... as long as I can do the reverse. I want to make sure that when my insurance rep says "your covered" he doesn't mean "your covered as long as you never make a claim."
I also want to get a truthful answer to the question "Will I be dropped after my first claim?"
I walked into my former IT Director's office once and saw "Windows95 for Dummies" sitting on her desk. Quite disturbing considering she was responsible for the technological direction of a Fortune 100 company.
A few days later she made the decision that we would "standardize" on Windows. All other platforms would be eliminated.
The book stayed on her desk for several weeks until I moved on to another job. If the company hadn't been bought there would probably be a "Windows XP for Dummies" on her desk right now.
If you want have the manufacturer do it they would need to take into account that different states & counties & cities use different sales tax rates. You would need to price a product according to each of these factors.
Multi-state or city retailers have the same issue. If you print your price stickers at one location. You must take each different sales tax rate into account.
If the retailer is not a multi-state or city company, they would need to peprice every item in their inventory every time the sales tax changes.
If you ask for a flat fee and the retailer pays the tax, you have other issues. When taxes increase the retailer (not the consumer) takes the hit. Suddenly a retailer is making less money than they were a few days ago. Again, they would need to reprice everything in their inventory to account for the change.
Next, assume that they do what you are asking. The first really big hit would be that almost every price would appear to increase in cost (some items are not taxed). I realize that this is just the tax being taken into account, but many people won't. A lot of people still don't understand that when the government adds a new social services you and/or someone else pays for that.
Don't get me wrong. I'd love the idea. I also would like a national sales tax with no income tax, but I don't see that happening any time soon either.
If you are a minor you have no real rite to privacy from your parents. Get over it. I didn't when I was a kid either. We didn't have this when I was in school, but I had teachers who published a course outline which included a subject timeline and how much homework a student could expect to do every night. These needed to be signed and returned. At least you have proof you have no homework on some nights.
This can be good too. You know exactly where you stand in a class and what is needed to either keep your grade or improve it. Not to mention that you never need to remember your homework.
I had a teacher once who looked at her grade book wrong. She gave me a quarter average of a D instead of a B. We got report cards on a Friday afternoon and my parents knew to expect them. The teacher was gone at the end of the day so I was forced to go home with an incorrect grade. Try convincing your parents "the teacher made a mistake" all weekend. The teacher wrote a note explaining everything and apologized on Monday, but it was a long tense weekend.
It is a parent's responsibility to make sure their kids attend school and do their homework. As a parent all you hear from the teachers is that the parents are not involved. This can help, although I would complain about the security.
I heard people grumbling about this and the general feeling is that IBM is encouraging this shortage.
They theory is that when a company can't find enough people they will outsource it. A big outsourcer is IBM Global Services, so they can make more money. IBM can more easily train people since they are so big.
First, I'm 31 and a mainframe (OS390) sysprog. Let's look at some of your arguments.
screen limited to 20 lines, 80 characters wide, all capital letters, red text on a black background. Not true. You can go to a 132x27 character screen witch if you emulate a mod-5 terminal. If you need more you can always edit locally and transfer it to the host. If you have OpenEdition authority you can download XTERM and use vi. Caps can be turned off. If you are in TSO, use CAPS OFF. Color syntax highlighting has been available for some time in TSO. Check your settings.
magine no debugging. Just hardcoded write statements. There are interactive debuggers. I've used them and they do most anything any other debugger can and are very user friendly. They tend to cost $$$ and use CPU, so most businesses frown on them. WRITE statements are much cheaper.
... 1,000 loopholes to recreate test data. Why? Sounds like a process error, not an OS problem.
No object-oriented nature at all. That is a function of the language, not the OS. C, C++, Java and many other languages are available. The problem is that COBOL is more efficient than C on the mainframe so it costs less to run.
Being punished by people thirty years older than you for trying to use a function or some reusable code. Sounds like a business culture issue.
... place more systems on top of it to interface it with your web system. And how is this different than any other existing system where you need to extend functionality.
Synchronization? Forget about it. Transactional data over the web? Not gonna happen.Why? It definitely can be done.
... thirty years older than me, is nursing a bad back and refuses to learn anything new. This is a cultural issue and one not limited to the Mainframe. Many *nix & Windows admins suffer from tunnel vision too. We started a limited Linux rollout and a lot the people who support Solaris were not terribly happy about it because they were had to learn something new.
... a bizarre theory that the bad economy is good... While I don't agree with his argument about COBOL, a bad economy can be good in some limited respects. It forces a company to refocus and stop the "white elephant projects" that suck time & resources and nobody cares about.
...COBOL programmers of the world shall rise again... If there is money in it, they probably will.
...only they're rising in India. Lots of companies are discovering this, but not just Cobol is rising there. I have a buddy in Chicago and his company fired half of their Windows sysadmins and outsourced it to India. The rumors are that the Unix guys are next. Cheaper labor is cheaper labor.
And I was wondering what to do with all that free disk space. I was leaning towards using it to store digital pictures of my family, but 300 versions of the same DLL seams a much better use. And keeping track of these will be easy because the Registry is so easy to understand anyway.
Just think, by the time the government comes up with a standard, you'd be certified to support a 286 PC with Dos 3.3. And the certification would probably only cost $200.
I really don't see much of a cost benefit over a high-end PDA. Sure it has more bells and whistles, but it is also heavier and not as compact. I use my Palm primarily for one thing. Reference. I store lots of notes there. I seldom edit them.
I'd also like to see the durability of one. If it can't take some abuse then it will fail. It is too expensive to break if it drops on the ground.
I really do hope it works because it would open up some interesting possibilities, but unless the price drops I really don't see it being a big seller. Don't forget that tech people will still be needed to fix problems which adds to the cost. There are backup & restore issues which adds to the cost. There are security issues where an expensive device vanishes (not to mention the data on it) and that adds to the cost.
I'd also be curious to see how people who are not good with PCs react. Odds are they are comfortable with a pen and paper and would just as soon keep it.
One feature that gets overlooked is JCL. It's ugly and it is a pain, but it really helps the mainframe do it's job. It forces you to say everything you need up front. How much disk space, how much CPU, how many lines of output are you printing, how much memory you need, and what performance your getting. If you exceed what you asked for, then your program (or JCL) has a problem and your program is abended.
This really helps keep a poorly written application from causing chaos on the system. Coded correctly, JCL is really powerful and allows lots of work on the mainframe to be done with very little human intervention.
You can code Java, C, and C++ in CICS. Plus Unix System Services has Perl and a lot of other stuff and there are graphical tools available if you are willing to pay for them (most companies are not).
As for the age thing, yes most people working on mainframes are older, but that just means that IBM has to make mainframes easier to use and/or companies will compensate these employees better and/or get rid of the machines. The market will decide, not the employee.
MIPS doesn't stand for million instructions per second. It stands for Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed. IBM never liked publishing benchmarks for mainframes because they don't say the whole story.
Mainframes don't run one application. They run thousands at the same time. I/O requests, CPU, and device contention are just a few of the many factors in a machine's speed. Just look at your PC. If you get the fastest dual Pentium, that just tells CPU spped. Put a slow hard drive and a 2MB video card, and any PC will seem faster. Mainframes are the same way so IBM has always been reluctant to publish numbers because businesses scream.
As for the software being buggy you are exactly right. The difference is that some of that software has had 20-30 years to work out the bugs.
And finally, yes, you are correct in saying that computationally demanding tasks using floating point multiplication and division don't perform well on the mainframe. Most businesses don't need to compute PI, so it was never a priority to IBM. Floating point addition & subtraction are very very fast if you write your application correctly.
The really sad thing that holds processor speed back on the mainframes is the software licenses. On a mainframe, the faster the machine, the more your software costs. This made it possible for smaller companies to buy a little mainframe. The big customers pay the most. This means you never buy a bigger machine than you need, because the software license costs get more expensive and no business wasts money.
And the funny thing is that the average failure time per CPU is 30 years. That means if you start today, you will run each instruction twice (once in each pipeline) and in 2032 you can expect your CPU to fail to the alternate.
IBM has been working on autonomic/self-diagnosing software for quite a while. I believe it is under the e-liza name (or something like that).
Basically, from what IBM has said, they are taking some of the mainframe OS/390 & z/OS features and applying them to other platforms. They are also trying to take the ease of configuration from Windows and applying it to some aspects of OS/390.
My guess is that this would be a very specialized OS to take advantage of the fetures of the platform. A cross platform OS (like Linux) would probably be too difficult to get to perform the way they need it to.
I once worked for a place which was hurting financially. Whenever anyone tried to go to a conference, the first thing the PHBs looked at was the location. If it was in Orlando or someplace fun (like Vegas) they immediately thought it was going to be a company paid vacaiton and rejected the request.
The sad part is some conferences are really good. There were a few I would have gone to if they were held in a garbage dump in Antartica.
I don't begrudge someone leaving a company for a better future and I do sympathize with the people out of work but...
How is leaving with zero notice for better pay any better than what the company is doing now? It is just the reverse, instead of them milking you, you're milking them. Leaving like that only hurts your co-workers left behind, I'm sure the CEO who is demanding the work doesn't care one ounce who left.
Also don't forget that when layoffs happen, the newer people are usually the first out the door. Change jobs too often, and your always at risk.
Respect works both ways. I used to hear complaints from the older crowd how "companies are not loyal to their employees anymore". Part of the reason companies are not loyal is because employees are not loyal to the company. Everyone is in it for themself. This is just a fact of today's life.
Some of the best work advice I ever got was from a fellow who had been in the field for years. The basic idea behind the advice was that never take a job only because of the money, take it because of the opportunity. In the long run, the opportunity will feed you better than the money.
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... as long as I can do the reverse. I want to make sure that when my insurance rep says "your covered" he doesn't mean "your covered as long as you never make a claim."
I also want to get a truthful answer to the question "Will I be dropped after my first claim?"
I walked into my former IT Director's office once and saw "Windows95 for Dummies" sitting on her desk. Quite disturbing considering she was responsible for the technological direction of a Fortune 100 company.
A few days later she made the decision that we would "standardize" on Windows. All other platforms would be eliminated.
The book stayed on her desk for several weeks until I moved on to another job. If the company hadn't been bought there would probably be a "Windows XP for Dummies" on her desk right now.
if they put a webcam and charged money. Heck, someday it may be free to fly as long as you spend 10 minutes in the booth.
If you apply Homer's logic you can drive legally in any car pool lane.
Marge: Do you ever drink alone?
Homer: Does the Lord count as a person?
I could be wrong, but I believe IBM is the world's largest software company. MicroSoft is the world's largest PC software company.
Even if you can't build it. Odds are they will give you the money anyway. Just put lots of big words in the proposal.
The reason they don't is simple. It is too hard.
If you want have the manufacturer do it they would need to take into account that different states & counties & cities use different sales tax rates. You would need to price a product according to each of these factors.
Multi-state or city retailers have the same issue. If you print your price stickers at one location. You must take each different sales tax rate into account.
If the retailer is not a multi-state or city company, they would need to peprice every item in their inventory every time the sales tax changes.
If you ask for a flat fee and the retailer pays the tax, you have other issues. When taxes increase the retailer (not the consumer) takes the hit. Suddenly a retailer is making less money than they were a few days ago. Again, they would need to reprice everything in their inventory to account for the change.
Next, assume that they do what you are asking. The first really big hit would be that almost every price would appear to increase in cost (some items are not taxed). I realize that this is just the tax being taken into account, but many people won't. A lot of people still don't understand that when the government adds a new social services you and/or someone else pays for that.
Don't get me wrong. I'd love the idea. I also would like a national sales tax with no income tax, but I don't see that happening any time soon either.
Just when I thought a company couldn't dig themselves in a deeper hole, they find another shovel.
If you are a minor you have no real rite to privacy from your parents. Get over it. I didn't when I was a kid either. We didn't have this when I was in school, but I had teachers who published a course outline which included a subject timeline and how much homework a student could expect to do every night. These needed to be signed and returned. At least you have proof you have no homework on some nights.
This can be good too. You know exactly where you stand in a class and what is needed to either keep your grade or improve it. Not to mention that you never need to remember your homework.
I had a teacher once who looked at her grade book wrong. She gave me a quarter average of a D instead of a B. We got report cards on a Friday afternoon and my parents knew to expect them. The teacher was gone at the end of the day so I was forced to go home with an incorrect grade. Try convincing your parents "the teacher made a mistake" all weekend. The teacher wrote a note explaining everything and apologized on Monday, but it was a long tense weekend.
It is a parent's responsibility to make sure their kids attend school and do their homework. As a parent all you hear from the teachers is that the parents are not involved. This can help, although I would complain about the security.
I heard people grumbling about this and the general feeling is that IBM is encouraging this shortage.
They theory is that when a company can't find enough people they will outsource it. A big outsourcer is IBM Global Services, so they can make more money. IBM can more easily train people since they are so big.
Just a rumor, but an interesting one...
screen limited to 20 lines, 80 characters wide, all capital letters, red text on a black background. Not true. You can go to a 132x27 character screen witch if you emulate a mod-5 terminal. If you need more you can always edit locally and transfer it to the host. If you have OpenEdition authority you can download XTERM and use vi. Caps can be turned off. If you are in TSO, use CAPS OFF. Color syntax highlighting has been available for some time in TSO. Check your settings.
magine no debugging. Just hardcoded write statements. There are interactive debuggers. I've used them and they do most anything any other debugger can and are very user friendly. They tend to cost $$$ and use CPU, so most businesses frown on them. WRITE statements are much cheaper.
No object-oriented nature at all. That is a function of the language, not the OS. C, C++, Java and many other languages are available. The problem is that COBOL is more efficient than C on the mainframe so it costs less to run.
Being punished by people thirty years older than you for trying to use a function or some reusable code. Sounds like a business culture issue.
Synchronization? Forget about it. Transactional data over the web? Not gonna happen.Why? It definitely can be done.
And I was wondering what to do with all that free disk space. I was leaning towards using it to store digital pictures of my family, but 300 versions of the same DLL seams a much better use. And keeping track of these will be easy because the Registry is so easy to understand anyway.
From a certain point of view, expecting MS software to be stable could be considered a user error.
A similan product Bacula performs a similar function.
Just think, by the time the government comes up with a standard, you'd be certified to support a 286 PC with Dos 3.3. And the certification would probably only cost $200.
What a bargain.
I wonder how much polution the power companies are producing to give them the electricity they need to do this.
I really don't see much of a cost benefit over a high-end PDA. Sure it has more bells and whistles, but it is also heavier and not as compact. I use my Palm primarily for one thing. Reference. I store lots of notes there. I seldom edit them.
I'd also like to see the durability of one. If it can't take some abuse then it will fail. It is too expensive to break if it drops on the ground.
I really do hope it works because it would open up some interesting possibilities, but unless the price drops I really don't see it being a big seller. Don't forget that tech people will still be needed to fix problems which adds to the cost. There are backup & restore issues which adds to the cost. There are security issues where an expensive device vanishes (not to mention the data on it) and that adds to the cost.
I'd also be curious to see how people who are not good with PCs react. Odds are they are comfortable with a pen and paper and would just as soon keep it.
One feature that gets overlooked is JCL. It's ugly and it is a pain, but it really helps the mainframe do it's job. It forces you to say everything you need up front. How much disk space, how much CPU, how many lines of output are you printing, how much memory you need, and what performance your getting. If you exceed what you asked for, then your program (or JCL) has a problem and your program is abended.
This really helps keep a poorly written application from causing chaos on the system. Coded correctly, JCL is really powerful and allows lots of work on the mainframe to be done with very little human intervention.
I work on a mainframe as a systems programmer.
You can code Java, C, and C++ in CICS. Plus Unix System Services has Perl and a lot of other stuff and there are graphical tools available if you are willing to pay for them (most companies are not).
As for the age thing, yes most people working on mainframes are older, but that just means that IBM has to make mainframes easier to use and/or companies will compensate these employees better and/or get rid of the machines. The market will decide, not the employee.
First, let me say you are being misled.
MIPS doesn't stand for million instructions per second. It stands for Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed. IBM never liked publishing benchmarks for mainframes because they don't say the whole story.
Mainframes don't run one application. They run thousands at the same time. I/O requests, CPU, and device contention are just a few of the many factors in a machine's speed. Just look at your PC. If you get the fastest dual Pentium, that just tells CPU spped. Put a slow hard drive and a 2MB video card, and any PC will seem faster. Mainframes are the same way so IBM has always been reluctant to publish numbers because businesses scream.
As for the software being buggy you are exactly right. The difference is that some of that software has had 20-30 years to work out the bugs.
And finally, yes, you are correct in saying that computationally demanding tasks using floating point multiplication and division don't perform well on the mainframe. Most businesses don't need to compute PI, so it was never a priority to IBM. Floating point addition & subtraction are very very fast if you write your application correctly.
The really sad thing that holds processor speed back on the mainframes is the software licenses. On a mainframe, the faster the machine, the more your software costs. This made it possible for smaller companies to buy a little mainframe. The big customers pay the most. This means you never buy a bigger machine than you need, because the software license costs get more expensive and no business wasts money.
And the funny thing is that the average failure time per CPU is 30 years. That means if you start today, you will run each instruction twice (once in each pipeline) and in 2032 you can expect your CPU to fail to the alternate.
software has gotten more complex and user expectations have grown at a rate equal or greater than software development tools.
IBM has been working on autonomic/self-diagnosing software for quite a while. I believe it is under the e-liza name (or something like that).
Basically, from what IBM has said, they are taking some of the mainframe OS/390 & z/OS features and applying them to other platforms. They are also trying to take the ease of configuration from Windows and applying it to some aspects of OS/390.
My guess is that this would be a very specialized OS to take advantage of the fetures of the platform. A cross platform OS (like Linux) would probably be too difficult to get to perform the way they need it to.
I once worked for a place which was hurting financially. Whenever anyone tried to go to a conference, the first thing the PHBs looked at was the location. If it was in Orlando or someplace fun (like Vegas) they immediately thought it was going to be a company paid vacaiton and rejected the request.
The sad part is some conferences are really good. There were a few I would have gone to if they were held in a garbage dump in Antartica.
I don't begrudge someone leaving a company for a better future and I do sympathize with the people out of work but...
How is leaving with zero notice for better pay any better than what the company is doing now? It is just the reverse, instead of them milking you, you're milking them. Leaving like that only hurts your co-workers left behind, I'm sure the CEO who is demanding the work doesn't care one ounce who left.
Also don't forget that when layoffs happen, the newer people are usually the first out the door. Change jobs too often, and your always at risk.
Respect works both ways. I used to hear complaints from the older crowd how "companies are not loyal to their employees anymore". Part of the reason companies are not loyal is because employees are not loyal to the company. Everyone is in it for themself. This is just a fact of today's life.
Some of the best work advice I ever got was from a fellow who had been in the field for years. The basic idea behind the advice was that never take a job only because of the money, take it because of the opportunity. In the long run, the opportunity will feed you better than the money.
Lastly, good luck at the interview.