Mr. Data explained it was being replaced by the Earth Planetary Network as more and more video went online and people prefered that. I remember that episode as that to me smells like The Internet. Today's DVRs are embedded computers and many fiber cables to our houses are internet connections with their own IP addresses where video is streamed.A
This is why the MPAA and the TV industry want to kill net neutrality. They realize this and wont to make video expensive so they can keep streaming $200 a month HD crap on the pipes so they can get paid no matter if we use TVs or computers.
The reason people put up with Windows is because they didn't know any better and were new users in the mid to late 1990s when most people first turned on a machine. Us geeks and rich kids did so in the 1980s at home, or perhaps earlier at work with mainframes. We saw how much Windows sucked, but we were a minority in 2001 with IE 6 and WindowsME. Bashing the mac at the time made Windows look better to noobs back then too which was a popular past time that bit us in the ass.
Today, that is changing as witnessed by Vista. Andriod and a resurgent Apple is now changing the minds of people who realize that Windows really does suck. That is the appeal of an IPAD if you just read books, browse the net, and post on facebook.
In the case of RHES the users are experts and wont upgrade. Plain and simple.
I was thinking inet fiasco on how Sun and Apple get nailed before it was considered cool when Cannonical decided to do so. It was still text based and backward compatible.
This is database driven with the potential to turn inot the next Windows registry. You know the one where 9 out of 10 PC problems are related to it when it gets corrupted or bad values get thrown in etc? It can get corrupted too if it is in an index. So if the system crashes when it is writting to your disks the system logs get corrupted and you have no idea what happened. Brilliant!
Fsck (or whatever the raid equilivent is. I haven't used Linux on a server in years) can fix text files in a journaled file system. But not corrupted indexes or binary key pairs. You're screwed.
So yes this is a steup backwards. Now if it still stored things in text files but offered event driven and enchanced kernel level logging then it would be cool.
They get corrupted and no way to fix corruption from fsck unlike regular files with a journaling file system....ok some smartass will say even with a journaled file system incomplete transactions get deleted, but mostly the file system will stay healthy.
If the log system gets corrupted from say a system crash or kernel panic you will have no record of it as the database will more than likely get corrupted unless it is a heavy enterprise one like Oracle or Postgres. In that case you will have performance issues.
XML. I hate it as it breaks grep and sed for people who want to do things like at 3:15AM after every backup go grep/etc/var/syslog with a sed -i "crapware backup sucess" > sendmail etc. True I bet you could use a a whole programming language like Perl and call an XML api, but that kills the point for a sys admin. A simple bash script would be more appropriate. Powershell in Windows has that problem as you need to be a.NET developer to use because of XML: files:-)
Nothing wrong with text. Hopefully JSON will work, but I would hope they could replace syslog but keep the format as a text file.
Maybe like Microsoft with the registry, is that RH is concerned over piracy and ORacle and CENTOS stealing their marketshare. It maybe opensource but storing proprietary and cryptic keys might be to prevent the Redhat Kernel from booting.
Wow Unix users are so conservative as your post shows.
Windows changes stuff and formats all the time and no one has an uproar. Unless it has a cell phone GUI:)
Sun got a bad rap for replacing inet several years ago with a more event driven initialization/startup system. Apple thought it was a good idea as many MacBooks go to sleep in one network and wake up in another with a different policy and a different set of rules and so on and figured they needed a new netinfo and inet system that was event driven more than anyone. Then it became cool after Apple and people realized inet is quite obsolete and silly.
RHES I am sure are not going to do anything retarded hopefully and keep it in a text format and probably going to do something event driven as well which will be a blessing on a complex server where you wont have hundres of scripts doing something based on what another script does etc. Or they will have more options and reporting with deep internals from the kernel like Windows and Solaris has.
"As has been pointed out, there is no reason you couldnt use a new tool to get the output you want out of the database."... and end up with the wonderful Windows Registry? 9 out of 10 times non virus related PC problems are ALWAYS related to the registry due to database/index corruption. It is autrocious and prefer Linux because it is text based.
MySQL corrupts and is why real DBAs from other platforms scratch their heads, and insist on PostgreSQL if you want free. Text is just easier not to mention fsck can repair a corrupted file. Not a database or an index however.
Good quesiton. In my state Mexicans do those jobs. No, I am not racist but stating the facts that orange growers wont hire Americans at all. We can sue them if we get hurt on the job, most pay half of minimum wage, very long hours, etc.
But, it is a job and if I were paid $10 I would do it as I would be a loser if I didn't. You can be unemployed for a month or two, but if you are still not working after that you are a loser. Go work at Walmart or BestBuy? Keep looking while you work there etc.
With 9% unemployment rate more Americans should be working and shame on them for not taking these jobs in Alabama while leeching off the tax payer.
Don't tell them you have a degree. I don't when working 2nd jobs. Many college graduates working at Walmart surely do not.
It is frustrating as the other day an interview turned me down figuring the job would be beneath me. This was for an analyst position and I desperated WANTED that job. As my alternative is poverty. Working in an office and getting that salary is not what I used to make, but I can keep my car and work my way up again when the economy improves. Employers are idiots as many people need to eat and are willing (maybe not all Americans) to do extra jobs and work. Unless you are senior management or something there is nothing wrong with doing whatever it takes and I wish more would do so. I guess I oversold myself and I found that strange as I would not mind working for just $35,000 a year since I have been out of work for several months.
But at this point no job is beneath me and people need to take lower end jobs.
I wish it were not true but lets see how long your wife or gf will stay with you if you have no job? Give it a try?
I know from experience that if I bring in just $15 an hour and barely make it by I will not remain married for long. My ex did love me, but she has a right to want what her exhusband made with a nice house and a pool so she left. She felt bad but that is life and I told her she can never buy a house again as there is no way we can save $60,000 in cash for a down payment with our salaries and rent.
People are selfish and I wish it were not true but it is. The more successful you are and the money you make determines your happiness, marriage, future, and chance for retirement. It is true after a certain amount money wont make you happy anymore but that amount is close to $100,000 a year.
Americans are lazy and wont pick vegatables in Alabama despite a 9% unemployment rate and a wage of up to a whole $10/hr! That is a lot of money coming from someone making just $7.50 at McDonalds. I would be happy to pick vegetables to pay off my student loans as I am broke now and I am not too good for these jobs. This is our future as good jobs are hard to get and relics of the past in the 1950s when all of Europe's factories were destroyed. That is one example right there.
There are plenty of jobs but no one wants to do them as they are embarrasing for people with higher goals in life. But they still can't get filled as accountants, graduates, and others prefer to watch TV and collect unemployment than to mow lawns and stock shelves.
I think people modded you down because they didn't like your answer. I wish it were not true, but after reading the link above book and seeing how in Alabama that no American would bother picking vegetables at $10/hr (not minimum wage!) when unemployment is over 9% shocked me! I assumed people even with college degrees would be linning up if they had student loans to pay or rent.
For the moderators yes, it is true that Asians work for much cheaper, but my neighbor who does I.T. management outsourced to India because they were willing to work 70 hour work weeks and say Yes Sir with a smile when something needed to get done. It angered my other neighbor who used to do I.T. work but businesses are just trying to cut costs to make their shareholders happy and they love the dedication in case a project is failing that the workers are happy to do overtime.
I wish what you said about women being selfish was not true, but I am a product of divorce over money. All I could make was $15/hr after school and her dreams of having a nice house with a pool like what she had with her exhusband caused the divorce. Her new boyfriend is a doctor. Coincidence? Come to think of it she was right and has a right to be happy like everyone else.
If you want to make money you have to get other people to pay you. That comes through not only work, but by serving and giving people/society the most value. You will get paid more
As long as IE is an actual modern browser starting with IE 9 and surely upcoming IE 10 the lockin will go away. True ActiveX and VBscript will always be tied to them but at least these ERP apps can run on IPADs, Chrome, and other platforms since the HTML and CSS are actually standards compliant. I think the IPHone with HTML 5 was the true wakeup call for Microsoft more than Firefox
In case you haven't noticed the MBA bean counters caused a servre recession and almost a depression. I wrote an entry last week about how some companies refuse to pay for tape backups! I was dumbfounded!?
$1500 was too much for a company making $1,000,000 a year in revenue and the cost accountants refused to implement it. This is normal now and where are you going to go? The company down the street has the same morons who want their bonus. If you read reviews on hard drives on Egghead you will people with $500,000 mission critical servers rating $79 green crappy WD caveliers at only 5400 rpms for their raids because management doesn't want to pay $300 for each drive that is enterpsie grade OMG the HORRORS.
Many are leaving I.T. and becoming bean counters. IT is the wave of the future just like outsourcing. In many cases it makes sense to use the cloud anyway as these guys only look at profitability ratios and think everything is always scarce even if the company makes tons of money. There is nothing you can do and yes being dollar dumb but penny wise is the standard way to run a business by everyone.
Not to mention it is unsupported and eventually wont compile. Libs and apis change. This is a huge problem getting KDE 3 resurrected. Gnome 2 is dead and it is not like just compiling vim. Libraries even have dependencies on other libraries. Mate may not have the resources to save it.
I agree with gnome 3. The demand for Notepad over MS word is HUGE! We all want a crappy UI that requires a quad core processor to have a gui less advanced and slower than the 6 mhz 1984 mac. People crave this and would pay mony. Nothing says professionalism than showing off to your friends how you spent the whole week and voided your warranty and ended up with uh yep just that.
I hear ya. The problem is all the operating systems are doing this. It is like they want us to all buy 8 inch crappy single tasking focused pads and netbooks with applets that have the functionalty of the 1984 mac hosted on a crappy cloud with monthly fees.
To hell with an input AND output oriented machine to do document creation and instead just sit at your local Starbucks with that credit card and consume content. Pffft/end rant
Go with Win 7. Unlike Gnome 2 it will be supported for 10 years until 2019. It is my next XP. My guess is Win 8 will bomb and win 9 will fix it by 2019. It is the only OS left that will be supported before mobile and phone oriente guis throw our productivity back 25 years. Sigh
Windows is much more stable baked and less buggy than Linux on a desktop. It is very sad but true due to alpha quality software. Windows stopped blue screening when XP came out and got rid of dos underneath that kept conflicting with win32 code. Windows 7 can stay up for years without a reboot now.
Not to me at least. I saw the writting on the wall last March. Guis were regressing, Java regressed with Oracle, Solaris went to hell with Java and is dying as custumers switch to Windows and Linux. Mostly Windows.
Worse, the browser wars 2.0 have crappy linux support and that was last straw for me.:-( Flash is only accelerated on Windows (last March), Firefox and Chrome are not accelerated on Linux either, and need to now be updated every 6 weeks (not on linux). Shit IE 9 had full acceleration and offered a supperior experience than linux even! Wtf? I had no reason to keep using it. All its advantages gone. Linux marketshare is half and linux is entering a dark age.
Windows 7 is much better than earlier versions and just works. Its nice having commercial software too
I am talkimg IBM mainframes that cost millions a year and hundreds an hour to operate. Not unix servers. I refer to fortune 250 companies that are traded and this includes European countries. Banks of course use mainframes because they can afford them and need something reliable and have very old software they need to run.
It seems to me that Linux is a poor mans Mac. I can't justify the price and the way Jobs leaves old versions of MacOS in the cold fast. It is great if you do not have $$$$ in student loans or get paid pre-2009 salaries but count your blessings if you do and can afford one.
In the Windows world people still use XP which is over 10 years old for crying out and software companies still support it.
I left Linux but switched to Windows because it is much cheaper and I can run Linux in a VM
I have never seen a mainframe before. Most I.T. people have not as only 250 companies in the whole US need them. Who cares about them as they mostly run old 30 year old cobol written software running in an emulator on them anyway.
It is not the cost of the data that will get you. It is the fact that 1,000+ employees will sit there with nothing to do as the server is done where you freak the fuck out trying to revive it. Tens of thousands an hour too.
YOu need to consider that and if you lose a days worth of work how much did that cost? It could be $120,000 easily as people would repeat what they did the previous day. IT could mean lost sales, fines/fees from creditors, and other nasties where they relied on your employer to do what they said before the disaster.
Tell the bean counters to screw themselves ! It is gross negligence no different than cancelling fire insurance. It is worth every penny unless you are a small shop. Even a good small shop owner backs up his data on a thumb drive every few days.
One of the reasons for buying overpriced HP and Dell servers is you can replace them or get a new motherboard if they fail.
With the same or very similiar chipset they wont bluescreen and you can get back to work from tape backup or plugging in the disk array. This is why you never build your own servers like your workstations. HP/Dell/IBM go out of their way to make sure their similiar server lines can be restored in such an emergency.
I worked in a school district as well . Not I.T. though.
Do you have any idea what the principals and administrators do? Lots of nasty and important government and CYA paperwork. Some of it is so important that the district/school gets fined if it is late or incomplete. If your school district worked in a city of 100,000 or more you have 100+ employees who are accountants, lawyers, anaylsts, grant acquisitions etc.
The cost of losing 1 weeks worth of work is the salary of all 100 people (not including 30 principles and 2,000 teachers) + any fines or lawsuits developing due to critical paperwork not completed to satisfy both the state and federal governments. It costs only several thousand dollars and my god, it is not incompentence but gross negligence not to do a daily backup.
If you are a school of 400 students all private with 7 private office staff and maybe 15 teachers then who cares? Use an online solution for $25 a month or a cheap $350 drive and 2 tapes costing $85 that get done at 3am every day.
Not having a daily backup to save money is like not having fire insurance or driver insurance for your bus drivers. Negligence and yes you can do all these things with backups. Cad programs with dongles you quoted? Those are not backed onto a server but maybe student cad drawings are on a file server.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you hear why TV became unpopular by 2040?
Mr. Data explained it was being replaced by the Earth Planetary Network as more and more video went online and people prefered that. I remember that episode as that to me smells like The Internet. Today's DVRs are embedded computers and many fiber cables to our houses are internet connections with their own IP addresses where video is streamed.A
This is why the MPAA and the TV industry want to kill net neutrality. They realize this and wont to make video expensive so they can keep streaming $200 a month HD crap on the pipes so they can get paid no matter if we use TVs or computers.
Disregard.
I RTFA and realized it was not a txt based replacement and bitching is indeed deserved if that is the case.
The reason people put up with Windows is because they didn't know any better and were new users in the mid to late 1990s when most people first turned on a machine. Us geeks and rich kids did so in the 1980s at home, or perhaps earlier at work with mainframes. We saw how much Windows sucked, but we were a minority in 2001 with IE 6 and WindowsME. Bashing the mac at the time made Windows look better to noobs back then too which was a popular past time that bit us in the ass.
Today, that is changing as witnessed by Vista. Andriod and a resurgent Apple is now changing the minds of people who realize that Windows really does suck. That is the appeal of an IPAD if you just read books, browse the net, and post on facebook.
In the case of RHES the users are experts and wont upgrade. Plain and simple.
There is a difference.
I was thinking inet fiasco on how Sun and Apple get nailed before it was considered cool when Cannonical decided to do so. It was still text based and backward compatible.
This is database driven with the potential to turn inot the next Windows registry. You know the one where 9 out of 10 PC problems are related to it when it gets corrupted or bad values get thrown in etc? It can get corrupted too if it is in an index. So if the system crashes when it is writting to your disks the system logs get corrupted and you have no idea what happened. Brilliant!
Fsck (or whatever the raid equilivent is. I haven't used Linux on a server in years) can fix text files in a journaled file system. But not corrupted indexes or binary key pairs. You're screwed.
So yes this is a steup backwards. Now if it still stored things in text files but offered event driven and enchanced kernel level logging then it would be cool.
SQL or any indexing or Database is BAD.
They get corrupted and no way to fix corruption from fsck unlike regular files with a journaling file system. ...ok some smartass will say even with a journaled file system incomplete transactions get deleted, but mostly the file system will stay healthy.
If the log system gets corrupted from say a system crash or kernel panic you will have no record of it as the database will more than likely get corrupted unless it is a heavy enterprise one like Oracle or Postgres. In that case you will have performance issues.
XML. I hate it as it breaks grep and sed for people who want to do things like at 3:15AM after every backup go grep /etc/var/syslog with a sed -i "crapware backup sucess" > sendmail etc. True I bet you could use a a whole programming language like Perl and call an XML api, but that kills the point for a sys admin. A simple bash script would be more appropriate. Powershell in Windows has that problem as you need to be a .NET developer to use because of XML: files :-)
Nothing wrong with text. Hopefully JSON will work, but I would hope they could replace syslog but keep the format as a text file.
Maybe like Microsoft with the registry, is that RH is concerned over piracy and ORacle and CENTOS stealing their marketshare. It maybe opensource but storing proprietary and cryptic keys might be to prevent the Redhat Kernel from booting.
Wow Unix users are so conservative as your post shows.
Windows changes stuff and formats all the time and no one has an uproar. Unless it has a cell phone GUI :)
Sun got a bad rap for replacing inet several years ago with a more event driven initialization/startup system. Apple thought it was a good idea as many MacBooks go to sleep in one network and wake up in another with a different policy and a different set of rules and so on and figured they needed a new netinfo and inet system that was event driven more than anyone. Then it became cool after Apple and people realized inet is quite obsolete and silly.
RHES I am sure are not going to do anything retarded hopefully and keep it in a text format and probably going to do something event driven as well which will be a blessing on a complex server where you wont have hundres of scripts doing something based on what another script does etc. Or they will have more options and reporting with deep internals from the kernel like Windows and Solaris has.
"As has been pointed out, there is no reason you couldnt use a new tool to get the output you want out of the database." ... and end up with the wonderful Windows Registry? 9 out of 10 times non virus related PC problems are ALWAYS related to the registry due to database/index corruption. It is autrocious and prefer Linux because it is text based.
MySQL corrupts and is why real DBAs from other platforms scratch their heads, and insist on PostgreSQL if you want free. Text is just easier not to mention fsck can repair a corrupted file. Not a database or an index however.
Good quesiton. In my state Mexicans do those jobs. No, I am not racist but stating the facts that orange growers wont hire Americans at all. We can sue them if we get hurt on the job, most pay half of minimum wage, very long hours, etc.
But, it is a job and if I were paid $10 I would do it as I would be a loser if I didn't. You can be unemployed for a month or two, but if you are still not working after that you are a loser. Go work at Walmart or BestBuy? Keep looking while you work there etc.
With 9% unemployment rate more Americans should be working and shame on them for not taking these jobs in Alabama while leeching off the tax payer.
Don't tell them you have a degree. I don't when working 2nd jobs. Many college graduates working at Walmart surely do not.
It is frustrating as the other day an interview turned me down figuring the job would be beneath me. This was for an analyst position and I desperated WANTED that job. As my alternative is poverty. Working in an office and getting that salary is not what I used to make, but I can keep my car and work my way up again when the economy improves. Employers are idiots as many people need to eat and are willing (maybe not all Americans) to do extra jobs and work. Unless you are senior management or something there is nothing wrong with doing whatever it takes and I wish more would do so. I guess I oversold myself and I found that strange as I would not mind working for just $35,000 a year since I have been out of work for several months.
But at this point no job is beneath me and people need to take lower end jobs.
I wish it were not true but lets see how long your wife or gf will stay with you if you have no job? Give it a try?
I know from experience that if I bring in just $15 an hour and barely make it by I will not remain married for long. My ex did love me, but she has a right to want what her exhusband made with a nice house and a pool so she left. She felt bad but that is life and I told her she can never buy a house again as there is no way we can save $60,000 in cash for a down payment with our salaries and rent.
People are selfish and I wish it were not true but it is. The more successful you are and the money you make determines your happiness, marriage, future, and chance for retirement. It is true after a certain amount money wont make you happy anymore but that amount is close to $100,000 a year.
Americans are lazy and wont pick vegatables in Alabama despite a 9% unemployment rate and a wage of up to a whole $10/hr! That is a lot of money coming from someone making just $7.50 at McDonalds. I would be happy to pick vegetables to pay off my student loans as I am broke now and I am not too good for these jobs. This is our future as good jobs are hard to get and relics of the past in the 1950s when all of Europe's factories were destroyed. That is one example right there.
There are plenty of jobs but no one wants to do them as they are embarrasing for people with higher goals in life. But they still can't get filled as accountants, graduates, and others prefer to watch TV and collect unemployment than to mow lawns and stock shelves.
You wouldn't happen to be a fan of Larry Winget or read his book Shut up stop whinning and go get a life?
I think people modded you down because they didn't like your answer. I wish it were not true, but after reading the link above book and seeing how in Alabama that no American would bother picking vegetables at $10/hr (not minimum wage!) when unemployment is over 9% shocked me! I assumed people even with college degrees would be linning up if they had student loans to pay or rent.
For the moderators yes, it is true that Asians work for much cheaper, but my neighbor who does I.T. management outsourced to India because they were willing to work 70 hour work weeks and say Yes Sir with a smile when something needed to get done. It angered my other neighbor who used to do I.T. work but businesses are just trying to cut costs to make their shareholders happy and they love the dedication in case a project is failing that the workers are happy to do overtime.
I wish what you said about women being selfish was not true, but I am a product of divorce over money. All I could make was $15/hr after school and her dreams of having a nice house with a pool like what she had with her exhusband caused the divorce. Her new boyfriend is a doctor. Coincidence? Come to think of it she was right and has a right to be happy like everyone else.
If you want to make money you have to get other people to pay you. That comes through not only work, but by serving and giving people/society the most value. You will get paid more
As long as IE is an actual modern browser starting with IE 9 and surely upcoming IE 10 the lockin will go away. True ActiveX and VBscript will always be tied to them but at least these ERP apps can run on IPADs, Chrome, and other platforms since the HTML and CSS are actually standards compliant. I think the IPHone with HTML 5 was the true wakeup call for Microsoft more than Firefox
In case you haven't noticed the MBA bean counters caused a servre recession and almost a depression. I wrote an entry last week about how some companies refuse to pay for tape backups! I was dumbfounded!?
$1500 was too much for a company making $1,000,000 a year in revenue and the cost accountants refused to implement it. This is normal now and where are you going to go? The company down the street has the same morons who want their bonus. If you read reviews on hard drives on Egghead you will people with $500,000 mission critical servers rating $79 green crappy WD caveliers at only 5400 rpms for their raids because management doesn't want to pay $300 for each drive that is enterpsie grade OMG the HORRORS.
Many are leaving I.T. and becoming bean counters. IT is the wave of the future just like outsourcing. In many cases it makes sense to use the cloud anyway as these guys only look at profitability ratios and think everything is always scarce even if the company makes tons of money. There is nothing you can do and yes being dollar dumb but penny wise is the standard way to run a business by everyone.
Rootkit makers and malware spammers who inject SEO ads on your webservers love you both!
Not to mention it is unsupported and eventually wont compile. Libs and apis change. This is a huge problem getting KDE 3 resurrected. Gnome 2 is dead and it is not like just compiling vim. Libraries even have dependencies on other libraries. Mate may not have the resources to save it.
I agree with gnome 3. The demand for Notepad over MS word is HUGE! We all want a crappy UI that requires a quad core processor to have a gui less advanced and slower than the 6 mhz 1984 mac. People crave this and would pay mony. Nothing says professionalism than showing off to your friends how you spent the whole week and voided your warranty and ended up with uh yep just that.
I hear ya. The problem is all the operating systems are doing this. It is like they want us to all buy 8 inch crappy single tasking focused pads and netbooks with applets that have the functionalty of the 1984 mac hosted on a crappy cloud with monthly fees.
To hell with an input AND output oriented machine to do document creation and instead just sit at your local Starbucks with that credit card and consume content. Pffft /end rant
Go with Win 7. Unlike Gnome 2 it will be supported for 10 years until 2019. It is my next XP. My guess is Win 8 will bomb and win 9 will fix it by 2019. It is the only OS left that will be supported before mobile and phone oriente guis throw our productivity back 25 years. Sigh
Windows is much more stable baked and less buggy than Linux on a desktop. It is very sad but true due to alpha quality software. Windows stopped blue screening when XP came out and got rid of dos underneath that kept conflicting with win32 code. Windows 7 can stay up for years without a reboot now.
Not to me at least. I saw the writting on the wall last March. Guis were regressing, Java regressed with Oracle, Solaris went to hell with Java and is dying as custumers switch to Windows and Linux. Mostly Windows.
Worse, the browser wars 2.0 have crappy linux support and that was last straw for me. :-( Flash is only accelerated on Windows (last March), Firefox and Chrome are not accelerated on Linux either, and need to now be updated every 6 weeks (not on linux). Shit IE 9 had full acceleration and offered a supperior experience than linux even! Wtf? I had no reason to keep using it. All its advantages gone. Linux marketshare is half and linux is entering a dark age.
Windows 7 is much better than earlier versions and just works. Its nice having commercial software too
I am talkimg IBM mainframes that cost millions a year and hundreds an hour to operate. Not unix servers. I refer to fortune 250 companies that are traded and this includes European countries. Banks of course use mainframes because they can afford them and need something reliable and have very old software they need to run.
It seems to me that Linux is a poor mans Mac. I can't justify the price and the way Jobs leaves old versions of MacOS in the cold fast. It is great if you do not have $$$$ in student loans or get paid pre-2009 salaries but count your blessings if you do and can afford one.
In the Windows world people still use XP which is over 10 years old for crying out and software companies still support it.
I left Linux but switched to Windows because it is much cheaper and I can run Linux in a VM
I have never seen a mainframe before. Most I.T. people have not as only 250 companies in the whole US need them. Who cares about them as they mostly run old 30 year old cobol written software running in an emulator on them anyway.
Wrong.
It is not the cost of the data that will get you. It is the fact that 1,000+ employees will sit there with nothing to do as the server is done where you freak the fuck out trying to revive it. Tens of thousands an hour too.
YOu need to consider that and if you lose a days worth of work how much did that cost? It could be $120,000 easily as people would repeat what they did the previous day. IT could mean lost sales, fines/fees from creditors, and other nasties where they relied on your employer to do what they said before the disaster.
Tell the bean counters to screw themselves ! It is gross negligence no different than cancelling fire insurance. It is worth every penny unless you are a small shop. Even a good small shop owner backs up his data on a thumb drive every few days.
One of the reasons for buying overpriced HP and Dell servers is you can replace them or get a new motherboard if they fail.
With the same or very similiar chipset they wont bluescreen and you can get back to work from tape backup or plugging in the disk array. This is why you never build your own servers like your workstations. HP/Dell/IBM go out of their way to make sure their similiar server lines can be restored in such an emergency.
I worked in a school district as well . Not I.T. though.
Do you have any idea what the principals and administrators do? Lots of nasty and important government and CYA paperwork. Some of it is so important that the district/school gets fined if it is late or incomplete. If your school district worked in a city of 100,000 or more you have 100+ employees who are accountants, lawyers, anaylsts, grant acquisitions etc.
The cost of losing 1 weeks worth of work is the salary of all 100 people (not including 30 principles and 2,000 teachers) + any fines or lawsuits developing due to critical paperwork not completed to satisfy both the state and federal governments. It costs only several thousand dollars and my god, it is not incompentence but gross negligence not to do a daily backup.
If you are a school of 400 students all private with 7 private office staff and maybe 15 teachers then who cares? Use an online solution for $25 a month or a cheap $350 drive and 2 tapes costing $85 that get done at 3am every day.
Not having a daily backup to save money is like not having fire insurance or driver insurance for your bus drivers. Negligence and yes you can do all these things with backups. Cad programs with dongles you quoted? Those are not backed onto a server but maybe student cad drawings are on a file server.