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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."
Have you ever coded in COBOL? I have. It is EXTREMELY easy. It is quite close to English and is not at all cryptic. I believe nearly any coder with any experience and a language reference guide can read through code and make changes were needed. It has been almost 10 years since I last wrote a PIC statement, but I am quite confident that not only I, but just about anyone could do it. While I think the stories about pulling old programmers out of mothballs (retirement) is rather heartening, I think they are blowing the problem out of proportion. What these companies should be doing is hiring experienced and mature coders who can learn COBOL then send them to school.
What I find disheartening is the fact that businesses are no longer able to see education and training of employees as a worthwhile investment. (I know why they probably don't see it as worthwhile and it has a lot to do with employee loyalty, but I have to insist that the problem of loyalty didn't really happen until employers started treating their employees as disposable... they have no qualms with firing and laying off people at-will and yet they expect employees to be loyal? Get real!)
Last week on Top Gear, they raced a standard letter sent via standard post in the UK from the south of the UK to the far north of the UK and the letter won.
Total cost of the stamp? A fraction of a pound.
The US is very similar. A little slower due to the extreme distances mail has to route to, but, i'd wager on mail versus delivering it yourself anyday. Not only that it's *cheap*
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Yeah, but how many post offices are there? Doesn't each post office need one machine to talk to the main cluster?
And do people mail stuff 24 hours per day, or is there a rush hour? Where everything spikes 10x as high?
Do these servers have to do any of that optical character recognition crap to figure out where to mail stuff, or is that handled by whatever company designed that part of the system?
There's plenty of valid reasons for why they *might* need that many servers. It could even be preparations for Christmas. Maybe they keep half of them in reserve for when they're needed?
The FedEx system doesn't handle hand written letters though, does it? You have to do a shipping label for most (all?) packages, with a digital bar code. USPS runs some very powerful OCR systems; maybe they're making the transactions so expensive. Just a thought.
I paid more for a first class stamp from the Bundespost in Germany in 1976 than I pay in the U.S. today, and the service is better. The USPS is a bargain and it's better managed than people give it credit for.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
I have to agree. When I was 19 and interning in the accounting department at a chemical plant, I was asked to add a new field to one of their systems because I knew FORTRAN. I looked at their code, told them that it was not FORTRAN, but I thought I understood what was going on. They said fine. After a couple of hours of monkey-see-monkey-do I had made the change and verified that the field showed up on the screen that they wanted it on, saved the values as expected and showed up in the modified reports where they wanted. It was not until over 20 years later that I looked inside a COBOL book and realized that I had been unknowingly 'tainted'. It was that easy.