Federal government wants institutions to keep lots of private data forever so they can ask for it when they want to collect your child support, get your tax, or look for terrorists. The best way to solve identity theft is to get private business out of the business of aiding the government to do it's job.
Maybe I'm biased, but I can think of two components in a project I'm working at the moment which point out vividly what I'm getting at. Both components were originally developed in 1997. One component was COBOL the other was a VB6 application built on top of an Access '95 database with two third party ActiveX components. The mainframe component was a piece of cake to upgrade to the requirements. The VB6 application was a huge pain in the ass which required me to find an old copy of Access 97 so I could upgrade the database to add a new key field. Fortunately the third party components were compatible with Access 97 and I didn't have to find a copy of Access 95. Eventually this thing needs to get rewritten obviously but we need the changes by August 1. There is no change control and the only decent upgrade path is a total rewrite which will have to wait due to our project deadlines.
Re:Some want to see the demise of the mainframe?
on
The Mainframe Still Lives!
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I do both mainframe programming and PC based programming and it's really far easier to maintain the mainframe stuff. It's also much more interesting. As a programmer perhaps the most telling thing I can say about the difference is that when your mainframe application dumps, you can actually analyze the dump and learn everything you need to know in most cases to fully diagnose the problem. PC programs on the other hand rely pretty much completely on recreating the abnormal situation in a debugging session in order to debug a problem. If you can't recreate the problem in your test case, you typically can't solve a problem. This pretty much insures that properly maintained mainframe programs will always be more reliable than PC based ones.
Often it is the cost of the third party software licenses (Computer Associates) that kill you on the Z/OS platform. They charge you by the MIPS, so as you grow and need a faster machine, CA is waiting there to hit you big time. It's a significant problem and one that IBM needs to remedy by bringing better alternatives to the Z/OS platform which aren't so cost prohibitive.
Since XML is text based, it can be much more easily transported across platforms with different character encodings. A binary format is much more problematic. For example, using XML you could generate the data, or parts of it, on a Mainframe system which uses EBCIDC encoding and then FTP that data into to a server that uses ASCII and parse it easily.
This is not true, especially in mainframe systems dates are usually stored as either a julian format YYYYDDD or gregorian YYYYMMDD format. Each segment is not stored in a separed binary number, that would have been extremely wasteful of space not to mention cumbersome. Instead dates are stored as a single numeric field formatted and in non Y2K compatible software this means they were stored as YYDDD or YYMMDD.
If these were used in date arithmetic using non Y2K patched software they would indeed return erroneous results. Often in software the question is asked "is date X before date Y?" The usual way of checking this is to compare the entire date field as if it were a single number. If date X is "greater than" date Z then date X happened after date Z. If you only have 2 digit years the answer is incorrect if the two dates span the century. This kind of logic is ubiquitous in many mainframe systems and required a lot of patching.
"I read that, and thought to myself: is science becoming the new religion of the 21st century?"
Maybe that's why our encounters with the unknown now tend to look like alien's with sophisticated technology instead of angels with chariots or elves with magic acorns. We're just projecting our own human wishes on the ink blot called "that which we don't understand."
Celebreties commenting on science is just an extension of the need for humans to have a class of shamans and healers who can speak knowningly about the unknown, it's like a priest class.
Where it's getting to be a problem now is that we now have to make the distinction between the prognosticaions of a cultural fetish and the findings of actual science.
We didn't have this problem so much with faeries and angels because at that point in history it was before the separation of material sciences from spiritual models. Now that relgion has become irrelevant in terms of explaining the scientific basis of things which appear miraculous or magical, it's becoming aberant and acting cornered and hateful. Not that relgion doesn't serve a possible constructive purpose but it is much more specialized now that we understand that there is a scientific dimension which is not subordinate to any particular spiritual doctrine.
The sooner people understand this the sooner people will stop strapping bombs to themselves in the name of magical beings and trying to stuff fairy tales into school curriculums and calling them "facts".
"There is a vast difference between copyrights and patents, and, in my opinion (and that of many others), patents have no place in software. Most knowledgable people agree that currently there is practically no way to write software without infringing on someone's patent, either knowingly or unknowingly. That should be a red flag that the current system is screwed up in a major way."
Heck, just open Visual Studio and start a new, whatever they call it, windows project based on some template and hit the run button. You have a fully functional program that probably infringes any number of patents.
Where I live in Minneapolis all the TV stations are broadcasting their content over the air HD. A lot of it is not 4:3 either. The shows I watch like Prison Break for example I watch in widescreen HD and it looks stunning.
The biggest problem isn't the local network TV stations. It's the damn satellite and cable broadcasts. I have DirecTV and get their HD package, HBO and ShowTime to maximise the HD content, I get a grand total of something like 8 HD stations. They look great, especially HD-Net and the HD Discovery channels, but the number of channels is underwhelming.
Meanwhile all the other content on dozens of satellite channels looks like crap by comparison. Most of it is 4:3 with the black stripes or I can zoom it and lose content. Some of it is letterboxed so I can zoom in to a wide screen format but the resolution is so horrible it's barely watchable.
Well, I've been a mainframe programmer for 25 years but when I entered the job market it was quite easy to get a job as a mainframe programmer because that was pretty what programming was. Companies expected to train people on the job. Now that doesn't seem to be the case. The training budgets are axed and jobs are filled by looking for people who already have the experience to do the job.
If IBM was smart about attracting talent to mainframe development, they would open up access to Z/OS and the dev tools to anyone who wanted to learn them. Where are the next generation of mainframe developers going to come from anyway? PC emulators exist but unfortunately you can't run Z/OS on them legally.
The only way for us to survive is to grow up spiritually. As long as significant portions of the population live under the belief that the world is guided by magical beings who are somehow looking out for their little regional tribe of true believers, we're doomed. These fantasies marginalize everyone outside of the tribe and color them less than human.
There is no daddy or mommy god hovering over us guiding us to some otherworldly paradise where the chosen will be rewarded and the outsiders punished. These ideas just justify killing those who believe differently.
Once we get over this notion and realize that we're all humans living on a small ball of rock and water we might have a chance of lifting our eyes above the rim of our individual limits. Then we'll go beyond childhood and become something mature, whose nature we can only guess at right now.
As I move from newbie to barely productive to competent I try to turn right around and participate in a forum that matches my previous skill level. I find that very often there are other people struggling with the same thing I just painstakingly figured out.
I think if more support fourms were somehow structured into levels and more people would participate at the level of expertise they possess it would help. It is frustrating to deal with the same first-time user questions over and over again, but a structured forum that includes a level for extreme beginners not only gives the beginners a place to feel safe to ask stupid questions, it gives those slightly more knowledgeable a place to feel like a useful part of the community support process.
As a programmer who actually worked in IT in 1999 I can assure you the reason Y2K wasn't a disaster is because people like me spent a lot of time fixing code. It *did* matter in many many cases that the old code only had 2 digit years.
Man has the right to live by his own law. Man has the right to live in the way that he wills to do. Man has the right to work as he will. Man has the right to play as he will. Man has the right to rest as he will. Man has the right to die when and how he will. Man has the right to eat what he will. Man has the right to drink what he will. Man has the right to dwell where he will. Man has the right to move as he will on the face of the earth. Man has the right to think what he will. Man has the right to speak what he will. Man has the right to write what he will. Man has the right to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will. Man has the right to dress as he will. Man has the right to love as he will, when, where, and with whom he will. Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.
I've been working on mainframe computers since 1976. One of the more recent projects I've been working on is developing SOAP interfaces for our data through CICS Transaction Server on the IBM Mainframe. Before that it was taking Cobol report output and loading it into a server so that reports were available over the Internet in PDF format. So while the environment is Mainframe the business requirements are cross platform. IBM Transaction Server for example can be used as a SOAP server enabling cross platform access to the Mainframe data. Other new things coming down the pike are virtualized linux partitions running in a VM environment on the zOS bos.
Languages are tools, I write in mainly Cobol and Easytrieve, though C, C++ and Java are also finding their way into the Mainframe environment. We have access to these languages but typically choose Cobol for heavy duty stuff because of the wealth of available code base and ease of use. Easytrieve is typically the choice for creating reports. Programmers need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that tool is Java, sometimes it is Cobol.
Ultimately perhaps applications will be deployed as entire virtual machines each containing exactly what is need to run that application perfectly. Tag onto that virtrualization a SOAPish interface that the meta-machine can query and dynamically adapt an interfaces to the available functions.
I'll never be able to use Google's Gmail until they let me change the "From" name to match my various email accounts. Other Webmail systems like Horde let you set up multiple identities. It's essential for those of us who manage many domains and have multiple email accounts forwarding into a single webmail interface.
I have a gmail account. I was excited at first, but at this point it is unusable.
You can only set up 20 filters, and there is no "and" "or" ability.
The spam filters only catch about half of my spam. Choosing "Report as spam" doesn't remove any other instances of the same spam which are sitting in my inbox. I get a lot of duplicate spam, so it would have been nice if there was some intelligence here.
You can't search on custom headers. I run my mail through spam filters before it ever gets to Gmail. These put specialy X-Spam headers in the email messages. You can't search on anything but "From", "To", "Subject", "Has the words" and "Doesn't have the words" which refer only to the body. This is just dumb since the data is obviously there and available to search on.
The address book is basicaly a place holder, it has no features you'd want beyond the most simple list.
You can't customize the Inbox view much at all. For example I like to display the "To" address in the Inbox view since I get a lot of mail addressed to different domains, and different email addresses. I need to be able to at least sort on these. I can search on them, but the searches can't be saved like the "Search Folders" in Outlook 2003. This is how a search based email service should work if you've ever seen them, they're great and completely blow away gmail's search feature.
I wanted to love Gmail, but it's not half the email client that Horde or Squirrelmail are on the web side, and comparing it to client side email programs is not even fair, it offers nothing other than offsite storage and access. If you don't need remote access there is no reason to switch to Gmail at all. I hope they get busy and start pumping up the feature set, I think they have a good beginning but it's no where near ready to compete with mature email solutions.
I bought a Palm Tungsten W and regretted it pretty much right away - it sucks as a phone, and AT&T Wireless sucks even more. But it works great as a PDA and it redeemed itself completely when I discovered I could download etexts from usenet and read them anywhere. I installed Palm Reader and Docs to Go and now I carry my W where ever I go. I'm having fun rereading old scifi I read years ago, and stuff like that. It's amazing all the stuff you can find to dump on there. I love reading books with the Palm, and the Tungsten's high resolution and backlight make it very easy to read under almost any conditions. When I replace my W with something newer and better, reading etexts will be a major consideration. I also love that I can carry large amounts of reference material with me at all times.
HD games are what is needed. When I went to buy my GC at Best Buy, I asked if they carried the Component Video Cable, so I could get 480P. The guy insisted that GC had no such thing, and it "didn't do High Def, only PlayStation and XBox do." But, many GC games can run at 480P, which isn't quite HD but it's in the right direction. Oddly no one in town carries the Component Video cables, I had to order them directly from Ninetendo, and the still haven't arrived. This makes no sense to me. Almost every GC game I own says it supports progressive scan on the box, yet without these cables I'll never see it.
Hit Zoom. On my widscreen TV often I can "zoom" my aspect ratio and cut off the bottom and top of the picture. This works great on letter box programs, often the channel logo is in the margin and i can watch the film without any annoying logos.
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Federal government wants institutions to keep lots of private data forever so they can ask for it when they want to collect your child support, get your tax, or look for terrorists. The best way to solve identity theft is to get private business out of the business of aiding the government to do it's job.
Maybe I'm biased, but I can think of two components in a project I'm working at the moment which point out vividly what I'm getting at. Both components were originally developed in 1997. One component was COBOL the other was a VB6 application built on top of an Access '95 database with two third party ActiveX components. The mainframe component was a piece of cake to upgrade to the requirements. The VB6 application was a huge pain in the ass which required me to find an old copy of Access 97 so I could upgrade the database to add a new key field. Fortunately the third party components were compatible with Access 97 and I didn't have to find a copy of Access 95. Eventually this thing needs to get rewritten obviously but we need the changes by August 1. There is no change control and the only decent upgrade path is a total rewrite which will have to wait due to our project deadlines.
I do both mainframe programming and PC based programming and it's really far easier to maintain the mainframe stuff. It's also much more interesting. As a programmer perhaps the most telling thing I can say about the difference is that when your mainframe application dumps, you can actually analyze the dump and learn everything you need to know in most cases to fully diagnose the problem. PC programs on the other hand rely pretty much completely on recreating the abnormal situation in a debugging session in order to debug a problem. If you can't recreate the problem in your test case, you typically can't solve a problem. This pretty much insures that properly maintained mainframe programs will always be more reliable than PC based ones.
Often it is the cost of the third party software licenses (Computer Associates) that kill you on the Z/OS platform. They charge you by the MIPS, so as you grow and need a faster machine, CA is waiting there to hit you big time. It's a significant problem and one that IBM needs to remedy by bringing better alternatives to the Z/OS platform which aren't so cost prohibitive.
Since XML is text based, it can be much more easily transported across platforms with different character encodings. A binary format is much more problematic. For example, using XML you could generate the data, or parts of it, on a Mainframe system which uses EBCIDC encoding and then FTP that data into to a server that uses ASCII and parse it easily.
This is not true, especially in mainframe systems dates are usually stored as either a julian format YYYYDDD or gregorian YYYYMMDD format. Each segment is not stored in a separed binary number, that would have been extremely wasteful of space not to mention cumbersome. Instead dates are stored as a single numeric field formatted and in non Y2K compatible software this means they were stored as YYDDD or YYMMDD.
If these were used in date arithmetic using non Y2K patched software they would indeed return erroneous results. Often in software the question is asked "is date X before date Y?" The usual way of checking this is to compare the entire date field as if it were a single number. If date X is "greater than" date Z then date X happened after date Z. If you only have 2 digit years the answer is incorrect if the two dates span the century. This kind of logic is ubiquitous in many mainframe systems and required a lot of patching.
"I read that, and thought to myself: is science becoming the new religion of the 21st century?"
Maybe that's why our encounters with the unknown now tend to look like alien's with sophisticated technology instead of angels with chariots or elves with magic acorns. We're just projecting our own human wishes on the ink blot called "that which we don't understand."
Celebreties commenting on science is just an extension of the need for humans to have a class of shamans and healers who can speak knowningly about the unknown, it's like a priest class.
Where it's getting to be a problem now is that we now have to make the distinction between the prognosticaions of a cultural fetish and the findings of actual science.
We didn't have this problem so much with faeries and angels because at that point in history it was before the separation of material sciences from spiritual models. Now that relgion has become irrelevant in terms of explaining the scientific basis of things which appear miraculous or magical, it's becoming aberant and acting cornered and hateful. Not that relgion doesn't serve a possible constructive purpose but it is much more specialized now that we understand that there is a scientific dimension which is not subordinate to any particular spiritual doctrine.
The sooner people understand this the sooner people will stop strapping bombs to themselves in the name of magical beings and trying to stuff fairy tales into school curriculums and calling them "facts".
"There is a vast difference between copyrights and patents, and, in my opinion (and that of many others), patents have no place in software. Most knowledgable people agree that currently there is practically no way to write software without infringing on someone's patent, either knowingly or unknowingly. That should be a red flag that the current system is screwed up in a major way."
Heck, just open Visual Studio and start a new, whatever they call it, windows project based on some template and hit the run button. You have a fully functional program that probably infringes any number of patents.
I wonder if I could whip up a distro called "SM Linux" (Senior Moment Linux) and get MS to pay me a million or two.
Where I live in Minneapolis all the TV stations are broadcasting their content over the air HD. A lot of it is not 4:3 either. The shows I watch like Prison Break for example I watch in widescreen HD and it looks stunning.
The biggest problem isn't the local network TV stations. It's the damn satellite and cable broadcasts. I have DirecTV and get their HD package, HBO and ShowTime to maximise the HD content, I get a grand total of something like 8 HD stations. They look great, especially HD-Net and the HD Discovery channels, but the number of channels is underwhelming.
Meanwhile all the other content on dozens of satellite channels looks like crap by comparison. Most of it is 4:3 with the black stripes or I can zoom it and lose content. Some of it is letterboxed so I can zoom in to a wide screen format but the resolution is so horrible it's barely watchable.
Well, I've been a mainframe programmer for 25 years but when I entered the job market it was quite easy to get a job as a mainframe programmer because that was pretty what programming was. Companies expected to train people on the job. Now that doesn't seem to be the case. The training budgets are axed and jobs are filled by looking for people who already have the experience to do the job.
If IBM was smart about attracting talent to mainframe development, they would open up access to Z/OS and the dev tools to anyone who wanted to learn them. Where are the next generation of mainframe developers going to come from anyway? PC emulators exist but unfortunately you can't run Z/OS on them legally.
Amen!
The only way for us to survive is to grow up spiritually. As long as significant portions of the population live under the belief that the world is guided by magical beings who are somehow looking out for their little regional tribe of true believers, we're doomed. These fantasies marginalize everyone outside of the tribe and color them less than human.
There is no daddy or mommy god hovering over us guiding us to some otherworldly paradise where the chosen will be rewarded and the outsiders punished. These ideas just justify killing those who believe differently.
Once we get over this notion and realize that we're all humans living on a small ball of rock and water we might have a chance of lifting our eyes above the rim of our individual limits. Then we'll go beyond childhood and become something mature, whose nature we can only guess at right now.
There may be an emulator, but you can't run the operating system, Z/OS on it without a license so it's not terribly useful.
As I move from newbie to barely productive to competent I try to turn right around and participate in a forum that matches my previous skill level. I find that very often there are other people struggling with the same thing I just painstakingly figured out.
I think if more support fourms were somehow structured into levels and more people would participate at the level of expertise they possess it would help. It is frustrating to deal with the same first-time user questions over and over again, but a structured forum that includes a level for extreme beginners not only gives the beginners a place to feel safe to ask stupid questions, it gives those slightly more knowledgeable a place to feel like a useful part of the community support process.
As a programmer who actually worked in IT in 1999 I can assure you the reason Y2K wasn't a disaster is because people like me spent a lot of time fixing code. It *did* matter in many many cases that the old code only had 2 digit years.
Man has the right to live by his own law.
Man has the right to live in the way that he wills to do.
Man has the right to work as he will.
Man has the right to play as he will.
Man has the right to rest as he will.
Man has the right to die when and how he will.
Man has the right to eat what he will.
Man has the right to drink what he will.
Man has the right to dwell where he will.
Man has the right to move as he will on the face of the earth.
Man has the right to think what he will.
Man has the right to speak what he will.
Man has the right to write what he will.
Man has the right to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will.
Man has the right to dress as he will.
Man has the right to love as he will, when, where, and with whom he will.
Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.
I've been working on mainframe computers since 1976. One of the more recent projects I've been working on is developing SOAP interfaces for our data through CICS Transaction Server on the IBM Mainframe. Before that it was taking Cobol report output and loading it into a server so that reports were available over the Internet in PDF format. So while the environment is Mainframe the business requirements are cross platform. IBM Transaction Server for example can be used as a SOAP server enabling cross platform access to the Mainframe data. Other new things coming down the pike are virtualized linux partitions running in a VM environment on the zOS bos.
Languages are tools, I write in mainly Cobol and Easytrieve, though C, C++ and Java are also finding their way into the Mainframe environment. We have access to these languages but typically choose Cobol for heavy duty stuff because of the wealth of available code base and ease of use. Easytrieve is typically the choice for creating reports. Programmers need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that tool is Java, sometimes it is Cobol.
Ultimately perhaps applications will be deployed as entire virtual machines each containing exactly what is need to run that application perfectly. Tag onto that virtrualization a SOAPish interface that the meta-machine can query and dynamically adapt an interfaces to the available functions.
I'll never be able to use Google's Gmail until they let me change the "From" name to match my various email accounts. Other Webmail systems like Horde let you set up multiple identities. It's essential for those of us who manage many domains and have multiple email accounts forwarding into a single webmail interface.
I have a gmail account. I was excited at first, but at this point it is unusable.
You can only set up 20 filters, and there is no "and" "or" ability.
The spam filters only catch about half of my spam. Choosing "Report as spam" doesn't remove any other instances of the same spam which are sitting in my inbox. I get a lot of duplicate spam, so it would have been nice if there was some intelligence here.
You can't search on custom headers. I run my mail through spam filters before it ever gets to Gmail. These put specialy X-Spam headers in the email messages. You can't search on anything but "From", "To", "Subject", "Has the words" and "Doesn't have the words" which refer only to the body. This is just dumb since the data is obviously there and available to search on.
The address book is basicaly a place holder, it has no features you'd want beyond the most simple list.
You can't customize the Inbox view much at all. For example I like to display the "To" address in the Inbox view since I get a lot of mail addressed to different domains, and different email addresses. I need to be able to at least sort on these. I can search on them, but the searches can't be saved like the "Search Folders" in Outlook 2003. This is how a search based email service should work if you've ever seen them, they're great and completely blow away gmail's search feature.
I wanted to love Gmail, but it's not half the email client that Horde or Squirrelmail are on the web side, and comparing it to client side email programs is not even fair, it offers nothing other than offsite storage and access. If you don't need remote access there is no reason to switch to Gmail at all. I hope they get busy and start pumping up the feature set, I think they have a good beginning but it's no where near ready to compete with mature email solutions.
I bought a Palm Tungsten W and regretted it pretty much right away - it sucks as a phone, and AT&T Wireless sucks even more. But it works great as a PDA and it redeemed itself completely when I discovered I could download etexts from usenet and read them anywhere. I installed Palm Reader and Docs to Go and now I carry my W where ever I go. I'm having fun rereading old scifi I read years ago, and stuff like that. It's amazing all the stuff you can find to dump on there. I love reading books with the Palm, and the Tungsten's high resolution and backlight make it very easy to read under almost any conditions. When I replace my W with something newer and better, reading etexts will be a major consideration. I also love that I can carry large amounts of reference material with me at all times.
HD games are what is needed.
When I went to buy my GC at Best Buy, I asked if they carried the Component Video Cable, so I could get 480P. The guy insisted that GC had no such thing, and it "didn't do High Def, only PlayStation and XBox do." But, many GC games can run at 480P, which isn't quite HD but it's in the right direction. Oddly no one in town carries the Component Video cables, I had to order them directly from Ninetendo, and the still haven't arrived. This makes no sense to me. Almost every GC game I own says it supports progressive scan on the box, yet without these cables I'll never see it.
Hit Zoom. On my widscreen TV often I can "zoom" my aspect ratio and cut off the bottom and top of the picture. This works great on letter box programs, often the channel logo is in the margin and i can watch the film without any annoying logos.