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O'Reilly On The Importance Of The Mainframe Heritage

Posted by timothy on from the tradition-of-heritage dept.

theodp writes "After exchanging e-mail with mainframe software pioneer Mario Morino, Tim O'Reilly writes 'It's important for the open source community to look more at the software heritage of the mainframe era.' O'Reilly might want to take a look at how Marino's own MICS software has been used since the 80's to automatically charge IBM mainframe users for printed material that could be ordered from PC clients with a single action by using billing and shipping information that was previously stored on a Mainframe server. The whole process might seem oddly familiar."

6 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. LOUD SUCKING SOUND EMANATING FROM BUFFALO, NY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    DAILY REMINDER: Hillary Clinton doesn't just stand idly by...she actively works to offshore American High-Tech!

    1. Re:LOUD SUCKING SOUND EMANATING FROM BUFFALO, NY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
      Piss off. Hillary's hot!

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  2. NEXT HARRY POTTER SPOILER by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Sirius does a Gandalf.

  3. YOU FAIL IT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
  4. Microsoft Windows XP Edition(TM) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Microsoft Windows XP Edition(TM), the newest product from Microsoft(TM), offers a variety of robust features. You'll wonder how you ever got along without them! For starters, Microsoft Windows XP Edition(TM) is exactly the windowless garbage you've always made it out to be! But that's not all! Microsoft Windows XP Edition(TM) also has windows all over the place! With Microsoft Windows XP Edition(TM), you never know what the hell you're doing because of all of the damn windows everywhere! ...well, at least it's better than Linux, fags.

  5. A modest proposal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    In the face of the ever worsening signal-to-noise ratio on Slashdot, I propose a following solution:

    1) The bulk of the noise is by posted by the anonymous cowards. Eliminate anonymity.

    2) In order to prevent people from creating multiple trolling accounts and accompanying karma-whore accounts (for moderating up the trolls), tie every account to a one specific IP.

    These two solutions will still not prevent a technologically adept troll, a huge minority as they might be, from spoiling the serious discussions on Slashdot. To further improve the anti-troll tactics, a more drastic measure has to be taken:

    3) Each individual has his/her personal style of writing. In fact, there exist algorithms and software for identifying an anonymous author by using his previous, non-anonymous posts. In the arts such algorithms have been used with great success to determine fake works by "Shakespeare" or some other famous author. By collecting the posts of well-known trolls into a database, we can cross correlate both anonymous and fake IP accounts with each specific troll. This enables the site administrators to take legal action against these die-hard career trolls.

    I have mailed this proposal to Rob Malda and, to my great pleasure, I already received reply that promised to take these measures under serious consideration. He did say, however, that more positive feedback from the subscriber userbase is required and I should make my proposal public. So, if you feel that it is imperative to reduce the noise on Slashdot, please drop Rob a mail telling how you feel about my proposal.