SPARTA News August 2001

August 2001

SPARTA Chapter President’s Corner

- by Brad Carson

Our July meeting brought us a visit from Milton Futrell of EMC to talk about EMC’s available software solutions for Data Management. Their solutions cover mid-range as well as mainframe-sized systems. We do have the EMC InfoMover product installed here at LabCorp to work with transferring large amounts of data between the production OS/390 system and a data warehouse RS/6000.
It has been a busy month at LabCorp; we are planning for a Disaster Recovery test on August 30th at Comdisco in Chicago. Also we are working on our Vendor software swap out. Right now we have gotten Tivoli NetView running in production, OPC running, and FileManager (can you say DITTO?) running. We have also placed DB2 version 7.1 into use on one of the test DB2 subsystems. We still have a long way to go on this conversion, but we are making some progress.
One more project that has started is the installation of Omegamon to replace BMC’s Mainview. This was another product that we had to download off the net and then create the install tapes from the downloaded data. Tech Support doing all these large downloads has gotten the attention of our networking group (It seems we were using a little bit of network bandwidth). After some explaining the situation, our networking group is setting up an alternate gateway for these transfers to ease the congestion on the corporate network.
This month brings us a presentation from Ed Webb and Duane Reaugh on their visit to SHARE in July. I always look forward to finding out what went on at SHARE and I know that Ed will always have plenty of handouts for us.

See you all on the 28th.

Our next meeting is on Tuesday August 28th at SAS. A deli tray, drinks, and dessert will be provided.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)

August 28 SHARE Conference Report by Ed Webb of SAS and Duane Reaugh of DTS Software
Sept. 25 TBA

We need ideas and volunteers for future speakers. Presentations don’t have to be fancy, just informative and interesting. Even a 5 or 10 minute talk can start an interesting interaction. Contact John Bryant by phone or e-mail as noted below.

2001-2002 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
LabCorp 919-572-7504
1912 Alexander Drive
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Brad_Carson@labcorp.com

John Bryant - Vice President
GlaxoSmithKline 919-483-9548
5 Moore Drive; D.111
RTP, NC 27709 JEB33378@gsk.com

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-412-6235
201 N. Eugene St. 336-227-2021 (Home)
Greensboro, NC 27401 MLOCKEY@netpath.net

Duane Reaugh - Treasurer
DTS Software 919-833-8426
2913 Wake Forest Road
Raleigh, NC 27609-7841 Duane@DTSsoftware.com

Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute 919-531-4162
SAS Campus Drive 919-362-0232 (Home)
Cary, NC 27513 EDWISTUO@aol.com

Meetings

Meetings are scheduled for the last Tuesday evening of each month (except no meeting in December), with optional dinner at 6:15 p.m. and the meeting beginning at 7:00 p.m.

These monthly meetings are held at LabCorp’s Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology (CMBP) near the Research Triangle Park (see last page). Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn Left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Brad Carson. Brad will escort you to the conference room.

Call for Articles

If you have any ideas for speakers, presentations, newsletter articles, or are interested in taking part in a presentation, PLEASE contact one of the Board of Directors with your suggestions.

Newsletter Mailings

The SPARTA chapter policy is to mail a copy of the monthly chapter newsletter to each SPARTA member, NaSPA national, each advertiser, persons who have requested a copy, and to other chapters who send us a copy of their newsletter. The newsletter is mailed about the 20th of each month so you can prepare for the meeting. The mailing list is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 412-6235; if you have corrections or problems receiving your newsletter, call Mike.

Latest CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V436 (dated June 12, 2001) are available from www.cbttape.org.

If you need a complete tape, contact Brad Carson at LabCorp or Ed Webb at SAS (see Board of Director’s list for contact info).

Minutes of the July 28, 2001 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Brad Carson, the Chapter President.

•Eleven (11) people were present; ten (10) were members.

•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job function.

•The minutes of June 2001 meeting were accepted as published in the July 2001 newsletter.

•The Treasurer’s Report was accepted as published in the July 2001 newsletter. As of June 18, 2001 the balance is $543.90

OLD BUSINESS

•Articles are needed for this newsletter. If you would like to write an article for this newsletter, please contact Ed Webb. Keep in mind that you don’t really need to write the article, it can be an article that you read that you would like to share with the membership.

•The SPARTA Web page is now available. To access the SPARTA Web page, point your Web browser to this site: www.netpath.net/~mlockey/sparta.html. Please send any comments or suggestions about the Web page to Mike Lockey (mlockey@netpath.net). Be sure to check the Web page every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

NEW BUSINESS

•Future Speakers and Topics:

August 2001 - SHARE Conference report
Other ideas:
- Conversion to RMM - Tommy Thomas
- TDMF - Ken Frump
- WLM Goal Mode - Jim Horne
- UNIX Services for OS/390
- IBM New Announcements
- CICS Web Bridge

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact John Bryant.

•Food for the August 2001 meeting will be a deli tray and sodas.

•The August SPARTA meeting will be held at SAS in Cary.

•Thanks to Brad Carson of LabCorp for hosting the July meeting.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:25 PM.

•Milton Futtrell of EMC presented information about EMC technologies and futures. Among items in his discussion were these:

36G or 73G or 181G drives in EMC 8430
36G drives are RAID-S
73G and 181G drives are RAID-1
4Q2001 EMC will support Dynamic PAV

•The meeting was adjourned at 8:15 PM.

Treasurer’s Report for June 2001

contributed by Duane Reaugh

As of June 18th we have $543.90 in the bank, but I have not paid the receipts from the last meeting.

Items of Interest

Fastest Supercomputer

contributed by Ed Webb

[Ed. note: We thought computers were getting smaller! Emphasis in article is mine.]

LIVERMORE, CA, August 15, 2001 -- The U.S. Government today dedicated the world's fastest supercomputer, an IBM system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that will bring the nation an important step closer to the goal of simulating a nuclear detonation inside a computer. The IBM machine, known as ASCI White, is capable of 12.3 trillion calculations per second, more than the combined speed of the next three most powerful supercomputers on earth.

Developed by IBM under the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Partnership, the system delivers 23% more power than was required in IBM's contract with the Department of Energy (DOE).

Located in a classified area at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ASCI White covers a space the size of two basketball courts and weighs 106 tons. It contains six trillion bytes (TB) of memory, almost 50,000 times greater than the average personal computer, and has more than 160 TB of IBM TotalStorage 7133 Serial Disk System capacity, or enough to hold six times the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

[Ed. note: Here’s the whole article:]

http://isource.ibm.com/cgi-bin/goto?it=usa_press&on=2001082001

Web Application Servers Overview

contributed by Ed Webb

[Ed. note: Here are some excerpts from a very interesting article about web application servers. See the link at the end for the full article. It’s well worth your time if you are curious about WebSphere or other web application servers.]

This article provides a brief history of application servers and offers an overview of the various software architectures used by WebObjects and its competitors [like IBM’s WebSphere]....

**Application Servers** -- [Apple’s] WebObjects was the original application server - an environment for developing and deploying applications meant to be accessed via a Web browser.

In many ways, application servers are a throwback to the days of the mainframe. Back then, a single big machine would do everything, while multiple inexpensive terminals plugged into the mainframe. The terminals were extremely lightweight computers - they could do little more than display received text and transmit keystrokes back to the mainframe.

The personal computer revolution gave individual users the capability to run their own software, freeing them from the tyranny of the corporate information systems priesthood. But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution: people wanted to share their information and programs.

Personal and centralized file sharing helped folks share their information, but sharing software was problematic. Programs developed for one platform wouldn’t run on another. Software had to be purchased, installed and maintained for each and every computer, dramatically raising costs and complexity. Programs also had to be specialized to handle different types of data; for example, some shared information should only be accessed through programs which can ensure validity, such as customer databases.

Then the Web happened. The message was HTML and the medium was HTTP. Any computer could retrieve documents from any other computer, diminishing the platform problem. Even more exciting was that the Web enabled folks to set up programs that could be accessed using HTML’s rudimentary support for inputting data.

In short order, the Macs in Graphics and the PCs in Accounting could access the same vacation forms served by the Unix box in Human Resources. What’s more, the capability to communicate between platforms meant that software installation and maintenance could happen on the company’s central server. When a bug was fixed or a feature was added, only the server needed to be updated - all the clients instantly and automatically took advantage of the upgrade the next time they used it.

“Thin clients” - inexpensive computers running lightweight software like a browser or Java interpreter - captured all the buzz. Why spend resources catering to lots of individual computers on a network when you can manage them centrally like the former mainframe system? But to remove weight from the clients, weight had to be added to the servers. The servers held all the program’s logic as well as all of the user’s data. Multiple users across the company (or the world!) would all simultaneously hammer the servers night and day.

Programmers faced tight software development timelines, amazing software complexity, and the requirement that the server almost never go down....

**Three Fundamentals** -- Application servers consist of three parts: the interface, the program’s logic, and the data access.

* The interface is what we users see and interact with. Typically it’s the HTML we view via our Web browsers, though Java can also provide an interface.

* The program’s logic is composed of the rules and procedures that run businesses. For example, it’s the program’s logic that won’t let you purchase a book from an online bookseller if the book is no longer in circulation. Applications contain hundreds or thousands of such rules. When to add tax. How much tax to add. How big a box to use for the shipment. Is the credit card valid? Do any ongoing sales apply to the current purchase? And so on.

* Finally, data access is the portion of the application which interacts with the database to create, view, update and delete information.

[Ed. note: See the full article for a description of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age in the realm of application servers and find out where WebSphere, among others, fits:]

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06465

Humor

Is It Better to be a Jock or a Nerd?

contributed by Chris Blackshire

The answer to the eternal question: Is “it better to be a jock or a nerd?”

Michael Jordan having “retired,” with $40 million in endorsements, he makes $178,100 a day, working or not.

If he sleeps 7 hours a night, he makes $52,000 every night while visions of sugarplums dance in his head.

If he goes to see a movie, it’ll cost him $7.00, but he’ll make $18,550 while he’s there.

If he decides to have a 5 minute egg, he’ll make $618 while boiling it.

He makes $7,415/hour more than minimum wage.

He’ll make $3,710 while watching each episode of Friends.

If he wanted to save up for a new Acura NSX ($90,000) it would take him a whole 12 hours.

If someone were to hand him his salary and endorsement money, they would have to do it at the rate of $2.00 every second.

He’ll probably pay around $200 for a nice round of golf, but will be reimbursed $33,390 for that round.

Assuming he puts the federal maximum of 15% of his income into a tax deferred account (401k), his contributions will hit the federal cap of $10,500 at 8:45am on January 1st.

If you were given a penny for every 10 dollars he made, you’d be living comfortably at $65,000 a year.

He’ll make about $19.60 while watching the 100 meter dash in the Olympics, and about $15,600 during the Boston Marathon.

While the common person is spending about $20 for a meal in his trendy Chicago restaurant, he’ll pull in about $5600.

This year, he’ll make more than twice as much as all U.S. past presidents for all of their terms combined.

Amazing isn’t it?

However...

If Jordan saves 100% of his income for the next 500 years, he’ll still have less than Bill Gates has at this very moment.

Game over. Nerd wins.


Think You Know Everything?

contributed by Chris Blackshire

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

Two-Thirds of the world’s eggplants are grown in New Jersey.

The longest one syllable word in the English language is “screeched.”

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.

All of the clocks in the movie “Pulp Fiction” are stuck on 4:20.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.

All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.

Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

Los Angeles’ full name is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula.”

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

In most advertisements, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.

Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer.

The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

A dime has 118 ridges all round the edge.

It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.

In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister.

The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.

“Stewardesses” is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

...Now you know everything...You could be a TEENAGER!