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The Mainframe World Is Alive, Even For Those Under 40
willdavid writes with a link to a report by Jeff Gould at Interop Systems, about the definitely-still-around world of mainframe computing, from which he extracts:
"Last week I had the occasion to visit SHARE, the premier mainframe conference, which was held in San Jose just down the road from where I live.
Based on what I saw, there is one thing I can tell you for sure, and that is that Cobol is not dead. And neither is the mainframe.
When I mentioned to one of my friends that I had been to SHARE, he joked that it must have looked like an AARP convention. But this turned out not to be so. While there were certainly a few 60-somethings strolling around the halls, the under 40 generation was also well represented. What struck me the most was not the advanced age of the people but the relative youth of a lot of the software being discussed."
However, it's not all fountain of youth there, either. (Thanks, BDPrime.)
I spent 20+ years as a mainframe systems programmer. VM/VSE. Since then, I've learned Linux et. al. Man would I love to install Linux in a virtual machine. I'll bet it could fly.
The ol' yellow number 2 pencil is still around as well, as is shoe-making, wine-barrel repair, and of course the oldest tool in the book ... the tool.
Like humans all technologies find their place in the universe. Mainframes have their advantages, just would not want one sitting on my lap.
Can somebody please explain to me what the hell a "mainframe" is/was for and why it might be dead?
According to Wikipedia, Mainframes are a bit like supercomputers but better suited to tasks where there's a LOT of input/output data, but not a lot of calculation involved. Payrolls and such.
As far as I'm aware, those tasks still exist today, probably moreso than in the 1970's and 1980's, so why would the Mainframe be dying out? Have regular desktop/server processors advanced faster than demand for this data calculation and thus are now simply adequate or is this article just a bit of FUD to make 'ol timmy look like he's doing his job?
FYI: I'm most certainly under 40. In fact, I'm barely more than half that age, so excuse my ignorance on the subject; the only times I've really heard the term "mainframe" used is in Films, Games and cheap 80's TV shows. And slashdot.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I think you mean the "almost 40 generation". ;-)
I question the need of mainframes today. Now, they are great for running legacy programs (such as payroll, etc) but other than for backwards-compatibly, what advantage does a mainframe have compared to say, a server?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I work for a small government organization out of CA . Before I started here there was a large push from mainframes to standalone servers, we just bought a backup mainframe though because alot of our core infrastructure runs so smoothly on it. Then when Vmware grew there was a big push into ESX server for our physical servers. Now there is a large discussion on right now for purchasing a IBM Z9 and moving the rest of our servers to that.
the rebellious youth still does not GET OFF MY LAWN ?!
The government(USoA) probaly trusts IBM more than any other company because they've had their census being calculated on their mainframes for the past about 110 years and They are good for fast tasks economicly(cheper than server, yet faster than a PC or Laptop).
-- (this is a sig) My Computer Programming Forumhttp://www.programers.co.nr/
I actually just took a job in software development on z/OS (the new hip, backwards-hat wearing mainframe operating system). Aside from the impressive clustering capabilities, we've got a lot of new and exciting stuff. (I personally am a big fan of AT-TLS) It's true that the systems are old and the interfaces archaic and painful to use, but the level of configurability and reliability these things offer is staggering. We have a few customers with 100% uptimes in the 20-year range.
My school (Northern Illinois University) actually is one of the few left offering full mainframe tracks in their computer science department, although COBOL was the most painful programming experience of my life.
I'd bet that my meta-group of 50 or so people has a median age of about 33, and while it is still the old dinosaurs who know the most, the definition of "dinosaur" in my personal, 15 person group is around 50 years old.
Mainframe I'd Like to Fsck!
I'm 25 and i work on mainframes. There is actually areally big skills crunch in the mainframe world for exactly the reason this post was created. People thought that the main frame is dead, but its not. And so people/companies stopped hiring nd educating. Now there is a big ages gap, between like the 30 somethings and the 40 somethings.
The main reason mainframes are getting used, is server consolidation and Virtualisation. When you can run all of your linux boxes virtualised on one machine, that draws less power, and has automatic systems to manage shutting virtual machines down and bring them back up without any human intervention, that is a positive. Also the mainframes hyper visor has about 30 years of developement in it and is VERY efficient.
I was at the last winter conference in Orlando. I would guess the median age of the attendees was somewhere around 40. There's a LOT of Linux going on in the mainframe world (and COBOL has nothing to do with it). The biggest mistake IBM is currently making IMO is they've gotten into bed with Suse. There was a large group from Suse (Germany) in Orlando last February. Again IMO, Suse is an awful Linux distro. Yast is an abomination to work with on a daily basis. I think Redhat missed the boat there even though their Enterprise Linux distribution has support for System 390 hardware. Anyway, the point is that Linux is alive and well and thriving on big iron.
In addition, one of the primary draws of Orlando is Disney World and the other nearby theme parks. The (oops, almost wrote "Teh" there) February conference was held IN Disney at the Coronado Springs (stay in the Cabanas section if you ever go there, for any reason). SHARE members vote on where to hold their meetings. If a majority of those folks were over 60 I doubt they'd continue returning to Orlando every few years.
If you're not familiar with where and how mainframes are being used today then I suggest that YOU are the one who's out of touch with a significant sector of the computing world. Business' needs don't all revolve around iphones, ajax and youtube. Or payroll and accounting, for that matter.
I worked implementing a new billing system built specifically for a Telco to be used in all branches in Latin America. We used Cobol and a Java front-end.
I must say that you can't beat a mainframe processing millions of records.
Also one thing I didn't know back then is the use of pointers in Cobol.
I'm taking a Cobol class as we speak (literally... I'm in class)
Back in the day, it seems to me that Sperry or Boughs (sp?) mainframes used their own communications system, which would drive N terminals off of one wire.
In those days, PC's could emulate several terminals, one at a time. I was with a company that did just that. But the PC's of the day would be hard pressed to handle the incoming traffic from multiple terminals.
These days with TCP/IP as the protocal to rule them all, I expect decent server would handle the same traffic as a mainframe of 20 years ago. I don't know what todays are like, but I doubt they've let them languish.
The only reason that we still run a mainframe is because the management in place grow up around the mainframe and their underlings would be put out of work if we got rid of it. There is no reason why we couldn't be moving all of its relatively simple programs from the mainframe to a JAVA or .NET other then the fact that we have to wait for all of the current decision makers to retire or just die. The money we waste on hardware components or in turning on software features that are free in most other parts of the industry as well as the time it takes for old farts to get their head around distributed computing concepts is insane. While they spend days writing a program to do screen scraping to get an answer for management "How many people work here?" before eventually conceding they are unable to get the correct result only to have management come to me for a 2 minute powershell script to get the same information from AD. Yes we store things one way in the mainframe and again in AD or SQL Databases because the mainframe people are scared to try and cross the bridge and work with us. They freak out at anything new and worse they don't how the mainframe works. I read all about the Z/9 in an attempt to relate to those bums, I walked over to their side of the hall and in 15 minutes realized the operators don't care to learn how or why something is, they prefer to think of it as a black box. A big black box that takes up lots of room, lots of power and lots of cash. IBM mainframes exist because people who fear change are unable to get off them, not because there is anything fundamentally advantageous about them. I am planning their destruction, a VM that runs on Intel hardware but responds just like a mainframe, it is software that could be sold for nothing and then all the mainframe apps could be moved to it and IBM would be finished, dead toast. I think it is sad you have to pay and enter a code if you want to see more HD space, you cannot just plug in more SAN space, you have to buy it like you would for the Intel side and then pay IBM to let you see it. It is just a revolting way of doing IT. Mainframes are not innovative people, Mainframes are not sex or cool. Mainframes are anti-hacker, anti-explorer, anti-learning. I cannot stress how much they suck.
Respect the Constitution
I question the need of mainframes today. Now, they are great for running legacy programs (such as payroll, etc) but other than for backwards-compatibly, what advantage does a mainframe have compared to say, a server?
Send me your Resume... if getting payed is something you consider "legacy" then I'd be happy to negotiate some legacy pay terms.
LoL: captch is "weekend"
I'm an engineer at a natural gas utility with ~1 million customers and I still depend on our mainframe for the most accurate data. It is used daily by hundreds of people in our company.
A system I built just this year has to deal with data exported by a COBOL system (Copybook formatted data). It made me sad.
So there *is* a market for CobolScript++
Table-ized A.I.
In spite of what some people may believe, there a whole raft of things that mainframes do exceedingly well. In spite of its having "reinvented" itself, IBM is still a big iron company, and there's a reason for that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
More transactions run through the world's mainframes in an hour than run through Google in a day.
Advice: on VPS providers
There are still places for mainframes. With virtualization, that Linux server you think you are leasing space on may actually be a slice of a mainframe.
But COBOL? Sure, there's legacy COBOL code that needs to be maintained. But answer this question: Given a clean slate and a proposal to build a new application, how many people would choose COBOL? Anybody?
[Sound of crickets]
The main reason COBOL is still around, a perverse reason at that, is that it is more expensive to port an app. than it is to patch it just one more time. This isn't necessarily a fault of COBOL itself, but a by-product of a lot of old apps having been written in it before modern programming practices took hold. Well documented COBOL programs are easier and cheaper to maintain than crummy ones. The problem is: they are also easier to port. The code that gets left behind is the garbage that nobody understands (or even has complete source to anymore). The incremental patches needed to keep it running are cheaper in the short term. But they raise the economic barrier to diving into it to reverse engineer and move to a new platform.
Have gnu, will travel.
Basically the mainframe and the software it hosts really make the cash for most enterprises - and as a consequence any sensible management are loathe to replace it with something "newer", even if the systems in question are horrible spaghetti nightmares that no-one really understands, and maintaining them is a process of trial and error. Replacement would simply be "cleaning the inside of a tin can", no obvious shareholder value at all in change for changes sake.
Also technology vendors have finally woken up to the fact that the mainframe isnt a dinosaur on the verge of extinction - for example making CICS transactions web-service enabled has made COBOL code just as capable of participating in a service-oriented architecture as a set of AXIS hosted java classes.
The iSeries is superior to a mainframe. The smallest servers cost about $10,000 and are good for a small business (50 - 60 employees) while the largest iSeries system dwarfs the largest mainframe. Being able to run virtually any operating system (Linux, Unix [AIX], Windows Server and i5/OS [formerly OS/400]) is an advantage as well. Discussion of a mainframe should be limited to IBM systems running z/OS and equivalents.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
There's a *lot* of mainframes at IBM-Boulder. They were deploying brand new (at the time) z9's to replace old 360/390 and earlier zSeries. If I recall the conversation with the facility manager for that project, it was a 5 to 1 ratio of old systems to the z9's, most of which would be running Linux VM's for WebSphere deployments of various types.
z/OS is an upgrade of OS390, but yes - it has something called UNIX System Services, which is POSIX compliant but not as friendly as LINUX.
It's not that z/OS fights changes, exactly. Windows is crufty because it has to run MS-DOS programs from the eighties. z/OS has to run programs from the sixties, and do it with a high degree of reliability.
Disclosure: I am an IBM employee and the author of a mainframe book.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Remember this Slashdot article from April? Inside Intel's $20M Multicore Research Program It talks about Intel and Microsoft spending money to get developers to write programs for multi-core processors. Guess what? Mainframe programmers don't have to waste a second worrying about multi-core processors. Between the compilers, operating system and hardware, it's all taken care of. And a 64-processor system runs almost as fast as 64 separate single-processor systems, something IBM does better than anyone else.
Or how about this one? More Interest In Parallel Programming Outside the US? The article quotes James Reinders of Intel: "programming for multi-core is catching the imagination of programmers more in Japan, China, Russia, and India than in Europe and the United States." Again, this is a no-brainer. When you're programming on Intel, you specifically have to code for multiple processors. With big iron, it's built in and done efficiently, too.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Mod parent up - he's on the mark. There's a lot of stuff out there for which the source is gone, but it still does the job. Witness the State of California's payroll system we were discussing a bit back.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
people mostly focus on what is now consumer computing - home PCs, mobile phones, etc and forget a lot about workhorse technology and legacy systems.
and 40 is not old you bastards!
i am only 38 and started out with mainframes, punched cards and 7 day compilation times! (there were 150 of us living in a shoe box in middle of road etc etc)
Cobol is not dead
Can someone please have mercy and put it down for good? On the list of programming languages that really, really deserve to die, Cobol is way up top, even above visual basic.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My Dad was a mainframe operator when I was a kid. We're talking early 70's here, but he actually went all the way back to the IBM 1401. I've always had a fondness for the beasts, but no experience with them. Therein lie the problem. They're not at all commodity iron. Linux came into existence because commodity equipment became powerful enough to host such an OS. That cannot be said of z/OS. It simply doesn't run on anything I'm likely to find on sale at Fry's.
How does one gain employable skills with untouchable hardware? (Note: I don't consider Hercules to be a solution. Where's the software?)
As a matter of fact yes, we have a steam engine about 400 yards from where I am sitting right now. Here on ye olde farm, that's the next big project after the shavings mill is finished (the building is almost done, then install the equipment), putting up the steam engine-driven sawmill. Sorta neat that the scraps from the device-the slabs- will provide the fuel to run it. Pure sustainable and carbon neutral, not too shabby in todays world. Not that this is all that common today, but it isn't that uncommon either, steam is still in widespread use around the world here and there, and a lot of modern powerplants are steam, for that matter. I would imagine a ton of people reading here today and posting are doing that from coal burning steam powerplants. Of course those are turbines and not pistons, but it is still steam powered. The one here is a piston, looks sort of like an old locomotive.
Just thought I'd throw that in because maybe mainframes still have some practical uses.
Dinosaurs are extinct. IBM mainframes are more like alligators or crocodiles or sharks... mostly unchanged from, and still closely related to, it's dinosaur-era ancestors, but still alive because it's so effective at what it does. Like those animals, mainframes still are the undisputed ruler of their part of the kingdom.
When we're old... hell, when we're dead... we'll likely still have something like Slashdot, with people saying "the mainframe will die any day now".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"It is amazing how few people realize how much of our society still uses steam. You forgot geothermal, and some forms of solar plants."
Yup. Back when I was in the Navy, and I got to my first ship, a nuclear carrier, I thought nuclear power was this gee-whiz technology; if you don't know any better, you'd be inclined to think that "nuclear power" is turning those propellers... via protons, electrons, ray-guns, something sci-fi like that. When a nuke machinist mate explained how it really worked, I was kind of shocked. Basically, all we had was a steam engine, where the heat came from a reactor instead of coal. Same process, just a different heating fuel. Since those days two decades ago, I've become fascinated by just how much "advanced technology" that we use is really nothing more than barely improved methods our ancestors used. Jet engines? Nothing more than prop engines with the fans on the inside and some ignited fuel in the exhaust. Ultra-modern rifles like M-16A4's and AUG and the L86? Working from the same priciples as rifles hundreds of years old. Hell, car engines are noting but a hunk of iron with a series of explosions in them.
Technology most of the time is really nothing more than a machine that takes advantage of some principle of nature, and is often very, very simple at it's core.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I'm 24 and work in the banking and insurance industry. I spend most of my day looking at green text on a black screen and its not going to change anytime soon. We have two big hulking IBM zseries mainframes running batch jobs all night. We also have a good few servers running unisys, unicentre and techscheduler. I know by far I prefer OPC running on the mainframes, if something breaks its just a bit of bad code or input from inhouse. The hardware itself just never gives any trouble. The users don't care what is running on the background, we have csi's running against cics sessions so all they see is a nice little website with no clue what going on in the background and they shouldn't care anyway. Noones going to go to the expense of replacing all the cobol in the background as long as IBM keeps developing and supporting mainframes. They just work.
Disclaimer: I manage the DASD (disk based storage) for a mainframe (z10) environment.
We used to run a System 390 (think watercooled and took up 1/4 of our datacenter floorspace)
We then migrated to a S390 (aircooled, the first big black box) in about 1995
We then migrated to a z900 in 2002.
We've just completed migrating to a z10.
The applications continue to run on our brand new mainframe unmodified since the early 90s. Sure we've gone from Bus and Tag to ESCON to FICON (1Gb, 2Gb and now 4Gb). But the same applications are taking up significantly less power and a percentage of the mainframe than previously did.
In the early 90s, 486dx was king. How many applications that ran on 486dx DOS systems are currently running in a VMware VM that is running MSDOS 6.22?
Next time you swipe a credit card, and within a few seconds you're approved for your transaction, including determining if you're purchasing something within a common pattern of recent purchases. How many x86 boxes would you need to manage this?
Thank us mainframers.
Btw: I'm 36, run linux at home and on the mainframe.
"Hell, car engines are noting but a hunk of iron with a series of explosions in them."
So are most Pintos
And scaling up a single mainframe gets exponentially more expensive; the price buying more commodity servers stays constant, meaning a linear cost of scaling.
Why do IT people (I'm assuming) make such lousy economists?
Think about it for just half a second. If you want to double the transactional capacity ("throughput") of your mainframe, you turn on more processor(s) inside the same box. (It's almost always inside the same box. A single mainframe can have massive capacity.) And you only do so when the mainframe is 100% busy for sustained periods, which it gracefully handles by the way without choking. You have zero reconfiguration to do to hardware, software, or applications: it's "on tap." (In fact, the machine itself can provision itself nowadays.) This is very cheap: doubling costs way, way less than the initial allocation. Also, up to 32 machines can share memory and operate as one, so if you are unusual and hit a single machine limit, no problem. It's only past 32 that you resort to partioning, traditional clustering, etc. -- and you've still got a lot more weapons at your disposal.
If you want to double your actual transactional capacity with highly distributed servers, you...well, it may be impossible. You better hope you have highly segmented and partitioned work for those servers to do, and that it is extremely well balanced so that it fits into little server buckets. The burden is mostly or entirely on you, the application developer, to figure that out -- and that's horribly expensive. (Because the work never is balanced, you have to install a bunch of servers that don't run continuously at near 100% busy, so you get less real-world performance out of each processor anyway.) But at the very least you have to more than double the number of boxes. And you have a lot of knobs to twist and turn to get your work settled into its new, large number of machines, so you better hope you don't need that extra capacity NOW. (Can't process those credit card transactions during a spike in demand? Sorry about that -- I guess your credit card company will just have skip collecting those millions of dollars.) And you get to hire and pay some more people to install, configure, and maintain those extra boxes. You also get to find more space in your data center (if you have it), consume more than double the power (if you have it), and run the air conditioning more than twice as hard (if you can). You pay Oracle, Microsoft, et. al. at least double, too. (That's not how mainframe softwre works: there are strong price curves, not lines.)
Fortunately there are some IT-economists in the world who understand this stuff.
Actually, IBM has been putting a lot of POWER inspiration into its z10 processors, although they are not at all the same. That means a z10 core is clocked at 4.4 GHz. It also has hardware decimal floating point, something nothing else has (except POWER6), which speeds floating point calculations by about 3 orders of magnitude versus software.
These processors are state-of-the-art, even in raw computational performance terms.
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The C programming language was invented at Bell Labs starting in 1969 and was, in turn, closely based on the B programming language invented much earlier. COBOL and C are both 3rd generation languages and fairly described as approximate contemporaries of one another. There's nothing inherently "more modern" about a C program, and there are a lot of business programmers who would argue C is much less modern than COBOL, particularly COBOL 2002. They certainly can defend that argument in dollar value and lines of code: COBOL is much more pervasive than C for business application programming. C tends to be pervasive in systems (such as operating systems and middleware) programming. COBOL fans would also have a strong claim on higher developer productivity, particularly for maintenance. C is admittedly comparatively harder to maintain.
Ah, but you say that C has its object-oriented cousin, C++. There's Objected Oriented COBOL (OO COBOL) also, so no extra points there, sorry. And the Java, C#, and Smalltalk (!) programmers all think C++ is ancient and crusty anyway.
Of course all of these programming languages (and others) run on mainframes -- yes, even C#, since Mono runs on mainframes -- so I'm not sure what your point is.
Keep an eye on this IBM contests page. IBM should announce a "Master the Mainframe" contest for 2008. (There's one for Australia listed already.) Sign up and enjoy -- that's a great way to get hands-on z/OS learning experience.
A company I used to work for after being bought out implemented SAP because that was what the new owners used. What did 6 years and $300 million get them? Less features, and stock inquires went from ~2-3 seconds to about 10 - 30 seconds. Or several minutes if there was a problem. At the time, the mainframe was running about $3 million/year including support staff. Thanks to SAP, I now snicker every time I see car commercial touting "German engineering"
IBM once made a desktop mainframe, the PC/370. You could run VM on it. But that was in 1985. Since then, they've avoided offering low-end mainframe compatible machines. There's no reason IBM couldn't offer a 1U server that runs zOS for $2000 or so, but they don't. Remember, most of the software was designed to run on machines well under 100 MIPS.
As other people have pointed out, IBM-type mainframes do virtualization right. Virtualization on x86 is a hack and an afterthought, even with the newer hardware support. x86 virtualization with VT hardware creates a virtual machine that doesn't look like a bare machine with VT hardware; the virtual machine has no "ring -1". VMware actually patches code on the fly to work on older x86 hardware, which makes VMware very complex and vulnerable to bugs. The mainframe people don't have do that. On IBM-compatible mainframes, the virtual machine can look just like a real machine; you can run VM under VM under VM, and it works fine. About ten deep, it's too slow to be useful, but it works. This is good for stability.
For historical reasons, PCs have a primitive I/O architecture. The "bus" concept came from the days when the peripherals and the memory were really on the same bus. That hasn't been true for decades now, but the architecture is still set up as if it was, with peripherals seeing physical, rather than logical addresses. In mainframes, there's an I/O MMU, memory protection between the peripherals and memory, and there's a channel architecture which standardizes how peripherals talk to the computer. PCs are still stuck in the "each peripheral has its own device register layout" era, which is why we have so much trouble with drivers. The "device register" and "bus" concepts are so deeply embedded in PC thinking that FireWire, which is really a local area network, was designed to emulate a bus with device registers.
a dailywtf.com story in the making.
The Slack/390 site is at http://www.slack390.org/
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until you've coded Perl using ISPF/PDF
I don't know but I am 19 years old and if you'd see me in RL you would think that I am the last person on earth who would be interested in computing and I'd rather use the cmd than the GUI, even though I grew up without the cmd.
Here be signatures
Has anyone actually done this? For me, Google returns exactly one hit -- your comment. Nice googlewhack, but not exactly a valid citation.
(ooohh, you mean without the quotes!)
"Good news, everyone!"
I am doing some stuff with a tier 1 bank in GB. They are planning to move their main ledger off the mainframe, and all the other banks are watching very closely - their mainframes cost them a fortune, but none of them dare to be the first to move.
Needless to say, my account is not with this bank, and if it were I'd move it.
Elsewhere, we see large enterprises who keep their crown jewels on their mainframes, but with heaps of mid and high range unix systems between users and the MF to do most of the number crunching and keep unnecessary load off the MF. What interests me is seeing some of the MF technologies working into the high end Unix - IBM have put partitioning technology into the P-series stuff, and Fujitsu have transferred stuff (e.g. memory mirroring) into the Sun/Fujitsu M-series.
I came across this while working on a Mainframe 'Linux' project
It's a very fair assessment in my opinion
http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/entry/once_again_mainframe_linux_vs
Yes, I mean without the quotes.
Running lots of Linux instances in VMs is pretty mainstream.
I still miss having my Unix command line thought!
And I'm 34.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
All sound like mainframe operations to me! I think that the mainframe will be around forever! Long life IBM. Ronbo
Semper Fi Ronald Ausman USMC Ret
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Because that gives you fixed point arithmetic. BCDs allow floating point with a fixed number of decimal significant figures. The POWER6 and Z10 chips have a hardware decimal floating point unit for precisely this reason. Trivial case, consider 0.1. You can't represent this in any finite number of binary digits (just as you can't represent 1/3 in decimal). If you need a fixed number of decimal places of precision, you can use fixed-point arithmetic. If you need a fixed number of decimal significant figures, you can't use binary at all because 0.1 is expected to have the same precision as 1.0 but in reality 1.0 will be stored as 1x2^0 while 0.1 will be stored as 2^(-4) + 2^(-5) + 2^(-8) and so on until you run out of binary digits.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The latest trend to 'virtualization' is not much more than a trend back to mainframe structure and partitioned machines. What goes around eventually comes back. The pain to manage a room full of PC's that need to be 'bounced' on a regular basis, will eventually lead to consolidation. Call it what you will, but it will resemble a mainframe. Fault tolerant and stable systems are required. Aren't we all a bit tired of the faulty software and systems we have been putting up with for the past 20 years? Windows dummied down an entire industry. CTL/ALT/DEL is common. In the mainframe world, like one joked, re-booting is only scheduled periodically; usually in conjunction with hardware/software upgrades. Mainframes are the parents of the energizer bunny! Cheers, Skip Stein
Skip Stein Free Agent Management Systems Consulting, Inc. http://www.msc-inc.net www.linkedin.com/in/skipstein
As I understand it, COBOL development is very often done by 20-something year old guest workers, and offshore workers. These guys do not study COBOL in college, they learn it on the job.
If you were selected to go to mars, would you prefer:
1) The earth based systems were running on hard-core mainframes
2) The earth based systems were running on a Google style cluster of PC's
I know which I'd prefer.
Mainframes dead? They are the future of computing, in a sense. We spent 30 years severing the ties between the average user and "big iron", now we are desperately trying to reconnect everything. Facebook is not very far removed from the old RSTS accounts on my high school's PDP-11. We even had a login script set up that gave everyone's status ala Twitter, circa the late 80s (via finger or the RSTS equivelent).
You know you're talking "old" when you're refering to the "Under 40 Crowd" as the young'uns!
Mainframe jobs are being outsourced.
Linux jobs are being outsourced.
Results are the same :)
Mirror hard drives, yes. Not RAM.
You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
25 years ago, coding on a mainframe meant an indestructable keyboard, an ashtray, and a green screen 3278. Today working on a mainframe is a lite-weight keyboard, a smoke-free environment, and a 3278 terminal emulator running on windoze with internet access. Now you can do your coding and documentation using more powerful text editors (kedit beats xedit any day) and better word processors (word sucks but beats anything on the mainframe for wysiwyg) and you can surf the net and read slash.dot, ycomb, and devx while your jobs are running and goog for ibm error messages. I think the hybrid mainframe/pc interface is 100x better but there's still a long long way to go in both worlds.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
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I think it's the reverse. z/VM is a virtualization product. Under z/VM, you can run z/OS, the traditional mainframe OS. You can also run Linux/390 (either SLES or RHEL).
-- Support a free market in the field of government