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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."
Your point?
There isn't anything wrong with COBOL for these kind of transactions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They moved their package tracking system to Linux? I wonder if, when you ask it where your shipment is, it will tell you to find it yourself in a condescending manner.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Submitted with the headline "Linux Penguin goes postal."
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.
No, and I'm sure there will be some people wanting to know if their mail is going to be delivered by Beowulf Cluster.
I, for one, welcome our mail-delivering, Beowulf Cluster overlords.
Now they can run a couple of Postfix servers and put themselves out of business!
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
If you're 30-something, you rely on email.
If you're in your 20s, you use IM
If you're 13 like me, it's all Twitter, all the time. Bonus: I have no need to receive packages because I shoplift everything.
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.
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!)
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.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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.
"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?"
factor in how much of your tax dollars when into that and then get back to us with a valid point....
Umm, the USPS is self-funded. None of your tax dollars go towards supporting their operation source
Well, look on the bright side...
Now we can say, with all confidence, that the world's largest mail server runs Linux
No sig for the moment.
Umm, the USPS is self-funded. None of your tax dollars go towards supporting their operation source
That's a little misleading - it hasn't always been that way, so a lot of the USPS infrastructure is tax-payer funded.
In addition, they come around every once and a while and ask for money from Congress - they are doing it this year and while I am hazy on the details, I believe they did something similar about a decade ago in order to fix funding problems with their pension system. Plus, they have a monopoly on letter delivery - that's why fedex costs so much more, they have to classify and price it as something other than a letter - so that's an indirect tax by government intervention to prevent a free market.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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?
Maybe their servers are in the union?
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
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.
While I'm no fan of rate hikes, getting any sort of physical entity across the country in a couple of days for under fifty cents is pretty much a modern miracle.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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.
There are good reasons why it is illegal to compete with the USPS. The Postal Service has requirements that other competitors do not. First, it has to offer first class service to all fifty states, even Alaska, Hawaii, and other unprofitable places. Second, it has to charge exactly the same rates domestically regardless of the distance. Third, you can mail an envelope you labeled by hand whereas UPS/FedEx would require you to barcode it.
If you allowed private enterprises to compete unchecked, they would cherrypick the most profitable routes (hubs, basically) and quickly bankrupt the Post Office. They'd also charge less than the Post Office on short routes that the Post Office would need to subsidize the longer routes. But if you had to regulate competitors to make sure they had the same disadvantages as the Post Office, what's the point?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/