence at the head table with Larry Ellison and Compaq’s “Exadata” imitation of Apple’s X-Serve trumpeted as the next word in storage; Sun almost instantly retaliating with a Jonathon Schwartz blog on saving millions by using ganged thumpers in large scale data warehousing; and, EMC/Dell chiming in with a me too press release on flash enabled storage.
Meanwhile, in one of those backroom announcements most of the media types attending seem to miss, Oracle quietly reconfirmed that the fusion applications they’re putting together from the Edwards, Seibel, PeopleSoft, and Oracle applications portfolios will drop both pillarization (breaking large databases into multiple schemas for independent implementation on PC scale gear) and PeopleWorks in favor of a single, fully integrated, database and programming framework running on an OS independent grid made up of small computers.
Oracle 10g, of course, has run on small grid machines for years now, but whether they can make Fusion’s process integrated business inteligence, third party interfacing, and controls work that way is an open question - and will, I’m betting, either be responsible for at least another six months of delay in getting Fusion out the door or produce a two step commercial release process in which the grid product follows the SMP release by at least that long.
What’s behind all this, however, is what I think of as next generation storage wars: in which Sun pushes order of magnitude cost-performance gains from an open source database environment running on fast SMP machines with flash enhanced “thumper” style storage into easy markets like data warehousing, and everybody else gets forced into indefensible defensive positions.
I’m going to speculate about Oracle’s survival strategy on this tomorrow, but just mention right now that the real bottom line on the announcements at OpenWorld is that two other big players in this market, IBM and Microsoft, so far seem to be relying mostly on customer inertia and pretty press releases - betting, in other words, that their IT customers and colleagues will cheerfully continue fooling their actual employers on the value of alternatives.
September 27th, 2008
More on Microsoft’s PC ads
So Microsoft dropped the Seinfeld ads - anyone think they might have figured out that the last few years of his show prominently featured a 20th Anniversary Macintosh?
The first in the series of new ads is different - but raises similar questions about which company the people who made it are actually rooting for.
The top line message in this ad is superficially clear: “it’s ok to be a PC user because lots of other people are too” - and the carrier for that is the subtext that “using a PC is PC”.
The first problem I have with this is that its impossible for Microsoft to say that it’s ok to use a PC because lots of other people do too, without raising the specter of non PC users - and thereby contradicting it’s own core sales premise: that you have to buy into Microsoft’s lock step upgrade process because everybody else does.
The subtext message is worse: their decision to remind viewers of Apple’s ads by using the “I’m a PC” personification in their opening scene has to be counter-productive for Microsoft - and then they double down on that effect by replacing the humor viewers expect from the Apple ads with a grim recital of politically correct labeling as their actors say things like “I design green buildings”, “I blog for Obama”, and “I turn number two into energy.”
And if that isn’t enough, you get a whole collection of ginzu knives with the ad: to balance, for example, that Obama reference they have a guy say he “broadcasts for McCain” - but most people know that McCain doesn’t own any radio stations and while he has lots of supporters who work in radio, nobody “broadcasts for McCain.”
Second, they have a crowd scene in which some actor claims that being PC connects her to a billion people - but even the most ignorant and bigoted of PC fans knows that the actual connections are almost all handled by Unix while only the most venal of target site operations explicitly favor Microsoft clients over Mac OS X and other Unix clients.
Overall there’s an interesting parallel to Vista in these commercials in that you could almost see a couple of genuinely creative people pitching an ad idea to a Microsoft committee - which promptly repudiates the humor, destroys the creative idea by earmarking in old ideas in exchange for votes, and allows its own collective bafflement and anger at falling further and further behind Apple to turn the final product into a hallowean house kind of Apple parody.
So what’s the bottom line? Well, if an ad agency approached your company to sell an ad whose opening highlights the competition, whose core message contradicts your primary selling message, and whose ending invites anyone with two brain cells to rub together to consider the ad a lie, would you hire them?
September 26th, 2008
From Chapter Two: The appliance computing culture
This is the 20th excerpt from the second book in the Defen series: BIT: Business Information Technology: Foundations, Infrastructure, and Culture
Note that the section this is taken from, on the evolution of appliance computing, includes numerous illustrations and note tables omitted here.
The iSeries data center tour
This is a tour of a data center built around an IBM iSeries mini-computer. The important things to note here are:
- The degree of centralized processing control;
- The focus on delivering packaged applications with only minor local tweaking; and,
- The high reliability, and relatively low overall cost, of the system.
Scale and Budget
This particular data center serves about 860 in-house users, 400 customer points of service, and 200 remote users in a wholesale distribution business. About 740, or almost all of the in-house users other than those in Finance and Marketing, use IBM relabelled NCD smart displays. In addition there are 109 Windows PC users running Windows 2000 Professional in the finance and marketing groups and eight Macintosh users in the advertising and flyer development group.
| What’s a smart display? |
|
A typical smart display has a powerful graphics engine and runs Java/OS, Windows, PDS (Postscript display system), or X clients, often concurrently. There are no moving, or user accessible, parts and typical MTBF (Mean time before failure) ratings are in the 300,000-hour range. A smart display is distinguished from a Microsoft thin client because applications run only on the server with no client side licensing required. From both the user and corporate perspective these things are tamper proof, highly secure, and essentially failure free. The typical smart display uses a high resolution screen (usually 17 or 21 inch) and can show simultaneous applications from multiple hosts - including concurrent Windows, Unix, or iSeries hosts. |
The remote users, mostly sales and support people, have company owned Thinkpads running Windows XP/Professional. The remote locations, which are generally in customer sites, usually have a Windows 2003 server on a T1 or comparable connection, and a dedicated firewall appliance linking the Windows server to the customer’s local area network.
| More Terminology |
| A LAN is a Local Area Network - meaning a network restricted to a single work site whether that’s an office or a campus. By extension a WAN is a wide area network joining several LANs.
“T1″ is an North American telco designation for a single cable provisioned to carry up to 24 concurrent telephone conversations but usually applied to equivalent rate data communications. Since a phone conversation has a digital equivalent rate of 56Kbits per second and requires an 8KBS control channel, a T1 provides for transmission at the rate of 1.536Mbs (=24 x 64) or about 192K characters per second. North American data transmissions ratings go all the way up to OC/3 - about 173M characters per second. The comparable European designations start at E1 =40 phone line equivalents or about 2.5Mbits/sec. The 1970s ISDN (integrated services, digital network) technology puts a digital signal in place of the analog phone signal and comes in increments of 56Kbits/sec. but can use the 8Kbs control link as well. Thus an ISDN link described as “2b+c” has two 56K channels and a shared 16K control channel to deliver 128Kbs in throughput. More modern ADSL/SDSL services are upgraded versions of ISDN using similar wiring but broader spectrum spreading to achieve much higher throughput - usually in the range of 1MBS to 8MBS depending on the user’s needs and budget. |
The company has just upgraded to the latest iSeries and is willing to share critical cost information. The company has had four AS/400s on lease from IBM since 1996 and has added disk and memory to these over time.
The current upgrades were triggered by the expiry of that lease agreement.
As part of the new agreement AS/400 peripherals purchased from IBM during the lease period are being returned for credit on the new gear, thereby reducing the list price to a total of $4,213,896.72, pre-tax.
The new machine is a fully configured iSeries Model 890-0198 and includes:
- 32 x 1.3GHz Power4 processors;
- 192 GB of memory;
- 6.5TB of disk storage (10K RPM, 17.54GB disks, RAID 5 in 22 enclosures);
- Continuation of the company’s IBM licenses, including OS/400 V5R2, DB2, RPG, and dozens of other tools or utilities;
- Some networking gear to replace the previous token ring switches which are being returned as part of a switch to TCP/IP; and,
- Lotus Domino Server Release 5.0.10 for iSeries for 2,500 users
In addition the data center has:
- Two racks of five PC servers each running Microsoft Terminal Server under Windows 2003 Server to provide Windows software services to smart display users; and,
- Two racks each containing four PC servers running Windows 2003 server with small business services to provide shared services support to the 109 Windows 2003/XP desktops.
Remote laptop users connect to the system over the internet using software encryption clients licensed from Cisco and are served through Lotus Domino running on the iSeries.
When asked why the company used the iSeries instead of another architecture, the director mentioned history first, saying that his company had enjoyed a long and satisfactory relationship with IBM. In addition, his justification for the decision to buy a new Model 890 instead of renewing the old lease or experimenting with another architecture included:
- The competitive advantage that can be gained by faster introduction of new services via centralized systems;
- High-quality service delivery;
- Good cost ratios;
- Low total cost of ownership;
- Fast delivery of applications and service change;
- Centralized management and deployment resulting in lower error rates and “fix it” costs;
- Ability to support all applications in one place but run them everywhere;
- Safe implementation of new technologies - including Linux on iSeries;
- Scalability and security, enterprise wide;
- Equal access to important applications, regardless of client device type;
- Elimination of system configuration and software installation problems;
- Easy-to-use desktop and menus;
- Reduced help desk calls.
Some notes:
- These excerpts don’t (usually) include footnotes and most illustrations have been dropped as simply too hard to insert correctly. (The wordpress html “editor” as used here enables a limited html subset and is implemented to force frustrations like the CPM line delimiters from MS-DOS).
- The feedback I’m looking for is what you guys do best: call me on mistakes, add thoughts/corrections on stuff I’ve missed or gotten wrong, and generally help make the thing better.
Notice that getting the facts right is particularly important for BIT - and that the length of the thing plus the complexity of the terminology and ideas introduced suggest that any explanatory anecdotes anyone may want to contribute could be valuable.
- When I make changes suggested in the comments, I make those changes only in the original, not in the excerpts reproduced here.
September 25th, 2008
Astroturfing, sockpuppets, and SCO
As most Zdnet readers undoubtedly know, a number of conservative bloggers responded to a recent set of internet smears aimed at Sarah Palin by digging deeply into the record to discover who had produced and released them.
The record of how this was done for one particular case includes back tracing the account ids used first to upload and distribute the video, and then to cover the attempted deletions once the account holders were publically identified.
Fox news had an interesting summary segment on this:
You might think, as I did at first, that this is just politics as usual and really has nothing to do with IT - but that’s wrong, and for two related reasons: first I believe that those of us who work in IT have a collective responsibility to ensure that the tools we develop and deploy aren’t used destructively; and, second, there’s a lot here to remind us of the initial campaign against SCO.
That campaign built SCO’s current image in the Linux community as stupid, greedy, and manipulative money changers out to gut Linux when, in reality, the actual character and motivations of the people involved have nothing to do with the issue and the actions they took were directed against IBM, not Linux.
As I said some time ago, I greatly admire the way groklaw has mobilized a significant fraction of the Linux community to support its perspective, and thought then that this would become a model for other people to study and copy for their own purposes. Unfortunately, as both the community perspective on SCO and the recent astroturfing attacks on Sarah Palin show, these methods have grown dangerously powerful in large part because it’s so hard to tell truth from falsehood, and sources deserving of belief from sources deserving only of scorn and ridicule.
Wikipedia has become, to cite a more widely known example than SCO, an important source of reference information if for no other reason than google’s decision to place wikipedia hits at the top of any search results list containing them - but wikipedia can’t be trusted, in large part because its apparent standard of truth is the self-interest of its contributors. Thus the top two hits google lists on the search “SCO Linux IBM” are hardly models of objective reporting - but you’d have to know quite a lot about the issue to see that, and not only would the previously uninformed arriving at either wikipedia article come away thinking the case a slam dunk for IBM, but it’s hard to see how such a reader would not be influenced by the editor’s apparent contempt for the SCO side of the dispute.
So what can we do to reduce the risk of acting, or deciding, on disinformation? I wish I knew - I mean, in the longer run some combination of technology and regulation will evolve to make the internet harder to abuse for political or commercial causes; but I don’t know what that solution will look like, and I don’t know when it will appear. In the meantime I think that the only thing we can do is to express increased cynicism about anything we read or see by consciously asking ourselves what wider realities might apply, and what the writer/producer’s real agenda might be.
Paul Murphy (a pseudonym) is an IT consultant specializing in Unix and related technologies. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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