I work in the mainframe software area and standard there is 1 year of support included in the price, then maintenance deals are also written are usually between 3 and 7 years for usually 15% of the price of the software. Though those deals are high convoluted now since you dont sell individual programs to customers any more but rather a packaged deal.
In terms of legacy support, that isnt really done either. Usually 3 major versions of a software are supported, meaning fixes are created for them regularly. That usually means a 5 year life cycle for a release. Fixes for problems once a version leaves support are special maintenance deals that usually cost more.
Though we have sold code as is. Meaning that the client is then responsible for maintaining the program because he has ownership of the code and a full license to do with it what he will. Though there is usually a 3 months period where we work out the bugs with them, but after that the code is theirs and they can fix it.
The Microprose Turn Based Strategy Games have always been high on my list of wanting another game. Maybe not so much a redo as just get either series started again.
GalCiv is a good game but somehow it just doesnt have the feel of MOO1 or 2. I played MOO1 for hours on end, and the sequel though not as hard as the original was also a very fun game. MOO3 was rushed and it shows.
The Mainframe does it job and does it well. Nothing comes close in Data Throughput Processing with the amount of reliability that a mainframe brings.
Computer 'Experts' have been saying that the mainframe is dead since the early 90s, but here we are 20 years later and I still have a job programming for it, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Small to mid-level servers just don't have the capacity to deal with the growing about of data generated. Fedex does in the neighborhood of 2 billion transactions a day, you cant just wipe together a Beowulf Cluster and think it will do the job reliably.
Or the better question is. How much do you trust the Federal Reserve to run all its processing on Windows machines. Or Wall Street. Ever consider if a transaction there is 'lost' because a windows blue screen? Even linux machines arent as dependable as a Mainframe. The IBM Z boxes actually have their own redundant parts included in them already. Not to mention that it will phone in its own tech support request.
Mainframes are not for everyone, but they do fulfill their job well when you do need them.
There are also enough tools out there like SOA so that even Java "Kids" can write applications for them easily.
Why do people always think it is about speed. It isnt. Mainframes are not super computers. They dont really need to be able to have very high processing power, what makes mainframes great is their storage movement capabilities. 2 billion transactions a day is a LOT of data to be thrown around, and a mainframe can easily handle that.
Beowulf Cluster? Not so much.
Reliability and redundancy is unmatched in a mainframe. There is a reason why financial institutions run Mainframes. Because that data really cant be lost.
Mainframe was called Dead in the early 90s and companies tried to switch to open systems and FAILED miserably. 20 years later and most Fortune 1000 companies still use a Mainframe, because nothing comes close to what they do.
Why is no one updating Cobol code? Because the skill to interact with other systems is disappearing.
As a Mainframe Utilities Programmer I hear it from customers all the time. "We can't touch that system because the guy who wrote it retired." System here just represent the code, but also the server backend stuff like database design.
I have heard stories of an IT department being 10 man team. In the 80s that team had everyone dedicated in maintaining the mainframes. Now, they still have 10 people but only 1 person is there to work on the Mainframe.
So now you have code from the 70s that no one understands, running a mission critical application, and you think the IT manager is going to touch it? He is praying it doesnt break on his watch or he might get a call from the COO. Even if it breaks, it is better to patch it then rewrite it because the database behind it is so vital to all the rest of the application that it cant be changed either.
The issue mainly is that no one is teaching old skills anymore. Skills that are still required, but really arent 'sexy' for young college students to learn. Even the name "Mainframe" has grandfather connotation to it while if people actually looked at the IBM Z Servers, one would see how high tech these systems actually are.
Just read the comments by Eric Flint and see that the authors who have books in the Library have seen a significant increase in sales. Sure, most of the books are older, and just the first one or two books in the series, but if other readers are anything like I am, then if you read the first book in a series and like it. You will definitely consider buying the second on wards.
Now the fact that he used in mainly to get notices is new, but free books really aren't
I graduated from Lafayette College with a Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Lafayette is mostly considered a small liberal arts college, but it has a very strong engineering program. Total size of the school is about 2000 students. It is considered part of the Little Ivy League, though formally that doesnt really exist.
In my opinion, you get what you pay for. Lafayette was small enough that I knew every professor and every student in my department. They knew me as well, and my grades in every class, even outside of the department. I don't think you can get that kind of personalized attention at a larger school. All of the classes were taught by professors. Never was there a T.A.
I mainly learned from lectures. The expensive $100 dollar a pop books were usually references guides for me. The professors knew their craft. And the course load was reasonable.
One issue that we had that first, my class was the first class of ECE majors. The college had decided to scrap their EE degree in favor of a mixed ECE degree. My class was the only class that was allowed to chose. Everyone before us was an EE, while any new freshmen were all ECE majors. The fact that we were the guinea pig class may have lightened the work load a little, but the move from EE to ECE was just shuffling around some classes and adding some Comp Sci classes.
On the flip side though, the whole college was also changing from the 5-3 system to the 4-4 system. The 5-3 system is you take 5 course for 3 credit hours a semester while the 4-4 is 4 classes for 4 credit hours. As an engineer I always had to take 5 classes regardless. But any class taken outside of the engineering department was now beefed up with usually more writing (Damn those humanities requirements).
Again, you get what you paid for. Small school, low student professor ratio, less chance to do some meaningful research, less known name on the diploma, and also usually in the middle of nowhere(Easton, PA isnt exactly a happening place)
Larger school, large city (usually), large classes, less interaction with faculty, more known name, bigger research being done.
I enjoyed going to Lafayette. I had enough free time, each semester usually only had 1 maybe 2 really difficult classes, while the rest were easy.
---
The article to me has some glaring misconceptions. The main one being that the writer believes that has a highschool science star he should have been able to master an engineering degree. AP courses help, but american highschool are woofully inadequate in preparing students for college.
I went to an international school and took the International Baccalaureate http://www.ibo.org/. It is an internation highschool degree program that tests and scores you on an internation level which is recognized by universities around the world while a regular american highschool diploma is not.
Grade inflation is not just occuring in colleges but start at elementary school. Getting an A in the US is just too simple. Too many straight A students are not really all they are cracked up to be.
Thus, I dont see a problem with the teaching being to difficult, to me it seemed like he had an over inflated ego by being the valedictorian of his class and never actually learned the way to learn in highschool. The fact that he switched completely out of the science field just shows me that he shouldnt have been an engineer.
I also think that the fact that the comp sci field has become increasingly more popular over the years, it is taking away a lot of the students that would have gone into engineering in the past.
The article reads too much like a blog entry then a news report. No input from the college stand point nor is there a student point of view of those who have managed to go through the program where he was successfully.
Contact IBM. A mainframe running z/VM is your solution here.
99.9% reliabilities is more then normal for those machines. It is modular enough to expand to what ever you may need in the future, and it has the dataprocessing horsepower to actually hand the 20k or so concurrent users at a time and have the harddrive space to match that many users as well.
Run linux or unix on top of VM and you should be fine.
"A big reason why this attitude prevails, however, has to do with the "single point-of-failure" issue. When your mainframe crashes, you can do absolutely nothing until the necessary repair work is done. This is where the distributed computing environment works very well."
Yet, when was the last time a mainframe actually failed? "Mainframe" is nolonger a single machine. It is a system of large computers on a common network similiar to distributed computing. Clustering computers is nothing new. A sysplex does it just the same, yet you only have 4 or 5 large mainframes in the system, with usually a number of backup machines if one actually does fail. One system fails, admin switches on the backups, the zOS operating system takes the bad system offline and intergrates the new one. All the process that were running on the bad machine are backed out and restarted on the new machine added, and you are still running, maybe a little slower because the backup is usually an old machine.
Data lost - Zero. System down time - Zero.
Mainframes dont crash. The system has been build with so many redundencies over the years, that if you know how to do it right then you have to try really hard to crash the system. Heck, I know one of the scandanavian airlines had their Mainframe up for 3 years straight. They finally had to take it down because they need to update something and only a Re-IPL would make it take effect.
Mainframes are almost too reliable. Companies are taking their mainframe system for granted. I talked to one person who joined a company with an IT department of about 10 people in the early 90s. All 10 people were dedicated to the mainframe. When he left in 2002, there were still only 10 people in the IT department but only 1 person had to maintain the mainframe, the rest were all smaller server and desktop admins.
Specifically, there is a law in china that in rural communities that if a girl is born first that the parents are allowed to have a second child in order to have a chance of having a son to inherit the land that they had been farming.
Though 2 children is the limit unless there are other circumstances. Also the chinese love twins. It is a common chinese wedding congratulation to wish the couple to receive twins.
Anyways, in such regard the communist system just works better. They need the strict system to dicate those family planning laws.
Blizzard is a division of Vivendi Universal. VU is a large distributor of all kinds of games for many platfroms. They have contracts with retailors, for many products. Advertisement and shelf space are all in these contracts.
Thus, inorder for a mediocre game to get that prime shelf space, they need to give part of the pie of one of the hottest games to come out in a while.
Remember that while a large chunk of people knew about World of Warcraft, the biggest buyer is still the casual buyer. VU and Blizzard needed to attract those people.
Now, WoW has been sold out in a number of places, and getting your hands on a box is difficult now, BUT I dont believe that VU or Blizzard expected this much of a demand.
Retailors needed to be included or they could just cut VU out of some other game that would need the shelf space. Remember also that most of the development cost is recovered from box sales while the monthly cost is more for server up keep and GM salaries. Expansions boxes pay for the programmers to keep developing. Just how the industry works.
Direct download will come, but I dont think it will happen before the summer.
Consider the fact that even in the article it states that 110,000 nursing jobs went unfilled last year. Another CNN article month ago shows that nursing will be the one of most in demand job in 10 years.
Is it really outsourcing when a job that is unfilled gets replaced by a robot?
Iceman
Oracle was not the first commercial database. IMS was available long before that. Oracle could be the first 'relational' database. IMS is hichrachical.
IMS was available in 1969 in the US and came to Europe in 73-74. DB2 is called DB2 because it is IBM second database. IMS was the first.
DB2 has since surpassed IMS in terms of world wide licenses. Though IMS is still the fastest transactional database in the world with test speeds on the New Z990 of about 2 Billion transaction a day which equals about 20,000 transactions a minute. No other database can equal an IMS database running FathPath.
IMS is in 95% of all Fortune 1000 companies.
First, you need that piece of paper. Going to college is a must, but today there are many schools available to you. Thus, you really need to narrow down your choices:
Large school or small? Close to home or not? Pure technical or not? And the big one, Cost.
Research where you want to go, dont go into it blindly. Visit campuses.
Interms of what you want to study, my personal opinion is that you need to look into an Engineering Degree. Electrical, Computer or Electrial and Computer Engineering degrees will give you more of a hardware background then Computer science, which is concerns itself more with programming. Though ultimately it isnt really all that important what you study as undergrad.
Graduate programs is where you would get most of your training in networking classes. You need to learn basic theory first. Only your senior year of being an undergrad can you start to apply such things.
I went to Lafayette College and studied ECE. The mix of both programming and electronics made the program interesting.
Still, even graduate work in networks wont help you all that much. Since we only use 10% of what we learn in college on the job anyways. Thus, your objective comes down to getting good grades and try to make yourself stand out so that you can get an offer from the employer you want. Ultimately, your employer would teach you your job.
A good engineering school is still my opinion. There are enough out there to choose from.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in the mainframe software area and standard there is 1 year of support included in the price, then maintenance deals are also written are usually between 3 and 7 years for usually 15% of the price of the software. Though those deals are high convoluted now since you dont sell individual programs to customers any more but rather a packaged deal.
In terms of legacy support, that isnt really done either. Usually 3 major versions of a software are supported, meaning fixes are created for them regularly. That usually means a 5 year life cycle for a release. Fixes for problems once a version leaves support are special maintenance deals that usually cost more.
Though we have sold code as is. Meaning that the client is then responsible for maintaining the program because he has ownership of the code and a full license to do with it what he will. Though there is usually a 3 months period where we work out the bugs with them, but after that the code is theirs and they can fix it.
The Microprose Turn Based Strategy Games have always been high on my list of wanting another game. Maybe not so much a redo as just get either series started again.
GalCiv is a good game but somehow it just doesnt have the feel of MOO1 or 2. I played MOO1 for hours on end, and the sequel though not as hard as the original was also a very fun game. MOO3 was rushed and it shows.
The Mainframe does it job and does it well. Nothing comes close in Data Throughput Processing with the amount of reliability that a mainframe brings.
Computer 'Experts' have been saying that the mainframe is dead since the early 90s, but here we are 20 years later and I still have a job programming for it, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Small to mid-level servers just don't have the capacity to deal with the growing about of data generated. Fedex does in the neighborhood of 2 billion transactions a day, you cant just wipe together a Beowulf Cluster and think it will do the job reliably.
Or the better question is. How much do you trust the Federal Reserve to run all its processing on Windows machines. Or Wall Street. Ever consider if a transaction there is 'lost' because a windows blue screen? Even linux machines arent as dependable as a Mainframe. The IBM Z boxes actually have their own redundant parts included in them already. Not to mention that it will phone in its own tech support request.
Mainframes are not for everyone, but they do fulfill their job well when you do need them.
There are also enough tools out there like SOA so that even Java "Kids" can write applications for them easily.
Mainframes run the world.
Why do people always think it is about speed. It isnt. Mainframes are not super computers. They dont really need to be able to have very high processing power, what makes mainframes great is their storage movement capabilities. 2 billion transactions a day is a LOT of data to be thrown around, and a mainframe can easily handle that.
Beowulf Cluster? Not so much.
Reliability and redundancy is unmatched in a mainframe. There is a reason why financial institutions run Mainframes. Because that data really cant be lost.
Mainframe was called Dead in the early 90s and companies tried to switch to open systems and FAILED miserably. 20 years later and most Fortune 1000 companies still use a Mainframe, because nothing comes close to what they do.
Why is no one updating Cobol code? Because the skill to interact with other systems is disappearing.
As a Mainframe Utilities Programmer I hear it from customers all the time. "We can't touch that system because the guy who wrote it retired." System here just represent the code, but also the server backend stuff like database design.
I have heard stories of an IT department being 10 man team. In the 80s that team had everyone dedicated in maintaining the mainframes. Now, they still have 10 people but only 1 person is there to work on the Mainframe.
So now you have code from the 70s that no one understands, running a mission critical application, and you think the IT manager is going to touch it? He is praying it doesnt break on his watch or he might get a call from the COO. Even if it breaks, it is better to patch it then rewrite it because the database behind it is so vital to all the rest of the application that it cant be changed either.
The issue mainly is that no one is teaching old skills anymore. Skills that are still required, but really arent 'sexy' for young college students to learn. Even the name "Mainframe" has grandfather connotation to it while if people actually looked at the IBM Z Servers, one would see how high tech these systems actually are.
He definitely isn't the first to do this. The Publisher Baen has been doing it for years.
http://www.baen.com/library/
Just read the comments by Eric Flint and see that the authors who have books in the Library have seen a significant increase in sales. Sure, most of the books are older, and just the first one or two books in the series, but if other readers are anything like I am, then if you read the first book in a series and like it. You will definitely consider buying the second on wards.
Now the fact that he used in mainly to get notices is new, but free books really aren't
I graduated from Lafayette College with a Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Lafayette is mostly considered a small liberal arts college, but it has a very strong engineering program. Total size of the school is about 2000 students. It is considered part of the Little Ivy League, though formally that doesnt really exist.
In my opinion, you get what you pay for. Lafayette was small enough that I knew every professor and every student in my department. They knew me as well, and my grades in every class, even outside of the department. I don't think you can get that kind of personalized attention at a larger school. All of the classes were taught by professors. Never was there a T.A.
I mainly learned from lectures. The expensive $100 dollar a pop books were usually references guides for me. The professors knew their craft. And the course load was reasonable.
One issue that we had that first, my class was the first class of ECE majors. The college had decided to scrap their EE degree in favor of a mixed ECE degree. My class was the only class that was allowed to chose. Everyone before us was an EE, while any new freshmen were all ECE majors. The fact that we were the guinea pig class may have lightened the work load a little, but the move from EE to ECE was just shuffling around some classes and adding some Comp Sci classes.
On the flip side though, the whole college was also changing from the 5-3 system to the 4-4 system. The 5-3 system is you take 5 course for 3 credit hours a semester while the 4-4 is 4 classes for 4 credit hours. As an engineer I always had to take 5 classes regardless. But any class taken outside of the engineering department was now beefed up with usually more writing (Damn those humanities requirements).
Again, you get what you paid for.
Small school, low student professor ratio, less chance to do some meaningful research, less known name on the diploma, and also usually in the middle of nowhere(Easton, PA isnt exactly a happening place)
Larger school, large city (usually), large classes, less interaction with faculty, more known name, bigger research being done.
I enjoyed going to Lafayette. I had enough free time, each semester usually only had 1 maybe 2 really difficult classes, while the rest were easy.
---
The article to me has some glaring misconceptions. The main one being that the writer believes that has a highschool science star he should have been able to master an engineering degree. AP courses help, but american highschool are woofully inadequate in preparing students for college.
I went to an international school and took the International Baccalaureate http://www.ibo.org/. It is an internation highschool degree program that tests and scores you on an internation level which is recognized by universities around the world while a regular american highschool diploma is not.
Grade inflation is not just occuring in colleges but start at elementary school. Getting an A in the US is just too simple. Too many straight A students are not really all they are cracked up to be.
Thus, I dont see a problem with the teaching being to difficult, to me it seemed like he had an over inflated ego by being the valedictorian of his class and never actually learned the way to learn in highschool. The fact that he switched completely out of the science field just shows me that he shouldnt have been an engineer.
I also think that the fact that the comp sci field has become increasingly more popular over the years, it is taking away a lot of the students that would have gone into engineering in the past.
The article reads too much like a blog entry then a news report. No input from the college stand point nor is there a student point of view of those who have managed to go through the program where he was successfully.
Flawed article.
Iceman
Contact IBM. A mainframe running z/VM is your solution here.
0 /
99.9% reliabilities is more then normal for those machines. It is modular enough to expand to what ever you may need in the future, and it has the dataprocessing horsepower to actually hand the 20k or so concurrent users at a time and have the harddrive space to match that many users as well.
Run linux or unix on top of VM and you should be fine.
Product Page for Z990:
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/z99
"A big reason why this attitude prevails, however, has to do with the "single point-of-failure" issue. When your mainframe crashes, you can do absolutely nothing until the necessary repair work is done. This is where the distributed computing environment works very well."
Yet, when was the last time a mainframe actually failed? "Mainframe" is nolonger a single machine. It is a system of large computers on a common network similiar to distributed computing. Clustering computers is nothing new. A sysplex does it just the same, yet you only have 4 or 5 large mainframes in the system, with usually a number of backup machines if one actually does fail. One system fails, admin switches on the backups, the zOS operating system takes the bad system offline and intergrates the new one. All the process that were running on the bad machine are backed out and restarted on the new machine added, and you are still running, maybe a little slower because the backup is usually an old machine.
Data lost - Zero.
System down time - Zero.
Mainframes dont crash. The system has been build with so many redundencies over the years, that if you know how to do it right then you have to try really hard to crash the system. Heck, I know one of the scandanavian airlines had their Mainframe up for 3 years straight. They finally had to take it down because they need to update something and only a Re-IPL would make it take effect.
Mainframes are almost too reliable. Companies are taking their mainframe system for granted. I talked to one person who joined a company with an IT department of about 10 people in the early 90s. All 10 people were dedicated to the mainframe. When he left in 2002, there were still only 10 people in the IT department but only 1 person had to maintain the mainframe, the rest were all smaller server and desktop admins.
Iceman
China isnt that heartless actually.
Specifically, there is a law in china that in rural communities that if a girl is born first that the parents are allowed to have a second child in order to have a chance of having a son to inherit the land that they had been farming.
Though 2 children is the limit unless there are other circumstances. Also the chinese love twins. It is a common chinese wedding congratulation to wish the couple to receive twins.
Anyways, in such regard the communist system just works better. They need the strict system to dicate those family planning laws.
Iceman
"Why go retail?"
Blizzard is a division of Vivendi Universal. VU is a large distributor of all kinds of games for many platfroms. They have contracts with retailors, for many products. Advertisement and shelf space are all in these contracts.
Thus, inorder for a mediocre game to get that prime shelf space, they need to give part of the pie of one of the hottest games to come out in a while.
Remember that while a large chunk of people knew about World of Warcraft, the biggest buyer is still the casual buyer. VU and Blizzard needed to attract those people.
Now, WoW has been sold out in a number of places, and getting your hands on a box is difficult now, BUT I dont believe that VU or Blizzard expected this much of a demand.
Retailors needed to be included or they could just cut VU out of some other game that would need the shelf space. Remember also that most of the development cost is recovered from box sales while the monthly cost is more for server up keep and GM salaries. Expansions boxes pay for the programmers to keep developing. Just how the industry works.
Direct download will come, but I dont think it will happen before the summer.
Iceman
Consider the fact that even in the article it states that 110,000 nursing jobs went unfilled last year. Another CNN article month ago shows that nursing will be the one of most in demand job in 10 years. Is it really outsourcing when a job that is unfilled gets replaced by a robot? Iceman
Oracle was not the first commercial database. IMS was available long before that. Oracle could be the first 'relational' database. IMS is hichrachical. IMS was available in 1969 in the US and came to Europe in 73-74. DB2 is called DB2 because it is IBM second database. IMS was the first. DB2 has since surpassed IMS in terms of world wide licenses. Though IMS is still the fastest transactional database in the world with test speeds on the New Z990 of about 2 Billion transaction a day which equals about 20,000 transactions a minute. No other database can equal an IMS database running FathPath. IMS is in 95% of all Fortune 1000 companies.
First, you need that piece of paper. Going to college is a must, but today there are many schools available to you. Thus, you really need to narrow down your choices: Large school or small? Close to home or not? Pure technical or not? And the big one, Cost. Research where you want to go, dont go into it blindly. Visit campuses. Interms of what you want to study, my personal opinion is that you need to look into an Engineering Degree. Electrical, Computer or Electrial and Computer Engineering degrees will give you more of a hardware background then Computer science, which is concerns itself more with programming. Though ultimately it isnt really all that important what you study as undergrad. Graduate programs is where you would get most of your training in networking classes. You need to learn basic theory first. Only your senior year of being an undergrad can you start to apply such things. I went to Lafayette College and studied ECE. The mix of both programming and electronics made the program interesting. Still, even graduate work in networks wont help you all that much. Since we only use 10% of what we learn in college on the job anyways. Thus, your objective comes down to getting good grades and try to make yourself stand out so that you can get an offer from the employer you want. Ultimately, your employer would teach you your job. A good engineering school is still my opinion. There are enough out there to choose from.