>>Well, I've got a batch process that is about to go into our production realm next week that processes 4 million customer accounts every night. Close enough?
What precisely are you doing with those accounts? Updating balances or some such thing?
Why would you do this in Java? Java == slow. Sorry it's true. Also, even if you implemented in C/C++ on distributed hardware, you're just not going to get the same performace you'd get on a mainframe. The 390 is faassst.
Our batch process consists of 45 jobs, about 150 programs (not including utilities like batch fileaid and syncsort), and takes in close to 40 feeds from around the world.
We're processing 5 million records a night, crunching the numbers every which way, rolling them up every which way, and loading the results an average of 15 million rows into a bunch of DB2 tables for online viewing.
Our critical path runs in less than 1 hour. The total job stream in real world time is 4 hours. We use about 1 1/2 hours of CPU time every night. That's 1 1/2 hours of 100% cpu utilization.
Now, this stream runs 3 times, simeltaniously, so multiply the resultant numbers by 3, but the clock time remains the same.
This is the power of COBOL on the mainframe. If we were doing this stuff in the distributed environment, we'd probably be looking at an 18 hour batch cycle.
No joke. I once duplicated part of the critical path in C and we let it rip on a prod server.. a newish Sun (can't remember the stats) it took 3 1/2 times as long in clock time to run as the mainframe version(15 mins on frame, 50 mins on Sun). And this was straight file processing and number crunching. I didn't bother to set up tables in Oracle after that... no point, the box was too slow.
So like everyone else has been saying, big companies run their business on big iron. And they use the distributed systems for not so critical processing and web/gui representation of reports.
I'm a UNIX guy now, but I started on the mainframe and I keep my skills sharp by doing a couple of COBOL projects a year. I like the fact that there's gonna be a shortage of mainframe guys.
I doubt that there are a large number of COBOL programmers in Bangladore, so I'm looking at some potential job security.
Also, COBOL's not such a bad language. Not for what it's meant for anyway. Learn it and code in it for a while. You'll see.
BTW, you shouldn't be calling me a moron anyway. I don't mind if someone disagrees with me, it's a good thing actually. But name calling is wrong in a forum like this.
If the game is interesting and worth playing, then why not port it? So you open your product to an audience that you wouldn't have had otherwise.
I've never heard of this series of games, but I guess that if it was a hit on the Mac it'd probably have some success on the x86 platform.
Is shareware really dead? I don't think so. I still buy the occasional game after downloading a demo version. It's not called shareware anymore but it feels the same to me.
I was watching the skirmish at Abu Dhar unfold on MSNBC early Sunday morning. I now feel educated in a very minute way about what the horrors or war are like.
Seeing those marines pinned down really freaked me out. They're regular guys out there with guns trying not to get killed.
So then the tanks come in and start exchanging machine gun fire with the Iraqi soldiers. There was a tremendous amount of sparking and some explosions as they exchanged fire. Then one tank fired it's main gun into a sand berm, and I knew that I was watching a couple of guys die. Same thing a few moments later when another tank put a big hole in a building.
My point?
I think that if even 1 video game developer uses any footage like this as a basis for realism in a game, it'll be a sad day. This stuff is not entertainment. History yes. Fun stuff? Nope. Not by a mile.
>>but the ship you describe is sufficiently more advanced than any other race's (known) technology, that it sounds like your commandos could easily destroy any ship in known space.
Yeah, but they would do this sparingly. Or secretly as the situation required without leaving too much of a trace.
To use their full force all the time would be like Superman running through main street USA killing everyone, unimpeded. It'd look cool for 5 seconds. Then it sould suck for 7 seasons.
AS far as how the Fed scientists managed to develop this tech. Luck. Reverse engineering. Theft. Hard work.
I have a personal preference to set it in or just after the DS9 timeline. I found DS9 to be a fascinating show with a lot of potential. It could have grown up to be B5, but I digress. I'd love to expand on and continue some of the stuff that DS9 started.
I can see hoe you'd think that. But it's not the case.
I was thinking about this concept before they brought in Section 31. After that, I kind of worked S31 into my story. They're a specialized covert ops/intel group. Kind of like James Bond in space. To contrast, my guys are Green Berets in space.
But S31 arrogant, miniterpret intel a lot of times, and have some bad buerocracy(sp) problems.
So S31 in my concept has some good ideas sometimes, but they make a lot of mistakes. They provide bad intel(sometimes intentionally), have their own agenda and are accountable to no one.
My guys follow orders, usually. Work off S31's intel sometimes. Make mistakes, and are accountable to The Fed itself.
S31's not a major part of my ideas. But they're in there for continuity reasons, and they can provide some good story ideas.
That's why the Federation cloak in my story is a big secret. Kind of adds to the suspense. Especially when someone who accidentally figures out that the cloak is being used has to be erased.
Then there's reprecussions for the erasure. Just like real life. No goody-goody Federation happy endings in my ideas.
One more thing. With the exception of the Federation cloak (which works flawlessly) all the stuff I described above works 'most of the time'.
You can't alwyas detect shield frequency. Sometimes a culture not sniffing for a nuke will find it. An M-16 will come up on a politician's kid's toy metal detector.... all scenerios leading to all kinds of mayhem and backpedaling.
Even the ship itself while a good rethought design, is imperfect.
The whole point of my story idea is that the Federation is far from perfect. Guys make mistakes, and the entity as a whole pays for it. Then tries to compensate, and the whole thing cycles through again. Just like real life.
>>If it was smaller than the Defiant, even if it looked similiar, it wouldnt' be a Defiant. The Defiant was a horribly designed ship anyways, they could never pin its actual size down
Never thought about this. I guess my answer is that they took the Defiant design and rethought the weak spots.
>>And I think photon/quantam torps that use matter/anti-matter are technically supposed to be a great deal more destructive than nukes (see TNG Tech Manual), even if all on-screen evidence counterdicts this.
Because quantum torps can be detected by most races sensors/security scanners, even if one is rigged for a timed explosion and left somewhere to blow up. Whreas an 'old time' nuke doesn't come up on certain cultures sensors. It's too old. Kind of the same reason the commando use projectile rifles (M-16's)
>>The original Defiant had one sitting in it, and cloak and cloak detecton systems are constantly evolving, so it would be like using early 20th century camo when your enemy has IR goggles.
The Romulan cloak in the Defiant had the same limitations as any other Romulan cloak. The fed mods to Kirks stolen one have gotten around the problems. The Romulans are too arrogant to see their own weaknesses, hence the slow development of their cloak tech.
>>Personal transport devices were used by terrorists in a TNG episode, but it led to gradual genetic damage.
Mine don't. They work.
>>Shield penetration only works if you have the exact shield frequency, or can slip it into a sensor window.
My scienists have figured out that shield frequency can be determined my reading the target shields themselves. If they're modulating at a certain frequency then it can be detected. Derived from Borg tech.
>>And what about section 31? They suck. Buch of intel guys getting their signals garbled. Can't tell Klingon language from Ferengi at times. They're part of my guys problems.
You know, one thing I'd like to see is a commando type show. This would take place in the TNG/DS9 timeline, mostly.
No wait, hear me out please. I think that Trek has become a bit too goddy-goody. Too polished. The Federation is too nice with their clean carpeted ships and humanitarian attitude.
I imagine a bunch of special operations guys flying around in a souped up Defiant type ship.
Their missions sould be covert ops, taking care of all the dirty work that the Federation needed taking care of. Assasinations(klingons, romulans, the occasional starfleet captain that gets too big for his red suit), scouting, hostage rescue, etc. All the things that Green Berets, Seals and Rangers do. Except in space.
The show would have a (Strazinsky style)story arc, lots and lots of subplots, and would also be told partially in flashback mode.
The sho would focus on the dark side of the Federation's operations. There'd be gratuitous violence. Interrogation, some torture, nuking of entire cities, that kind of thing. Definitely pushing for an R rating.
Ever wonder what really happened to Sisco? Ask the captain of this ship. Who planted the swamp thing that killed Tasha Yar? Yup, it was my guys. Except that they f*ked up. The grease slick should have killed Riker. Oops.
Turns out that the Federation isn't really so perfect after all. That's the point. And these commandos have to fly around and clean up the mess and try not to make too much of a mess themselves.
Think NYPD Blue meets Babylon 5 meets Rambo meets DS9. Gritty. Profane. Huge stories. Mega violence. Poltical intrigue. Powerful storytelling. Believable characters with growth potential. Plot continuity. They could even pull stories out of the headlines(or war reports).
I really think a show like this would appeal to a whole new audience. Maybe with the commando slant they could get a portion of the crowd that likes war movies. Maybe with the NYPD Blue plot elements they could pick up some of that crowd. And maybe they'd bring back some of the older Trek crowd because the flashback storytelling and obligatory time travel episodes would show that there were some otherthings going on behind the scenes in TNG, DS9, TOS and Enterprise.
Oh yeah, about the ship. It's an advanced Defiant class. A bit smaller than the type we saw on DS9. It's painted black, and can drop undetected into a planet's atmosphere to put troops on the surface. It's armed with the standard trek weapons, as well as nuclear warheads.
It has a cloaking device. This was secretly developed by the Federation after they reverse engineered the one that Kirk stole from the Romulans. Here's the killer. The ship can fire and use the transporter while cloaked. It can also be cloaked and shielded at the same time, and can still shoot and transport. It has a kind of replicator/transporter hybrid. To a small extent it can pull blueprints of something out of the computer and beam it somewhere.
The ship is a freakin killer. And it's the biggest secret the Federation has.
The guys themselves run around with phasers, M-16 type rifles, knives, and Klingon Bat-Lets. They have stolen(reverse engineered) Jem-Hadar personal cloaks, and personal short range transport devices. And the command crew thinks nothing about using their shield penetrating transporters to beam a nuke into a Romulan engine room.
They follow a Jem-Hadar ship into a wormhole and end up in the middle of a huge battle taking place amongst gargantuan ships. Then just as the crew is recovering from pissing themselves from fear a huge sphere jumps into view and blasts a planet into hamburger.
Couldn't you just do the same thing by leaning your laptop on a thin O'reilly book? OK, so maybe you's have to go to the craft store and spend 69 cents on rubber feet to keep the laptop from sliding.
Beats paying $19.99. And you already HAVE the O'reilly book.
How about the thing that holding my shop back from Solaris 2.8 is the freakin' Rouge Wave libraries.
They don't work with the SUN 5.6 C++ compiler. I feel bad for anyone who's come to rely on these libraries.
Myself, I got away from them about 2 years ago. I inherited some code that used the product, and I hated it. It smelled bad. Really. So I implemented my own routines on my own schedule. Good thing, cuz every other bozo using those libs is on a tight conversion schedule.
I don't buy a computer case for it's looks. I buy it because it'll be big enough to hold my mobo and peripherals, and have enough fans to cool my CPU's.
Who cares what it looks like? Really. It's under my desk which is also where I keep my feet, and the dog is known to roam....
Slashdot Mirror
Does a slashdotting constitute a DOS attack?
I guess the extra traffic couldn't help the situation.
Oh, too bad...
>>Well, I've got a batch process that is about to go into our production realm next week that processes 4 million customer accounts every night. Close enough?
What precisely are you doing with those accounts? Updating balances or some such thing?
Why would you do this in Java? Java == slow. Sorry it's true. Also, even if you implemented in C/C++ on distributed hardware, you're just not going to get the same performace you'd get on a mainframe. The 390 is faassst.
Our batch process consists of 45 jobs, about 150 programs (not including utilities like batch fileaid and syncsort), and takes in close to 40 feeds from around the world.
We're processing 5 million records a night, crunching the numbers every which way, rolling them up every which way, and loading the results an average of 15 million rows into a bunch of DB2 tables for online viewing.
Our critical path runs in less than 1 hour. The total job stream in real world time is 4 hours. We use about 1 1/2 hours of CPU time every night. That's 1 1/2 hours of 100% cpu utilization.
Now, this stream runs 3 times, simeltaniously, so multiply the resultant numbers by 3, but the clock time remains the same.
This is the power of COBOL on the mainframe. If we were doing this stuff in the distributed environment, we'd probably be looking at an 18 hour batch cycle.
No joke. I once duplicated part of the critical path in C and we let it rip on a prod server.. a newish Sun (can't remember the stats) it took 3 1/2 times as long in clock time to run as the mainframe version(15 mins on frame, 50 mins on Sun). And this was straight file processing and number crunching. I didn't bother to set up tables in Oracle after that... no point, the box was too slow.
So like everyone else has been saying, big companies run their business on big iron. And they use the distributed systems for not so critical processing and web/gui representation of reports.
I'm a UNIX guy now, but I started on the mainframe and I keep my skills sharp by doing a couple of COBOL projects a year. I like the fact that there's gonna be a shortage of mainframe guys.
I doubt that there are a large number of COBOL programmers in Bangladore, so I'm looking at some potential job security.
Also, COBOL's not such a bad language. Not for what it's meant for anyway. Learn it and code in it for a while. You'll see.
Don't attack me. I'm not the AC.
BTW, you shouldn't be calling me a moron anyway. I don't mind if someone disagrees with me, it's a good thing actually. But name calling is wrong in a forum like this.
Don't you agree?
I think those 2 whackos from the Trench Coat Mafia had Doom levels of the school.
Never could find them though.
If the game is interesting and worth playing, then why not port it? So you open your product to an audience that you wouldn't have had otherwise.
I've never heard of this series of games, but I guess that if it was a hit on the Mac it'd probably have some success on the x86 platform.
Is shareware really dead? I don't think so. I still buy the occasional game after downloading a demo version. It's not called shareware anymore but it feels the same to me.
If I like it, I buy it.
For a minute I thought this article was about an X-Box hack. Maybe one that would allow games from any other vendor to be played on the X-Box.
Guess not.
I was watching the skirmish at Abu Dhar unfold on MSNBC early Sunday morning. I now feel educated in a very minute way about what the horrors or war are like.
Seeing those marines pinned down really freaked me out. They're regular guys out there with guns trying not to get killed.
So then the tanks come in and start exchanging machine gun fire with the Iraqi soldiers. There was a tremendous amount of sparking and some explosions as they exchanged fire. Then one tank fired it's main gun into a sand berm, and I knew that I was watching a couple of guys die. Same thing a few moments later when another tank put a big hole in a building.
My point?
I think that if even 1 video game developer uses any footage like this as a basis for realism in a game, it'll be a sad day. This stuff is not entertainment. History yes. Fun stuff? Nope. Not by a mile.
Yeah but I need a smallish commando dropship, not a galaxy class deluxe.
>>but the ship you describe is sufficiently more advanced than any other race's (known) technology, that it sounds like your commandos could easily destroy any ship in known space.
Yeah, but they would do this sparingly. Or secretly as the situation required without leaving too much of a trace.
To use their full force all the time would be like Superman running through main street USA killing everyone, unimpeded. It'd look cool for 5 seconds. Then it sould suck for 7 seasons.
AS far as how the Fed scientists managed to develop this tech. Luck. Reverse engineering. Theft. Hard work.
I have a personal preference to set it in or just after the DS9 timeline. I found DS9 to be a fascinating show with a lot of potential. It could have grown up to be B5, but I digress. I'd love to expand on and continue some of the stuff that DS9 started.
>>SO, it'd be "Star Trek: Section 31", then?
I can see hoe you'd think that. But it's not the case.
I was thinking about this concept before they brought in Section 31. After that, I kind of worked S31 into my story. They're a specialized covert ops/intel group. Kind of like James Bond in space. To contrast, my guys are Green Berets in space.
But S31 arrogant, miniterpret intel a lot of times, and have some bad buerocracy(sp) problems.
So S31 in my concept has some good ideas sometimes, but they make a lot of mistakes. They provide bad intel(sometimes intentionally), have their own agenda and are accountable to no one.
My guys follow orders, usually. Work off S31's intel sometimes. Make mistakes, and are accountable to The Fed itself.
S31's not a major part of my ideas. But they're in there for continuity reasons, and they can provide some good story ideas.
I didn't even know about this. I guess I was doing something else when that episode of (which series?) came on.
I don't want these guys to be totally indestructable. It would get old fast, kind of like playing Doom or Quake in god mode.
Superpowers suck, IMHO. But cool tech that works most of the time is interesting.
That's why the Federation cloak in my story is a big secret. Kind of adds to the suspense. Especially when someone who accidentally figures out that the cloak is being used has to be erased.
Then there's reprecussions for the erasure. Just like real life. No goody-goody Federation happy endings in my ideas.
One more thing. With the exception of the Federation cloak (which works flawlessly) all the stuff I described above works 'most of the time'.
You can't alwyas detect shield frequency. Sometimes a culture not sniffing for a nuke will find it. An M-16 will come up on a politician's kid's toy metal detector.... all scenerios leading to all kinds of mayhem and backpedaling.
Even the ship itself while a good rethought design, is imperfect.
The whole point of my story idea is that the Federation is far from perfect. Guys make mistakes, and the entity as a whole pays for it. Then tries to compensate, and the whole thing cycles through again. Just like real life.
>>If it was smaller than the Defiant, even if it looked similiar, it wouldnt' be a Defiant. The Defiant was a horribly designed ship anyways, they could never pin its actual size down
Never thought about this. I guess my answer is that they took the Defiant design and rethought the weak spots.
>>And I think photon/quantam torps that use matter/anti-matter are technically supposed to be a great deal more destructive than nukes (see TNG Tech Manual), even if all on-screen evidence counterdicts this.
Because quantum torps can be detected by most races sensors/security scanners, even if one is rigged for a timed explosion and left somewhere to blow up. Whreas an 'old time' nuke doesn't come up on certain cultures sensors. It's too old. Kind of the same reason the commando use projectile rifles (M-16's)
>>The original Defiant had one sitting in it, and cloak and cloak detecton systems are constantly evolving, so it would be like using early 20th century camo when your enemy has IR goggles.
The Romulan cloak in the Defiant had the same limitations as any other Romulan cloak. The fed mods to Kirks stolen one have gotten around the problems. The Romulans are too arrogant to see their own weaknesses, hence the slow development of their cloak tech.
>>Personal transport devices were used by terrorists in a TNG episode, but it led to gradual genetic damage.
Mine don't. They work.
>>Shield penetration only works if you have the exact shield frequency, or can slip it into a sensor window.
My scienists have figured out that shield frequency can be determined my reading the target shields themselves. If they're modulating at a certain frequency then it can be detected. Derived from Borg tech.
>>And what about section 31?
They suck. Buch of intel guys getting their signals garbled. Can't tell Klingon language from Ferengi at times. They're part of my guys problems.
Any other questions?
You know, one thing I'd like to see is a commando type show. This would take place in the TNG/DS9 timeline, mostly.
;)
No wait, hear me out please. I think that Trek has become a bit too goddy-goody. Too polished. The Federation is too nice with their clean carpeted ships and humanitarian attitude.
I imagine a bunch of special operations guys flying around in a souped up Defiant type ship.
Their missions sould be covert ops, taking care of all the dirty work that the Federation needed taking care of. Assasinations(klingons, romulans, the occasional starfleet captain that gets too big for his red suit), scouting, hostage rescue, etc. All the things that Green Berets, Seals and Rangers do. Except in space.
The show would have a (Strazinsky style)story arc, lots and lots of subplots, and would also be told partially in flashback mode.
The sho would focus on the dark side of the Federation's operations. There'd be gratuitous violence. Interrogation, some torture, nuking of entire cities, that kind of thing. Definitely pushing for an R rating.
Ever wonder what really happened to Sisco? Ask the captain of this ship. Who planted the swamp thing that killed Tasha Yar? Yup, it was my guys. Except that they f*ked up. The grease slick should have killed Riker. Oops.
Turns out that the Federation isn't really so perfect after all. That's the point. And these commandos have to fly around and clean up the mess and try not to make too much of a mess themselves.
Think NYPD Blue meets Babylon 5 meets Rambo meets DS9. Gritty. Profane. Huge stories. Mega violence. Poltical intrigue. Powerful storytelling. Believable characters with growth potential. Plot continuity. They could even pull stories out of the headlines(or war reports).
I really think a show like this would appeal to a whole new audience. Maybe with the commando slant they could get a portion of the crowd that likes war movies. Maybe with the NYPD Blue plot elements they could pick up some of that crowd. And maybe they'd bring back some of the older Trek crowd because the flashback storytelling and obligatory time travel episodes would show that there were some otherthings going on behind the scenes in TNG, DS9, TOS and Enterprise.
Oh yeah, about the ship. It's an advanced Defiant class. A bit smaller than the type we saw on DS9. It's painted black, and can drop undetected into a planet's atmosphere to put troops on the surface. It's armed with the standard trek weapons, as well as nuclear warheads.
It has a cloaking device. This was secretly developed by the Federation after they reverse engineered the one that Kirk stole from the Romulans. Here's the killer. The ship can fire and use the transporter while cloaked. It can also be cloaked and shielded at the same time, and can still shoot and transport. It has a kind of replicator/transporter hybrid. To a small extent it can pull blueprints of something out of the computer and beam it somewhere.
The ship is a freakin killer. And it's the biggest secret the Federation has.
The guys themselves run around with phasers, M-16 type rifles, knives, and Klingon Bat-Lets. They have stolen(reverse engineered) Jem-Hadar personal cloaks, and personal short range transport devices. And the command crew thinks nothing about using their shield penetrating transporters to beam a nuke into a Romulan engine room.
Yeah, I've thought about this quite a bit.
They follow a Jem-Hadar ship into a wormhole and end up in the middle of a huge battle taking place amongst gargantuan ships. Then just as the crew is recovering from pissing themselves from fear a huge sphere jumps into view and blasts a planet into hamburger.
Please mod up the parent. Interesting or something.
As an American, I'm not happy with what he says, but what he says makes some sense.
Yeah, and on those [b]really[/b] lonely nights you'd get a little thrill when the fan kicks in.
I know. I've been there.
>>College textbooks are choosen for the class by the professor who has expertise in the area.
Not always true. It's been my experience that the department in question specifies the books for a course.
Obviously if your Prof. is the Department Head, then he's making the decision.
Yeah. And guys who like to light their farts on fire are going to have a ball with this.
Couldn't you just do the same thing by leaning your laptop on a thin O'reilly book? OK, so maybe you's have to go to the craft store and spend 69 cents on rubber feet to keep the laptop from sliding.
Beats paying $19.99. And you already HAVE the O'reilly book.
So now I can have exhaust pipes coming off my laptop? Cool.
Can they be made to look like the pipes on a Harley?
Mmmmm chrome....
How about the thing that holding my shop back from Solaris 2.8 is the freakin' Rouge Wave libraries.
They don't work with the SUN 5.6 C++ compiler. I feel bad for anyone who's come to rely on these libraries.
Myself, I got away from them about 2 years ago. I inherited some code that used the product, and I hated it. It smelled bad. Really. So I implemented my own routines on my own schedule. Good thing, cuz every other bozo using those libs is on a tight conversion schedule.
When the hell are they going to start alpha or beta testing subselects? I mean come on already.
select a.cusip, a.description
from security_master a
where
a.cusip in (select b.cusip from new_issues b)
order by a.cusip;
When MySQL can do that simple contrived query I'll take it out of the toy box.
I don't buy a computer case for it's looks. I buy it because it'll be big enough to hold my mobo and peripherals, and have enough fans to cool my CPU's.
Who cares what it looks like? Really. It's under my desk which is also where I keep my feet, and the dog is known to roam....