Dr. Dobb's Journal June, 2004
The Rexx Language Association (http://www.rexxla.org/) is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Rexx programming language with an extended International Rexx Symposium. Created by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM UK Laboratories, Rexx stands for "Restructured Extended Executor Language." As a procedural language that was designed to be used as a macro language for other applications, Rexx is considered a precursor to modern scripting languages like TCL and Python.
That's not to say that Rexx is obsolete. Currently maintained projects include Regina, a Rexx interpreter that has been ported to most current OSs; Object Rexx, IBM's object-oriented version of Rexx, which is upwardly compatible with classic Rexx and provides interfaces to DB2, C, and C++ applications; and NetRexx, which compiles Rexx code into Java bytecode.
The Rexx Standard was adopted by ANSI in 1996, under the title "Information Technology—Programming Language REXX."
Scientists at North Carolina State University say their Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol (BIC-TCP) is thousands of times faster than DSL. Professors Injong Rhee and Khaled Harfoush, along with postdoctoral student Dr. Lisong Xu, presented a paper to the IEEE demonstrating transfer speeds approaching 10 Gbps—roughly 6000 times that of DSL. The problem with TCP, they claim, is that even when vast amounts of bandwidth are available on a network, TCP's scaling mechanism is too slow to ramp up to full consumption. On a 10-Gbps pipeline with 1500-byte packets, it would take a traditional TCP connection over an hour to go from half utilization to full utilization of the bandwidth.
BIC-TCP is much more aggressive about consuming all available bandwidth. The problem then becomes one of "playing fair"—making sure that BIC-TCP can coexist peacefully with old-fashioned TCP traffic. BIC-TCP includes two policies designed to make sure it consumes only its fair share of bandwidth: An "additive increase" strategy keeps BIC-TCP from gobbling up bandwidth too quickly, and a "binary search increase" technique forces it to scale back as the network approaches full capacity.
Rhee, Harfoush, and Xu's paper is published in the Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2004, and available at http://www4.ncsu.edu:8030/~lxu2/xu_INFOCOM_2004.pdf.
Twenty-five percent of U.S. IT jobs will be lost to offshoring by 2010, according to a new Gartner report. The research firm suggests that most of those jobs will go to India, but China and Russia are also strong contenders, with Malaysia and the Philippines benefiting as well. Gartner also says that European companies are following the outsourcing trend; by next year, the company expects one third of the major European businesses to move some of their IT operations offshore.
Roughly 500,000 of the 10.3 million technology jobs in the U.S. will move offshore this year alone, according to Gartner; but the company also predicts that political maneuverings combined with a few visible business failures—such as Dell's recently abandoned attempt to direct tech support requests to a call center in India—will produce a short-term backlash against outsourcing. However, Gartner predicts that the cost-cutting imperative will win out in the long term.
Other research firms concur that the offshoring trend will intensify over the next few years. Deloitte Research predicts that 5 percent of the telecom industry, and 2 million jobs in the financial sector, will move offshore by 2008, while Forrester Research expects the U.S. to lose 3.3 million jobs over the next 15 years.
Responding to charges that the Java Community Process (http://www.jcp.org/) is too closed and proprietary, Sun has implemented changes designed to encourage more public feedback during the JSR process. Version 2.6 of the JCP specifies that the initial review period for each JSR will be open to the public, and changes have been made to the process to encourage JSRs to enter review earlier in their development, with more issues open for feedback. Moreover, the Spec Leads on each JSR must create a "transparency plan," demonstrating how progress on the JSR will be communicated to the public. Steps are also being taken to allow representatives from smaller companies and individual members to become Spec Leads.
On the technical front, Version 2.6 of the JCP simplifies the process of creating reference implementations and Technical Compatibility Kits (required for every JSR).