SSWUGtv
With Stephen Wynkoop
In this episode: SQL Server tip of the day – working with your indexes – some tips and approaches.
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Readers Responses
Today we have responses from our readers regarding the Editorial from yesterday, considering the position of the mainframe computer, and dealing with advancing age in the workplace.
James gives us more background on the IBM Watson project
They are RISC processors not RISK processors.
Watson was constructed of:
“a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers” with “with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM”
What was once called MainFrame computing on RISC has not been good at pushing around BITS in the manner you refer to for decades.
That is why the POWER Architecture project was created to begin with.
“IBM won a $244 million DARPA contract in November 2006 to develop a petascale supercomputer architecture before the end of 2010 in the HPCS project. The contract also states that the architecture shall be available commercially”
POWER7,technology used for WATSON was an advancement from POWER6 for this contract that also made MainFrame system clustering system program easier because it:
“enables research scientists to program a cluster as if it were a single system, without using message passing. From a productivity standpoint, this is essential since some scientists are not conversant with MPI or other parallel programming techniques used in clusters”
What most people who have actually read about POWER7 and Watson see as the real “Value Add” IBM gave to this DARPA project. They literally dumbed it down a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)
Barbara shares her insight regarding older workers…age can make a difference
That’s a good start, but it doesn’t cover jobs where a salary range is specified, and an older person applies, and is screened out before the process ever reaches the offer negotiation phase. It doesn’t cover situations such as those exposed years ago in 60 Minutes and elsewhere, showing differential treatment of older candidates. It does not cover situations where the older worker clearly indicates acceptance of a lower salary. It also doesn’t cover the fact that our labor market has essentially been opened to the entire world, and our college students are even being kneecapped by processes that open doors to foreign workers. Foreign workers have also mastered the contracting work system, where scrutiny is lighter than for those seeking "permanent" employment.
Also, any slams against public workers are uncalled for. Public workers can so get laid off and even fired. Political coups can affect them as well, as do falling tax revenues. New skill set requirements just caused a department to cut its staff in half at a major public research university right here in my area. Public workers in my area haven’t gotten step raises in over a decade, have gone multiple years without cost of living raises, and are now facing personnel system changes that have transformed many of them into at-will employees. They simply do not have all the protections that private sector workers imagine that they have.
Thanks James and Barbara for your contributions. Share your thoughts by sending email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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