From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: What is swap in the financial market? Date: Mar 21, 2009 Blog: Derivatives Marketsfrom wiki
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?
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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 -0400Charles Richmond <frizzle@tx.rr.com> writes:
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.
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Passwords: silly or serious? Date: Mar 21, 2009 Blog: Computer Networkingold 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):
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
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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 -0400Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
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
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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 -0400Christopher Keller <cwkeller@gmx.net> writes:
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
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: registers vs cache Newsgroups: comp.arch Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:58:13 -0400jgd writes:
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.
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: ATMs At Risk Date: Mar 22, 2009 Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and SecurityATMs At Risk
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: IBM in Talks to Buy Sun Date: Mar 22, 2009 Blog: Greater IBMIBM in Talks to Buy Sun
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
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: The background reasons of Credit Crunch Date: Mar 22, 2009 Blog: EconomicsA 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/
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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 -0400Bletchley Park fires up replica Turing 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 ...
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: How to implement PKI authority? Date: Mar 23, 2009 Blog: Software DevelopmentPKI ... 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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> writes:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> writes:
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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Should we fear and hate derivatives? Date: Mar 23, 2009 Blog: Derivatives MarketsNaked Short Sales Hint Fraud in Bringing Down Lehman
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 ...
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Future System Date: Mar 24, 2009 Blog: Greater IBMre:
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/Multics/ctss/etc) is
found in Melinda's vm370 history ... which can found here:
https://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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: The background reasons of Credit Crunch Date: Mar 24, 2009 Blog: Economicsre:
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?
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: ATMs At Risk Date: Mar 22, 2009 Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Securityre:
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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 Policyre:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:31:34 -0400hancock4 writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400gavin@allegro.com (Gavin Scott) writes:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:23:22 -0400hancock4 writes:
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: ATMs At Risk Date: Mar 25, 2009 Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Securityre:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Payment downtime threatens online retailers Date: Mar 25, 2009 Blog: Payment Systems NetworkPayment downtime threatens online retailers
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 Regulationlinkedin reference:
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
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:
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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:25:04 -0400Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:53:10 -0400Al Kossow <aek@spies.com> writes:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:34:19 -0400re:
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 experience).
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400somewhat 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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
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 ...
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 Regulationre:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Marc Auslander <marcslists@optonline.NOSPAM.net> writes:
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
https://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?
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Microminiaturized Modules Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:05:55 -0400TrailingEdgeTechnologies <bbreynolds@aol.com> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400TrailingEdgeTechnologies <bbreynolds@aol.com> writes:
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
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:39:21 -0400greymaus <greymausg@mail.com> writes:
... 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
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 GovernanceI 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
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Cybercrime running into trillions, experts claim Date: Mar 27, 2009 Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and SecurityCybercrime running into trillions, experts claim
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
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 -0400thvv <thvv64@gmail.com> writes:
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
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:15:28 -0400re:
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
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 -0400m42tom-ibmmain@YAHOO.COM (Tom Marchant) writes:
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
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 -0400Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
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"
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400kenney writes:
... 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?
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400adykes@panix.com (Al Dykes) writes:
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
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 -0400adykes@panix.com (Al Dykes) writes:
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
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 -0400Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
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
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 -0400re:
3090 web page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230719145910/https://www.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?
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400a for something a little different ... wiki page with "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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something? Date: Mar 30, 2009 Blog: Financial Regulationlinkedin question/answer
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Malcolm Beattie <mbeattie@clueful.co.uk> writes:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Morten Reistad <first@last.name> 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.
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
... 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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Tesco to open 30 "bank branches" this year Date: Mar 31, 2009 Blog: Payment Systems NetworkTesco to open 30 "bank branches" this year
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?
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
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):
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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 -0400patrick.okeefe@WAMU.NET (Patrick O'Keefe) writes:
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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400given 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 ...
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: An interesting take on Verified by Visa Policy Date: Apr 1, 2009 Blog: Payment Systems NetworkAn interesting take on Verified by Visa Policy
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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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:
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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity Newsgroups: comp.arch Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:26:53 -0400Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> writes:
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
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: School traditions Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:08:56 -0400greymaus <greymausg@mail.com> writes:
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).
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
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.
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40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70
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 -0400Chris Barts <chbarts+usenet@gmail.com> writes:
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
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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:
and a little more april 1st digression ...
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/04/01/deluge_of_browser_security_issues_drives_mass_migration.html
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: The Watches Guy... Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:44:36 -0400greymaus <greymausg@mail.com> writes:
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
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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 ThinkingJohn 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.
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: School traditions Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:58:56 -0400Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
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
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: The Future Shape of Payments Is Anything But Flat Date: Apr 04, 2009 Blog: First Data NetworkingThe Future Shape of Payments Is Anything But Flat
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
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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 -0400Walter Bushell <proto@panix.com> writes:
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
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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 -0400Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
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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 -0400Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something? Date: Apr 4, 2009 Blog: Financial Cryptographyre:
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 ...
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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 -0400nmm1 writes:
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 ...
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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 -0400Walter Bushell <proto@panix.com> writes:
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
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Architectural Diversity Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:04:07 -0400Walter Bushell <proto@panix.com> writes:
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?
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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 -0400jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> writes:
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
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: IPv6 over Social Network Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:04:53 -0400my rfc index:
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
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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 -0400John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
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
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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 Marketswith 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
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