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The Eternal Mainframe
theodp writes "In his latest essay, Rudolf Winestock argues that the movement to replace the mainframe has re-invented the mainframe, as well as the reason why people wanted to get rid of mainframes in the first place. 'The modern server farm looks like those first computer rooms,' Winestock writes. 'Row after row of metal frames (excuse me—racks) bearing computer modules in a room that's packed with cables and extra ventilation ducts. Just like mainframes. Server farms have multiple redundant CPUs, memory, disks, and network connections. Just like mainframes. The rooms that house these server farms are typically not open even to many people in the same organization, but only to dedicated operations teams. Just like mainframes.' And with terabytes of data sitting in servers begging to be monetized by business and scrutinized by government, Winestock warns that the New Boss is worse than the Old Boss. So, what does this mean for the future of fully functional, general purpose, standalone computers? 'Offline computer use frustrates the march of progress,' says Winestock. 'If offline use becomes uncommon, then the great and the good will ask: "What are [you] hiding? Are you making kiddie porn? Laundering money? Spreading hate? Do you want the terrorists to win?"'"
Wow, so deep. Computer is the Internet, Internet is the computer.
Mainframes are specialised equipment, server farms are almost generic computers with redundancies. The real difference is the cost. Today's server farms would cost many factors more if they were built with specialised mainframes, there is no other real difference, they are really there for the same purpose.
You can't handle the truth.
Just like the mainframe.
It's the usual argument. If you have something to hide, you're probably a bad person.
That "may" be true if the authorities are not abusing their power, or trying to gain more power than the people want them to have.
As soon as you have even a potentially oppressive regime, privacy becomes essential.
He is wrong, on pretty much every level, even the visual.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Ok. First of all, I said [xxxxxxx] Krist. Second, I'm proud of my Willy and I want everybody to know. Not only that. I want to show it on television and I don't want Krist extremists or parent extremists to censor me. I have a Willy, You don't respect my privacy, then I have to confront you with my Willy. Simple as that.
Also I want you to know I went to the toilet. I want you to know that too. I mean, no. I don't want you to know, but I did it and you said you wanted to know.
You see. That privacy thing. It has a reason. There is A LOT I did do that I don't want you to know. Just because it's not of your fucking business.
And now I'm going to [xxxxxxxxxx].
Privacy is terrorism.
One of the points I found the most insightful is that the geeks don't like to take the time to make things work anymore. I remember a colleague saying that there was no better way to kill a hobby than to get it as a job.
The days of tweaking the OS and hardware as a common practice among the majority of geeks is gone. The field is too broad now. You have to pick which stack, and where on it, you want to hack.
Ok, I give up, why you?
..that have very big amounts of data, complex data structures and can't afford any errors (especially data corruption) caused by hardware limitations.
Banks is an example.
Mundus Vult Decipi
We all need a good look at it. Does it look ridiculous to everybody? Good. Now let's move on to things that might actually happen.
Server farms will offload much of the computer power and most people will use lightweight, low power portable devices? Yeah probably.
Server farms will get bigger and more powerful? Definitely.
That model will fit for every business and organization and individual user? No way. Won't happen.
Please keep in mind that my 3 year old Android phone is more powerful than any PC was in 1990.
Today's datacenters where of course not needed in the past as they are now.
The quantity, and the individual size, of the data transmitted is growing larger with new users and media.
Are the majority of YouTube videos necessary?
I suppose if you stand back from about 3 miles and never bother to understand the underlying architcture and how it scales while ignoring the flexibility of server farms as opposed to very much a box that mainframes put you in (with very minor flexibility) then yeah -- they're exactly the same.
It's easy to draw parallels between general functionality, but you have to reduce it to "a series of tubes" type descriptions to get there.
Are you making kiddie porn? Laundering money? Spreading hate? Do you want the terrorists to win?
Because I don't want every goddamn marketer out there trying to sell me their shit. I don't want to have to deal some horseshit like this because businesses feel entitled to stick their noses into my business.
No, you are NOT offering me "convenience" - you are prying.
As it is, I CAN create a dossier that would make an East German Stazi agent cream his pants by just hitting the credit bureaus, Google, ChoicePoint, ISPs, Cell phone companies, and every other business entity out there that has this need to collect consumer data.
Something to hide?
Well, just ask the atheist, gay or lesbian, peace protestor or Muslim who has their identity known what happens to them.
The uncle of the Marathon bombers who had his face plastered all over the place is headed for some serious shit. You just know that folks are going to vandalize his house, harass him, and give him a lot of shit just because he's related to those kids and a Muslim.
People are hateful, ignorant, cruel, shallow and just stupid - until proven otherwise. Therefore, it is imperative to keep one's secrets.
How do you say "The cow's out of the barn," in Latin? There are already too many computers around. Yes, more people are using "the cloud" with mobile, networked devices, there will always be valid reasons for using standalone machines. It's a little soon to start worrying about the gubmint coming to take away our computers. Other than that, it's an interesting take on the development of computing over the years.
There was a time when we expected computers to become so easy that everyone could use them. We've given up that dream. Now it's all "managed" again. There are admins and users again, and the admins (or their bosses) decide what the users can do and how. Computing is no longer done with a device you own but a service that someone else provides to you. Yes, you still pay for a device, but that's merely an advanced terminal.
I blame the users. If they bothered to learn even a little about how things work, they wouldn't give up their freedom so easily. The complacency is staggering. Even people whose job depends on being able to efficiently work with computers often perform repetitive tasks manually instead of learning how to use more of the program they're working with. Of course, with users like that, who refuse to learn how to use what capabilities are already at their disposal, there's a market for the simplest automation performed as a service.
the most important of the world's business has always been done by mainframes, most of your money is information in a network of mainframes.
Clearly this noobin has never done a day of sysadmin in his life on either mainframe or non-mainframe systems. Why are we listening to this guy anyways?
Because otherwise why's all the comments up here like "Yeah, it walks and quacks like a duck, but does it have a bill like a duck? Nope! Author's an idiot. Also, why the duck are we discussing waterfowl, mainframe's a computer, you silly person!"?
The point is, instead of making data and programs decentralized and under users' control, we're back to the Cult of Mainframe, with black boxes behind locked doors keeping and processing our data in the ways known only to the priesthood.
The fuck's with all the "Mainframes didn't even look like this!!111" comments?
Not networked, networked, not, networked, on and on. Each cycle begets a new cycle. Now it's just called "the cloud."
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Mainframes are FAR more flexible than the x86 server farms.
They are also less expensive for the same amount of computation - above a minimum amount. A small IBM z system can run more VMs than the equivalently expensed X86 farm, with dynamic load balancing as well.
The general thinking of comparing the two is that both systems are the ones running running the show, storing the data, and being accessed by dumb-clients that only serve as terminals.
Obviously server farms and mainframes are very different from a back-end technology standpoint, but from a viewpoint of the user they are identical in every single way. You log in with your user specific credentials, you do your work using the server's processing power and save your work in the servers storage medium. Your client likely is even set to network boot from a server supplied boot image via PXE. If your local machine is nothing but a terminal to access the backend machine, then you are for all practical purposes operating in a mainframe environment.
No shit. Every time I heard someone saying he plans on building a private cloud on his computer, I ask myself why he just doesn't buy a mainframe.
I mean, not every server farm or server room can be compared to a mainframe. But these days, when companies have VMWare clusters and what-ever clouds, it is impossible not to draw a comparison since, functionally (and sometimes structuraly) they are pretty much like mainframes.
morcego
When you pry it from my fat, greasy hands.
The laughable thing is, the mainframe occupying the whole room is less powerful than one blade of that server rack. The processor is so laughable IBM won't let you benchmark it against an PC, and the storage subsystem is just a bunch of stock PC disk parts.
MAN THEY ARE SLOW!
Someone in the industry realizes that computing is really iterative and what's old will eventually become new again.
I believe the origin of this periodic realizations is as follows:
(I intentionally used "jargon" instead of "technique", since the need to create a new term doesn't seem proportional to the actual change in implementation)
1. A college fresh out get hired at a I.T. farm armed with a new set of computing jargon that impresses human resources.
2. He applies his version of how things should work to the current workplace and things progress well.
3. Over the next few years the department grows and new hires are brought in to help meet demand.
4. The new hires start preaching their version of computing jargon that was created by academia to publish a paper.
5. The once college fresh out comes to the realization that the new computing jargon are practically synonyms for the previous generation's jargon.
6. The new hire proceeds to step #1 and the circle of I.T. begins anew.
The neat thing about this iterative process is that the difference in implementation of the jargon between generation N and N - 1 are small enough to not seem that much different. However the difference in implementation of jargon between the current generation and the people hired 5 to 10 cycles prior can and usually are dramatic.
I entered the field when distributive computing and storage with localized networks were being created and evangelized. Scientific computing had to be performed at universities and anything serious had to be done by renting time on a supercomputer connected via the internet. Medium sized businesses had to rent time on mainframes to perform payroll or hired firms specializing in payroll which still exists today. Small businesses had no access to computing until personal computers and single user applications came into use. Because of the newer businesses being more familiar with distributive computing than centralized computing, they scaled personal computers up to meet the new demands. This ability to scale computing power up allows the company to grow the computing infrastructure as needed. This was not possible with mainframes. Eventually the company grows to the point that it needs to have their data and application centralized and use data centers to handle the load.
If you step back and look solely at the physical structure (e.g. data center, clerical offices) it resembles the centralized computing from 50 years ago. However if you look at the actual data and computing flow you'll see that its a hybrid of central and distributed computing that was not imagined in the past 20 years. It's more fractal in nature. Your computing at any given moment can be centralized to your terminal, your home, your office, your department, your company, or even global (e.g. Google, Github).
I declare this to be known as BTE's law. ;)
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Almost all of his examples are a complete non-sequitor. How does one launder money, spread hate, help the terrorists, etc. with a computer that is NOT connected? Likewise, does this mean that all of the people who owned computers in the pre-Internet era only owned them to do these things? And none of this follows from comparing mainframes and server farms or even has anything to do with mainframes and server farms.
Sounds more like he has a guilty conscience about doing these same things from his not connected computer and should be hauled before some secret tribunal to answer for his crimes (Oh, and just denying that this is how he came to his conclusions is just further proof that he is a lying to conceal his guilt).
How's that for a little non-sequitor inuendo?
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
HTML5 interfaces will always suck just the way javascript HTML 4 interfaces suck- you can't take a server hit every time you want to react to a mouse movement or process a keystroke.
For a large number of apps, this actually doesn't matter but for people who really do creative work with their computer , the UI and a very large amount of processing of local data will have to take place on the local machine.
I suppose their are entities out there actively plotting the end of personal general purpose PC but to say that they somehow control what direction the world will go is paranoiac to the well-known Kaczinsky Limit.
Benefit, productivity, competitive advantage, goodness, fun whatever gets maximized when the cloud/server/web / whatever is utilized for what its good for - communication and distribution of content and the processing of truly HUGE data sets or data from a very large number of data sources. .
On that last point, even there the necessity of the cloud is challenged by distributed applications of the SETI type.
I think Adam Smith pretty well had this down with the idea of relative competitive advantage. Servers should not try to do UIs or make believable promises WRT to the security needed for very critical data. Local PCs are easily connected to a wide range of other-generated / other processed data via the web and servers.
Top of the range IBM kit, the multi-million dollar kit is 17802 MIPS, about 1/5th the performance of an i7 based server.
http://www.computermerchants.com.au/zseries-mips-chart-update-july-2008/#.UXP6LcpdkcE
IBM sales men will tell you all manner of lies, but they won't let you benchmark their mainframes, against PCs and they don't for a damn good reason.
The disk subsystem is assembled from PC parts (IBM sold their disk division), the processor is a slow IBM model (IBM haven't been a threat to Intel for ages), and when pressed on performance, the salemen usually pretend the MIPS are more powerful ops, more secure ops, as if multiplying integers is somehow special on mainframes.
It's pitiful.
You talk into your phone and SIRI does a voice analysis, and searches larges data sets for an answer. Watson had to be fed the question as text on Jeopardy, because there was enough processing power to do voice to text.
If offline use becomes uncommon, then the great and the good will ask: "What are [you] hiding? Are you making kiddie porn? Laundering money? Spreading hate? Do you want the terrorists to win?"
Yes, all of those. Brainwashed scantly dressed girl scout sleeper cells. Their leader, the cookie master, commands them to rain door-to-door jihad on the snackers.
Now that I've exposed my knowledge of them, it's only a matter of time until I'm cooked. My only hope is that the New Boss will reach me first and be merciful!
'Offline computer use frustrates the march of progress,' says Winestock. 'If offline use becomes uncommon, then the great and the good will ask: "What are [you] hiding? Are you making kiddie porn? Laundering money? Spreading hate? Do you want the terrorists to win?"'"
Really? I think the Tea Party has found their next candidate for president. Now if only he had a personal life like the "Newt."
IT needs some kind of an apprenticeship system or at lest more tech schools where you learn from people who have done real work and not so much people working on there academia papers and you have more hands on learning as well.
Mr. Winestock's parallels between server farms and mainframes are reasonable, if unoriginal, and the same can be said for his concerns over privacy and social control. His attempt to claim the former as the causative agent for the latter, however, goes wrong right from the start: 'Mini/micro-computers were supposed to kill the mainframe.'
Not so. They came about firstly because technological advances made them possible, and also because some smart people realized that they would allow us to do things that, in practice, we could not do before. The pioneers of these developments were not interested in reproducing, much less replacing, mainframe computing.
Turing showed us that the form of our hardware doesn't dictate what we can do with it. To understand the arc of privacy erosion and social control, we need to examine social history and human nature, not the artifacts of technological advance.
So to win I too must become a terrorist.
Now for some snazzy mirrorshades. I already have the mullet.
Download caps / lag / 3g, 4g, LTE roaming costs will make it very hard to go all back end with your system being just a dumb terminal.
And with roaming cost that can hit $10-$20+ a meg in Canada (higher in other places). A nice remote desktop at least 1024X786 can burn data fast.
Somehow it needs to act as an aid to getting laid instead of a barrier. If we can figure out how to do that the problem will fix itself.
"Google, for example, has pretty full-featured job control layered on top of their server farm."
Google has never cared about errors.
Who gives a damn if what absolutely positively SHOULD have been the very first result is instead the fourth or the fifth result, or if it appears on page two of the results, or if it somehow magically disappears into the ether because commodity server #XJ42 in rack #43HB on aisle #521JJ in column #447F in building #QQZ1 in server farm #H61M happened to have crashed just as the query response was being assembled?
Especially if the query involved "Justin Bieber", "Lindsay Lohan", or "Natalie Portman Hot Grits".
IBM, on the other hand, has always cared about errors - has always, in fact, been FANATICAL about errors.
If you send a query to an IBM mainframe, then you're expecting umpteen-sigmas of confidence that the mainframe will actually be up and running, that you'll get an actual response, and that the response, when it finally arrives, will be 100% CORRECT.
Especially when the response is something along the lines of "DANGER: CHILD KNOWN TO BE ALLERGIC TO AMOXICILLIN. ALLERGIC RESPONSE INCLUDES ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK. PRESCRIPTION REQUEST THEREFORE INVALID AND REFUSED."
But CS is not IT and people who do academic papers are type of people in IT who have been in academic for most of there life and have little to no hands on IT work.
And we don't need more people in IT loaded with academic smarts but little IT book smarts / Little hands on smarts.
If anyone has been paying attention, its quite clear that lots of new "tech" are just reiteration of old 70's & 80's unix functionality in the "core" level ..
This guys knows nothing about actual mainframes. His long, rambling post may be interesting for other reasons.
I'm not so sure that is entirely true. I do not believe data centers (at least the good ones) are complete void of CS people. IT people who maintain an infrastructure do not work inside a vacuum. They are either influenced directly by CS people within their organization, or indirectly by the computing appliances or applications that they maintain.
I'm afraid a lot of low level techs become scape goats for high level techs that should have known better. I thought we already have tech schools that train low level IT workers. The ones at my place of work have trained at these institutions and are continuously trained through vendor provided seminars and in-house training. I don't think the shortage is entirely from the lack of talent or pre-occupational training. I think a lot of problems can be attributed by the lack of continuing training while employed. I know of several companies which hired techs to do nothing but keep the network up. They don't provide training and their requirement to run a legacy network running a custom built application several years old are satisfied. However when compared to their colleagues that work elsewhere they begin to look like IT lay people who are ill-equipped to handle modern applications or security requirements.
Most these businesses keep their in-house IT far way from the internet except for the email that is provided by an off-site service. Then one day a middle manager will go to a retreat, learn how they can improve their business by integrating with social media and whatever other buzzwords are offered, returns and tells their "sheltered" IT department to make it so. This is where the news making blunders are made...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
That statement is nothing shy of a Full Monty disgrace to free enterprise. Nobody ever has a nice thing to say about government, and this leads to the comforting illusion that we can devolve the beast of government (for the most part) to the free market where much of government's function would be better served, until some high and mighty idiot in the private sector comes around saying something like this and bursting everyone's happy bubble. Well done, Eric, running the graduated approach to managing one's personal boundaries straight to the tip heap, for the betterment of all society. Yes, this is exactly what government by quarterly report will look like when that fine day finally comes. Book it.
There has never in history been a society that has strayed so far into the glass fishbowl: in a closed community where no behaviour goes unnoticed, living quiet lives of desperation is the order of business. Woe to anyone who dares to shirk this shackle (a theme of the very difficult movie Breaking the Waves). And yet, this too is not enough?
What a pompous ass to make such a remark. So close, and yet so far. Google could have been so much worse. For a long stretch, their sane and (relatively) moral decisions far outweighed their missteps. Then they caught wind of Facebook eating their lunch, and now they seem hell-bent on making up for lost time. I can barely express my disgust at the implications of that remark.
There's that old joke about Gates declared darkness "the new standard". Now we have Schmidt declaring the naked light bulb in the holding cells of the Lubyanka as the new, unceasing dawn.
I was reading about circadian phase entrainment the other day. In the hamster model (which I say generically, forgetting the precise rodent flavour) they use constant dim light to establish the free running state (which is actually the free running state in constant dim light). They don't use constant bright light, because constant bright light causes the cells of the suprachiasmatic nucleus to lose synchrony (effectively destroying the body's internal circadian signal altogether). In the torture setting--if that is in fact the purpose of the unblinking naked light bulb hanging above arm's reach in every cell--loss of circadian rhythm would have an effect on sleep that would promptly dissolve and disintegrate all sense of perspective and self-hood. This is, of course, what they wish to achieve. One doesn't torture the whole man, one tortures the wretched shell, so that the whole man shall never take up residence ever again.
Praise be to Google, keeper of the constant light.
being abused by gov't. I don't think it really matters. Online is still just online, and I've said before and will say again that the Occupy Wall Street Movement showed that in the real world when the gov't wants something to go away it does.
Basically we don't really have the freedom he's saying we'll lose. Real freedom is economic freedom. You're not free as long as somebody controls your access to food, shelter and health care. Until then you'll do exactly what they say and so will everybody else.
If you want freedom stop bothering with all these surveillance scares and start asking what it takes to really be free. Ask yourself if you can ever be free in a world where 6 people have more money than 100 million others combined?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...The Eternal 'Frame?
You know what is interresting, have you seen the new X1 from Comcast ? It really is very close to a dump terminal:
http://www.openstack.org/summit/portland-2013/session-videos/presentation/keynote-openstack-as-a-platform-ecosystem
http://www.openstack.org/summit/san-diego-2012/openstack-summit-sessions/presentation/open-source-versions-of-amazon-s-sns-and-sqs
It send keystrokes one way and receives screens back.
New things are always on the horizon
But we also need people who are not codeers doing other IT work. Also CS can trun out people loaded with theory and other skills that are really not needed do you really need to know the full theory of file systems / and other low level OS stuff? or more of a higher level view of stuff? Ok the low level stuff is good if you are coding a OS but not so much if you are coding a app we don't want apps with there own file saving / loading systems over the build in os ones?
Even people whose job depends on being able to efficiently work with computers often perform repetitive tasks manually instead of learning how to use more of the program they're working with.
What...you don't actually think that thing everyone carries in their pocket or purse is a telephone, do you?
A smartphone is a computer, but from what I've seen, its automation framework isn't quite as rich as that of a PC.
You haven't tried the IBM kool-aid yet. Those people whose jobs currently rely on mainframe expertise are very happy with them. They do have better error-checking but everything else is at least an order of magnitude out of whack with commodity hardware price/performance, and in many cases, several orders. You can reduce some of the costs on their zSeries by buying specialised processors for DB2, Java, and Linux (~100K a pop) so you don't have to may for MIPS usage but the costs are still astronomical for the performance. If it was cost effective, don't you think Amazon would be running its cloud services on them?
The last TCO I was involved with actually showed that the mainframe was the more cost effective approach for the use case at hand.
As for Amazon, well that is hard to say. If when they first started, they knew how successful they were going to grow and how quickly, maybe they would have gone with a mainframe solution.That's the nice thing of TCO analysis, it eliminates, or should eminiate, any platform bias the decision makers have. Then again, it also depends on really knowing what future growth patterns and expected use cases are or it is just more GIGO.
The blades in the racks will get smaller and smaller, and cooler and cooler until... a bunch of hippie hackers decide to build a server farm on their kitchen table. The "dumb terminal" will sit right there on the kitchen table too. It'll be the same "cloud" architecture, but small and private. The PC (Personal Cloud) revolution will begin.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You know what is interresting, have you seen the new X1 from Comcast ? It really is very close to a dump terminal:
(Two long YouTube videos)
Are transcripts publicly available?
It send keystrokes one way and receives screens back.
The last time I heard about that, it was called "OnLive".
Turing showed us that the form of our hardware doesn't dictate what we can do with it.
Which is why certain makers of consumer electronics are bending over backwards to use cryptography to keep hardware that they sell from being used as universal Turing machines. Apple, game console makers, and pay-TV converter box makers are especially guilty.
Download caps / lag / 3g, 4g, LTE roaming costs
Then instead of 3G and LTE, use Wi-Fi with a wired upstream. Most restaurant chains provide it to customers. Or are you talking about using a laptop on the bus?
You know what is interesting, have you seen the new X1 from Comcast ? It really is very close to a dump terminal:
Dump terminal?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Dump terminal: 1. A terminal that connects exclusively to /dev/null. 2. A thin client used in garbage disposal business.
Tomorrow is another day...
The article talked about the "priesthood" of the mainframes. This priesthood did not only extend to the people who worked in the air conditioned room with the raised floor, it also extended to the people who GRANTED you access to the computer itself. Even on the "ancient" mainframes of the 1960's, you still had to have an account created for you. What we use today to enforce security was then used to keep track of computer (CPU, disk and tape storage, and paper usage) so the "archbishop" who ran the computer room knew who to bill. Without that account you were doomed to only look at the computer through the glass windows and drool. What the introduction of the PC did is make it possible for anyone who wanted to hack^H^H^H^Hprogram and had enough money to buy it to do so. Today, thirty-five years later, used PCs are a dime a dozen. All one needs is to buy, borrow, or steal an Internet connection.
I frankly don't care what others want to use computers for; I want to program. It's what I love to do, it's what I'm best at, and I suspect that this is a sentiment shared by many of not most of the geeks here. I don't see the rebirth of the mainframe in the form of cloud computing to be any threat to that so long as the free software movement continues to exist and continues to produce high-quality compilers. In fact, if anything, the fact that the software engineering world is so highly specialized provides so many avenues for a true hacker^H^H^H^H^H^Hprogrammer to explore, from the very broad wastelands of the web app world all the way down to the machine level with embedded systems. In fact, any geek who wants to explore the mainframe world can do so. The Hercules emulator for IBM 360 and its derivatives (including the current Z series mainframes) is freeware and IBM wrote the operating systems and compilers for them before software could be copyrighted so those are in the public domain. So, this is a wonderful time to be a geek!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
I obviously meant what you call a thin client.
New things are always on the horizon
re: cheaper than paying 20 creeps with greasy hair to change hard drives, stack servers into a rack and fuck up the rollout of new VMs. [emphasis mine, pointing out the ad hominem attack]
.
Way to do an ad hominem attack on Linux on non-mainframe, dude! Those "creeps with greasy hair" are the Lintel guys about whom you're complaining and whom you've disparaged and thus made it harder for them to see or consider or accept your points (valid or not) about mainframes and system Z. Those guys are probably also a decent percentage of the audience here on slashdot.
.
If, on the other hand, you're a marketing shill and a marketing droid for IBM, then you're probably trying to reach the V.P. level decision makers and C.I.O.s, and in that case, calling those lower-level workers "creeps with greasy hair" ( as opposed to those wonderful starched-white-shirt-IBM-consultants-at-$1kph [one kilobucks per hour] who must use some ah-mazing hair-care products available exclusively from the salons of International Blowdry Machines ) makes sense. You're trying to make them feel shame for not using IBM. Way to use linux for personal gain and give nothing back to the community!
Well that's only the outside. Once you log in to them the look like this.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
It's been up since September 1, of this year. Today is September 7174, 1993.
That's because it's pretty much already automated everything that the average user cares about.
Not all users are average. Mobile operating systems still tend to lack the sort of user scripting that not-average users care about and that average users can still learn to care about.
There's no difference between the "cloud" and a mainframe... except either it's your mainframe, or you're timesharing. Then there's the point that in a lot of the cloud, you get to allow someone else to make money off of your data.
Around 2000, an IBM engineer maxed out a good-sized mainframe... with 48,000 instances of Linux running under VM (that's IBM VM, runs on mainframes only, has been around since the seventies). The system *comfortably* ran 32,000 instances.
So, how many servers do you want to pay for? How many VMs will *comfortably* run on each?
Every ten years or so, I hear that the mainframe is dead (again, like Kenny). Usually, within a few months, I also see that IBM has declared record shipments of new mainframes.
Too many of you think we're in a "post-privacy" world; tell that to any company or government, or most people, and they'll look at you like you're an idiot.
And you are.
Not too many months ago, the UK decided they would *not* put things on the Cloud, because the provider couldn't guarantee that the British data would be stored, *all* of it, on UK soil. You want your nuclear data stored in any datacenter, maybe, say, in Africa, or eastern Europe, or India, or China? I work for a US federal contractor (non-military, thank you), and I had to get a "position of trust" clearance, because I'm a sysadmin. You want to GUARANTEE to me that every single person who has physical or admin access to the servers and disk farms that our data might go on HAS SOME LEVEL OF CLEARANCE? You want your personal infomation, including, say, medical and financial, secure? Oh, you don't *care* who knows enough to steal your identity, or keep you from getting a job due to medical reasons that might increase their benefit costs?
mark
The mentality of the operators. Server admins do things in the name of expediency that mainframe operators would never do. The PC hardware is not the source of most outages. It is human error. Humans operate both servers and mainframes so what accounts for the difference? Attitude of the operators. To get things done quickly you need to think like a server admin but to keep things up and running you need to think like a mainframe operator.
Thin client: A customer weighting less than 100 pounds.
Tomorrow is another day...