List of Archived Posts

2009 Newsgroup Postings (03/21 - 04/05)

What is swap in the financial market?
Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversary
Passwords: silly or serious?
Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversary
Cost of CPU Time
registers vs cache
ATMs At Risk
IBM in Talks to Buy Sun
The background reasons of Credit Crunch
Bletchley Park fires up replica Turing Bombe
How to implement PKI authority?
Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?
Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?
Should we fear and hate derivatives?
Future System
The background reasons of Credit Crunch
ATMs At Risk
Why is everyone talking about AIG bonuses of millions and keeping their mouth shut on billions sent to foreign banks?
Microminiaturized Modules
Architectural Diversity
Microminiaturized Modules
ATMs At Risk
Payment downtime threatens online retailers
Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
Architectural Diversity
Microminiaturized Modules
Microminiaturized Modules
Microminiaturized Modules
Denmark, Sweden top US in new global IT report
Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Microminiaturized Modules
Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Architectural Diversity
Architectural Diversity
How do you see ethics playing a role in your organizations current or past?
Cybercrime running into trillions, experts claim
Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Architectural Diversity
"A foolish consistency" or "3390 cyl/track architecture"
Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
Architectural Diversity
Architectural Diversity
Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
When did "client server" become part of the language?
When did "client server" become part of the language?
When did "client server" become part of the language?
Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
history of comments and source code annotations
Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
When did "client server" become part of the language?
Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
When did "client server" become part of the language?
Tesco to open 30 "bank branches" this year
Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
"A foolish consistency" or "3390 cyl/track architecture"
Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
Rackable Snaps Up Silicon Graphics in Fire Sale
An interesting take on Verified by Visa Policy
School traditions
Architectural Diversity
Architectural Diversity
School traditions
Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
When did "client server" become part of the language?
Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
The Watches Guy
Most 'leaders' do not 'lead' and the majority of 'managers' do not 'manage'. Why is this?
School traditions
The Future Shape of Payments Is Anything But Flat
Architectural Diversity
School traditions
We Are All French Now
Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
We Are All French Now
1401's in high schools?
Architectural Diversity
Architectural Diversity
IPv6 over Social Network
Decimal roolz, was Architectural Diversity
Is FINANCE the institutionalized form whereby (smart?) elites exact payment for the rest's being...?

What is swap in the financial market?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: What is swap in the financial market?
Date: Mar 21, 2009
Blog: Derivatives Markets
from wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap

it is a little like insurance if the buyer owns the product ... but otherwise can be more like betting in las vegas.

Washington post had 3-part series on AGI CDS/swap group a month or so ago. Basically, risk analysis/justification was done for triple-A rated corporate bonds (which was the only thing they were supposed to do) ... but then there was reference to the group going "rogue" and writing CDS for whoever asked for it.

There were some references to the group treating all payments as pure profit with no reserves to ever cover payouts ... and when others at the company started to look at the actual operations ... they were discounted because the operations was reporting such huge profits (and took such enormous bonuses based on those reported profits)

Commodities Futures Modernization act has been implicated in both ENRON and AIG.

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis; Phil Gramm
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

from above:
He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

... snip ...

Gramm and the 'Enron Loophole'
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/17grammside.html

from above:
Enron was a major contributor to Mr. Gramm's political campaigns, and Mr. Gramm's wife, Wendy, served on the Enron board, which she joined after stepping down as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

... snip ...

Phil Gramm's Enron Favor
https://web.archive.org/web/20080711114839/http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-01-15/news/phil-gramm-s-enron-favor/

from above:
A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.

... snip ...

Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aYJZOB_gZi0I

from above:
That same year Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt opposed an attempt by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to study regulating over-the-counter derivatives. In 2000, Congress passed a law keeping them unregulated.

... snip ...

one of the articles from the period mentioned that House passed the bill ... and even before the copy of the bill was distributed in the Senate, the Senate passed it unanimously. Also Born (as chairman) must have been fairly quickly replaced by Gramm's wife (before she resigned the position to join Enron).

in the wake of ENRON, congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley, but didn't do anything about the underlying problem. Also, Sarbanes-Oxley put a lot of responsibility on SEC ... and there have several recent references that SEC has been doing little or no enforcement (in many areas) for the past decade or so (in the congressional hearings on Madoff there was testimony by person that had been trying for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff).

recent related question/answer (mentioning CDS, insurance, & betting):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#74 Why is everyone talking about AIG bonuses of millions and keeping their mouth shut on billions sent to foreign banks?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversary

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversary
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 11:06:54 -0400
Charles Richmond <frizzle@tx.rr.com> writes:
Reminds me of Shugart floppy disks. Alan Shugart, the founder of the company, sold it long ago to Xerox. But Xerox did *not* know how to run a floppy disk drive company, so they ran the company "into the ground".

Alan Shugart waited out his "non-competition" agreement, and then founded Seagate.


wiki floppy reference ... (8in) at ibm 1968, commercially available in "1971"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

used loading microcode into 3830 (disk controller for 3330 disks) and many 370 processors (at power-up/boot).

old post with some detailed refs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#17 index searching

article from EE times:
http://www.disktrend.com/disk3.htm

from above:

... But in the summer of 1969, Memorex hired Shugart to take over its young disk-drive operation as vice president of product development.

After Shugart joined Memorex, a large number of IBMers followed. A very large number. Some estimates had the number at 200. Recruiting was casual. Nursing a beer or two, Shugart would hang around the eatery where many IBM engineers would lunch. Casual old-buddy greetings would ensue and, pretty soon, the disk-drive staff at Memorex would grow while that at IBM would shrink. Shugart was assisted by a telephone.

By 1971, Shugart was responsible for all product development at Memorex. In January 1973, he left to found Shugart Associates. In December 1974, impatient with the absence of products ready for the market place, the venture capitalists who funded Shugart Associates fired Alan Shugart. Or maybe he quit.

The difference, Shugart said later, was about five microseconds. Shugart was replaced by Don Massaro, a cofounder and director of engineering. Under his leadership, the company brought out the first 5.25 inch floppy drive in 1976. A few years later, Xerox bought the company and closed it down within three years.

... snip ...

later in the 70s I had transferred from science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

to sjr ... bldg. 28 on the san jose plant site ... across the street from bldg 14 (disk engineering) and 15 (product test) ... and they let me walk around 14&15 and play disk engineer.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

I was asked in to participate in some of the conference calls with channel engineers in pok. I asked why i was being dragged into such discussions ... and the reply was that things like that had been handled by senior engineers ... but they were in short supply since so many had left the company.

I also got to do part of work on original relational/sql dbms implementation at bldg. 28 on system/r ... misc. past references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

and when Jim left for Tandem ... he tried to get me to do more of it, old email reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801006
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801016
in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1 The Elements of Programming Style

for a little other (network) topic drift ... old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email800331
in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#22 vmshare

referencing european gov. regulations prohibiting Tymnet from hooking up to ARPA.

other european issues were with encrypted network links. the internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

had all links encrypted ... which encountered significant gov. resistance when there was a link connecting two corporate sites that happen to be in different countries (and the link crossed a country border). by the mid-80s, there was some comment that the internal network had over half of all link encryptors in the world.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Passwords: silly or serious?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Passwords: silly or serious?
Date: Mar 21, 2009
Blog: Computer Networking
old reference/post with copy of (rules for passwords) "CORPORATE DIRECTIVE NUMBER 84-570471" dated April 1, 1984 (sunday) posted on some number of corporate bulletin boards (April 1, 1984 ... coming up on 25th anniv):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#52

back in the 60s ... with only 1 or 2 passwords ... impossible-to-remember passwords weren't too bad. however, passwords are a form of something you know, shared-secret ... as such, each unique security domain requires their own unique passwords (in part as countermeasure to cross-domain attacks, say local garage ISP operation against corporate online banking).

With proliferation of electronic environments, issue is that organizational security operations tend to be myopic about realistic human factors ... because people aren't capable of memorizing hundreds of different, unique, impossible-to-memorize passwords (that may be required to be changed monthly).

Once people were faced with memorizing more than a very few such passwords ... there were no longer any "good" passwords (as a unique something you know authentication shared-secret)

misc. past posts regarding 3-factor authentication paradigm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#3factor
and shared-secret paradigm specifically
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#secrets

--
40+yrs virtualization experience, online at home since Mar70

Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversary

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversary
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:01:15 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
used loading microcode into 3830 (disk controller for 3330 disks) and many 370 processors (at power-up/boot).

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#1 Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversary

many 370 processors had an IMPL (initial miroprogram load) button (on front panel) in addition to the IPL (initial program load, i.e. BOOT) button ... avoiding having to power cycle to do a new microprogram load.

for 370/145 ... virtual memory was (eventually) a different floppy disk microprogram load (by the time shipping to customers) ... and standard 370/145 front panel ... had "rollers" for displaying processor information in front panel lights. The PSW (program status word) roller had a "XLATE" label for one of the lights ... before 370 virtual memory was even announced. There was speculation that the XLATE label referred to "address translate".

Biggest problem getting virtual memory announced (and shipped) was (significant) task design/build (delay) for the address translate hardware for 370/165

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Cost of CPU Time

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cost of CPU Time
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 09:50:05 -0400
Christopher Keller <cwkeller@gmx.net> writes:
Isn't one of the advantages of cloud computing the avoidance of over- or underprovisioning? e.g. Above the clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing: d1smfj0g31qzek.cloudfront.net/abovetheclouds.pdf

"1. The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand, thereby eliminating the need for Cloud Computing users to plan far ahead for provisioning. 2. The elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users, thereby allowing companies to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs. 3. The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed (e.g., processors by the hour and storage by the day) and release them as needed, thereby rewarding conservation by letting machines and storage go when they are no longer useful."


somebody is provisioning ... could be considered like interstate highways ... shared resource rather than each person building their own highway ... but that doesn't mean there can't be traffic jams.

not all that different that any community shared resource ... cellphone towers, internet, etc.

there is direct analogy with online commercial time-sharing services in the 60s & 70s ... there were some number of them that started off with (virtual machine) cp67 in the 60s and then later vm370 in the 70s. misc. past posts mentioning (virtual machine based) online commercial time-sharing services
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

for another take ... this is decade old post of a two decade old comparison of a SNA configuration using 19.2 point-to-point links versus high-speed network backbone using T1 links (for a large corporation).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#67

Not only was the T1 backbone configuration (communication products division didn't offer products with T1 capability) much cheaper and had higher availability, but avg & 95percentile response was significantly better.

this sort of ran afoul of the communication products division

of course communication products division also wasn't happy with clone controllers. as undergraduate in the 60s ... i had tried to get the 2702 to do something that it couldn't quite do. somewhat as a result, the univ. started a clone controller product ... initially using an Interdata/3 minicomputer. Reverse engineered the 360 channel interface, built a channel attachment board for the Interdata/3 and programmed the Interdata/3 to emulate the 2702 (with a few additional bells & whistles). An article blamed four of us for initiating the clone controllers. misc. past posts mentioning clone controller
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

registers vs cache

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: registers vs cache
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:58:13 -0400
jgd writes:
To answer the larger question, counting clock cycles is no longer a useful operation. In the days of processors that executed one instruction at a time, and didn't have caches, it could be meaningful and/or useful. This is no longer the case. Pretending it is will just waste your time. If this is homework, your course is out of date.

in the 60s & 70s most of the mainframes were microcoded machines. the low-end & mid-range were vertical microcode ... basically microcode that looks more like familiar instructions ... and avg'ed 10 microcode instructions per mainframe instruction (but there was some degree of variation)

the "high-end" machines tended to be "horizontal" microcode ... basically able to directly control independent operating units in the machine ... but had to carefully account for latency and asynchronous operation. One microcode instruction executed per machine cycle.

an example was 370/165 in the early 70s which avg'ed 2.1 cycles/instructions per mainframe instruction. going from 370/165 to 370/168 involved faster storage ... but also optimized microcode (somewhat higher degree of overlapped operation) ... which dropped the avg. machine cycle (microcode instruction) per mainframe instruction from 2.1 to 1.6.

370/195 was pipelined machine ... but branch instructions would drain the pipeline. nominal 10mip peak processing ... but because of branches in a lot of code, typically ran 5mips. there was a "hyper-threading" effort (that never shipped as product) to add second PSW, another set of registers, etc ... to emulate dual i-stream ... aka dual emulated processor with some assumption that two normal i-streams (with frequent branching), each operating at 5mips ... would aggregate at 10mips.

however, in the early 70s ... there was also the future system project
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

to replace all the mainframes. It was an extremely complex machine archtecture. one of the analysis that contributed to the demise of future system was that a FS machine built out of 370/195 technology would have the thruput of 370/145 (about 1/30th the thruput).

i've periodically claimed that major motivation for the 801/risc effort in the mid-70s, was to go to the opposite extreme in machine architecture (vis-a-vis the failed future system effort).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

there was a major push circa 1980 to converge the large variety of different (internal) corporate microprocessors to common 801/RISC (internal microprogramming to emulate other architectures, used in large variety of controllers, etc). the follow-on to the (370) 4341 machine was originally going to have 801/risc "microprocessor" (i.e. native engine was risc/801, "microcoded" to emulate 370). originally, the s/38 follow-on (as/400) was also going to be 801/risc. For various reasons, the efforts floundered (with efforts reverything to cisc) ... and in the early 80s, there were some number of 801/risc engineers showing up at other vendor risc efforts around silicon valley.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

ATMs At Risk

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: ATMs At Risk
Date: Mar 22, 2009
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
ATMs At Risk
http://www.darkreading.com/insiderthreat/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=4YGCJZZBFXSMCQSNDLOSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=215901034

from above:
The attack is similar to a recent incident in Europe, where several checkout card readers in major supermarket chains arrived with sniffers built into them. "They had been tampered with during production, so you couldn't tell they [were compromised] from the outside"

... snip ...

old reference about working on "hardened O/S" as an undergraduate in the 60s. course i didn't know about these guys until much later. vendor would even ask me to do some specific enhancements to be included in the product. in retrospect some may have originated here
https://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml

wiki reference to 3624 (and 3614) at Los Gatos lab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3624

somebody making the above wiki entry even made reference to one of my old posts about working at Los Gatos lab.

wiki magstripe reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe

mentioning that Los Gatos lab also managed magstripe standards and code (from 1966 to 1975)

and for a little other drift, recent post about the backend dataprocessing used by many ATM operations:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#27

and misc. past posts mentioning having worked on original relational/SQL DBMS (I had offices both in bldg. 28 and then in Almaden after they moved up the hill, and in bldg. 29 ... Los Gatos lab)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

and a little x-over payment systems network item from last fall:

Father of Financial Dataprocessing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#27

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

IBM in Talks to Buy Sun

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: IBM in Talks to Buy Sun
Date: Mar 22, 2009
Blog: Greater IBM
IBM in Talks to Buy Sun
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123735970806267921.html

I periodically mention the long ago meeting at the palo alto science center where the people that would go on and found sun ... made a pitch to ibm about ibm producing the sun product. there were (at least) three internal groups all claiming that they were doing something better ... and so ibm turned down the offer. a few past references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#24 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#30 Stanford University Network (SUN) 3M workstation

Sequent had done scale-up mainframe using intel processors and SCI for up to 256 processor shared memory. big install base was financial Informix applications ... both might have been considered a threat to more mainstream mainframe operations.

Steve Chen (IBM kingston group had earlier provided funding to his "Chen Supercomputer" startup) was CTO ... and we had done some consulting for Steve (prior to IBM appearing on the scene).

In our prior life (before departing in '92) we had participated in some early SCI meetings (as well as FCS and some other things).

for other sequent trivia ... we had been called in to consult with small client/server startup that wanted to payment transactions on their server. the startup had also invented this stuff called SSL they wanted to use ... the result is now frequently referred to as "electronic commerce".

somewhat related to this old post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

about a meeting involving HA/CMP scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

shortly after the above meeting, the scale-up effort was transferred ... some old email references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

announced as product for numeric intensive market (only) and we were told we couldn't work on anything with more than four processors. About the same time we left ... two of the other people mentioned in the referenced meeting ... also departed their positions and later were found at the small client/server startup in charge of something called the "commerce server".

in any case, in this period ... lots of webservers were having huge problems with processor load, system spending 95% of the time in tcp/ip session termination FINWAIT processing. The issue was that most tcp/ip sessions implementations had been done assuming long-lived sessions and few concurrent operations in session terminatiion. HTTP operations over tcp changed all that with enormous explosion in short lived sessions and corresponding explosion in FINWAIT processing. the startup was constantly adding servers trying to manage the load ... until they installed a sequent server. It turned out that sequent had already addressed the session termination/FINWAIT problem in support of commercial customers with huge numbers of tcp (non-http) sessions.

Eventually other vendors got around to fixing the problem (also).

a few past posts mentioning "FINWAIT":
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#52 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#39 CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#45 M$ SMP and old time IBM's LCMP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#12 Possible to have 5,000 sockets open concurrently?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#33 A Speculative question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#50 Question about Unix "heritage"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005c.html#70 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#13 RFC 2616 change proposal to increase speed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#21 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#36 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#37 Curiosity

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

The background reasons of Credit Crunch

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: The background reasons of Credit Crunch
Date: Mar 22, 2009
Blog: Economics
A big part of credit boom started with (mostly unregulated) non-depository institutions funding loans with securitization:

Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

from above:
The bundling of consumer loans and home mortgages into packages of securities -- a process known as securitization -- was the biggest U.S. export business of the 21st century. More than $27 trillion of these securities have been sold since 2001, according to the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association, an industry trade group. That's almost twice last year's U.S. gross domestic product of $13.8 trillion

... snip ...

on the lending side, nobody really cared about borrower qualifications ...

The Man Who Beat The Shorts
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1117/114.html

from above:
Watsa's only sin was in being a little too early with his prediction that the era of credit expansion would end badly. This is what he said in Fairfax's 2003 annual report: "It seems to us that securitization eliminates the incentive for the originator of [a] loan to be credit sensitive. Prior to securitization, the dealer would be very concerned about who was given credit to buy an automobile. With securitization, the dealer (almost) does not care."

... snip ...

it was just how fast loans could be written to all comers ... and unloaded as (triple-A rated) toxic CDOs. no-documentation, no-down-payment, 1% interest-only payment (introductory) ARMs would be quite attractive to speculators since the carrying cost was less than real-estate inflation in many parts of the country (and they were planning on flipping before the rates adjusted).

In the congressional hearings last fall, into rating agencies and toxic CDOs, it was repeatedly mentioned that both the toxic CDO issuers/sellers and the rating agencies knew that the toxic CDOs weren't worth the triple-A ratings ... but the issuers/sellers were paying for the triple-A ratings. The triple-A ratings enormously increased the institutions that would deal in (buy) the toxic CDOs and enormously increased the amount of money available for lending by non-depository institutions.

With a growing realization that the toxic CDOs weren't worth their triple-A ratings ... there was increasing reluctance to deal in such instruments (precipitating a big contraction in lending by non-depository institutions). Also with growing concern (FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt) it started to affect acceptance of other rated instruments. For instance Warren Buffett stepped in a year ago to insure muni-bonds because of bond market "freeze-up".

The repeal of Glass-Steagall then had a lot of investment banking arms of commercial banks buying these securitized loans (loans that they hadn't originally made) and carrying them "off-balance"

Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aYJZOB_gZi0I

quote from early 30s, Glass-Steagall (Pecora, senate banking) hearings:
BROKERS' LOANS AND INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION

For the purpose of making it perfectly clear that the present industrial depression was due to the inflation of credit on brokers' loans, as obtained from the Bureau of Research of the Federal Reserve Board, the figures show that the inflation of credit for speculative purposes on stock exchanges were responsible directly for a rise in the average of quotations of the stocks from sixty in 1922 to 225 in 1929 to 35 in 1932 and that the change in the value of such Stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange went through the same identical changes in almost identical percentages.


... snip ...

there is a correspondence between the speculation in the real-estate market leveraging (ARM) loans from non-depository institutions and the speculation in the '20s stock market using brokers' loans.

another part:

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis; Phil Gramm
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

from above:
He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

... snip ...

PBS program indicating CITI a major participant in repeal of Glass-Steagall
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/

this has CITI with one of the largest portfolios ($1.2T) of off-balance toxic assets
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/11/28/stay-away-from-citigroup-c/

recent articles about CITI on the road to returning to days before it pushed thru repeal of Glass-Steagall:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aaJyWTgJRSBs&refer=home
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/16/business/15citi-409167.php
with citigroup "holdings"
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5haU80OuiDFQKB5S9WBH3KGFv4CuQD9720L080

and references related to gov. having to clean up commercial banks toxic assets
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a5z1.VcMZHBM&refer=home
http://www.reuters.com/article/CHMMFG/idUSN2048782420090320

this is a long-winded, decade old (jan99) post discussing some of the current problems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm

including discussion of CITI realizing in 1989 that adjustable rate mortgage portfolio could take down the bank ... and unloaded the portfolio and got out of that business.

now, a good part of off-balance toxic assets are composed of (securitized, toxic CDO) adjustable rate mortgages. one might ask what happened to all citi's institutional knowledge regarding dangers of ARM portfolios between 1989 and this decade

there has been (at least) one article trying to lay the blame (for all the commercial banks around the world holding these toxic, securitized loans) on the complexity of analyzing the toxic CDO instruments:

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all

crunch, in part, because a lot of the non-depository lending institutions are out of the business (since the market dried up for their toxic CDOs). many sources of funds around the world are apprehensive about putting money into other parts of the market (after the revelations regarding the rating agencies and the triple-A ratings on toxic CDOs).

crunch, in part, because many of the large depository institutions, in earlier periods source of lending ... are holding all these toxic CDOs/assets and are technically insolvent.

crunch, in part, because of the resulting economic downturn (analogy with brokers' loans used for speculation resulting in the depression) is stressing lots of financial institutions ... not just the responsible parties. there have been several news items about community banks complaining that they never were involved with toxic CDOs and their FDIC premiums have increased ... which is decreasing their ability to lend.

in any case ... there are a lot more articles that the parties buying these toxic CDOs were being driven by the business people who were overriding the risk managers. there were recent quotes from chairman of goldman-sachs that in the future, the ability of business people to override risk manager has to be significantly reduced. trying to blame the risk managers and/or any of the risk tools appears to be more a case of smoke and obfuscation

How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/how-wall-streets-quants-lied-to-their-computers/
Subprime = Triple-A ratings? or 'How to Lie with Statistics' (gone 404 but lives on at the wayback machine)
https://web.archive.org/web/20071111031315/http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/07/25/subprime-triple-a-ratings-or-how-to-lie-with-statistics/

there is also my example that in 1989, CITI knew how to (correctly) analyze a large complex ARM portfolio ... but by the middle part of this decade, that ability appeared to have evaporated (i.e. a toxic CDO, composed of of ARM mortgages, is effectively an ARM portfolio), or was, at least, ignored.

another example is that some number of the institutions buying those toxic CDOs were playing long/short mismatch ... which has been known for centuries to take down institutions. there have been comments that lehman and bear-stearns only had moderate chance of surviving playing long/short mismatch (independent of leveraging and/or whether the toxic CDOs deserved their triple-A ratings). reference here:
http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/13/citigroup-suntrust-siv-ent-fin-cx_bh_1113hamiltonmatch.html

and decade old article from san fran fed on problems with long/short mismatch
http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2000/september/short-term-international-borrowing-and-financial-fragility/

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Bletchley Park fires up replica Turing Bombe

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Bletchley Park fires up replica Turing Bombe
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:20:04 -0400
Bletchley Park fires up replica Turing Bombe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/23/bletchley_bombe/

from above:
The Bombe was the brainchild of Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, and the 210 machines manufactured by the British Tabulator Machine Company did vital work cracking encoded German military traffic - a feat which shortened the war by two years, Bletchley Park suggests.

... snip ...

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

How to implement PKI authority?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: How to implement PKI authority?
Date: Mar 23, 2009
Blog: Software Development
PKI ... public key infrastructure

CA ... officially certification authority ... common use has corrupted it to certificate authority.

the (PKI) digital certificate ... is a representation of the certification processs performed by the CA ... i.e. a digial certificate is analogous to a diploma representing some education. the corruption of CA to certificate authority is analogous to referring to educational institutions as diploma mills.

we had been called in to consult with a small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their servers. They had invented this stuff called SSL they wanted to use as part of the operation. The result is frequently now referred to as "electronic commerce". As part of that effort we had to do some end-to-end business process walk thru of these new things calling themselves Certification Authorities that were issuing these things called digital certificates. Many of these new operations calling themselves Certification Authorities had been started by individuals that mainly had technical backgrounds. A common refrain was that they expected a Certification Authority to have something to do with technology ... but were finding that it to be 90% bookkeeping, accounting, filing, etc.

We did later coin the term certificate manufacturing ... for Certification Authorities that were purely creating digital certificates ... that effectively represented little more than diplomas from diploma mills.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?
Newsgroups: alt.lang.asm,comp.arch,sci.electronics.design
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:47:48 -0400
Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> writes:
At this time Borland came out with Anders Heijlsberg's Turbo Pascal, which ran rings around Logitech M2, in pretty much every possible way.

Los Gatos used metaware's technology for a lot of stuff dealing with defining languages related to VLSI tools ... including starting out a (mainframe) pascal language. the pascal language eventually evolved to the point that it was released to customers as vs/pascal (and later also released on aix).

vs/pascal was used to implement the mainframe tcp/ip stack ... which suffered from none buffer overflow vulnerabilities and exploits commoningly associated with C language implementations ... misc past posts mentioning C language
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow

it wasn't so much that it was impossible to implement buffer overflow problems in pascal ... it just was that it took enormous amount of effort to have buffer overflows ... comparable to the effort in C language environments to NOT having buffer overflows.

unrelated to the use of Pascal language in the mainframe tcp/ip stack implementation ... here are various past references to doing the rfc1044 implementation for the mainframe tcp/ip product ... and in some tuning work at cray research getting something like 30 times the thruput with 1/20 the pathlength (nearly 3 orders of magnitude improvement)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

in many ways, pascal shares the difficulty of having buffer overflowd with the much more ungainly PLI ... slight drift here about air force security study of "multics" (implemented in PLI) including mentioning of not having any buffer overflows:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#42 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation

somewhat more topic drift ... multics was going on the 5th flr of 545 tech sq ... and the science center doing virtual machine cp67 work was on 4th flr of 545 tech sq ... misc. past references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

i was undergraduate at a univ. that had installed cp67 and I got to play with it. the vendor even asked if i could make some specific enhancements. in retrospect ... some of the enhancements may have originated from these guys ... which I didn't learn about until much later:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml

for some turbo pascal (& c) trivia ... there was an effort a couple yrs ago to recover several old borland turbo distribution diskettes (i had to find a 5.25 floppy drive, i eventually managed to recover close to 30 floppies):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#35 Turbo C 1.5 (1987)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#37 Turbo C 1.5 (1987)

i had logitech modula2 diskettes but didn't try and recover them.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?
Newsgroups: alt.lang.asm,comp.arch,sci.electronics.design
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:46:26 -0400
Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> writes:
I loved having Vs/Pascal available!

I used it once to write the mainframe part of a heavily customized Kermit implementation that was capable of using 1900+ byte large packets, by filling most of a screen image.

The client was on the other end of a 3270 protocol emulator, talking VT100 or similar, and it would remove the screen formatting sequences and end up with the same packet data.

The fun part was that this worked pretty much immediately, and ran just as fast as the file transfer facility on a dedicated 3270-PC, and 10x faster than the (Kermit) reference version which used the default single line packets.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#11 Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?

not long after the "troubles" in '92 (went into the "red") ... the company was spinning off and/or moving to COTS for some number of things (lots of cost/capital reducing measures). some of this was moving to outside vendor off-the-shelf electronic design tools ... which also involved transferring some number of internal tools to outside vendors.

we had already left ... but i got a consulting contract to port a >50k statement (rs/6000) vs/pascal (electronic design) application to other platforms (as part of outside vendor picking up the application). vs/pascal had lots of enhancements and some number of other pascals appeared to have been used for little more than student education projects ... which significantly complicated the port (that plus one of the vendors had outsourced their pascal to an organization 12 time-zones away).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Should we fear and hate derivatives?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Should we fear and hate derivatives?
Date: Mar 23, 2009
Blog: Derivatives Markets
Naked Short Sales Hint Fraud in Bringing Down Lehman
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aB1jlqmFOTCA&refer=home

from above:
Trimbath attributes the almost ninefold growth in the value of failed trades from 1995 to 2007 to a rise in naked short sales. "You can't have millions of shares fail to deliver and say, 'Oops, my dog ate my certificates'"

... snip ...

With respect to AIG & CDS ... the root cause is also been blamed for ENRON.

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis; Phil Gramm
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

from above:
He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

... snip ...

Gramm and the 'Enron Loophole'
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/17grammside.html

from above:
Enron was a major contributor to Mr. Gramm's political campaigns, and Mr. Gramm's wife, Wendy, served on the Enron board, which she joined after stepping down as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

... snip ...

Phil Gramm's Enron Favor
https://web.archive.org/web/20080711114839/http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-01-15/news/phil-gramm-s-enron-favor/

from above:
A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.

... snip ...

Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aYJZOB_gZi0I

from above:
That same year Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt opposed an attempt by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to study regulating over-the-counter derivatives. In 2000, Congress passed a law keeping them unregulated.

... snip ...

one of the articles from the period mentioned that House passed the bill ... and even before the copy of the bill was distributed in the Senate, the Senate passed it unanimously. Also Born (as chairman) must have been fairly quickly replaced by Gramm's wife (before she resigned the position to join Enron).

in the wake of ENRON, congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley ... but didn't address the underlying problem.

somewhat still going on in real time ... item from today:

Sanders Blocks Vote to Confirm Gensler as CFTC Chair
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aYUJHzwyIvVw&refer=home

from above:
Gensler's nomination was approved by the Senate Agriculture Committee March 16 and is awaiting approval by the full Senate. He worked at the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, where he was involved in 2000 legislation that exempted derivatives contracts from oversight by the CFTC.

... snip ...

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Future System

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Future System
Date: Mar 24, 2009
Blog: Greater IBM
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#66 Future System

I've claimed that John's 801/risc effort was at least partly motivated to go to the opposite extreme from future system. misc. past posts mentioning 801/risc, romp, rios, iliad, fort knox, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

4381 (4341 follow-on) was originally going to be Iliad chip (i.e. 801/risc) ... and I made some (small) contributions to somebody else's document (I still have softcopy someplace) that contributed to retargeting 4381 from Iliad to cisc (in manner similar to as/400 being retargeted from Iliad to cisc).

old post with several old emails from early 80s mentioning 801/Iliad
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#65 801

other old email from 70s & 80s mentioning 801, Iliad, romp, Fort Knox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#801

I had gotten blamed for computer conferencing on the internal (corporate) network in the 70s and early 80s ... misc. past posts mentioning internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

... which had also originated at the science center ... aka 4th flr, 545 tech sq. misc. past posts mentioning science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

the science center was also the origin for (virtual machine) cp67 (later morphed into vm370) and where gml was invented (later morphed into sgml, html, xml, etc) ... to name a few.

Note that part of Future System was page mapped (or one level store) architecture ... somewhat left over from tss/360 (and/or similar multics). Some of this early project mac (tss/mutlics/ctss/etc) is found in Melinda's vm370 history ... which can found here:
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

I had seen some of the problems with tss/360 (and especially performance problems with their page mapped infrastructure) at the univ. as undergraduate. the univ. originally installed 360/67 for tss/360 ... but primarily stayed with os/360 ... although they let me play a lot with cp67.

Later, in the early 70s, I did a paged mapped implementation for cp67/cms ... that was designed to overcome most of the major performance shortcomings of tss/360 implementation .... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

I then migrated much of the work to vm370 ... and would do some relatively large scale internal distributions of the highly modified system ... misc. old email references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

the actual page mapped features didn't ship ... but some of the supporting functions leaked out as "DCSS" ... in the post-FS period, when there was a mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 software & hardware product pipeline (which was neglected during the FS period).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

The background reasons of Credit Crunch

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: The background reasons of Credit Crunch
Date: Mar 24, 2009
Blog: Economics
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#8 The background reasons of Credit Crunch

we had been asked to come in and consult with small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... they also had this technology called SSL they had invented that they wanted to use. the result is now frequently referred to as "electronic commerce". Somewhat as a result, in the mid-90s, we were asked to participate in the x9a10 financial standard working group, which had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments ... which resulted in the x9.59 financial standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

somewhat as a result of that work, we were asked to come in to NSCC (since merged with DTC to be DTCC) to look at doing something similar for all trader operations. Part way thru that effort, it was suspended. A side-effect of the integrity work would have resulted in significantly more visibility and transparency ... which they said went counter to fundamental trader culture.

in the recent congressional hearings about Madoff, the repeated theme (by the person that had been trying to get SEC to do something about Madoff for a decade) was the major need for visibilty and transparency ... that new legislation and regulation was needed ... but much more important was visibility and transparency.

in the congressional hearings into rating agencies and toxic CDOs ... another item mentioned was that in the early 70s, the rating agencies switched from the buyer paying for the ratings to the seller/issuer paying for the ratings, which "mis-aligned" the business process and created opportunity for conflict of interest.

In late Jan. there were some reports that the gov. was using IDC to help "price" toxic assets. IDC had bought the pricing services division from one of the rating agencies in the early 70s ... about the time their business processes became "mis-aligned" (disclaimer, I interviewed with IDC in the late 60s ... but didn't join them).

misc. past posts mentioining mis-aligned business process:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#14 What are the challenges in risk analytics post financial crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#32 What are the challenges in risk analytics post financial crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#42 Lets play Blame Game...?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#52 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#53 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#57 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#74 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#77 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#79 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#37 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#38 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#51 Will the Draft Bill floated in Congress yesterday to restrict trading of naked Credit Default Swaps help or aggravate?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#52 What has the Global Financial Crisis taught the Nations, it's Governments and Decision Makers, and how should they apply that knowledge to manage risks differently in the future?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#53 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#73 What can we learn from the meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#78 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#1 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#7 Payments start-up Noca takes aim at interchange Achilles heel
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#45 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#51 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#61 Accounting for the "greed factor"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#65 is it possible that ALL banks will be nationalized?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

ATMs At Risk

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: ATMs At Risk
Date: Mar 22, 2009
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#6 ATMs At Risk

news item from today ...

Australian ATM skimming gang nets $500,000
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19810

note, one of the issues with some of the ATM exploits involving skimmers being installed early in the build process (similar to the POS exploit mentioned in the original article) ... was inventory tracking of where every ATM machine from every vendor was physically located (analogy with product recall scenarios).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Why is everyone talking about AIG bonuses of millions and keeping their mouth shut on billions sent to foreign banks?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Why is everyone talking about AIG bonuses of millions and keeping their mouth shut on billions sent to foreign banks?
Date: Mar 24, 2009
Blog: Government Policy
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#74 Why is everyone talking about AIG bonuses of millions and keeping their mouth shut on billions sent to foreign banks?

There is also this question/answer from late Jan. on industry issue of bonuses:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/professional-development/ethics/PRO_PET/439092-319120
and my answer(s) also archived here:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#25

example of some of the articles from Jan. question/answer:

Bailed-Out Banks Dole Out Bonuses; Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, Others Mum on How They Are Using TARP Cash
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Business/story?id=6498680&page=1

from above:
Goldman Sachs, which accepted $10 billion in government money, and lost $2.1 billion last quarter, announced Tuesday that it handed out $10.93 billion in benefits, bonuses, and compensation for the year.

... snip ...

also ...

Obama Calls Bonuses 'Shameful' as Dodd Vows to Reclaim Money
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=anzJooSeABDM
Obama: Big Wall Street Bonuses 'Shameful'
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/economy-watch/2009/01/obama_big_wall_street_bonuses.html

slightly older article:

The Fed's Too Easy on Wall Street
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-03-19/the-feds-too-easy-on-wall-streetbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice

from above:
Here's a staggering figure to contemplate: New York City securities industry firms paid out a total of $137 billion in employee bonuses from 2002 to 2007, according to figures compiled by the New York State Office of the Comptroller. Let's break that down: Wall Street honchos earned a bonus of $9.8 billion in 2002, $15.8 billion in 2003, $18.6 billion in 2004, $25.7 billion in 2005, $33.9 billion in 2006, and $33.2 billion in 2007.

... snip ...

basically nearly everybody touching CDS & CDO instruments were declaring them as enormous profits and taking enormous commissions/bonuses ... leaving their institutions, the gov. and the American taxpayer holding the bag.

misc. other past posts mentioning staggering wall street bonuses:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#73 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#80 Are reckless risks a natural fallout of "excessive" executive compensation ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#25 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#41 The subject is authoritarian tendencies in corporate management, and how they are related to political culture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#45 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#57 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#59 As bonuses...why breed greed, when others are in dire need?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#0 PNC Financial to pay CEO $3 million stock bonus
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#3 Congress Set to Approve Pay Cap of $500,000

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Microminiaturized Modules

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:31:34 -0400
hancock4 writes:
Yes. April 1964, introduction of System/360.

It's amazing that back then any mainstream press article on computers always focused on memory and processing speed and lots of technical whizbang words, but rarely on what those numbers meant in terms of throughput. Apparently reporters never asked what real-world work a computer could actually do. Saying a computer could calculate "millions of multiplications per second" did not translate into paychecks prepared per hour. I can't help but suspect that back then much work was unit-record I/O dependent, that is limited by the speed of the line printer and card reader.

I think it was only in the 1980s that they evaluated computers in real world work terms, using the System/370-158 as a baseline.


one of the issues at the univ. was that they had a 709/1401 combination. the 1401 handled unit record and did tape<->unit record ... and the 709 ran workload tape->tape ... running student jobs at one or more per second.

initial 360/67 install (significantly faster than 709) was handling its own unit record directly ... and the student jobs were running sequentially/synchronously at unit record speed ... taking nearly a minute per. introduction of HASP (spooling) made the unit processing asynchronous ... about doubling the thruput. A big bottleneck was then random disk accesses (compared to sequential tape->tape thruput on 709).

I did a lot of careful placement of data on disk to improve student job thruput by factor of (additional) nearly three times.

It wasn't until we installed WATFOR at the univ ... that student job thruput processing exceeded the 709 (coupled with HASP providing asynchronous unit record processing). I have some vaque recollection that WATFOR (processing time) was rated at something like 20,000 statements per second (on 360/65 or 67). ... and student jobs were typically around 50-100 statements (which finally changed student job workload from significant percentage of univ. datacenter workload to negligible part of processing).

misc. past posts mentioning hasp
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#hasp

some past posts about comparison of 4341, 158-3, and 3031 (4341 nearly thruput of 6600 for numerical intensive benchmark)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#0 Is a VAX a mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#7 4341 was "Is a VAX a mainframe?"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#0 Microcode?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#7 CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#19 CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#4 misc. old benchmarks (4331 & 11/750)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#31 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#21 moving on
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#62 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#54 mainframe performance

for little topic drift ... mid-range 4341 (and vax) market started to explode starting in '79 ... saw some customers ordering 43xxs in multiple hundreds at a time. recent post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#1

mentioning that internally, the explosion in numbers of 4341s resulted in disappearnce of conference rooms as departments starting using them for 4341 computer rooms.

and vax numbers sliced and diced by year, model, US/non-US, etc ... showing corresponding (midrange market) explosion in number of vax machines and then they drop off in the mid-80s as workstations and larger PCs took over the market:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:16:33 -0400
gavin@allegro.com (Gavin Scott) writes:
My point is that there's a psychological effect that I have seen in myself and numerous other users where you're in a hurry typing the command, writing the email, etc. and the action of typing out the information partially blocks the mind from fully evaluating what it's doing. As soon as there's a pause, after pressing [send] on the email, [return] on the format, or [launch commit] or whatever, that seems to be the moment that your brain has the free "cycles" to run the "I'm bored now, let's think about what's going on" thread.

You've never hit send on an email and immediately remembered you forgot the attachment, or a cc:, or something?

So I'm suggesting that for a major, undoable, long-running task like a pack format, the ability to let the user change their mind (even in a pretty short window before the process actually starts) is likely to be as valuable as asking if they're "sure".


there was nearly an opposite study from the early 80s regarding sub-second (system) response time. basically attention "wandered" perportional to response time ... and required attention to come back to the task at hand ... with a minimum threshold somewhere between .1-.25 seconds (varied across the population, threshold where people didn't differentiate response time from instantaneous).

attention wandering was basically equivalent to system response (over perception threshold). A response of 1 minute resulted in attention wandering of 1 minute ... resulting in 2 minutes elapsed time to get person back to doing next operation (five minutes response, would require an additional five minutes human to refocus on task) Interactive User Productivity
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/a3807c5b4823c53f85256561006324be/03408534f83228d685256bfa00685b4b?OpenDocument
Factors affectiving programmer productivity during application development
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/a3807c5b4823c53f85256561006324be/b9a0458ee9e2179385256bfa00685b7d?OpenDocument

this was in a period where some systems were having extreme difficulty even meeting 1second system response time ... so there was a lot of FUD about subsecond response wouldn't have any benefits for normal humans.

it wasn't just the "system" (software) ... but various hardware components also.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#19 3270 protocol
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#2 IBM 327x terminals and controllers (was Re: Itanium2 power
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#6 IBM 327x terminals and controllers (was Re: Itanium2 power
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#69 OT: One for the historians - 360/91
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#43 IBM 3174

old reference comparing 3272/3277 against (newer) 3274/3278 and CMS vis-a-vis TSO (most TSO systems were lucky even to achieve 1sec system response):

hardware     TSO 1sec.    CMS .25sec.     CMS .11sec.
3272/3277        .086        1.086         .336            .196
3274/3278        .530        1.530         .78             .64
... snip ...

There were number of systems of the period touting their great CMS performance of .25sec response ... and when I pointed out I was getting .11sec for essentially the same hardware configuration and workload ... the response was that it wasn't fair (to other people) to make comparisons with anything I did.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Microminiaturized Modules

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:23:22 -0400
hancock4 writes:
Industrial ads and corporate house organs of the 1960s-1970s were incredibly sexist by today's standards. Very often pretty girls, sometimes wild-looking girls, would pose with equipment.

lots of tv, automobile commercials, tv shows (shows like groucho marx), airlines (there was a cal. airline with its major theme that all the stewardesses wore hotpants), (industrial) calendars are particularly infamous (still are, do web search calendars & pinup)

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

ATMs At Risk

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: ATMs At Risk
Date: Mar 25, 2009
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#6 ATMs At Risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#16 ATMs At Risk

funny you should mention that ... in prior life we did end-to-end walk of the whole manufacturing and security process ... in part looking at significant economic savings at the same time significantly improving the integrity ... and even tho we haven't been involved for some time (and all rights were assigned so we have no interest) ... the patents continue to trickle out ... even one earlier this month ... summary
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadssummary.htm

several of the above are related to end-to-end device authentication.

somewhat on the other side was x9.59 financial transaction standard.

we had been asked to consult with small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... they also had invented this technology called SSL they wanted to use; the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce".

somewhat as a result of that effort, in the mid-90s, we were asked to participate in the x9a10 financial standard working group ... which had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for *ALL* retail payments (this was *ALL*, as in credit, debit, ACH, stored-value, internet, POS, face-to-face, attended, unattended, aka *ALL*). Part of x9a10 involved detailed, end-to-end threat & vulnerability studies of the various environments. The result was x9.59 financial transaction standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

part of the study was looking at skimming, sniffing, evesdropping, harvesting and data breach vulnrabilities ... basically crooks being able to use information from other transactions to perform fraudulent financial transaction (sort of class of replay attacks). x9.59 slightly tweaked the paradigm to eliminate the usefullness of the information. x9.59 did nothing about preventing skimming, sniffing, evesdropping, heavesting and/or data breaches ... x9.59 just eliminated the ability of the crooks to use the information for fraudulent transactions. this significantly mitigates the integrity requirements that have been required as countermeasures to sniffing & data breach threats.

at the time, I also semi-facetiously commented that I was going to take a $500 milspec part and aggresively cost reduce it by 2-3 orders of magnitude while improving the integrity (eventually got it on very close to the EPC RFID curve ... i.e. the chips they've been looking at being a few cents to replace barcodes/UPC).

part of the referenced patents include parameterised risk management ... basically enabling the ability on a per transaction basis to evaluate a transaction risk ... things like the integrity level of the authentication token as well as the integrity level of the environment in which the transaction was executed. part of x9.59 financial transaction not only allows for token authentication (as part of something you have authentication) but also the device/environment to authenticate the transaction also (say a particular POS terminal or ATM machine).

parameterised risk management also was done to enable person-centric environment ... the same token being used for lots of different environments with lots of different institutions ... for instance w/o a PIN for low-value transit turnstyle, with a PIN for higher value POS transactions (or security door entry), and/or one or more biometrics (with or w/o a PIN). for even higher value operations.

... oh, the elimination of fraud from evesdropping also affects this earlier work that we had done with SSL. The major use of SSL in the world today is this thing we had earlier worked on (frequently referred to now as "electronic commerce") for hiding financial transaction details. With x9.59 eliminating the threat (& fraud) from evesdropping on financial transactions ... it also eliminates the major use of SSL in the world today.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Payment downtime threatens online retailers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Payment downtime threatens online retailers
Date: Mar 25, 2009
Blog: Payment Systems Network
Payment downtime threatens online retailers
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2239046/payment-downtime-threatens

we had been called in to consult with a small client/server startup that wanted to payment transactions on their server ... they had also invented this technology called SSL they wanted to use ... the result is now frequently now called "electronic commerce". part of that infrastructure was deployment of something called the "payment gateway" (gateway between the internet and the banking payment network that webservers could "talk" to with SSL). lots of past posts mentioning payment gateway
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway

this is recent post in a computer architecture discussion regarding some of the things we did to address availability issues for that gateway (on the internet):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#60

in a past life we had done a "high availability" product which involved addressing many of the issues ... misc. past posts mentioning HA/CMP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

for some folklore ... this is old post referencing a high-availability scale-up meeting held in jan92
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

now, two of the (other) people mentioned in the above referenced meeting ... subsequently left and showed up at the small client/server responsible for something called the "commerce" server.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
Date: Mar 25, 2009
Blog: Financial Regulation
linkedin reference:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/finance-accounting/financial-regulation/FIN_FRG/444997-2498009

FDIC and Federal Reserve somewhat evolved to protect customer deposits ... which indirectly tended to influence and stabilize many other parts of the economic infrastructure. however in the latest crisis, (mostly unregulated) non-depository institutions played a major role ... using securitization as source of funds.

Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

from above:
The bundling of consumer loans and home mortgages into packages of securities -- a process known as securitization -- was the biggest U.S. export business of the 21st century. More than $27 trillion of these securities have been sold since 2001, according to the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association, an industry trade group. That's almost twice last year's U.S. gross domestic product of $13.8 trillion

... snip ...

With the repeal of Glass-Steagall, eliminating separation between commercial banking and investment banking ... large commercial banks had their investment banking arms buying up huge amounts of these securitized loans and carry them off-balance (as toxic assets, again pretty much unregulated). The commercial banks were providing a lot of the funding for these loans ... but by a much more circuitous route (which bypassed much of the regulation that was put in place to prevent crisis like we now have).

this has CITI with still possibly one of the largest portfolios ($1.2T) of these off-balance toxic assets (after having sold off some amount last yr to pimco at 22cents on the dollar)
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/11/28/stay-away-from-citigroup-c/

Part of the issue was that AIG played a major role in these circuitous transactions (involving $27T in securitized loans) ... resulting in the current crisis (with claims of lots of systemic risk and on the verge of taking down the global banking system). So if a duty is to protect the banking system ... and activities by AIG contribute to threat of taking down the banking system (which has been the justification for the AIG bailout) ... should AIG be allowed to run completely rogue or not?

Commodities Futures Modernization act has been implicated in both ENRON and AIG.

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis; Phil Gramm
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

from above:
He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

... snip ...

Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aYJZOB_gZi0I

from above:
That same year Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt opposed an attempt by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to study regulating over-the-counter derivatives. In 2000, Congress passed a law keeping them unregulated.

... snip ...

one of the articles from the period mentioned that House passed the bill ... and even before the copy of the bill was distributed in the Senate, the Senate passed it unanimously.

Claim has been that a lot of the deregulation activity has been because of congressional contributions by financial industry. CSPAN show a couple weeks ago said that it was $250M in the session that passed Glass-Steagall and $2B in the session that passed TARP (last week news item was that it totaled $5B in the period). PBS program looking at some of it:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/

on the (unregulated) lending side (by non-depository institutions), nobody really cared about borrower qualifications ... since they would immediately turn around and sell them off (and it was no longer their problem)

The Man Who Beat The Shorts
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1117/114.html

from above:
Watsa's only sin was in being a little too early with his prediction that the era of credit expansion would end badly. This is what he said in Fairfax's 2003 annual report: "It seems to us that securitization eliminates the incentive for the originator of [a] loan to be credit sensitive. Prior to securitization, the dealer would be very concerned about who was given credit to buy an automobile. With securitization, the dealer (almost) does not care."

... snip ...

it was just how fast loans could be written to all comers ... and unloaded as (triple-A rated) toxic CDOs. no-documentation, no-down-payment, 1% interest-only payment (introductory) ARMs would be quite attractive to speculators since the carrying cost was less than real-estate inflation in many parts of the country (and they were planning on flipping before the rates adjusted). quote from early 30s, Glass-Steagall (Pecora, senate banking) hearings:
BROKERS' LOANS AND INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION

For the purpose of making it perfectly clear that the present industrial depression was due to the inflation of credit on brokers' loans, as obtained from the Bureau of Research of the Federal Reserve Board, the figures show that the inflation of credit for speculative purposes on stock exchanges were responsible directly for a rise in the average of quotations of the stocks from sixty in 1922 to 225 in 1929 to 35 in 1932 and that the change in the value of such Stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange went through the same identical changes in almost identical percentages.


... snip ...

there is a correpsondance between the speculation in the real-estate market leveraging (ARM) loans from non-depository institutions and the speculation in the '20s stock market using brokers' loans.

latest from today:

Bank's Hidden Junk Menaces $1 Trillion Purge
>http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=akv_p6LBNIdw&refer=home

from above:
So investors betting for quick solutions to the financial crisis could be disappointed. The tangled web that banks wove over the years will take a long time to undo.

At the end of 2008, for example, off-balance-sheet assets at just the four biggest U.S. banks -- Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- were about $5.2 trillion, according to their 2008 annual filings.


... snip ...

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:11:31 -0400
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
This reached an extreme when I heard some of the 1100 people talking about their online systems striving for a consistent response time, as opposed to a quick one - which meant imposing a delay if the system was ready to respond too soon.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#19 Arhcitectural Diversity

there were some studies that if it couldn't be made quick ... make it predictable ... being slow adversely affected human factors ... slow and unpredictable/variable could be worse than slow and predictable.

i tried to strive for (predictable) graceful degradation ... as systems became increasingly loaded during the day ... a couple load peaks at mid-morning and mid-afternoon (although striving for trivial response quick throughout the day).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Microminiaturized Modules

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:25:04 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
I'm not sure. At one point I tried to trace them to get permission to post something on the Web. I think they were bought out by an outfit in CT, but I think they're completely gone now, left no forwarding address. I went ahead and posted anyhow.

this claims to be datamation
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/cnews/

i had gotten blamed for computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s. some of it leaked out and Datamation had an article about it in nov81 issue (even referencing my name).

misc. past posts mentioning internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Microminiaturized Modules

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:53:10 -0400
Al Kossow <aek@spies.com> writes:
page 64

Programming was also the subject of a celebrated VNET memo-this time from one of IBM'S most loved and respected VM "veterans," Lyn Wheeler, a systems programmer at IBM'S San Jose center. Wheeler has probably done as much as anyone to make VM the current runaway success that it is, say former colleagues. His classic Wheeler Scheduler has become the natural mode for that operating system, they say. A former colleague said that Wheeler accepted an invitation to visit Jim Gray after Gray had joined Tandem, about a year ago. The event was Tandem's celebrated weekly "beer bash," which has become a regular Friday afternoon revel-usually around the company's swimming pool.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#25 Microminiaturized Modules

There used to be friday after work at various places around the san jose plant site ... that Jim would periodically attend (prior to leaving for tandem). one of the places was a deli that opened up across from bldg. 28 ... they had a back room that was normally closed ... but would open up for us on friday evening ... and provide us with half-price on pitchers of anchor steam. for some unfathomable reason they had a plaque on the door with my name on it.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Microminiaturized Modules

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:34:19 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#25
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#26

oh, and things weren't particularly good prior to getting blamed for computer conferencing on the internal network

a couple past posts mentioning "career"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#0
background description of some of the above:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48

making facetious references to the FS effort wasn't particularly career enhnacing ... nor was the "red box" incident described in the above. i was only semi-facetious in the above that it looked like there was 1/3rd premium (in larger salary) being offered to new hires with no experience (compared to existing salary for long time employee with lots of expierence).

there were subsequent comments about best could hope for is to not be fired and allowed to do it again and they could have forgiven you for being wrong, but they were never going to forgive you for being right.

the appearance of the article just added fuel to the fire.

it became impossible for things like getting executive sign-off to publish papers and even took almost a year to get approval to send the response mentioned here (even tho the reference was to work that was at least decade old at the time, lots of it done when i was undergraduate):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#46

one might be tempted to conclude that the reference that fergus/morris made, about what happened in the wake of FS, was in full swing by the early 80s. old reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#33
more recent references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#44
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#66

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Denmark, Sweden top US in new global IT report

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Denmark, Sweden top US in new global IT report
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:49:42 -0400
somewhat past threads about US loosing position in the world, education system dropping near the bottom of industrial nations, etc

Denmark, Sweden top US in new global IT report
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090326/ap_on_hi_te/eu_global_technology

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:30:31 -0400
Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9129459

from above:
So now that we're more than 30 years into the era of the personal computer, Computerworld writers and editors, like all technology aficionados, find ourselves with lots of memories and reactions to the operating systems of yesteryear. We have said goodbye to some of them with regret. (So long, AmigaOS!) Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!) Some, we threw out with great force. (Don't let the door hit you on the way out, MS-DOS 4.0!)

... snip ...

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:44:28 -0400
Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9129498

from above (reference to unix turned 40):
With your birth as our starting point, then, let's look at the biggest desktop OS milestones of the past 40 years.

... snip ...

recent post in ibm-main thread about cloud computing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#4

mentioning that some of this is analogous to commerical online time-sharing from the 60s & 70s providing "personal computing" like services ... which were somewhat supplanted by "real" personal computers in the 80s. misc. past posts mentioning timesharing services
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

Why netbooks are killing Microsoft
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=333519

which somewhat makes netbooks analogous to the old time portable terminals ... picture of miniterm on desk at home in late '70s (next to compact microfiche viewer)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/miniterm.jpg

from this thread last year:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#38 Baudot code direct to computers?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#51 Baudot code direct to computers?

... the following is a similar post I recently made to a cloud computing thread in a Boyd blog:
cloud computing is analogous to commercial, online timesharing from the 60s & 70s. they provided a lot of personal computing function and were eclipsed by personal computers (people could have their own dedicated computers). some of the timesharing companies evolved into higher value information (as personal computers began to take over much of their original market) ... and then moved on to the web.

One such that I interviewed with in the late 60s (but didn't join) was IDC ... which had already started move into financial services. Another was bought by D&B to be major part of their internal computing.

I find IDC interesting in light of the current economic situation. Last fall, congressional hearings into rating agencies and toxic (securitized mortgages) CDOs repeatedly pointed out that both the sellers/issuers and rating agencies knew the toxic CDOs weren't worth the triple-A rating, but the sellers/issuers were paying for the triple-A ratings. The claim was that in the early 70s, the rating agencies changed from having the buyers paying for ratings to the sellers paying for ratings, which mis-aligned the business process and opened it up for conflict of interest.

In late Jan, there were a couple news items that the gov. was using IDC to help price a lot of the toxic assets (CDOs) that it was considering buying. IDC had bought the pricing service division from one of the rating agencies in the early 70s (about the time the testimony in the hearings claimed that the rating agencies' business processes became misaligned).


... snip ...

other posts mentioning Boyd and/or OODA-loop
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
Date: Mar 26, 2009
Blog: Financial Regulation
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?

tv business news show just now discussing Geithner congressional testimony ... pointed out that many of the members in congress were involved in the deregulation that played major role in allowing the current crisis (like the reference to senate so quick to pass commodity futures modernization act ... and recipients of the $5b from the financial industry)

other items from today:

More than just repairs
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13394576&source=features_box_main
Geither urges quick action on regulation; Congress demurs
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/regulation/2009-03-26-financial-regulation_N.htm
Geithner Calls for ‘New Rules of the Game' in Finance
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aembkwNWI0nU&refer=worldwide

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:46:24 -0400
Marc Auslander <marcslists@optonline.NOSPAM.net> writes:
I guess I'm really and old timer - I was wondering where TSS was! Does anyone even remember TSS, one of the earliest true virtual memory OS's.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#29 Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#30 Timeline: 40 years of OS milesontes?

tss/360, tss ???

recently mentioned here in "Future System" thread in Greater IBM blog:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#14 Future System

as in above ... Melinda's vm history
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

has quite a bit about the science center (4th flr, 545)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

had some anticipation about getting ctss (project mac) follow-on. however, it went with GE (multics ... 5th flr, 545) and tss group got the 360/67 mission. Melinda's history does talk about science center doing special hardware modifications for 360/40 to support virtual memory ... and building cp/40. later, when the science center finally got a 360/67, cp/40 morphed into cp/67.

univ. had gotten 360/67 to run tss/360 ... but spent most of the time running os/360. IBM SE would get (univ. 360/67) time on the weekends to work with tss/360 (during 1967, at least until I started playing with cp67 on the weekends and i wasn't doing os/360 system maint.). I have some vague memory of the IBM SE turning in 100-200 bug fixes on something like release 0.67 ... and got a response back from the tss/360 group that they were shipping release 0.68 and he would have to start all over from scratch.

in '68 (even before I had done a lot of the cp67 performance optimization), the IBM SE and I created a synthetic fortran, edit, compile and execute benchmark. He ran it with four simulated tss/360 terminals ... and I ran it with 35 simulated cms terminals ... and the cp67/cms response and thruput numbers (for 35 simulated users) was better than the tss/360 numbers (for four simulated users).

in the referenced blog post ... I mentioned that in the early 70s, I had done a page-mapped filesystem for (cp67) cms ... and was careful to avoid a lot of the problems that I had observed in the tss/360 implementation.

for other drift ... past references to Gary Kildall having used cp/67 at NPG in the early 70s ... possibly explaining the choice of "cp/m" name.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#52 Kildall "flying" (was Re: First OS?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#40 Which Monitor Would You Pick??????
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#48 Early microcomputer (esp i8008) software
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#41 Is computer history taugh now?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Microminiaturized Modules

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:05:55 -0400
TrailingEdgeTechnologies <bbreynolds@aol.com> writes:
How 'bout Braniff, who painted the planes and did up the air hostesses in art from multiple modern artists. I remember a COMMON conference which was held at the hotel in the middle of the DFW airport in early 1980s, and all of the Braniff planes (mainly 727s, as I recall) were parked on the tarmac around the hotel: colorful, but dead.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#20 Microminiaturized Modules

PSA website:
http://www.catchoursmile.com/

from above:
At a time when the rest of America was button down serious, PSA capitalized on its notion that flying could be enjoyable. While other airlines cloaked their planes and crews in somber shades of blue and beige, PSA planes wore stripes of fuchsia, orange and red with a big, bold smile painted under the nose. And PSA flight attendants, those legendary California golden girls, stepped out in hot pants and miniskirts, raising the pulse rate of many a bleary eyed commuter.

...

PSA came to represent the quintessential California mindset: bold, brash, sexy, sometimes off the wall, but always friendly, always fun.


... snip ...

some of images from above:
http://www.catchoursmile.com/myweb/stews11.jpg
http://www.catchoursmile.com/myweb/stews33.jpg
http://www.catchoursmile.com/myweb/StewsB.jpg
http://www.catchoursmile.com/myweb/cos12.jpg

another PSA website:
http://www.jetpsa.com/index2.html

page of stewardess/flight attendent uniforms:
http://www.jetpsa.com/uniforms/uniforms.html

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:22:15 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
Seems like an attempt to implement Multics on a system without segmentation. I understand the source is around, and there are some Herculeans playing with it. Things are complicated by the fact that the compilers were apparently copyrighted and are unavailable.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#14
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#32

360/67 had 1mbyte segments and option for 24bit addressing (16 segments) and 32bit addressing (4096 segments).

one of the really painful problems that i had doing page-mapped filesystem was cms ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

was that a whole lot of the cms infrastructure was compilers and applications brought over from os/360 ... which had this ("horrible") problem with "relocatable adcons" ... which were actually "fixed" early in the process to specific addresses. i had all sorts of problems making executable images on disk being able to be loaded at arbitrary virtual addresses. misc. past posts discussing the issues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#adcon

the objective was not only to be able to page map any executable file at arbitrary virtual address ... but to have the same r/o shared page mapped object (instructions/executable or other) possibly appear simulataneously at different virtual addresses in different virtual address spaces.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:16:27 -0400
TrailingEdgeTechnologies <bbreynolds@aol.com> writes:
There have been expository statements that all of the bad things in our current environment are due to 1000 executives.

business school article from yr ago that estimated that 1000 executives are responsible for 80% of the current crisis and it would go a long ways towards correcting the problem if the gov. could figure out how they could loose their job.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1933 (gone 404 and/or requires registration)

there are also articles that a lot of the current problem are because of congress passing various deregulations measures ... attributed to financial industry had made $250m contributions in the session that repealed Glass-Steagall, and $2B contriubtions in the recent session that passed TARP ($5B total contributions in the period between session repealed Glass-Steagall and now).

some recent posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#38 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#53 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#55 Who will give Citigroup the KNOCKOUT blow?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#65 is it possible that ALL banks will be nationalized?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#10 Who will Survive AIG or Derivative Counterparty Risk?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#28 I need insight on the Stock Market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#61 Quiz: Evaluate your level of Spreadsheet risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#63 Do bonuses foster unethical conduct?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#0 What is swap in the financial market?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#8 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#13 Should we fear and hate derivatives?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?

mentioning:

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis; Phil Gramm
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

from above:

He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

... snip ...

and

Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aYJZOB_gZi0I

from above:
That same year Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt opposed an attempt by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to study regulating over-the-counter derivatives. In 2000, Congress passed a law keeping them unregulated.

... snip ...

one of the articles from the period mentioned that House passed the bill ... and even before the copy of the bill was distributed in the Senate, the Senate passed it unanimously.

note that commodity future modernization act was also implicated in ENRON ... and after ENRON, congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley ... but didn't fix the underlying problem (leading to AIG)

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:39:21 -0400
greymaus <greymausg@mail.com> writes:
kinda like the advertising answer to the criticism that 80% of adverts are a waste of time, "But which 20% is paying?. Better to continue with the lot, rather than cut the ones that work"

We have to believe that most people are honest and trustwoorthy, but sometimes one wonders.

After WWII, many ex-Nazis were allowed to continue in similiar positions, under the occupation. One cannot replace an entire network, that was shown when the entire Baath-Sunni officialdom was sacked after Saddam fell. It was only when those people were brought back into use that problems receded. What is needed is the reintroduction of laws that limit the spread of problems like those that got us here.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#35 Architectural Diversity

... long post warning ...

past references to some court cases involving theft of trade secrets ... the court basically asummes that nearly everybody is susceptable given sufficient temptation ... and that the fraud countermeasures have to be proportional to the temptation.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#4 Is SUN going to become x86'ed ??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#71 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?

the business school article issue is analogous to the 90/10 percent rule ... that you can get 90 percent with the initial effort ... and it takes ten-to-hundred times more effort to get the final 10percent. in this case, 1000 executives responsible for 80% ... and then huge numbers of people responsible for the remaining 20%.

this is somewhat the part about securitization of ARM mortgages resulting in lenders using securitization (in large part, non-regulated, non-depository operations) ... they didn't have to care about loan quality since they could immediately unload the loan as part of (triple-A rated) toxic CDO. no-documentation, no-down payment, 1% interest only payment ARM became extremely attractive to speculators since the carrying cost was way less than real-estate inflation in many parts of the country (planning on flipping before rates adjusted). A few executives were responsible for putting together the pieces that made it all flow ... coupled with large numbers of loan officers and speculators (getting the 1000 would pretty much eliminate the core responsble).

the business school article didn't include anything about anybody that hadn't participated in the whole scenario.

Just about everybody that were touching CDOs and CDSs were declaring them as huge profits and taking in huge commissions, bonuses, compensation (leaving their institutions, the gov. and the American taxpayer holding the bag) ... which was also large part responsible for wall street bonuses spiking by at least four times during the period

The Fed's Too Easy on Wall Street
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-03-19/the-feds-too-easy-on-wall-streetbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice

from above:
Here's a staggering figure to contemplate: New York City securities industry firms paid out a total of $137 billion in employee bonuses from 2002 to 2007, according to figures compiled by the New York State Office of the Comptroller. Let's break that down: Wall Street honchos earned a bonus of $9.8 billion in 2002, $15.8 billion in 2003, $18.6 billion in 2004, $25.7 billion in 2005, $33.9 billion in 2006, and $33.2 billion in 2007.

... snip ...

some of the current bonus issues are they had gotten so used to the inflated compensation ... there are attempts to avoid returning to the days before CDOs & CDSs (some attempts to making light of current bonuses are only half the peak ... but actually still way above the pre CDO/CDS days)

Repeal of Glass-Steagall had eliminated separation between commercial banks and investment banks ... and allowed investment bank arms (of some large commercial banks) to buy up huge amounts of the toxic CDOs and carrying them off-balance.

Bank's Hidden Junk Menaces $1 Trillion Purge
>http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=akv_p6LBNIdw&refer=home

from above:
So investors betting for quick solutions to the financial crisis could be disappointed. The tangled web that banks wove over the years will take a long time to undo.

At the end of 2008, for example, off-balance-sheet assets at just the four biggest U.S. banks -- Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- were about $5.2 trillion, according to their 2008 annual filings.


...snip ...

Regulated Commercial banks (depository institutions) were actually providing huge amounts of the funding for all this toxic lending ... but in a circuitous and mostly unregulated manner.

from last summer ...

Corporate Fraud and Misconduct Risks Driven by Pressure to do 'Whatever It Takes'; Fewer episodes reported by companies with ethics and compliance programs
http://www.informationweek.com/financialservices/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215801487

from above:
Of more than 5,000 U.S. workers polled this summer, 74 percent said they had personally observed misconduct within their organizations during the prior 12 months, unchanged from the level reported by KPMG survey respondents in 2005. Roughly half (46 percent) of respondents reported that what they observed "could cause a significant loss of public trust if discovered," a figure that rises to 60 percent among employees working in the banking and finance industry.

... snip ...

If the overall avg. is 46percent and the financial industry is 60 percent, then the non-financial avg may be as low as 30percent ... making the financial industry twice as bad as other industries.

In the wake of ENRON, sarbanes-oxley was passed ... among other things supposedly SEC responsible for fraud related to audits and financial filings of public companies. However, possibly as mentioned in the Madoff hearings (by person that had been trying for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff), SEC didn't appear to be doing a whole lot ... and the GAO started a database of public filings with problems (which actually increased by over 3times in period after Sarbanes-Oxley ... compared to the 90s).
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-06-1079sp

from above:
The database consists of two files: (1) a file that lists 1,390 restatement announcements that we identified as having been made because of financial reporting fraud and/or accounting errors between July 1, 2002, and September 30, 2005, and (2) a file that lists 396 restatement announcements that we identified as having been made because of financial reporting fraud and/or accounting errors between October 1, 2005, and June 30, 2006.

... snip ...

in part, executives have incentive to fiddle financial reports in order to boost their compensation/bonuses. reports may be subsequently refiled ... but additional compensation wasn't forfeited.

there was study last fall of 270-some companies that had redone their executive compensation plan because of problems they had with the executives (objective to eliminate motivation for things like fiddling financial reports, aka sarbanes-oxley didn't appear to have any affect)

In the Madoff congressional hearings ... the theme from the person that had been trying for a decade to get the SEC to do something about Madoff for a decade, was that crooks and fraud thrive where there is lack of transparency and visibility. They mentioned that new regulation and legislation is needed ... but much more important is changing the environment to be transparent and visible.

we had been asked to come in and consult with small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... they also had this technology called SSL they had invented that they wanted to use. the result is now frequently referred to as "electronic commerce". Somewhat as a result, in the mid-90s, we were asked to participate in the x9a10 financial standard working group, which had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments ... which resulted in the x9.59 financial standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

later in the 90s (possibly somewhat as a result of the earlier work), we were asked to come in to NSCC (since merged with DTC to be DTCC) to look at doing something similar for all trader operations. Part way thru that effort, it was suspended. A side-effect of the integrity work would have resulted in significantly more visibility and transparency ... which they said went counter to fundamental trader culture.

other recent posts referring to some of the above:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#73 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#80 Are reckless risks a natural fallout of "excessive" executive compensation ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#25 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#35 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#41 The subject is authoritarian tendencies in corporate management, and how they are related to political culture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#45 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#57 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#59 As bonuses...why breed greed, when others are in dire need?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#65 What can agencies such as the SEC do to insure us that something like Madoff's Ponzi scheme will never happen again?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#80 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#1 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#0 PNC Financial to pay CEO $3 million stock bonus
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#3 Congress Set to Approve Pay Cap of $500,000
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#47 Bernard Madoff Is Jailed After Pleading Guilty -- are there more "Madoff's" out there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#63 Do bonuses foster unethical conduct?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#75 Whistleblowing and reporting fraud
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#15 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#17 Why is everyone talking about AIG bonuses of millions and keeping their mouth shut on billions sent to foreign banks?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

How do you see ethics playing a role in your organizations current or past?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: How do you see ethics playing a role in your organizations current or past?
Date: Mar 27, 2009
Blog: Corporate Governance
I was always told that business ethics was an oxymoron ... but then there is this

Corporate Fraud and Misconduct Risks Driven by Pressure to do 'Whatever It Takes'; Fewer episodes reported by companies with ethics and compliance programs
http://www.informationweek.com/financialservices/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215801487

from above:
Of more than 5,000 U.S. workers polled this summer, 74 percent said they had personally observed misconduct within their organizations during the prior 12 months, unchanged from the level reported by KPMG survey respondents in 2005. Roughly half (46 percent) of respondents reported that what they observed "could cause a significant loss of public trust if discovered," a figure that rises to 60 percent among employees working in the banking and finance industry.

... snip ...

If the overall avg. is 46percent and the financial industry is 60 percent, then the non-financial avg may be as low as 30percent ... making the financial industry twice as bad as other industries.

In the wake of ENRON, sarbanes-oxley was passed ... among other things supposedly SEC responsible for fraud related to audits and financial filings of public companies. However, possibly as mentioned in the Madoff hearings (by person that had been trying for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff), SEC didn't appear to be doing a whole lot ... and the GAO started a database of public filings with problems (which actually increased by over 3times in period after Sarbanes-Oxley ... compared to the 90s).
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-06-1079sp

from above:
The database consists of two files: (1) a file that lists 1,390 restatement announcements that we identified as having been made because of financial reporting fraud and/or accounting errors between July 1, 2002, and September 30, 2005, and (2) a file that lists 396 restatement announcements that we identified as having been made because of financial reporting fraud and/or accounting errors between October 1, 2005, and June 30, 2006.

... snip ...

in part, executives have incentive to fiddle financial reports in order to boost their compensation/bonuses. reports may be subsequently refiled ... but additional compensation wasn't forfeited.

there was study last fall of 270-some companies that had redone their executive compensation plan because of problems they had with the executives (objective to eliminate motivation for things like fiddling financial reports, aka sarbanes-oxley didn't appear to have any affect)

other recent posts mentioning above references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#73 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#11 Amid Economic Turbulence, Mainframes Counter IT Cost-Cutting Trend
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#12 Amid Economic Turbulence, Mainframes Counter IT Cost-Cutting Trend
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#17 Fraud -- how can you stay one step ahead?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#25 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#36 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#48 The blame game is on : A blow to the Audit/Accounting Industry or a lesson learned ???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#52 What has the Global Financial Crisis taught the Nations, it's Governments and Decision Makers, and how should they apply that knowledge to manage risks differently in the future?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#53 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#54 In your opinion, which facts caused the global crise situation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#73 What can we learn from the meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#80 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#0 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#20 Decision Making or Instinctive Steering?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#29 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#0 PNC Financial to pay CEO $3 million stock bonus
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#3 Congress Set to Approve Pay Cap of $500,000
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#37 NEW SEC (Enforcement) MANUAL, A welcome addition
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#42 Bernard Madoff Is Jailed After Pleading Guilty -- are there more "Madoff's" out there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#61 Quiz: Evaluate your level of Spreadsheet risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#63 Do bonuses foster unethical conduct?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#75 Whistleblowing and reporting fraud
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#36 Architectural Diversity

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Cybercrime running into trillions, experts claim

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Cybercrime running into trillions, experts claim
Date: Mar 27, 2009
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
Cybercrime running into trillions, experts claim
http://www.cbronline.com/news/cybercrime_running_into_trillions_experts_claim_270309

note that there were some number of news articles in 2004 that mentioned cybercrime had exceeded drug crime

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left  behind
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:07:41 -0400
thvv <thvv64@gmail.com> writes:
The 360/67 had segmentation and paging, but they put the access control on the page's storage key rather than the segment, which meant that TSS and CP/67 could not do Multics-style sharing where a page could be read-write to one process and read-only to another.

(The legend is that IBM was leaked the Multics design requirements in 1964 .. but they didn't get the last memo in the series, which described segmentation and sharing.)

Multics segment-mapped executable files instead of page mapping, and did not relocate the code: each segment's addresses started at zero. Of course this meant all new compilers, and recompiling every application.

TSS had some neat features. It would be great to see it emulated.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#29 Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#32 Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#34 Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

i provided for both genarlized page mapping ... if sharing wasn't an issue ... but in the morph of the implementation from cp67->vm370 went to segment aligned if sharing was defined. for sharing ... I did have restriction that the pages for each shared segment was at contiguous records in the file system ... which required that I add to the filesystem implementation, support for contiguous allocation segment-worth of pages. CMS filesystem standard process was effectively independent (somewhat scatter) allocation for record. I then leveraged the contiguous allocation for generalized performance improvement for larger, multiple record files (whether or not sharing was required). misc. past posts mention my page/segment mapped implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

of course, having the ability for dynamic contiguous allocation (built into the filesystem) helped differentiate performance comparisons of the pagemapped implementation vis-a-vis the non pagemapped implementation.

note that 370 virtual memory did have virtual memory sharing where some processes could have r/w sharing and other processes would have r/o sharing.

the morph of cp67/cms to vm370/cms, the vm370/cms sharing implementation initially took advantage of the feature.

however, in the schedule slipping of virtual memory hardware retrofit to 370/165, it was one of the features dropped as part of gaining back part of the schedule. as a result, processors that had already implemented the full 370 virtual memory architecture, had to drop back to the 370/165 subset. the other problem was that vm370/cms sharing had to come up with a really ugly hack to at least provide r/o sharing.

past posts mentioning escalation meetings and/or other mention of having to drop back to 370 virtual memory subset in order to gain back part of the virtual memory announcement schedule.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#9 Hadware Support for Protection Bits: what does it really mean?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#23 Virtual memory implementation in S/370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#5 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#41 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#22 Virtual Virtualizers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#26 Mainframe Limericks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#61 Is the teaching of non-reentrant HLASM coding practices ever defensible?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#1 Is the teaching of non-reentrant HLASM coding practices ever
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#60 Why these original FORTRAN quirks?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#26 moving on
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#32 Running OS/390 on z9 BC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#14 more shared segment archeology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#16 more shared segment archeology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#43 z/VM usability
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#41 Virtual Storage implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#70 GETMAIN/FREEMAIN and virtual storage backing up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#62 CSA 'above the bar'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#20 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#34 What if the computers went back to the '70s too?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:15:28 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#35 Architectural Diversity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#36 Architectural Diversity

from cleaning OCR of early 30s Glass-Steagall (pecora, senate banking) hearings
BROKERS' LOANS AND INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION

For the purpose of making it perfectly clear that the present industrial depression was due to the inflation of credit on brokers' loans, as obtained from the Bureau of Research of the Federal Reserve Board, the figures show that the inflation of credit for speculative purposes on stock exchanges were responsible directly for a rise in the average of quotations of the stocks from sixty in 1922 to 225 in 1929 to 35 in 1932 and that the change in the value of such Stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange went through the same identical changes in almost identical percentages.


... snip ...

there is a correspondence between the speculation in the real-estate market leveraging (ARM) loans from non-depository institutions and the speculation in the '20s stock market using brokers' loans.

a lot of the loan funding was actually coming from (regulated) commercial banks (with just four large regulated banks holding $5.2T in these toxic, unregulated, securitized loans) ... but via circuitous route enabled by various congressional legislation over the past decade (coupled with lax enforcement of remaining regulation) ... which was in turn, significantly motivated by the $5B in contributions by financial industry during the period.

misc. recent posts mentioning the brokers' loan (being at basis for the crash of '29):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#77 Who first mentioned Credit Crunch?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#8 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

"A foolish consistency" or "3390 cyl/track architecture"

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: "A foolish consistency" or "3390 cyl/track architecture"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:44:47 -0400
m42tom-ibmmain@YAHOO.COM (Tom Marchant) writes:
Indeed, one could build a 3390 with only one recording surface and an arm that has 15 heads.

IAC, the emulation of such a large number of tracks per cylinder would probably not be too difficult. The real problem with that kind of architecture would be the software changes that would be needed.


from long ago and far away ... 16 data tracks & 1 servo track, head with 16 r/w data interfaces with 2 service track interfaces:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#email871230

in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#30 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ?

and related email in the same post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#email871122

above eamil discusses that initial 3380 intertrack gap was 20 track widths ... 3380Es (double density) cut the inter-track gap to 10 track-widths (double the number of tracks per surface, double the number of "cylinders").

the following post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#31 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ?

discusses 3330s had 20 surfaces (20 heads per "cylinder") ... 19 "data" surfaces & 20th surface for encoding positional information.

the post after that
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#32 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ?

discusses that the 2301 "drum" was fixed-head device ... with head per track. actually there were two devices ... the 2303 "drum" that read/wrote single head at a time ... and the 2303 "drum" that read/wrote four heads in parallel (with four times the data transfer rate of 2303).

the 2305 was a fixed head "disk" (platters with head per track on multiple platters ... as opposed to the 2303/2301 "drums").

above also shows my (incomplete) table of code names for different products.

misc. past posts about getting to play disk engineer in bldg 14 (disk engineering) and bldg 15 (disk product test)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:59:57 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
My wife has laid her hands on a EEE 900. It fits in the purse. It plays mp3 files for 5 hours, can play 3 decent dvds from a usb stick, has good wifi and network, and runs all the stuff she needs privately.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#30 Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones

my wife has somewhat been lusting after the sony netbook ... she claims that it is the first keyboard that she has tried ... that actually "fits" her hands. she also prefers that it doesn't have touchpad ... since w/o touchpad the smaller size/distance also better fits the size of her hands
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338331,00.asp

"about the length of the eeePC, but only half its depth"

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:59:11 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
My idea, which I have yet to pass along to my congresscritter, is a "stockholders' bill of rights". Stockholders should have to vote on compensation for C-level execs. As it is now they appoint each other to boards and award each other money in secret, with basically no oversight. We don't need government regulation, just let the owners of a company have some say in how much their employees get paid.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#35 Architectural Diversity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#36 Architectural Diversity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#40 Architectural Diversity

in theory "owners" already have that right ... some of that has been raised in fed. gov (and ultimately the american taxpayer) now being the owner of AIG. one question is who is congress working for ... the american taxpayer or the financial industry (that made $5B in contributions).

related (a.f.c.) post from last summer (mentioning testimony about barring various parties from lobbying congress):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#71

and (a.f.c.) post from last sept.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#49 taxes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#50 taxes

about annual round-table meeting of economists saying that flat-rate tax would eliminate a lot of motivation for lobbying and go a long way to reducing the pervasive atmosphere of corruption in washington.

there was recent news item about some of the financial companies accepting gov. bail-out, considering damping down their contribution & lobbying activities for a few months.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 09:48:25 -0400
kenney writes:
RAID systems are normally independent of the OS and consist of more than one disc by definition. In most cases a hardware RAID controller is used but even under software control the assembly appears as one disc to the OS. Unfortunately RAID only provides protection against disc failure not accidental formatting. I don't remember when RAID systems were introduced.

patented awarded in '78 (one of the histories use to mention IBM funding Berkeley for their work in late 80s):
http://wapedia.mobi/en/RAID?t=12.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

... i actually worked with person awarded patent ... when i got to play disk engineer in bldgs 14&15. misc. past posts mentioning getting to play disk engineer in bldgs 14&15
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

first used in as/400 (possibly s/38?) ... problem was that filesystem treated all the disks as one great big pool ... and did scatter allocate. common failure mode of the period was single disk ... but because of the nature of the filesystem ... they used backup of everything and restore of everything. i have vague recollection that before raid ... recovery (of single disk failure) might even run to a day ... since full restore of all disks was required.

for other drift ... i had used the page mapped mechanism (that i added to cp67 and then ported to vm370 for cms paged mapped filesystem) to scaffold a new implementation of the vm370 "spool filesystem" ... running in virtual address space and written in vs/pascal. One of the issues was that because spool filesystem treated all available disks as single pool and did scatter allocate ... single disk failure had catastrophic failure mode. besides significantly improving thruput, an objective was to make recovery significantly more robust (and faster) ... and also make it significantly more resistant to single disk failures.

recent posts mentioning vs/pascal
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#11 Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#12 Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?

misc. past posts mentioning page mapped work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

misc. past posts mentioning redoing vm370 "spool filesystem" in vs/pascal running in virtual address space:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#43 Migrating pages from a paging device (was Re: removal of paging device)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#7 More newbie stop the war here!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#44 PDP-10 Archive migration plan
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#26 Microkernels are not "all or nothing". Re: Multics Concepts For
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#63 SPXTAPE status from REXX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#19 HERCULES
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#3 History of C
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#38 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#28 MVCIN instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#35 Charging Time
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#21 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#45 The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007q.html#26 Does software life begin at 40? IBM updates IMS database
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#22 Was CMS multi-tasking?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:40:53 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
How do we fare otherwise in the mainframe comparison? Number of channels?

The biggest, meanest PC PCI buildout I have seen is from the biggest IBM xServer, where there are 16 processors, and 8 customer usable PCI busses. With an 8-sata controller in each, we can have 64 SATA links. SATA should beat any IBM channel, any day. You can attach a homongous SAN raid to each of them; 100T should be easy for each of these. Or, you could have a Tehuti 2-port 10G ethernet card there.

How many channels were actually possible on the various 3[67]0 models and follow-ons? I have a distinct memory that double-digit channel installations was a pretty rare occurrance.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#48 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#54 mainframe performance

larger 360s had some number of 6+1 channel (6 selector + 1 multiplexor) configurations

some number of larger 168-3s had 12 selector

158 had 7 channels standard ... because they were "integrated" ... both the channel microcode and 370 microcode ran on the same engine.

303x came with channel director ... basically the 158 engine configured w/o 370 microcode. a "uniprocessor" 3031 was two 158 engines ... a channel director (integrated channel microcode, no 370 microcode) and a 3031 (no channel microcode, 370 microcode).

there were quite a few 3033s with three channel directors (15 selector channels & 1 multiplexor configurations). some large 168 & 3033 shops had configurations with 300 disk drives.

one of the enhancements with 3mbyte channel introduce with 3880/3380 was being able to transfer multiple bytes per channel interface handshake. this relaxed channel latency (besides increasing datarate) ... and increased maximum channel (daisy-chain) length from 200ft to 400ft. the issue was that the size of the disk boxes and the number of boxes larger customers were installing was pushing the 200ft maximum length. put the processor in the middle of a room, the size of football field (or larger) and spread the disks out in all directions. some customers tried multi-floor configurations to increase the number of boxes that could be configured in 200ft radius sphere (rather than just 200ft raidus circle).

a 2nd problem in time-frame of large 168 configuration was controller command processor overhead (controller would obtain channel and keep the channel busy during command processing overhead ... in addition to data transfer). typical configuration would have large number of disk controllers and large number of 3274 (3270 terminal controllers) ... equally spread across all 15 selector channels. turns out that 3274 controller command processing had especially high channel busy overhead (which could interfer with disk thruput connected on same shared channel). i've mentioned before doing HYPERchannel support for Santa Tersa lab ... that allowed relocating 300 people from IMS group to remote location ... but providing them with local 3270 terminal access (they had tested standard product remote 3270 and found it horribly unacceptable). It turns out that HYPERchannel A22x boxes (that replaced local 3274 controllers on local channels) had much lower command processing channel overhead ... and resulted in overall system thruput increasing 10-15% (drastically reducing channel busy overhead from local 3274s interferring with disk thruput). lots of past posts mentioning HSDT project &/or HYPERchannel (including doing support to remote IMS group)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

recent post mentioning 3274 controller:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#19 Architectural Diversity

as in 4341 cluster reference ... six 4341s ... was aggregate mip rate about 50% more than 3033 (and cheaper) ... 36 aggregate selector channels (compared to 15 for 3033) ... and up to 96 mbytes aggregate memory (compared to 16mbyte initially for 3033).

recent post mentioning getting into trouble about claiming (starting in mid-late 70s) relative system disk thruput had declined by an order of magnitude over a period of over a decade (and systems were starting to leverage electornic/real storage to compensate for disk thruput limitations ... effectively caching in one way or another).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#8 Is SUN going to become x86'ed ??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#48 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

dyadic (two processor) 3081 configurations came standard with 24 channels.

3090s shipped with 96 channels. original 3090 design had fewer channels and one less TCM (six instead of seven?). to handle 3mbyte transfer, the 3880 disk controller was changed to using (vertical m'code) jib-prime microprocessor for command processing and special hardware datapath for data transfer (compared to earlier 3830 controller that used same horizontal/faster microprocessor for everything). The result was that the 3880 had significantly higher channel busy (for command processing) overhear. when 3090 realized the significance, they had to increase the standard channel configuration ... which caused the number of TCMs to go up, which increased the manufacturing costs (by significant amount). There were some semi-facetious comments about charging the disk division for the additional 3090 manufacturing costs.

some minor reference ... in the wake of death of FS project
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

there was mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipelines. part of that was Q&D conversion of 168 wiring diagram into slightly faster chips for the 3033 (3031 was slightly reconfigured 158 & 3032 was slightly reconfigured 168) ... by the 168 group. The 158 group started off on the 3081. when the 168 group finished 3033 ... they then started on 3090 ... the 3081 was still a few years away (this was back when there was claim that auto industry took 7-8 yrs to bring out new model ... and it was taking approx. same elapsed time for new mainframe model). as a result, the 3090 design was well along when the 3880 controller channel busy overhead issue came up.

because they were letting me play disk engineer over in bldgs. 14 & 15 (engineering and product test) ... and I also provided a highly custom operating system for their development & test environment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

I was embroiled in the middle of the initial diagnoses of the significance of the increase in 3880 controller channel busy overhead. misc. past posts about monday morning getting calls asking what I had done to their system (30% or better degradation in system thruput) over the weekend (when no other changes had been made). It turns out they had replaced a 3830 controller (controlling 16 3330 drives) with a 3880 controller.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#28 checking some myths.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#2 Microcode? (& index searching)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#40 inter-block gaps on DASD tracks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#45 hung/zombie users ... long boring, wandering story
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#15 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#61 IBM 3614 and 3624 ATM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#6 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#0 IBM 3380 and 3880 maintenance docs needed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#44 When Does Folklore Begin???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#6 21st Century ISA goals?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#52 Throwaway cores
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#75 Disk drive improvements

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

When did "client server" become part of the language?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When did "client server" become part of the language?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:43:16 -0400
adykes@panix.com (Al Dykes) writes:
What is the oldest reference to C/S architecture that anyone can come up with?

not specifically about C/S ... but I've periodically noted that SAA in late 80s/early 90s ... could be construed to stave off C/S ... perserving the originally terminal emulation paradigm. A big uptake in PCs ... where business customers being able to convert their already justified purchases of thousands (in some case tens of thousands) of 3270 orders to IBM/PCs ... basically same cost & nearly same footprint ... provide both 3270 terminal emulation and some amount of local personal computing. As a result, a significant install base related to terminal emulation grew up.

As PCs (and workstations) propagated ... they started to take-over the mid-range computing market place in the mid-80s ... and the technology provided much larger range of capability at the desk. This growing proliferation, both taking over the mid-range market place and greater capability at the desk ... accelerated the change from terminal emulation paradigm to the client/server paradigm. recent posts mentioning the move of mid-range to workstations/PCs in the mid-80s:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#48 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#54 mainframe performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#5 registers vs cache
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#18 Microminiaturized Modules

As mentioned, SAA, was somewhat positioned to stave off that migration (and protect/preserve the significant terminal emulation install base).

One of the motivations for token/ring was that "star-wired" runs of 3270 terminal cables (each terminal having point-to-point from the datacenter out to each terminal) was starting to result in exceeding some bldgs' lbs/sq-ft loading limits. Part of SAA push was to reconfigure/replace the point-to-point 3270 cables with LAN token/ring and run 300 PCs per token/ring segment. The resulting small avg. bandwidth per PC helped preserve the terminal emulation paradigm.

We got into some amount of trouble with the SAA forces in this period for coming up with 3-tier architecture as ... expansion of C/S ... out pitching to customer executives that 3-tier middle layer (later morphing into middleware) could provide significant advantages over terminal emulation (and straight 2-tier) ... with significant more bandwidth per desktop and more function ... and could actually be configured for same or even lower cost.

misc. past post mentioning coming up with 3-tier, middle layer and having problems with the SAA forces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

one of the related scenarios was internal, annual, world-wide communication conference held in the late 80s ... where somebody from the disk division had a talk supposedly about 3174 controller performance ... but actually started the talk by saying the head of the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division.

the presentation was that in the attempt to protect the terminal emulation install base, the communication group was constantly objecting (throwing up road blocks) to anything that would significantly increase the bandwidth per PC into the mainframe/datacenter. Significant restriction on the available bandwidth (and function provided by terminal emulation paradigm) was accelerating the migration of applications out of the datacenter ... increasing desktop disk sales and (non-datacenter) server disk sales (preventing datacenter & mainframes from being a major player in the emerging client/server paradigm).

my wife had run into a prior form of the battle with the communication group when she was con'ed into going to POK (high-end mainframe) to be responsible for loosely-coupled architecture. one of the things she did while there was the Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

which, except for IMS hot-standby didn't see a lot of uptake until sysplex. part of the problem was nearly constant war with the communication group over using SNA facilities for loosely-coupled (aka cluster in non-mainframe terminology) operation. Temporary truce was that she could use non-SNA facilities within the boundaries of the datacenter ... but anything that crossed the datacenter walls had to be SNA.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

When did "client server" become part of the language?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When did "client server" become part of the language?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:45:19 -0400
adykes@panix.com (Al Dykes) writes:
The term first and then, if possible, some implementation that looks like C/S as a programmer would use the term today.

You've got to convivce me that a 7090 running batch with 1401s for unit record operations is client server. Maybe you have something else in mind.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#46 When did "client server" become part of the language?

7090/1401 & various other "loosely-coupled" ... were more akin to what my wife did a stint having responsibility for the architecture:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

with the proliferation of 43xx boxes (and other mid-range boxes) starting in the late 70s ... as "departmental" (sometimes "branch") computing ... there was start of protocol where these deparmental/branch processors were acting as "clients" of the datacenter mainframes. at the time it was more commonly referred to as distributed dataprocessing (lots of mid-range boxes in lots of distributed locations ... which real "dumb" 3270 terminals connected to ... and in turn were connected to more centralized datacenter mainframes).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

When did "client server" become part of the language?

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When did "client server" become part of the language?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:06:12 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
with the proliferation of 43xx boxes (and other mid-range boxes) starting in the late 70s ... as "departmental" (sometimes "branch") computing ... there was start of protocol where these deparmental/branch processors were acting as "clients" of the datacenter mainframes. at the time it was more commonly referred to as distributed dataprocessing (lots of mid-range boxes in lots of distributed locations ... which real "dumb" 3270 terminals connected to ... and in turn were connected to more centralized datacenter mainframes).

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#45 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#47 When did "client server" become part of the language?

one might claim that after having done a lot of work on the "distributed dataprocessing" paradigm ... and then also doing a lot of work on more traditional server/client paradigm ... then it was a relatively simple, natural step to 3-tier paradigm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:18:33 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
3090s shipped with 96 channels. original 3090 design had fewer channels and one less TCM (six instead of seven?). to handle 3mbyte transfer, the 3880 disk controller was changed to using (vertical m'code) jib-prime microprocessor for command processing and special hardware datapath for data transfer (compared to earlier 3830 controller that used same horizontal/faster microprocessor for everything). The result was that the 3880 had significantly higher channel busy (for command processing) overhear. when 3090 realized the significance, they had to increase the standard channel configuration ... which caused the number of TCMs to go up, which increased the manufacturing costs (by significant amount). There were some semi-facetious comments about charging the disk division for the additional 3090 manufacturing costs.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#45 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

one of the things that finally got ESCON (fiber optic) announced & shipped was the problem trying to connect 96 bus&tab cables into processor. Pair of ESCON fibers were even more compact than 3270 coax cables. a couple recent posts mentioning ESCON
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#47 Using a PC as DASD
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#49 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

and recent post mentioning one of the motivations for token/ring lan was that in some bldgs. the weight of 3270 coax cables were starting to exceed bldg lbs/sq-ft loading limits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#46 When did "client server" become part of the language?

disclaimer: my wife is co-inventor on one of the first token passing lan patents.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:17:59 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#45 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#49 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

3090 web page:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3090.html

"32 channels" on 3090-200 & "64 channels" on 3090-400 ... so 96 channels for 3090-600

above also mentions that two 3370 (FBA) drives were required for "3092" processor controllers.

the processor controller started out to be a 4331 running a highly modified version of vm370 release 6. this was upgraded to (before first customer ship) to be a pair of 4361s (for redundant/backup).

a couple recent posts mentioning 3090 service processor being vm370/cms
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#22 Evil weather
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#77 Z11 - Water cooling?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:32:20 -0400
a for something a little different ... wiki page with "list of ibm products"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_products

above references some of the non-mainframe stuff ... like the ATM cash machines (business sold off to Diebold).

but 3624 & 3614 ATM cash machines were done at los gatos lab in the 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3624

whoever edited above entry even included a reference to one of my a.f.c. posts

for even more los gatos folklore ... magstripe technology invented at ibm and managed at los gatos lab until 1975
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe

and some recent posts in a (linkedin) financial fraud group:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#6 ATMs At Risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#16 ATMs At Risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#21 ATMs At Risk

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

history of comments and source code annotations

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: history of comments and source code annotations
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:12:32 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
Not as descriptive as you'd think. I've looked at a lot of code over the years, and current "good" C code is much less readable than, say, JES. I've picked up a lot of programs with no description of what it does, who calls it, etc. Even a two-liner at the start of the program would give me an idea of whether or not I might want to look at this program, but is usually missing.

my wife did a stint in the g'burg JES group before getting con'ed into going to POK to be in charge of loosely-coupled architecture. Group sort of started with HASP for JES2 ... but also picked up ASP for JES3. One of her first tasks was "reading" the ASP code to generate "type-1" (JES3) documentation. Later she did spec for combined/merged JES2/JES3 product ... which never happened ... even tho the two products were in the same group ... there was still a lot of politics interferring with doing a single converged product. situation continues to this day

wiki jes 2/3 page (mentions asp/jes3 evolving from 7094/7044 direct coupled system):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Entry_Subsystem_3

wiki hasp page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Automated_Spooling_Program

misc. past posts mentioning HASP and/or HASP networking:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#hasp

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
Date: Mar 30, 2009
Blog: Financial Regulation
linkedin question/answer
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/finance-accounting/financial-regulation/FIN_FRG/448607-88448

about:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/Recommendations.pdf

A repeated theme in the Madoff hearing by the person trying for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff, was that while new legislation and regulation was required, it was much more important to have transparency and visibility; crooks are inventive and will always be ahead of regulation.

however ...

The Quiet Coup
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

from above:
But there's a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests -- financiers, in the case of the U.S. -- played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

... snip ...

The DNA of Corruption
http://www.d-n-i.net/dni/2009/03/29/the-dna-of-corruption/

from above:
While the scale of venality of Wall Street dwarfs that of the Pentagon's, I submit that many of the central qualities shaping America's Defense Meltdown (an important new book with this title, also written by insiders, can be found here) can be found in Simon Johnson's exegesis of America's even more profound Financial Meltdown.

... snip ...

... and related to above ...

Mark-to-Market Lobby Buoys Bank Profits 20% as FASB May Say Yes
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=awSxPMGzDW38&refer=home

from above:
Officials at Norwalk, Connecticut-based FASB were under "tremendous pressure" and "more or less eviscerated mark-to-market accounting," said Robert Willens, a former managing director at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. who runs his own tax and accounting advisery firm in New York. "I'd say there was a pretty close cause and effect."

... snip ...

Now-needy FDIC collected little in premiums
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/03/11/now_needy_fdic_collected_little_in_premiums/

from above:
The federal agency that insures bank deposits, which is asking for emergency powers to borrow up to $500 billion to take over failed banks, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.

... snip ...

with respect to taxes, there was roundtable of "leading expert" economists last summer about current economic mess. their solution was "flat rate" tax. the justification was:
1) eliminates possibly majority of current graft & corruption in washington that is related to current tax code structure, lobbying and special interests

2) picks up 3-5% productivity in GNP. current 65,000 page taxcode is reduced to 600 pages ... that frees up huge amount of people-hrs in lost productivity involved in dealing directly with the taxcode as well as lost productivity because of non-optimal business decisions.


their bottom line was that it probably would only be temporary before the special interests reestablish the current pervasive atmosphere of graft & corruption.

a semi-humorous comment was that a special interest that has lobbied against such a change has been Ireland ... supposedly because some number of US operations have been motivated to move to Ireland because of their much simpler business environment.

with respect to feedback processes ... I had done a lot with dynamic adaptive (feedback) control algorithms as an undergraduate in the 60s ... which was used in some products shipped in the 70s & 80s. In the early 80s, I had a chance to meet John Boyd and sponsor his briefings. I found quite a bit of affinity to John's OODA-loop concept (observe, orient, decide, act) that is now starting to be taught in some MBA programs.

misc. past posts & references to John Boyd (&/or OODA-loop)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

last fall, congressional hearings into rating agencies and toxic CDOs, it was stated that in the early 70s, the rating agencies business process became "mis-aligned" when they changed from the buyers paying for the ratings to the issuers/sellers paying for the ratings (and creating opportunity for conflict of interest). several times in the hearings it was stated that both the rating agencies and the issuer/sellers knew that the toxic CDOs weren't worth the triple-A ratings but the rating agencies were being paid for the triple-A ratings.

then in late january, there was some news items that the gov. was using IDC to help evaluate the banking industry toxic assets (largely made up of these triple-A rated toxic CDOs).

Bank's Hidden Junk Menaces $1 Trillion Purge
>http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=akv_p6LBNIdw&refer=home

from above:
So investors betting for quick solutions to the financial crisis could be disappointed. The tangled web that banks wove over the years will take a long time to undo.

At the end of 2008, for example, off-balance-sheet assets at just the four biggest U.S. banks -- Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- were about $5.2 trillion, according to their 2008 annual filings.


... snip ...

about the time the rating agencies' business process became mis-aligned in the early 70s, IDC bought the "pricing services" division from one of the rating agencies. disclaimer: i interviewed with IDC in the late 60s ... but didn't join them.

in any case, there were numerous comments that regulation is significantly simpler when the business processes are "aligned" (i.e. people incented to do the right thing) ... conversely, regulation becames significantly more difficult when the business processes are "mis-aligned" (people are incented to do the wrong thing).

the related comments from the Madoff hearings (again by the person that had tried for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff) was that crooks and fraud thrive where there is lack of transparency and visibility (transparency and visibility also mitigates the amount of regulation that is required).

we had been called in to consult with a small client/server company that wanted to do payments on their server; they also had invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use; the result is now frequently referred to as "electronic commerce". Somewhat as result, in the mid-90s we were asked to participat in the x9a10 financial standard working group which had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments. The result of that was the x9.59 financial transaction standard ...some refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

Possibly because of the x9.59 work, we were asked in to NSCC (since merged with DTC to become DTCC) to look at adding similar integrity to all trader operations. Relatively quickly the effort was suspended because a side-effect of the work would have significantly improved transparency and visibility which supposedly runs counter to fundamental trader culture.

misc. recent posts mentioning NSCC/DTCC:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#35 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#65 What can agencies such as the SEC do to insure us that something like Madoff's Ponzi scheme will never happen again?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#80 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#1 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#47 Bernard Madoff Is Jailed After Pleading Guilty -- are there more "Madoff's" out there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#15 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#36 Architectural Diversity

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:26:31 -0400
Malcolm Beattie <mbeattie@clueful.co.uk> writes:
This comfortably beats System x for maximum channels and I/O capability.

Few customers approach 1024 channels but the prior limit of 256 channels per box was definitely a constraint, especially when consolidating multiple footprints onto newer boxes.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#45 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#49 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#50 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

3090 ran into a different kind of channel limit when trying to connect HiPPI (basically standards version of Cray channel). The standard I/O interface wouldn't handle the data rate (100mbytes/sec) ... recent reference in this discussion:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#29 Thanks for the SEL32 Reminder, Al!

so HiPPI attachement was cut into the side of the "expanded storage" bus.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:14:43 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
of course, having the ability for dynamic contiguous allocation (built into the filesystem) helped differentiate performance comparisons of the pagemapped implementation vis-a-vis the non pagemapped implementation.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#39 Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

maybe a tiny bit this comparison about ext3->ext4:
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7271

from above:
Ext4 allows the blocks for a particular file to be stored as an extent. An extent is just a contiguous set of blocks. So the file system only has to store two bits of information, the starting block, and how many contiguous blocks are in the extent. Extents also help prevent file fragmentation improving performance because you are storing the data in contiguous blocks. Extents also help with file deletion because you have much less metadata information to change.

and ...
Ext3 allocates blocks for a file one at a time (typically using 4KB blocks). For very large files, the associated function that does the allocation will have to be called thousands of times. ext4 uses "multi-block allocation" which allows multiple blocks (hence the name) to be allocated during one function call. This can greatly improve the performance of ext4 relative to ext3, particularly for large files.

... snip ...

misc. past posts mentioning page-mapped
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

When did "client server" become part of the language?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When did "client server" become part of the language?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:40:57 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
If you look at the RFC's in the 700-900 range you will find lots of references to peer-to-peer networking, and the "client server" words are never uttered. This may be political, as the "c-s" words. There was a real, strongly politicised debate then. See the polemics from Michael Padlipsky, RFC874 and RFC875, they are well worth reading, or re-reading, in these days of NAT and lacking network transparency. (They were published in septemner 1982, and are clearly polemics in an ongoing debate, so the opposing view must have been clearly established at that time, even if the naming was not set yet.)

He, and others, use words other than C/S to refer to the phenomenon, like "host-front end", "host-terminal"; and there is a constant set of argumentation against the concepts, where peer to peer networking with end to end addressing and transparency is promoted. This was (and is) the ideological underpinning of the Internet. Lose it, and we lose the Internet.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#46 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#47 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#48 When did "client server" become part of the language?

summaries for rfc 600-900 (peroid 12/14/1973-01/06/1984)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcidx2.htm

from my rfc index
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

summaries normally are placed in lower frame. clicking on the ".txt=" field, retrieves the actual rfc.

in the earlier part of the period, when the original SNA specification was being worked on ... my wife was co-author of AWP39, peer-to-peer networking architecture ... which the SNA group appeared possibly to view as competition. The issue was that SNA was primarily a specification for a (mainframe) master control of large number of dumb terminals; wasn't actualy about networking at all (as normally used today) ... other than referring to communication infrastructure involving large numbers of dumb terminals. However, since "SNA" had co-opt the word "network", it was then necessary to use the term "peer-to-peer" to differentiate "real" networking from master/slave communication involving large number of dumb terminals (some cases large tens of thousands in single customer configuration).

This may have contributed to some amount of the later discord that she had with the SNA/communication group ... when she had been con'ed into going to POK to be in charge of looseley-coupled architecture ... and did Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

recent reference in part of this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#46 When did "client server" become part of the language?

slightly related ... recent reference to her doing stint reporting to the person responsible for the "interconnect" part of Future System architecture (which was between processors as opposed to communication involved with large numbers of dumb terminals):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#66 Future System

for little topic drift ... AWP164 ... was "architecture white paper" for APPN. For a period, I reported to the same executive as the person responsible for AWP164 ... and would periodically rib the AWP164 about not wasting his time attempting to add (real) networking to SNA ... because they would never appreciate it (and come work on real networking). As it turned out, when APPN was about to be announced, the SNA group "non-concurred" ... and the matter had to be escalated. After, several weeks it was eventually resolved and the APPN product announcement letter was carefully rewritten to avoid saying that APPN was in anyway related to SNA.

misc. past posts mentioning AWP39:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#38 RS/6000 in Sysplex Environment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#31 IBM 3705 and UC.5
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#8 EBCDIC to 6-bit and back
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#15 DUMP Datasets and SMS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#17 DUMP Datasets and SMS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#27 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#23 Channel Distances
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#52 Need Help defining an AS400 with an IP address to the mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#31 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#9 Arpa address
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#21 Sending CONSOLE/SYSLOG To Off-Mainframe Server
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#4 Google Architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#45 Mainframe Linux Mythbusting (Was: Using Java in batch on z/OS?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#62 Greatest Software, System R
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#4 Was FORTRAN buggy?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#9 Was FORTRAN buggy?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#36 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#28 Assembler question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#55 What's a mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#9 Mainframe vs. "Server" (Was Just another example of mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#48 6400 impact printer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#55 Is computer history taugh now?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#35 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#39 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#62 Friday musings on the future of 3270 applications
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#72 FICON tape drive?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#12 JES2 or JES3, Which one is older?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#23 Newsweek article--baby boomers and computers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007q.html#46 Are there tasks that don't play by WLM's rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#10 IBM System/3 & 3277-1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#53 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#71 Interesting ibm about the myths of the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#73 Convergent Technologies vs Sun
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#97 We're losing the battle

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:12:25 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
Which again confirms that a normal server pc for $1500 would have more I/O channels than any mainframe prior to the 3033, and a medium end machine at $2500 could match the 3033 with two large SATA cards.

I tend to recommend the xSeries disk rack/raids to larger installations for *n*x stuff, and they have up to 37 disks in a raid-6 configuration in 14U. They can, and do, work off a single SATA channel; which can be supplied 8 to a card. having 1000-disk farms is therefore fully possible in the larger xSeries machines. (still a "peecee").

Dell or HP does not go as far.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#19 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#48 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#49 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#50 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#70 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#45 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#49 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#50 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#51 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#54 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

I think we got into trouble in this area, doing HA/CMP cluster scale-up referenced in this old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

... and lots of old ha/cmp posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

this old post mentions cluster scale-up meeting in Jan92
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

and that shortly after ... the project was transferred (and shortly later announced as a numerical intensive solution only) and we were told we weren't suppose to work on anything with more than four processors.

At the time, mainframe had (fiber-optic) ESCON channel (200mbits, half-duplex) ... and referenced earlier ... it took quite a bit of work to get a HiPPI channel interface carved into 3090.

Prior to cluster scale-up ... one of the Austin engineers had taken the ESCON architecture (which had been kicking around POK since the late 70s) and modified it to be slightly faster, use much less expensive drivers and be full-duplex. He then wanted to move on and do a 800mbit version ... and after some number of arguments, we convinced him to get involved with FCS instead (he became the secretary of the committee and responsible for the standards document). initial "medusa" (cluster-in-a-rack) was based on this interconnect work.

Also, as mentioned, we wanted to evolve Harrier (which was 80mbit serial copper) so that it would interoperate with the same interconnect.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

When did "client server" become part of the language?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When did "client server" become part of the language?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:20:37 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
Indeed. By mid 1982 it was clear that peer to peer networking has won out, at least in the Internet world. ISO and CCITT kept fighting it until they were steamrollered sometime in 1996.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#46 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#47 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#48 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#56 When did "client server" become part of the language?

... as a networking layer architecture ... however, the advent of PCs with LANs renewed things for small departmental stuff. For lots of the 80s, there was small "workgroup" types of organization that didn't even have internet connectivity ... various of the NETBIOS & NETBUI stuff.

even after adapting to internetworking addressing ... there were still large amounts of traffic that was asymmetrical between servers and clients.

the earlier server operations was possibly in part because of the relatively higher cost & availability of disk space ... so server with hard disk providing services to clients that still had little or no of their own hard disk space (LANs were something of a "communication" paradigm shift, in OSI ... LAN MAC physical interface effectively extends part-way into "networking", level-3).

the san jose disk division in 81/82 time-frame had the DataHub project which was developing software to deploy "server" on personal computer local area networks. i've mentioned before that a lot of the software was being written under a work-for-hire contract by a group in Provo Utah (one of the san jose people were commuting to Provo nearly every week). at some point, the corporation decided to terminate the project ... and allowed the group in Provo to retain rights to everything they had done. Not long later, a client/server company (name starting with the letter "N") appeared in Provo. misc. past posts mentioning DataHub:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#40 No more innovation? Get serious
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#19 When will IBM buy Sun?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#79 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#33 Over-the-shoulder effect
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#26 MP cost effectiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#13 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#16 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#23 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#9 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#36 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#39 Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#31 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#17 Is computer history taught now?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#49 How difficult would it be for a SYSPROG ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#21 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#86 The Unexpected Fact about the First Computer Programmer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#35 Newsweek article--baby boomers and computers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#53 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#8 MAINFRAME Training with IBM Certification and JOB GUARANTEE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#36 Making tea
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#68 New machine code

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Tesco to open 30 "bank branches" this year

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Tesco to open 30 "bank branches" this year
Date: Mar 31, 2009
Blog: Payment Systems Network
Tesco to open 30 "bank branches" this year
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19842

from above:
UK supermarket chain Tesco plans to open 30 bank branches in its stores by the end of 2009 as it looks to cash in on consumer mistrust of traditional banks and extend its presence in financial services.

... snip ...

related to banking ...

The Quiet Coup
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

from above:
But there's a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests -- financiers, in the case of the U.S. -- played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

... snip ...

i.e. there are some bank "store-fronts" in retail & grocery stores in the US ... but they are standard "banks" ... addressing a convenience issue ... not attempting to address any "trust" issue there might be with commercial banks.

in the 90s there were some number of commercial entities making sounds about getting into financial services.

part of the statements on the floor of congress supporting the bank modernization act was that its purpose was to allow institutions that are already banks to remain banks and prevent entities that weren't already banks, from becoming a bank (with specific mention of m'soft and walmart). note that the legislation is also implicated in the current financial crisis with its repeal of Glass-Steagall.

Later there was announcement that walmart was buying a bank charter and some amount of press regarding lobbying to prevent that from happening. walmart was responding that it was purely going to be used to eliminate the stiff acquiring interchange fees (by becoming their own acquirer, there were some reference to walmart accounting for something between 1/4th and 1/3rd of all payment transactions at US retail stores) ... and the charter would not be used for issuing or consumer banking.

Related to the "quiet coup" article ... there have been statements that in the congressional session that passed bank modernization, the financial industry made $250m in contributions and in the recent session that passed TARP, they made $2B in contributions (aggregate of $5B in contributions made during the period from the financial industry).

related linkedin question/answer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:51:42 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
I think we got into trouble in this area, doing HA/CMP cluster scale-up referenced in this old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

... and lots of old ha/cmp posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

this old post mentions cluster scale-up meeting in Jan92
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

and that shortly after ... the project was transferred (and shortly later announced as a numerical intensive solution only) and we were told we weren't suppose to work on anything with more than four processors.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#57 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

part of the i/o problem in this era was battling with the boca organization.

in the days of the pc/rt, there was 16-bit isa bus and austin could do their own adapters. however, roll forward to rs/6000 with 32-bit microchannel, and austin was under heavy pressure by boca to "help their brethren" and use boca (ps2) adapters.

an example was their microchannel 16mbit t/r adapter ... well designed for terminal emulation ... hundreds of PCs all sharing the same 16mbits ... but horrible for any kind of high thruput and/or asymmmetric client/server operation. austin had earlier done their own pc/rt 4mbit t/r adapter ... and that adapter had higher (per adapter thruput) than the boca microchannel 16mbit t/r adapter ... recent post referencing terminal emulation paradigm and design point with large numbers all sharing same bandwidth:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#46 When did "client server" become part of the language?

the situation was similar with the boca PS2 graphics adapters, their enet adapters, and their scsi disk adapters. At one point I started making the off-hand comment that if RS/6000 was going to have to use all the same adapters as the PS2 (that for lots of things), it would run as slow as PS2.

one of the things about harrier was that it was designed for really high-thruput ... including asymmetric operation for heavy-duty server work. harrier basically ran SCSI disk command protocol over its 80mbit serial copper, later increased to 160mbit and renamed "SSA". Harrier using effectively disks with the same functional characteristics as used with SCSI adapter ... had significantly higher thruput. Part of it was because of pairs of full-duplex serial links had higher thruput than plain SCSI. However, the Harrier adapter also had significantly lower command processing overhead (vis-a-vis the PS2 SCSI adapter). somewhat similar to discussion regarding jib-prime used in 3880 disk controller:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#45 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

and its affect on number of channels needed by 3090 to try and achieve a "balanced" thruput configurations (larger number of channels used to offset the high, increased channel busy associated with 3880 controller command processing overhead):

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

"A foolish consistency" or "3390 cyl/track architecture"

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: "A foolish consistency" or "3390 cyl/track architecture"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:50:34 -0400
patrick.okeefe@WAMU.NET (Patrick O'Keefe) writes:
I think that logic may not apply. It all depends on how the emulation works. The "wasted" track space may not take any space on the real hardware. We may be protected from our old stupidity (but I'm sure there is lots of new stupidity to make up for that).

It's still complicated. Now you have to know which old guideleines still hold, which can be discarded, and what new guidelines are needed.


cyl/track & ckd architecture are left over from 1960s trade-offs ... cyl/track provided a direct 1:1 logical/physical correspondence so that uses (application developers) could wring every possible bit out of the infrastructure. ckd allowed for leaving information data structure indexes out on disk ... rathing than caching them in real-storage. this traded-off i/o channel, controller, and device thruput against extremely (much more) scarce and expensive real stroage.

the ckd architecture trade-off was already shifting in by the mid-70s ... where bottleneck had significantly switched from being real storage to i/o thruput (and starting to see use of electronic storage for caching and/or staging information to compensate for the increasing bottlenecked i/o resources). I was being called into some number of severe thruput bottlenecked customer situations where the problem turned out how to minimize the use of PDS directory & VTOC multi-track search.

at the same time, the disk price/bit was drastically dropping ... so the cost effort to optimize every last bit of disk space was starting to cost more than the disk bits saved.

FBA bascially addressed both issues;
1) it drastically simplified the logical structure users and application developers had to deal with and

2) eliminated the whole search infrastructure; recognizing that it was more efficient to cache/save high use data structures in electronic storage so that I/O read/write operations would directly specify required record.


I was told that even if I provided fully developed, tested, and integrated MVS FBA support ... it would still cost (an additional) $26M to ship (changes to documentation, education, etc). Supposedly I had to show incremental revenue/sales as result of shipping MVS FBA support (i.e. on the order of $200m-$300m in incremental disk sales). The theory was customers were buying as much disk as they required and the only thing that MVS FBA support would provide would be the disks sold would be FBA rather than CKD (but no incremental sales). Any argument about infrastructure and long-term life-cycle savings with any MVS shift to FBA was discounted (as well as indirect sales because of simpler/faster development)

I also was pontificating about how relative system disk thruput had dropped by factor of ten times over a period of yrs. Eventually some executive in the disk division asked their performance group to refute my statements. After several weeks, they came back and basically said that I had slightly understated the issue; i.e. disks may have gotten five times faster ... but with fewer arms and/or more data/arm to access, the avg. thruput per access (because of higher loading and queuing issues) was possibly only three times better. At the same time, processor had gotten possibly 50 times faster (processors 50 times faster, disks 5 times faster ... ratio of disk:processor thruput had declined by order of magnitude). Applications using 60s disk i/o techniques weren't able to keep the processors busy ... w/o heavy leveraging of electronic storage.

In any case, the disk performance group turned the study around into a SHARE presentation recommending how to optimize disk configurations (basically attempting to mitigate the thrutput bottlenecks).

In the meantime trying to get ECKD debugged and working as a subset solution for the multi-track search overhead ... was a monumental undertaking.

lots of past posts mentioning ckd, multi-track search, fba, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd

semi-related, misc. past posts mentioning getting to play disk engineer in bldg 14 (disk engineering) & bldg 15 (disk product test).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

then as all physical disk technology shifted to "FBA" ... there was another major effort required to continue to emulate CKD infrastructure on top of an underlying infrastructure that is fundamentally FBA.

slightly related to the technology paradigm trade-off CKD/FBA shift was the discussions in the '70s between the STL IMS group and SJR system/r relational database group (original relational/sql)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

The IMS group position was that direct record pointers as part of the data infrastructure required half the disk space as System/R (relational, later sql/ds, db2, etc) and significantly fewer disk i/os. Basically the internal index structure used by relational doubled the space required on disk and required quite a few disk i/os to eventually acquire the pointer to the record containing the data. System/R response was that the eliminating record pointers as part of the exposed data significantly simplified the administrative and application process.

Going into the 80s, administrative and application development costs were significantly increasing (and becoming scarce resource). disk space costs were significantly declining (mitigating the doubled disk space associated with relational index). The amount of electronic storage also significantly increased (and cost decreased) allowing much of the index to be cached ... eliminating much of the additional physical I/Os "index" penalty. In any case, relational paradigm started to become much more cost effective (because of changes in the people costs for administration & development vis-a-vis hardware costs).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:07:52 -0400
Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162106/where_are_they_now_25_computer_products_that_refuse_to_die.html

from above:
These tech products and services may be forgotten, but they're far from gone. How have these geezers managed to hang on for so long?

... snip ...
Hardware Holdouts

Dot-Matrix Printers Hayes Modems MiniDisc Monochrome Displays Hercules Personal Digital Asssitants Packard Bell Amiga Floppy disks Zip Disks Z80 Microprocessor

Software Survivors

dBASE Netscape MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 PageMaker After Dark Harvard Graphics

Sites, Services, and Stores

AltaVista Webvan CompuServe Prodigy Circuit City Egghead Software


--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Rackable Snaps Up Silicon Graphics in Fire Sale

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Rackable Snaps Up Silicon Graphics in Fire Sale
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:31:01 -0400
given silicon graphics past history and the current date ... one might think this was an April 1st news item:

Rackable Snaps Up Silicon Graphics in Fire Sale
http://www.internetnews.com/breakingnews/article.php/3813171/Rackable+Snaps+Up+Silicon+Graphics+in+Fire+Sale.htm

from above:
Server and data storage products maker Rackable Systems on Wednesday said it agreed to acquire Silicon Graphics, which filed for bankruptcy protection earlier in the day, for about $25 million in cash.

... snip ...

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

An interesting take on Verified by Visa Policy

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: An interesting take on Verified by Visa Policy
Date: Apr 1, 2009
Blog: Payment Systems Network
An interesting take on Verified by Visa Policy
http://www.links.org/?p=591

note that many of the scenarios where server presents some personally selected/recorded image/value ... are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. rather than the fraudulent attack attempting to simply impersonate a valid website ... they perform a MITM-attack ... using information from you to impersonate you to the real website ... and using information from the real website to impersonate the website to you.

In many cases, it can even be simpler than trying to build a duplicate of the real website ... say hacking some flavor of proxy code to turn it into a MITM application ... and using the data from the real website to impersonate the real website. misc. posts mentioning MITM-attacks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#mitm

One of the other issues that was raised was changing the burden of proof in a dispute ... from the merchant needing to prove the valid user performed the transaction to the user having to prove that they didn't perform the transaction.

we were brought in to consult with a small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server and they had invented this technology called SSL they wanted to use. The result is now frequently referred to as electronic commerce.

A major justification for SSL was it being a countermeasure to man-in-the-middle attacks ... but required some specific deployment and use ... which were almost immediately neglected/ignored. This has contributed to recent additional efforts like the EV SSL digital certificates and some number of other things.

simple recent reference
http://www.securitypark.co.uk/security_article262809.html

and recent items about it still not a panacea
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS102398+20-Mar-2009+PRN20090320
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1657733/extended_validation_certificates_for_ssl_websites_compromised/
http://www.ibtimes.com/pr/articles/86726/20090320/extended-validation-certificates-for-ssl-websites-compromised.htm

with respect to SET ... since we had already done the SSL flavor ... we were asked to participate in some of the SET stuff. When the SET specification was initially posted, we did a business profile of the operation as well as public-key operation profile. We then got some benchmarks of the public-key profile done (with a special BSAFE library that had its performance boosted by a factor of four). We reported back the public-key profile benchmark numbers and were told by some people that the numbers were one hundred times too slow (when they should have asked why they were four times too fast). Later when initial SET pilots were measured, they were within a couple percent of our benchmark numbers (the BSAFE speed-ups had been made generally available).

One question was why the participants were claiming our benchmark numbers were 100 times too slow (when they should have been asking why they were four times too fast).

Now, i've mentioned that SSL "security" was based on specific deployment & use ... which were almost immediately compromised. One of the SSL "security" issues was providing for MITM countermeasures ... which required that the end-user understand the relationship between the website they were talking to and that website's URL (since the browser only verifies that the correspondence between the URL and the actual website ... not whether the user is actually connected to the webserver they think they are talking too). The net was that it requires the user provides the URL ... which is validated by SSL ... for the whole shopping & purchase experience.

Almost immediately, merchants found that SSL cut their thruput by 90-95% and dropped back to only using SSL for the purchase experience (so the initial URL provided by the user was not being validated). Users became conditioned to clicking on buttons that provided URLs (creating a disconnect between user awareness of URLs). Malicious, unvalidated websites could now provide "check-out" buttons which would supply a URL for which they had obtained a valid SSL digital certificate (this also enables MITM attacks where special responses from the valid webserver don't have to be simulated ... they can be the information from the "real" website ... with the fraudulent website running a MITM operation).

If SSL overhead was too onerous for most merchants ... what happens when that overhead is significantly increased by SET?

The other issue was (despite claims to the contrary) ... SET provided very little additional protection over what was already provided by SSL. For SET to have made any headway against the established, deployed solution (SSL) ... it would have had to provide significantly more benefit (especially considering its exceptional increase in overhead).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

School traditions

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: School traditions
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,humanities.classics
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:19:50 -0400
"Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj" <urjlew@bellsouth.net> writes:
I have read that hemp has good industrial fiber. Good for making paper, various fabrics, et.c.

baling twine ... straw, alfalfa, etc

quicky search engine ... some listed here
https://www.reconstructinghistory.com/rope.php?c=126&w=24&r=Y

this tries to mention more uses than duct tape
http://www.equisearch.com/horses_care/farm_ranch/management/balingtwine030703/

a history of hay balers & baling twine
http://www.bridoncordage.com/history_twine.html

above mention that there was some baling with wire, i handled some bales with wire (instead of twine) ... which did require gloves ... you could somewhat get by w/o gloves with twine. above is vendor of brailian sisal baling twine (describing it much better than hemp).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:26:53 -0400
Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> writes:
Back around 1987 (+/- a couple of years) there was a Dos backup program, based on diskettes as the backup medium, which tried really hard to make each diskette a lot more fault-tolerant:

It did this by writing a RAID-style XOR checksum as the last record on each track, and it did the same thing with the last track, i.e. a 2D ECC code.

The vertical code used a skew algorithm so that the inner track checksum safeguarded data that was scattered around the circumference of the diskette.

The end result was that you could take a stapler and punch a hole through a backup diskette and still read all the data. (I tried it, and it did work. :-)


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#44 Architectural Diversity

cyclotomics did some similar work for the cdrom standard ... being able to scratch the cdrom fairly significantly and still recover all the data. then kodak was looking at getting into cdrom & related stuff and bought them.
http://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/cyclo.html
also some here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp

a little of cdrom discussion here
http://www.usna.edu/Users/math/wdj/reed-sol.htm

from above:
The CIRC code used on audio CDs can correct burst errors of up to 3500 bits (2.4mm) and can interpolate error bursts of up to 12,000 bits (8.5 mm). Advances in technology in the past 20 years have lead to even more applications for CD technology including DVDs. The error correction on a CD guarantees that high quality music can be enjoyed consistently and reliably.

... snip ...

we worked with cyclotomics some with regard to communication FEC in the hsdt project ... in the early to mid 80s, ... misc. past posts mentioning HSDT (happened to also have somebody on the project that had been one of Reed's graduate students):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

i also looked at feasability of doing chips that would handle disk data rates (3+mbytes/sec). slightly akin to this ... but decade earlier
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/SPE-9-97.html

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:58:50 -0400
jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> writes:
Yep. Prep'ing the data so that it was sequential before running the program was another technique. I'd forgotten that.

we had an (small pilot) application a decade or so ago that needed several million updates/day against 60million accounts. quick back of the napkin calculations for a RDBMS implementation was that it would take much longer than a day to perform daily operation.

we settled on sort of the updates and a sequential tape-to-tape run, using (then) new generation of large capacity 3590 tapes ... which ran in under an hr. (for the small pilot; showing enuf headroom to scale-up for full operation).

somewhat harks back to my experience rewriting 1401 MPIO for 360/30 at the univ. ... which handled unit record front-end for 709 (running tape-to-tape ibsys). In theory, the univ. could have continued to run 1401 MPIO on 360/30 in 1401 emulation mode ... but doing the conversion provided experience with 360.

student fortran jobs on the 709 ran significantly less elapsed time ... than they did (initially) on 360/67. by the time of 360/67, i had gotten the responsibility of system support ... and I was going thru all sorts of efforts to overcome the (essentially random) disk access latency.

recent retailling of that story:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#18 Microminiaturized Modules

old post with part of presentation I made at fall68 SHARE meeting about a lot of pathlength work I had done on cp67 (some sections of cp67 reduced instruction pathlength by 100 times, overall was cpu cycle reduction from 534secs to 113secs) ... as well as reference to os/360 work on careful placement of data on disks (to reduce avg. arm access letency) to improve student fortran job thruput by nearly factor of three times:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 CP/67 & OS MFT14

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

School traditions

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: School traditions
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:08:56 -0400
greymaus <greymausg@mail.com> writes:
As did I, and still remember the weight, and the unsafety of the baler.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#65 School traditions

i was too young & brash to be worried about the danger; balers, combines, mowers, etc. ... although there were incidents where neighbors (well, at least people in relative local vicinity) were seriously injured and/or killed. old post about laying firecracker in palm of hand and letting it go off:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#25 Security Proportional to Risk (was: IBM Mainframe at home)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#79 Working while young
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008b.html#57 Govt demands password to personal computer

straw was easy around 40lbs ... alfalfa bales would run anywhere between 60lbs and nearly 90lbs (depending how much moisture and how large the size of the bale was set).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:23:11 -0400
Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
The box running m0n0wall acting as my firwall and NAT boots of a CD and has a floppy (with the write protect set) holding the config file.

we had been called in to consult with small client/server startup, they also had invented this stuff called SSL they wanted to use. the result is frequently called "electronic commerce". part of the effort involved deploying something called a "payment gateway" (handled transactions from webservers on internet and handing them off to payment network). misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway

part of it involved lots of high-availability stuff, based on earlier experience doing ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

in fact, two people responsible for the "commerce server" at the startup ... we had previously done some work with ... they are mentioned in this meeting from jan92 on ha/cmp cluster scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

part of the gateways were some old surplus sun pancakes with hacked version of sun/os to tolerate running with hard disk that had "writes" disabled (as well as some other tailoring) ... for firewalls.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

When did "client server" become part of the language?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When did "client server" become part of the language?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:15:48 -0400
Chris Barts <chbarts+usenet@gmail.com> writes:
(Had the Multics concept of computing as a utility taken off, the VM/CMS paradigm may have been a workable definition for 'personal computing', with individuals paying to hook a terminal to a city's mainframe to access their personal data sets using their own instance of some simple OS. There are obvious benefits to this, mainly because it implies all computer systems are run by semi-competent sysadmins. But that isn't how the world turned out, much to the benefit of people who hold unorthodox ideas.)

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#46 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#47 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#48 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#56 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#58 When did "client server" become part of the language?

I've several times mentioned a number of (successful) commercial time-sharing services based on cp67/cms and/or vm370 (people paying to hook up terminal to commercial mainframe):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

including both IDC and NCSS formed in the 60s starting out with cp67. In some past discussions, there were some from multics mentioning that nothing similar happened with multics (although NCSS did do some experimenting with multics).

That "personal computing" model continued to be relatively successful until the mid-80s when personal computers starting to become more prevalent ... which i've also claimed decimated the mid-range computer market (vaxes, 43xx machines).

As an aside ... there have been some recent references about some move returning to that computing model with netbooks and cloud computing.

Now, both IDC and NCSS fairly quickly moved upscale to providing added value services like financial information ... NCSS eventually being bought by D&B. IDC is still around (having moved some amount of their services to the web) ... some topic drift ...

Last fall, the congressional hearings into toxic CDOs and the rating agencies ... several times it was mentioned that both the sellers/issuers of toxic CDOs and the rating agencies knew that the toxic CDOs weren't worth triple-A rating ... but the issuer/sellers were paying for the triple-A ratings. There were several references to the rating agenicies business model became "mis-aligned" in the early 70s when they switched from the buyers paying for the ratings to the sellers paying for the ratings ... creating big opening for conflict of interest.

In late Jan. there were some news items about the gov. using IDC to help value the toxic assets at financial institutions (as part of looking at buying the assets). In the early 70s (when the rating agencies' business model became "mis-aligned"), IDC bought the pricing services division from one of the rating agencies. Disclaimer, I had interviewed with IDC in the 60s, but didn't join them.

Reference to those toxic assets, in large part made up of (triple-A rated) toxic CDOs:

Bank's Hidden Junk Menaces $1 Trillion Purge
>http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=akv_p6LBNIdw&refer=home

from above:
So investors betting for quick solutions to the financial crisis could be disappointed. The tangled web that banks wove over the years will take a long time to undo.

At the end of 2008, for example, off-balance-sheet assets at just the four biggest U.S. banks -- Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- were about $5.2 trillion, according to their 2008 annual filings.


... snip ...

reference to regulated financial institutions being able to leverage their (unregulated) investment banking operations to buy large amounts of toxic assets and carry them off-balance:

Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aYJZOB_gZi0I

recent reference to some of the problems/issues attempting to clear those toxic assets (from regulated financial institutions):

Mark-to-Market Lobby Buoys Bank Profits 20% as FASB May Say Yes
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=awSxPMGzDW38&refer=home

from above:
Officials at Norwalk, Connecticut-based FASB were under "tremendous pressure" and "more or less eviscerated mark-to-market accounting," said Robert Willens, a former managing director at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. who runs his own tax and accounting advisery firm in New York. "I'd say there was a pretty close cause and effect."

... snip ...

also referenced in this recent post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?

and also in this blog:
https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001162.html

other misc past posts with references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#53 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#65 is it possible that ALL banks will be nationalized?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#10 Who will Survive AIG or Derivative Counterparty Risk?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#16 The Formula That Killed Wall Street
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#18 HSBC is expected to announce a profit, which is good, what did they do differently?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#28 I need insight on the Stock Market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#42 Bernard Madoff Is Jailed After Pleading Guilty -- are there more "Madoff's" out there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#61 Quiz: Evaluate your level of Spreadsheet risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#63 Do bonuses foster unethical conduct?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#64 Should AIG executives be allowed to keep the bonuses they were contractually obligated to be paid?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#0 What is swap in the financial market?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#8 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#13 Should we fear and hate derivatives?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#35 Architectural Diversity

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:43:14 -0400
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
Take a look near the bottom (9-edge). In very fine print you should see an identification of the manufacturer and "electro number" (i.e. the manufacturer's code for the pattern that's printed on the card). The most common - IBM 5081 - would be on a true-blue IBM card with just rows 0 through 9 printed. (Note that I used "blue" metaphorically there - the colour of the card stock is independent of the electro number, since it's the same printing plate regardless of which colour card you're printing on.)

a little late for april 1st ... but
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/1/715269/-Daily-Kos:-Ready-for-the-Future,-Ready-for-the-Enterprise

and a little more april 1st digression ...
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/04/01/deluge_of_browser_security_issues_drives_mass_migration.html

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

The Watches Guy

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Watches Guy...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:44:36 -0400
greymaus <greymausg@mail.com> writes:
the Highlands went straight from, basically Stone Age, clan relationships to the modern age. The members of the clans had no rights whatever, under the old system the Clan chieftain was expected to look out for the welfare of his people, and they were expected to follow him to war, etc, and pay some rent, not very much. With the change, encouraged after the '45, to modern relationships, the 'Lairds' were allowed to just drive the people off the land, and replace them with large farms, generally grazed with sheep. People still curse the Sutherlands, the worse offenders.

my wife's (fathers) scottish clan was disbanded ... but some continued on as the scribes in scotland.
http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/Macfie/index.html

lots migrated to the americas ... in part related to a black adder episode with a question about what does an englishman do when they encounter a man in a skirt? -- they run him through and nick his land.

my wife's father got a set of books (which were history lectures from the 1880s) as reward for something or other at west point. part of the lecture talks about the scottish settlers (in virginia) influence on the constitution ... that if it hadn't been for influence of the scottish settlers, the US wouldn't have been a democracy, because the influence of the english settlers would have resulted in a different kind of government.

past references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#30 Empires and Imperialism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#47 Mickey and friends
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#51 EZPass: Yes, Big Brother IS Watching You!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007q.html#10 Horrid thought about Politics, President Bush, and Democrats

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Most 'leaders' do not 'lead' and the majority of 'managers' do not 'manage'. Why is this?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Most 'leaders' do not 'lead' and the majority of 'managers' do not 'manage'. Why is this?
Date: Apr 3, 2009
Blog: Systems Thinking
John Boyd would give a briefing titled Organic Design for Command and Control.

Basically, at entry to WW2 the US army needed to field a large numbers that had little or no training. In order to leverage the few skilled resources available, they created a very rigidly structured, top-down, command & control structure. Role forward a couple decades ... and those people (that had acquired their training in how to operated a large organization in WW2 army) were starting to permeate corporate management. As a result, they were starting to transfer that training for very rigid, structured, top-down command & control structure to the commercial world.

Boyd would then make the point that somewhat the antithesis of that approach was Leadership and Appreciation.

The rigidly, structured top-down command and control structure explanation has also been used to explain the report that relatively recently the ratio of executive compensation to employee compensation had exploded to 400:1 after having been 20:1 for a long time (and 10:1 in most of the rest of the world).

lots of past posts mentioning John Boyd &/or OODA-loops
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd
misc URLs from around the web mentioning John Boyd &/or OODA-loops
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2

Boyd would contrast the US Army's WW2 rigid, structured, top-down command and control structure with the much more fluid German Army structure. In part, he attributed the difference to the German Army in WW2 having only 3% officers to the US Army needing 12% officers (to implement the significantly more rigid structure).

Boyd would highlight's Guderian's blitzkrieg as an example. ... along with Guderian's direction regarding verbal orders only; to make sure that his people were dynamically making on-the-spot fluid decisions ... and not having to worrying about after-action, morning afternoon quarterbacks .. there was going to be no paper trail. Supposedly verbal orders only ranks up their with radio (coordinating tank activity) for success of blitzkrieg.

As noted in some of the Boyd URLs, he was credited with strategic battle plan in Desert Storm ... and some have been quoted that a problem with the current foray into Iraq was that Boyd had died in 1997.

About the time of one his briefings that I had sponsored in the early 80s ... I was involved in a major corporate security audit. There had been recently deployed some number of computer laser printers in each departmental area around the bldg. The auditors did an after hours sweep looking for classified material having been printed and left out. One of the new features of the laser printer was printing a "separator" page from a 2nd paper drawer, loaded with different colored paper, which gave the details about who the output belonged to. Since that only involved very little space on the separator page, we added random quotes to help fill up the rest of the page. One of the random sayings was definition of "Auditors" as the "people who go in after the war is lost and bayonet the wounded". The after-hours security sweep didn't turn up any classified documents left out ... but did find some separator pages with that random quote ... and the auditors complained that we had done it on purpose.

Oh, another Boyd example was ideal would provide overall strategic direction leaving local people on the spot adapting the strategic plan to tactical implementation. The rigidly, structured, top-down command-and-control structure would tend to be providing both strategic and tactical direction from the top (with no independent action by local people on the spot).

Another example was that the rigid, structured, top-down command-and-control structure tended to achieve victory by substituting local agility, adaptive initiative with logistics management of overwhelming superior resources.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

School traditions

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: School traditions
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:58:56 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
straw was easy around 40lbs ... alfalfa bales would run anywhere between 60lbs and nearly 90lbs (depending how much moisture and how large the size of the bale was set).

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#65 School traditions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#68 School traditions

somewhat more compression than standard baler?

Straw bale house survives violent shaking at earthquake lab
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-04/uonr-sbh040209.php

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

The Future Shape of Payments Is Anything But Flat

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: The Future Shape of Payments Is Anything But Flat
Date: Apr 04, 2009
Blog: First Data Networking
The Future Shape of Payments Is Anything But Flat
http://www.firstdata.com/pdf/AmericanBanker2.24.09.pdf

I think that separating authentication (i.e. card as something you have) from business accounts is one of the things covered in the AADS patent portfolio
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadssummary.htm

Another part of such a change is enabling shift from "institutional-centric" paradigm to person-centric paradigm for something you have tokens. However, there remains the "institutional" PIN (i.e. registered at the institution), as opposed to a "person" PIN (validated by the token) ... somewhat retains an institutional focus. An institutional PIN ... is a shared-secret something you know authentication. From Security 101 ... each unique security domain requires unique shared-secret something you know (as countermeasure to x-domain exploits).

Note however, person-centric PINs can be vulnerable to things like yes card exploit ... referenced in this article about presentation at Cartes 2002
https://web.archive.org/web/20030417083810/http://www.smartcard.co.uk/resources/articles/cartes2002.html

and misc past discussions here:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard

and misc. past posts discussing 3-factor authentication paradigm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#3factor

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:32:31 -0400
Walter Bushell <proto@panix.com> writes:
COBOL was written so that half witted junior programmers could fix batch jobs at 3AM.

that is at the "micro" level ... at the "macro" level there may be little difference whatever language is used.

misc. past posts about >450k statement cobol application that runs every night on 40+ large configured mainframes (that were something like $30m per) .
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#50 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#20 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#21 Distributed Computing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#24 Job ad for z/OS systems programmer trainee
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#73 Price of CPU seconds
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#81 Intel: an expensive many-core future is ahead of us

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

School traditions

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: School traditions
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,humanities.classics
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:42:35 -0400
Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
Sure it does there's a pretty large industry making and selling assorted paraphenalia to marijuana smokers.

i remember tower records on bascom (across from pruneyard) in the 70s, three sections were vinyl, tapes, and a head shop (black light posters and various paraphenalia in the case at the check-out counter).

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

We Are All French Now

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: We Are All French Now
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:36:59 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
Speaking of WW2, the Free French, lead by a renegade General, did make a deal with the Allies to librate France, and include France in the occupation of Germany for the next 49 years.

saw recent footage about one of the yankee opening battles of ww2 in africa was yankees having to fight french forces ... with something like 5000 casualties.

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
Date: Apr 4, 2009
Blog: Financial Cryptography
re:
https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001162.html

above references this post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?

a couple months ago there was CSPAN program looking at congressional financing that mentioned in the session that repealed Glass-Steagall, the financial industry made $250m in contributions and in the session that approved $800B TARP, there was $2B in contributions from financial industry. More recently there was report that there was a total of $5B in funds from the financial industry during the period (nearly evenly divided between the two parties).

additional articles about the FASB rule change:

The FASB Rally: More Dishonest Breathing Room For Banks
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/the-ticker/2009/04/02/the-fasb-rally-more-dishonest-breathing-room-for-banks.html
Mark To Market Eased: Making A Silk Purse From A Sow's Ear? Example Included Below
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977645377&grpId=3659174697241980&nav=Groupspace

Why We Need to Keep Mark to Market
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/blog/2009/04/why-we-need-to-keep-mark-to-market.html

from above:
Investors once believed that U.S. markets were sufficiently protected from political pressure and manipulation by a system of interlocking independent agencies and rule-making bodies -- some government-run, some not. That system is being dismantled, piece by piece, by political jawboning and rushed rule rewrites. Now, investors find themselves with fewer protections and weakened protectors.

... snip ...

and ...

FHLB, the ‘B' stands for Bowsher
http://www.ft.com/blog/2009/04/03/54461/fhlb-the-b-stands-for-bowsher/
Seattle FHLB Had 'Material Weaknesses' in Internal Controls
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aoY83b_uD0ek

older post mentioning magnitude of problem:

Bank's Hidden Junk Menaces $1 Trillion Purge
>http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=akv_p6LBNIdw&refer=home

from above:
So investors betting for quick solutions to the financial crisis could be disappointed. The tangled web that banks wove over the years will take a long time to undo.

At the end of 2008, for example, off-balance-sheet assets at just the four biggest U.S. banks -- Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- were about $5.2 trillion, according to their 2008 annual filings.


... snip ...

Mayo Says Loan Losses Will Exceed Depression Levels
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a1yCkrhVtOks&refer=home

from above:
Banks committed the "seven deadly sins" of banking in trying to compensate for lower natural growth rates and will now feel the costs of those actions, Mayo wrote.

... snip ...

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

We Are All French Now

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: We Are All French Now
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:03:14 -0400
nmm1 writes:
Er, I suggest that you get hold of a real history and not the propaganda that the USA media presents. Operation Torch wasn't an opening battle in the North African campaign, let alone World War II, but was essentially the finale of the former. Rommel had been all but defeated by Montgomery before Eisenhower got involved, though was still fairly firmly dug into his last stronghold.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#78

sorry, i tried to make distinction that it was "yankee" entre ... and yankee battling the french, ... wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torch

from above:
The Allies believed that the Vichy French forces would not fight, partly because of information supplied by American Consul Robert Daniel Murphy in Algiers. However they harboured suspicions that the Vichy French navy would bear a grudge over the British action at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940. An assessment of the sympathies of the French forces in North Africa was essential, and plans were made to secure their cooperation, rather than resistance.

... snip ...

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

1401's in high schools?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: 1401's in high schools?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:49:17 -0400
Walter Bushell <proto@panix.com> writes:
Ha, I've had to teach that one. Hey, the top to the computer is an unobstructed surface. Then I explained the purpose of the vents was.

recent posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#39 1401's in high schools?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#55 1401's in high schools?

los gatos lab told a story of terminals they had designed for airline checkin counters .... the top had vents for air flow ... and were prone to agents & customers sitting soft drink bottles on the top.

at some point a tray was built into the inside of the terminal ... underneath the vents ... capable of handling up to a quart of liquid.

then there was the 1403N1 printer and possibly because the sound proofing in the cover added so much weight ... there was mechanical lift to raise the cover. the top of the printer was frequently convenient to stack things. however, 1403N1 would automatic raise the cover (dumping everything on top on the floor), whenever it got out of paper condition.

a couple past posts mentioning cover would automatically raise:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#21 IBM 1403 printer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003o.html#30 who invented the "popup" ?

for random topic drift ... recent threads also mentioning los gatos lab:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#6 ATMs At Risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#11 Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#51 Mainframe Hall of Fame: 17 New Members Added

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:04:07 -0400
Walter Bushell <proto@panix.com> writes:
We can't wave money in front of people and expect them not to take it. Some regulation is mandatory, otherwise the pressures on individuals will be too big to resist. I mean, if you quit your job, it is considered a black mark on your record, and if you mention you did it for principle, you may never work again. Business does not like idealists. One of my friends who worked for a bank got fired after he deposited a large chunk of his inheritance. The bank felt that since he was independently wealthy they couldn't trust him.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#36 Architectural Diversity

the 1000 are the ones:

The Quiet Coup
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

from above:
But there's a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests -- financiers, in the case of the U.S. -- played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

... snip ...

referenced in these posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#79 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?

also this blog
https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001162.html

as mentioned in the post, in similar past threads ... i've referenced judge in old industrial espionage case ... effectively taking the position that everybody is subject to temptation and countermeasures to theft have to be proportional to the temptation (effectively highly valued industrial information is temptation similar to swimming pools for minors ... it is the responsibility of the swimming pool owner to take adequate measures to prevent minors from trespassing and drowning ... aka requirement to child-proof the environment) ... a couple recent references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#4 Is SUN going to become x86'ed ??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#71 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Architectural Diversity

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:25:07 -0400
jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> writes:
Which you apparently are one. You should listen to an expert COBOL coder some day. Charlie could tell you some really nice tales about tax laws and writing the code to reflect the latest politicians' tweaking. You do NOT want to have to that shit in machine language.

ideally, you don't even want it in procedural language ... preferrable something that takes (business) rule specification directly to executable code.

recent reference to old thread about advantages of flat-rate tax ... reducing tax-code from >60,000 pages to <600 pages:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?

possibly resulting in 3-5% GNP productivity improvment.

old threads here in a.f.c mentioning the tax code complexity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#87 Fraud due to stupid failure to test for negative
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#43 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#44 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

IPv6 over Social Network

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: IPv6 over Social Network
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:04:53 -0400
my rfc index:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

from earlier this week:
5514 E
IPv6 over Social Networks, Vyncke E., 2009/04/01 (6pp) (.txt=10127)
(Refs 2080, 3428, 5340) (was
draft-vyncke-ip-over-social-network-01.txt)

5513 I
IANA Considerations for Three Letter Acronyms, Farrel A., 2009/04/01
(7pp) (.txt=13931) (Refs 1819) (was
draft-farrel-iana-tla-registry-00.txt)


....

for the whole list ...

click on Term (term->RFC#) in RFCs listed by section and scoll-down/find "April1". clicking on a RFC number brings up the summary for that RFC in the lower frame. clicking on the ".txt=nnnn" field ... retrieves the actual RFC.

... for slightly other topic drift ... Greater IBM Connection social networking did a profile on the technology i use to manage the RFC index information (and merged taxonomies and glossaries) ... for those not members of "Greater IBM Connection" ... a copy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ibmconnect.html

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Decimal roolz, was Architectural Diversity

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Decimal roolz, was Architectural Diversity
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:37:36 -0400
John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
The ia32 architecture still has decimal adjust instructions that let you construct loops that do packed or unpacked decimal addition and subtractions. They're gone in ia64, but it still has the floating point instructions to load and store 18 digit signed decimal integers.

And, of course, don't forget the decimal floating stuff found everywhere from Java and GCC to the microcode in POWER workstations and Z10 mainframes.


IEEE decimal floating-point specification:
http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ARITH.2001.930114

abstract:
Abstract: Even though decimal arithmetic is pervasive in financial and commercial transactions, computers are still implementing almost all arithmetic calculations using binary arithmetic. As chip real estate becomes cheaper it is becoming likely that more computer manufacturers will provide processors with decimal arithmetic engines. Programming languages and databases are expanding the decimal data types available while there has been little change in the base hardware. As a result, each language and application is defining a different arithmetic and few have considered the efficiency of hardware implementations when setting requirements. In this paper, we propose a decimal format which meets the requirements of existing standards for decimal arithmetic and is efficient for hardware implementation. We propose this specification in the hope that designers will consider providing decimal arithmetic in future microprocessors and that future decimal software specifications will consider hardware efficiencies.

... snip ...

Mike's wiki page with some number of decimal floating-point articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cowlishaw

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70

Is FINANCE the institutionalized form whereby (smart?) elites exact payment for the rest's being...?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Is FINANCE the institutionalized form whereby (smart?) elites exact payment for the rest's being...?
Date: Apr 05, 2009
Blog: Equity Markets
with reference:

Excerpted from: How bank bonuses let us all down, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fa89be08-02aa-11de-b58b-000077b07658.html

similar article ...

The Quiet Coup
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

from above:
But there's a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests -- financiers, in the case of the U.S. -- played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

... snip ...

previous reference to article:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#59 Tesco to open 30 "bank branches" this year
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#82 Architectural Diversity

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70




previous, next, index - home