So, um, where is everyone?

[ddrueding]

A more amazing multi-personality post-padder I have never seen...

 

[The JoJo]

Did someone mention rum.....? :mrgrn:

Yup, it's been a bit slow lately, but it'll get better...

 

[sechs]

Fast fact: The banana tree is an herb.

 

[ddrueding]

Fast fact: The banana tree is an herb.

But have you ever tried sticking an entire tree in your pipe and smoking it? It's a little rough on the teeth...

 

[Tea]

I hate bananaz!

 

[CityK]

I hate bananaz!

Yeah right! You know what they say - once a bananaz junkie, always a bananaz junkie

 

[CityK]

me, myself, and i

that was a stirring rendition. You made Harry proud.

 

[i]

me, myself, and i

that was a stirring rendition. You made Harry proud.

Thank you.

It's only half the song actually, but I figured filling another page would have been pushing it.

 

[Tea]

Nope. Never. Or at least not for a seriously long time. After eating my way out of the truck - hey, that's 40 feet of bananas stacked higher than Tannin's head - I experienced a change of heart. And a small episode of convulsive vomiting.

Also, I got very fat.

So now I am on a new diet. It seems to be woring well. It's called the "no-food at all diet" and, ever so slowly, I am taking on a more normal shape. (Well, I have big rolls of loose furry skin now, but that's normal for an orangutan.

Sometime in the next few months, I expect to be slim enough to fit into the front seat of Tannin's car again. (I get really tired of walking everywhere, or riding in the back like a parcel.)

No more bananaz!

 

[Tea]

Hell, it'z so quiet around here these last few dayz that I'd nearly value a nice long chat with a banana. Or possibly a mango.

 

[Mercutio]

My lack of mental health is taking an unfortunately large chunk out of my day. Sorry Tea.

 

[jtr1962]

Hell, it'z so quiet around here these last few dayz that I'd nearly value a nice long chat with a banana. Or possibly a mango.

Unfortunately, I've been too busy to spend much time here, and I'll be helping my friend who owns a taximeter shop with the rate change coming to the city taxis for the next three weeks so I won't be around much, if at all, after around next Monday. Don't despair. I should be back sometime in mid-May unless I croak from working that many hours.

 

[Handruin]

I've been unmotivated and unhelpful in posting anything useful, so I try to keep it to a minimum. I'm trying to learn some new things with php, and it's frustrating and discouraging. I don't know what it is about me, but I don't like it. I don't like giving up on difficult tasks, but at the same time I do. (does that make any sense?)

Does anyone one else ever feel like they stumble onto a problem, wade through hours of searching for reading material to a solution, and when you get done learning about the problem, you're just to tired afterwards to fix it? Well, I go through this all the time, and I'm growing tired of not knowing so many things. Once I learn something new, my brain doesn't like to remember it...I would like my memory to be better, it pisses me off sometimes.

 

[Buck]

Does anyone one else ever feel like they stumble onto a problem, wade through hours of searching for reading material to a solution, and when you get done learning about the problem, you're just to tired afterwards to fix it? Well, I go through this all the time, and I'm growing tired of not knowing so many things. Once I learn something new, my brain doesn't like to remember it...I would like my memory to be better, it pisses me off sometimes.

Yes, I can totally understand Handy. Lately, either my memory fails or I must focus on something so closely, that everything else gets forgotten and ignored. I think we should go back to manual labor, it is much less taxing on the brain. Woops, I just remembered I have a bad back - bummer.

 

[mubs]

The amount of knowledge keeps growing at a phenomenal rate. Kids (young to college-level) today need to learn so much more than an old fart like me did. The problem's going to get much worse. What's going to become more and more important is not knowing all this stuff, but knowing where to find the info, and to have the ability to learn on-the-fly, what you need to know, when you need to know. Just-in-time learning. Unless humans end up with boulder-sized brains, there's no other way to cope.

 

[its.fubar]

mubs: I have a suggestion for you get a PDA with a great deal of memory ha ha

 

[ddrueding]

What's going to become more and more important is not knowing all this stuff, but knowing where to find the info, and to have the ability to learn on-the-fly, what you need to know, when you need to know. Just-in-time learning. Unless humans end up with boulder-sized brains, there's no other way to cope.

This is what I've been doing my whole life. I've never gone into a job qualified to do it. And for the most part I've been honest about it.

 

[Mercutio]

The other side to that is that I've been overqualified for every job I've ever had. It's not a big deal, and I like the work that I do, but I've never been someplace where my work has actually been challenging.

 

[Mercutio]

But if it makes anyone feel better, Handy, I run into the same thing all the time. There are a whole bunch of little tiny things I could do to automate or improve my home network and I never got around to actually doing any of them.

 

[Buck]

The other side to that is that I've been overqualified for every job I've ever had. It's not a big deal, and I like the work that I do, but I've never been someplace where my work has actually been challenging.

What would you consider to be challenging? The reason I ask is that I have never considered the operation of a computer and the problems that end-users encounter to be challenging, but for others, it is downright mind boggling. So the notion of something being challenging is quite subjective.

 

[Mercutio]

Maybe some kind of design work might be challenging. Or security analysis. I don't know. Day-to-day work involving desktops and servers certainly isn't.

 

[its.fubar]

What is more difficult and satisfying to do being over qualify for a job or doing a job that you are not qualify for but doing it satisfactory to everyone's acceptance.

 

[mubs]

This is what I've been doing my whole life. I've never gone into a job qualified to do it.

You could be describing me.

Buck, while what is challenging is indeed a subjective issue, one can say in general that if you're not qualified (knowledge-wise) to handle something but need to, that is challenging. I've been thrust into situations where I've had to install and or manage AS/400, Unix, NT and Netware systems in a corporate setting; and I had never even seen/touched/used one of those. I've implemented two ERPs that I had no prior knowledge of or training in.

I sweated blood and worked my ass off, but accomplished what was needed. To say that it was challening would be a gross understatement.

 

[Mercutio]

So mubs, how do you get the job where you get to do those things?

 

[mubs]

A bit o' luck, lots of serendipity and foolhardy guts. When I've been down and out, I've taken whatever I could, trusting my instinct that I was not getting way in over my head. The toughest one was the AS/400; it's a very different animal, what with the coax, terminals, somewhat different paradigms for working with the OS. The others were easier for me because I had previosuly worked a bit on a couple of minicomputer OSes, and used concepts from there.

The weirdest experience was with Unixware. Novell had just bought AT&T's System V Unix, worked on it a bit and released it as Unixware 2.0. It came with the HP NetServer (P133 based), and had to be installed. I had a zillion other things, and not wanting to screw up, hired a consultant for a day to install Unixware. This guy had prior experience (or so he claimed) with it. At the end of the day, he said he had run into problems and would have to finish up the next day. At 4pm the next day, I fired him. Ended up doing it myself that night. Took me a couple of tries (it kept goofing up at one point).

Like Dave, I've always been frank, though. I always said I hadn't worked on that particular (insert system or software here), but that I had worked on similar (insert system or software here) and didn't foresee any problems being able to do the job. Mind you, for every instance that this has worked, it has not about 150 times. Especially these days. Employers are so picky now that they're even specifying the prospective employee's underwear size. It's that bad. Would be very funny if it wasn't for the enormous number of unemployed, which includes yours sincerely.

 

[ddrueding]

A bit o' luck, lots of serendipity and foolhardy guts. When I've been down and out, I've taken whatever I could, trusting my instinct that I was not getting way in over my head.

Exactly...everything but the instinct part. I just say yes. I currently have an AS/400 under my control, but I'm phasing it out as I have no idea how to work it.

I bid a huge job about 6 months ago, a full-scale wireless internet implementation for 3000+ homes over 12 acres. "Sure" I said, and bid the job. WTF...if I get it (still in city council meetings) I'll be learning a lot about high-powered WiFi

 

[Fushigi]

Exactly...everything but the instinct part. I just say yes. I currently have an AS/400 under my control, but I'm phasing it out as I have no idea how to work it.

I won't give you my standard "AS/400 is better than everything else" speech, even though it is. But I will say that there are AS/400 resources all over the place online. And I don't mean IBM's site, although it is getting better. Feel free to PM me if you run into any specific questions. Or go to midrange.com and subscribe to an ML or 2. Or attend an IBM Technical Conference or a COMMON conference and you can learn a ton.

But if you're determined to get rid of it, I know a reseller in Irvine; he might be interested in buying it.

mubs, it's actually twinax (pdf); not coax. And yes, it is a different animal. But there's so much power in it's simplicity. The F4 key alone blows away anything MS ever did from the command prompt. Many other OS structures like subsystems, memory pools, job descriptions, etc. don't even have true counterparts in other mainstream OSes.

Anyway, Twinax is fading away. No need to bother with it except where it's already deployed. I only have 1 twinax console on one of my 400s; the other uses a serial-attached PC (I'll go LAN-attached at some point).

BTW, while no Folding client is available, there is a SETI client for the 400.

 

[mubs]

Fushigi,

Yup, it was Twinax (I struggled to remember then caved in to coax ). Thanks for straightening me out. I only wish I had you to fall back on at that time.

I had to manage the system in the mid-90s. The Internet was in its infancy, and the best I had available to me at work and at home was 28k dial-up to Compuserve. Even in the late 90s, that location didn't have broadband; we ended up with ISDN and were charged for every "call" to the ISP. Our monthly bills for that ranged from $350-$800!

There was neither time nor money for training/learning more than the bare minimum necessary. There was a distinct lack of motivation because it was scheduled to be replaced with the new ERP running on Unix. That said, in the time I had to take care of it, there was not one single, solitary hiccup from the beast.

I have nothing but admiration for it's stability, reliability and availability. The reason it got canned was the horrible application sw that was running on it. Unfortunately, replacement sw for the AS/400 were frightfully expensive compared to what was available for Intel/Unix. Being a small company with limited $, the decision to replace it was a no brainer.

I still wish many times I was an AS/400 person. There are many, many good companies with good positions that use them for their mission-critical apps.

 

[Fushigi]

Read a great line from a 400 consultant yesterday. When talking to companies that are considering moving off the 400, he always asks: Why do you want to move to a product that includes a database repair utility? How can you possibly trust a system if such a utility is necessary? (Hint: The 400 has no such utility nor does it need one)

 

[mubs]

One thing that has always amazed me is IBM's inept marketing. The 400 has to be one of the best kept secrets in the computing world.

 

[Mercutio]

It's not IBM's inept marketing. It's IBM's inept management. I fairly believe that more of the smartest folks in IT and engineering work at IBM than anyplace else... and they're stunted by business managers who make Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss look like some kind of genius. Especially since IBM does matrix (project-based) management and everyone gets three or four dimwits at a time as bosses.

 

[sechs]

IBM has had (and recognises) that it makes buttloads of IP and doesn't use it, just as Xerox did with PARC. This is largely due to their play-it-safe management style (which also help them bungle the PC market). There was a push, starting about ten years ago, to use, license, or sell all of this.

While nobody ever got fired for going with IBM, they've seriously moved their focus away from hardware towards software and services.

 

[Fushigi]

One thing that has always amazed me is IBM's inept marketing. The 400 has to be one of the best kept secrets in the computing world.

IBM does a fine job of marketing the system within the installed user base. We get plenty of info regarding upgrade paths, OS products, etc.

Where IBM falls down hard is marketing the system outside the installed base.

 

[Fushigi]

The main problem as I see it is that IBM is indeed focusing on services. More than half their revenue now comes from services. The iSeries (latest name for the 400) only brings in a couple of billion a year.

Anyway, so services are IN. But the 400 traditionally doesn't need much in the way of services as most things are built in:
- Database integration. Indexing, record retrieval, etc. are OS functions; not app functions. I've yet to see the 400 shop that employs a DBA. BTW, this also means OS batch files can natively process database files.
- SQL. Any OS batch or HLL program can do SQL.
- Security. As tight as you want to make it.
- Backup/recovery. Can a PC boot off a tape drive & auto-restore?
- App dev tools. Now Eclipse-based.
- Web integration. Apache, CERN, Tomcat, Websphere: Pick your poison.
- Windows on a card. No footprint. No maintenance costs.
- PC integration (data transfer, file/print sharing, etc.).
- TCP/IP, SNA, IPX for LANs; Async, Bisync, SDLC for dialup.
- All the normal TCP apps: NFS, LDAP, Telnet, FTP, HTTP, SNMP, BootP, DHCP, LPD, LPR, SMPT, POP
- Not only can it serve file but it can mount filesystems on NT & Unix

Those have been there for years. Some newer stuff:
- 64 bit Linux? Pick Red Hat or Suse.
- Logical Partitioning
- Dynamic resource allocation between partitions
- Capacity Upgrade on Demand is built in for CPUs; coming for other components.
- Unix shell & AIX binary support
- Full native AIX in a partition? Coming this fall.

Since most functions are built-in to the OS, they are tested together when new releases come out. So you generally do not worry about a new release breaking existing functions that come with the OS. Just 3rd party app compatability. IBM Rochester (MN), to my mind, has the best minds in the business. When they consolidated the iSeris & pSeries (RS6000) camps, Rochester was chosen over Austin (IIRC) to be the new home for both.

The hardware's pretty slick, too.

So, IBM can't make much $ off of AS/400 services. But we all know Windows & Unix machines need lots of babysitting so there's lots of services $ to be made there. It's only natural that IBM would focus on Windows & Unix.

 

[sechs]

The key here is to sell them the AS/400 and support services, with said services unnecessary.

 

[CityK]

Its very, very quite around here lately. Come on people! Greg and Gary can't float this boat all on their own!

 

[ddrueding]

Things aren't going well for me lately, I'll be back later.

 

[Fushigi]

Been very busy with work & home stuff. I've generally stayed caught up on reading the topics but haven't seen much to chime in on.

My main PC seems to be starting to have a few issues. Some spontaneous reboots and occasionally I'll find it 'off', well really more like failed, with an alternating high/low hum from the PSU. I've disabled Folding and it seems somewhat more stable so it's probably thermal. When I have the time I'll dismount the CPU HSF and re-apply the arctic silver. Hopefully that'll fix it as I've been spending too much on the house lately to afford PC parts.

 

[Bartender]

I'm always around here CityK, just busy doing work. Buck is normally here too, but he tends to sleep a lot from all the booze. Greg and Gary are quite capable at keeping things afloat (at starting a few debates too). It would be nice if we could get a consensus for the new bouncer . . er, I mean moderator election poll. You can always count on fb lurking in the background too, although fb doesn't say much (kinda like me).

 

[Bartender]

Things aren't going well for me lately, I'll be back later.

I hope they get better quickly.