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US Postal Service Moves To GNU/Linux
twitter writes "The US Postal Service has moved its Cobol package tracking software to HP machines running GNU/Linux. 1,300 servers handle 40 million transactions a day and cost less than the last system, which was based on a Sun Solaris environment." The migration took a year. The USPS isn't spelling how big the savings are, except that they are "significant."
that's pretty damn good time to move a system.
Now f they could drop tues, thurs and sat mail service they would save a bundle.
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Your point?
There isn't anything wrong with COBOL for these kind of transactions.
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What are you whining about? The cost of postage has historically risen at a lower rate than inflation. Meaning that stamps do cost less, just not in face value.
Yeah it's totally insane that we are charged a whole $0.44 to reliably send any piece of paper over 3,000 miles to it's precise recipient in a matter of days. This is the kind of technological marvel that future societies will be looking back in awe of.
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I'm sure I could get a dramatic speed improvement running Apple II 6502 code on an emulator on a Mac Pro simply because the emulator can run faster than the original hardware.
Given that it took 1400 Linux boxes to handle the load, I'd say your post is, at best ignorant, at worst, a blatant troll.
a) Just because it's COBOL, doesn't mean it was running on crappy hardware.
b) COBOL is far from dead, in that many applications running today are written in it. Believe it or not, it makes more sense to continue to run that old code than to rewrite from scratch in the latest shiny because they already know *it works*.
You're really complaining about $.50 for the level of service you get from the USPS? For that price, you can send a standard letter anywhere in the US (including the non-continental US) usually arriving in less than 5 days with a loss rate of virtually zero. They deliver mail to (nearly) every address in the US 6 days a week, and will even come to check for outgoing if you don't have any incoming. They even manage to deliver when the roads are absolute shit and no one in their right mind would be out and about.
All for a price that has actually been decreasing over the years if you take into account inflation, let alone the increases in gas prices that have occurred over the last 10 years. Personally, I think that's pretty damn good and wouldn't complain if they raised the price to an even dollar, it would still be under priced for the service they provide.
Not only that, I just checked and according to fedex it costs $7.39 to mail that same letter from coast to coast for their cheapest option. That's only what, nearly 17 times more expensive? Travel times are 5 days compared to about 7 for the USPS, not much faster. I'm sure the libertarians will chime in that they could do that much cheaper if the (subsidized) USPS weren't in the way, but I suspect it would be like the way that CD prices went down after the technology became established, or the way that cable and telephone prices went down after the markets were deregulated (i.e., they didn't). Bottom line is that the USPS is an astonishingly inexpensive with a low failure rate for the price. It's a great service that our government provides. While I'm glad that they are saving this money, I'd rather that they put it to work on avoiding reductions in service or balancing their budget rather than reducing the price of postage.
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That was uncalled for. A Linux user will ask you very politely if the package bar code was code128 or some other zebra coding technology. Someone will pipe in that back in his day, there were no barcoded ZIPs, just hand written numbers written in brown crayon on a cardboard box. Someone else will chime in that back in his day, you were lucky if it had the country on it, much less a ZIP code. Someone else will tell you that UPS uses a system called PLD and you need to look at the 1Z label code and direct you to ups.com. Someone will call that person an idiot and say that USPS is not UPS. Someone else will ask, "Why are you trying to track your package? Tell us what you really want to accomplish."
(I kid, I kid. I'm a Linux user through and through.)
Wait... fedex costs more because USPS has a monopoly? Lets see... what other monopolies are out there to compare to this statement. Nope, does not compute.
Some people do not like the USPS because it represents an actual successful arm of the government. You want to know why they ask congress for money? Its to get back what Congress ultimately takes from the USPS because its the only thing besides taxes that makes money in our government system.
I say YAY USPS, one of the few "companies" where you dont have to worry about your pension, retirement, or jobs.
Let me use a "scare word" for those of you whom are still stuck in the 1980s. "Socialism" can work.
Sure, so long as you never need to make any changes to the code. The surviving COBOL coders have gone back into comfortable retirement with the money they made fixing Y2K. So they've moved from old iron to a modern operating system; they could still reap even more benefits by recoding for modern languages and coding practices.
But then, this is the US Postal Service. COBOL's probably fast enough for the task.
So you're saying that COBOL is so hideously difficult, so byzantine, so labyrinthine in nature that no one could possibly learn it now? That programmers educated today have no possibility of understanding a language that was designed some decades ago? You realize that C is 30 years old now, right?
This sort of fear mongering through ignorance is getting stale. COBOL is just another language, and one that happened to be designed for ease of expression for less-than-stellar programmers. Legions of students have learned enough C over a weekend to code up the examples in K&R, so I'm actually quite confident that professional programmers can, without any prior experience in COBOL, learn the language, even become proficient in it, in a brief enough time to make modifications to existing code bases.
Look, we're talking about learning a computer language and modifying or maintaining code, not learning Elizabethan English well enough to write a new Shakespeare play that can pass off as an original. It just isn't that hard.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
COBOL is not "slow". It is a compiled language. Sure the source code may involve a lot more lines and words than the equivalent C, but it likely compiles down to roughly the same size.
Since the article mentioned that the code was ported I'm assuming it was natively compiled and not just running under an emulator.
I don't mean to strawman your argument, but: Do you really want your government taxing itself? Because that's a layer of absurdity that I, for one, am completely unwilling to pay for the administration of.
Kid-proof tablet..
Tell us what you really want to accomplish
As an aside, it seems that everyone I ask that to is really offended by it, even when I get an answer out of them and am able to hand them a 30 second solution from package bar to replace the nightmare of a kludge they're asking for help with using package foo. Even at the more "advanced" level, I've been called an idiot for "not knowing" how to get bash to print the third column of a file when either awk or cut is exactly what they want (protip: bash is glue for sticking these other programs together).
Or to troll the crap out of people. Trolling leads to page views and more comments.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I suspect use of the term is more likely to provoke diatribes than to avoid them.
"Socialism" can work
So, the USPS is self-funded, relying on delivering services in highly competitive market in order to pay their bills. They have a variety of positions to fill, and offer fairly modest salaries combined with fairly aggressive benefits packages in order to attract and retain workers who could just go somewhere else.
How is this socialism? Other than, obviously, the government controlling the prices they're allowed to charge, and thus limiting their ability to more gracefully meet certain costs. So it's not socialism - it's a business running in a market, and managing to hang on by its teeth despite an especially burdensome regulatory millstone around its neck.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Sure, so long as you never need to make any changes to the code. The surviving COBOL coders have gone back into comfortable retirement with the money they made fixing Y2K. So they've moved from old iron to a modern operating system; they could still reap even more benefits by recoding for modern languages and coding practices.
There's seldom a benefit to be found in taking millions of lines of code that are working exactly as needed and re-writing them from then ground up simply because the language isn't snazzy enough. There's a large number of COBOL programmers still in the work force; even if they all charged premium if the system is maintainable it will be still be cheaper than writing a new one. Yours is the same kind of thinking that leads people into buying new cars every few years -- "Well, it will cost less than repairing the old one when it breaks down". In both cases, it is a very rare exception for the most expensive available alternative to cost less.
But then, this is the US Postal Service. COBOL's probably fast enough for the task.
COBOL compiles down to executable machine code (presumably ELF) -- language isn't going to affect performance here.
Sure, and how OS's use the Linux kernel but not the GNU toolchain? And how many of those (any?) are enterprise offerings? So could it well be BSD/Linux? Thanks for this useless tangent.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Actually I've read Fortran was faster than C back in the 80's because it did not suffer from pointer aliasing and the like. Basically it was a simpler language and thus easier for a simple compiler to turn into efficient assembler. I've also see a surreal page where Basic code was translated into SSE assembler. Obviously the mapping from Basic arithmetic to SSE is pretty trivial to do. That's probably true of Fortran or Cobol but it defintely isn't true of C or C++ once the compiler has to worry about pointer aliasing. A lot of C programmers tend to concentrate on writing easy to read code and let the compiler turn it into something efficient too, it's a very different mindset from people who told the compiler exactly what sequence of operations they wanted because optimizers weren't practical.
That being said if you look at the output of a modern C compiler it is very very good. Still back in the days when more primitive languages were popular, I think that was not the case.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Socialism, money and competition are not mutually exclusive.
Maaaan... You in most cases rant about a US corrupted image of socialism.
Because it provides a social necessity.
If the service was not socialized then small communicates will either not be served or would have to pay more to send (or even receive) a letter.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's seldom a benefit to be found in taking millions of lines of code that are working exactly as needed and re-writing them from then ground up simply because the language isn't snazzy enough.
In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.. Programmers often like to "fix" things (i.e., rewrite them) and you're absolutely right: the best management decision is often to leave it alone.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I don't mean to strawman your argument, but: Do you really want your government taxing itself? Because that's a layer of absurdity that I, for one, am completely unwilling to pay for the administration of.
Well, presumably all those millions of government employees file income tax returns.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.