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Year of the Mainframe? Not Quite, Say Linux Grids
OSS_ilation writes "IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe, but not so fast. At R.L. Polk and Co., one of the oldest automobile analytics firms in the U.S., an aging mainframe couldn't cut it, so the IT staff looked elsewhere. Their search led to a grid computing environment — more specifically, a grid computing environment running Linux on more than 120 Dell servers. The mainframe's still there, apparently, but after an internal comparison showed the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs, Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more medial tasks."
Medial, as in Median as in Average, does not mean average as in "day to day", it means the middle of a set of numbers. 10, 20, 30, 8, 45, 99, 10 - the median here is "8". How do you define "medial tasks"? The ones that sit in the middle of the work log?
The grammar police are right here. The word the guy was looking for was "menial". I don't agree with his derogatory comments on phrases like "safe haven" (haven has had it's definition expanded to mean other things than safety, so it's a distinguisher) but I do fully agree with these people who say that things are "medial tasks", "for all intensive purposes" and even stupid mistakes like "I could of done it better" which makes no sense (could've though if they had passed English), and crazy mispronounciations of cute British phrases bastardised by Americans..
They probably got the performance benefits by effectively sidelining a bunch of mainframe luddites who haven't moved their skill sets forwards since 1985.
Seriously, the problem with mainframes has always been the mindset of the MF development staff, who resist change no matter what.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.