The problem is that knowledge is typically easier applicable than experience. You have to make sure that the experienced people know how to bring in their experience.
Additionally, you have to consider what is more important in your situation.
The free market is a surprisingly direct form of democracy. Either you society is not interested in the care of human beings (no demand) or there are too many people in this field (over supply).
Which basically is good. If it is not important to your society than this is the outcome of a democratic process (the market). Who are you to know better than the majority? Or, there is an over supply which means your society puts more than necessary effort into the care of human beings. There are just too many people making bad career choices.
"Imagine being able to program in the language of your choice..."
Which bigger enterprise would allow you to program in the language of your choice. We have a code base written by around 1000 developers during the last thirty years. Do you really think we give developers a choice about their language?
Depending on the problem you have to solve there is one language to pick. Maintaining this code is extremely expensive. This is were the real complexity lies and this is the problem we have to address.
I really do not care whether our developers have it cozy so that they can pick the language of the day...
What do you expect your VM to be? An operating system or a container where your business logic runs?
I work for a bank. We do not do operating systems, we do banking. Some of our apps are very large Java systems. And no, we do not need JNI, neither would we bother about device drivers.
Hardware independence is invented. That is what Java is doing for you.
In reality, the Swiss bank secrecy is neutral, pretty much like the rest of the country.
Yes, this can be abused to evade taxes. It can also be used to evade your fortune being confiscated by some tyrant which suppresses you. A lot of the arguments against Swiss banks we hear these days were already brought up by the Nazis. There was a reason why so many Jewish families were hiding their money in Switzerland.
In several areas, Swiss legislation is much more strict for example when it comes to preventing money laundry. And yes, the Swiss laws force banks to comply in criminal investigation, --- even from abroad when officially requested. Claiming that the Swiss profit from "victims from the rest of the world" sounds corny and is ridiculous.
To me, it looks more like trying to smear competition. We do banking and we are good at.
Disclaimer: I am Swiss and I work for a Swiss bank.
Depending on the numbers, the contribution of the finance sector to the BIP of Switzerland is around 10%. While this is important, it is not the backbone of the Swiss economy.
Over the years, the interest became less and less a factor in the income of banks. These days, banks earn money by charging fees for their service. The fact that foreign investors pick Swiss banks has nothing to do with the "interest rate".
I assume you work in IT and banking is not really your thing... However, I am glad that the 80% of fat you describe to be inside of Swiss banks also allowed you finding a job.
What strikes me as amazing is the silence about this topic in Switzerland.
We are rather touchy about our banks and normally a leak of this magnitude would be considered top news. Yet, the topic was given no news coverage in Switzerland. After all, an internal document leaked which pointed towards illegal activities of the bank!
And before all the trolls have a party: no, this is not a normal business practice of a Swiss bank.
Disclaimer: Working for a Swiss bank, I am biased.
Every bank always used to identify their customers; for obvious reasons. Ten years ago, there was a global trend towards stronger identification of your customers. In banks we call this KYC (know your client). Basically, this goes beyond identifying your client. It includes checking the plausibility of your banking business. For example, if you are a student but you shuffle around huge amounts of money then the bank will like to know where the money comes from. You could be just a straw man for whoever.
A lot of the rumors about Swiss banks come from silly movies. It is not true that you can enter a Swiss bank with a bag of money and open a secret account based on a code number. The so called "numbered accounts" are nothing more than ordinary bank accounts which are internally identified by a number. Only very few employees have access to the information who is the owner of the account. However, the bank does know who owns the account. There are good reasons for such accounts. Assume you work yourself for the bank and you want to prevent your team colleagues from checking your account.
Additionally, the Swiss tax law is different from most other countries. Switzerland distinguishes between tax fraud and "tax withholding". Not declaring all your income to the tax authorities is not necessarily a crime in Switzerland. And if it is no crime here, a foreign country cannot ask for legal support during investigations.
Now you can claim that the Swiss banks together with the Swiss tax regulation help criminals to cheat their own tax authorities. However, you can also claim that the Swiss banks together with the Swiss tax regulation protect people around the world from being robbed by their local dictators. It depends on the viewpoint.
Personally, I like the idea that there is one place in the world where you can safely place your assets and they are protected, --- even against your own government if necessary.
Against common believe, there is no anonymous banking in Switzerland.
Swiss law requires every bank to have an ID of each customer. As a Swiss bank customer you are not anonymous. The local regulations to prevent money laundry are one of the most strict in the world. Much stricter than the regulation in the UK for example.
Disclaimer: I am Swiss and I work for a Swiss bank.
At the end of the year, it will be easier for the new parts of the EU to receive a residential perm in Switzerland.
Switzerland is not part of Schengen. IANAL but I am Swiss.
Your "notions" of Poland are probably just prejudice.
Well, although I would not expect an off-the-shelf PC to catch fire, I always felt strange about my self assembled PCs. Let's face it, there are components in my server which were never certified to work together. And this machine runs day and night.
However, there is a simple solution: a small Cyprian company (FirePro http://www.firepro.info/products.php) offers aerosol fire extinguishers. You can basically have a protection solution like it is used in data centers; --- but on a shoestring budget.
So far it was not put to the test but it feels like proactive insurance.
Somehow the whole discussion here takes the side of the consumer who would like to have something for free. Fine. However, did you ever though about where it comes from?
In central Europe we have a problem with MythTV because the electronic program guide is hard to come by. So, I though I could develop such a service. The cost side was quickly estimated. My time for the development, the time to maintain the service, the cost to collect the program information (some TV stations demand money for this information). A quick look showed that the market would be big enough to sustain a business case based on a moderate monthly fee for my service.
The results of a quick survey were disastrous: Many people easily agreed to pay 5-10 EUR per year because they could share the program information with four, five friends. In the end, I had to factor in the people just sharing the information from the service. Due to this, there was no market left, the business case collapsed.
No, I did not spend my time and my money to develop an electronic program guide for MythTV in central Europe.
Did you ever though at how many maybe useful things we do not have because your attitude as a consumer did not make it worthwhile?
Well, I feel less threatened from Iran than I feel from the US. I met several Iranians and they are decent folks. Never ever did any of them mention that they consider themselves to be the world police, the sole superpower or the number one.
They just recently came out of a revolution which got rid of a dictatorship (people fighting for their freedom, you might have heard about it...). I would give them some time to get to a stable situation and to develop a democratic tradition.
Fact is that they already have more women in their parliament than most western countries.
Oh, and I would not hesitate to sell them all the CPUs they desire. This is because I live in a free country and neither US propaganda nor US law applies to me.
Well, you can do the math yourself. You need 500 volunteers collecting 100 signatures. Basically, it is not that difficult. Typically, it is more difficult to collect signatures for ideas which are complicated to explain to the public. DMCA might be a difficult one.
As a Swiss, I am surprised that I have to learn about this law on slashdot! I am going to check the law and see what can be done.
Direct Democracies tend to fall apart with large numbers of people.
How did this get insightful? There is no fact backing up the claim. To my knowledge only Austria (similar size than Switzerland) has a limited from of direct democracy.
I am biased (I am Swiss) but I do think that direct democracy is a rather advanced form of democracy. A huge part of the US constitution is about balancing the right of the people against the government. However, the proposed solutions appear rather naive. How many of you would fetch their rifle to fight against an unjust government? Get real... In the last years you lost basic rights and you were unable to prevent this.
Being able to just stop unjust laws in the beginning changes the balance of power tremendously.
For customers, middleware is not that important anymore. We have all the middleware we could need. We are served, thanks.
Typically, customers look for business solutions. They look for standardized packages for their business domain. This is were SAP is getting stronger. (BTW, we had to tell SAP that we did not need middleware from their side...)
The whole SOA trend goes in this direction. To stop thinking about integration as technical plumbing but as connections with a business meaning. This is an arena where BEA has not a lot to offer. Their expertise is in plumbing (although they are very good at doing this).
Sorry folks, we speak here about enterprise computing. Nobody really cares for open source until it is a proven product. And JBoss is not in this league. If you run several million transactions per day and each transaction makes you one EUR or more, there is nothing open source can give you:
Nobody else with such a load is using JBoss.
There is not enough support for your installation (every hour downtime is expensive...)
You cannot hire people off the street who are familiar with the product.
Selling open source to your management is difficult. Typically, there is no company big enough behind an open source product to be legally responsible for it.
Open source is no added value. If your run several million transactions a day then your are not a software company. Your competence lies elsewhere. Such companies never ever modify the source code of a product. Why should they? Modifying the code just makes the previously mentioned points worse...
BEA has a track record for enterprise products which in my personal experience is better than the one of IBM. IBM can get it right but it takes five years and several versions of their product. BEA can get introduce a new product in reasonable time and you do not have to wait three releases until it runs stable.
My bet is that OAS will disappear.
OAS has not really any market penetration and ISVs typically support WSA or WLS. The new think for WLS would be that Oracle can "force" customers to adopt it. Most customers use Oracle DBs anyway and the WLS app server could become a necessary part of it. Oracle already tried this with OAS, just that it did work due to the lacking ISV support. IBM uses a similar schema with WSA.
We spoke with several bigger companies in Switzerland who made the same experience you did. You install linux on the mainframe and the system behaves like a very expensive Unix box.
There is nothing magical about mainframes. They are build for a special task (transaction processing) which is rather IO intensive. A transaction request comes in, a small processing footprint touches the database and out goes the reply. Due to the characteristic of this processing style, you can run such machines under high load using 80% of their capacity. If you install linux on them then they behave like Unix machines: idling around at 10-20% to have enough resources left for the next spike of processing.
Virtualization helps to distribute the load better. However, this has nothing to do with the mainframe. It is the ability of virtualization itself.
However, a lot is probably gained from licensing fees as well. Typically, this works for a year or two until the vendor realizes that you run their software now on a mainframe. Then they start to change license agreements and cost goes up again.
Currently, IBM is trying to lure software on their mainframe with huge license discounts (special JAVA cpus that are close to for free, linux on z/OS which has a reduced license fee, etc.). You can guess what wil happen once your application platform is migrated...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that knowledge is typically easier applicable than experience. You have to make sure that the experienced people know how to bring in their experience.
Additionally, you have to consider what is more important in your situation.
And in other words, you have not yet created value :-)
The free market is a surprisingly direct form of democracy. Either you society is not interested in the care of human beings (no demand) or there are too many people in this field (over supply). Which basically is good. If it is not important to your society than this is the outcome of a democratic process (the market). Who are you to know better than the majority? Or, there is an over supply which means your society puts more than necessary effort into the care of human beings. There are just too many people making bad career choices.
"Imagine being able to program in the language of your choice..."
Which bigger enterprise would allow you to program in the language of your choice. We have a code base written by around 1000 developers during the last thirty years. Do you really think we give developers a choice about their language?
Depending on the problem you have to solve there is one language to pick. Maintaining this code is extremely expensive. This is were the real complexity lies and this is the problem we have to address.
I really do not care whether our developers have it cozy so that they can pick the language of the day...
What do you expect your VM to be? An operating system or a container where your business logic runs?
I work for a bank. We do not do operating systems, we do banking. Some of our apps are very large Java systems. And no, we do not need JNI, neither would we bother about device drivers.
Hardware independence is invented. That is what Java is doing for you.
Better check whether your bank still exists :-)
In reality, the Swiss bank secrecy is neutral, pretty much like the rest of the country.
Yes, this can be abused to evade taxes. It can also be used to evade your fortune being confiscated by some tyrant which suppresses you. A lot of the arguments against Swiss banks we hear these days were already brought up by the Nazis. There was a reason why so many Jewish families were hiding their money in Switzerland.
In several areas, Swiss legislation is much more strict for example when it comes to preventing money laundry. And yes, the Swiss laws force banks to comply in criminal investigation, --- even from abroad when officially requested. Claiming that the Swiss profit from "victims from the rest of the world" sounds corny and is ridiculous.
To me, it looks more like trying to smear competition. We do banking and we are good at.
Disclaimer: I am Swiss and I work for a Swiss bank.
Depending on the numbers, the contribution of the finance sector to the BIP of Switzerland is around 10%. While this is important, it is not the backbone of the Swiss economy.
Over the years, the interest became less and less a factor in the income of banks. These days, banks earn money by charging fees for their service. The fact that foreign investors pick Swiss banks has nothing to do with the "interest rate".
I assume you work in IT and banking is not really your thing... However, I am glad that the 80% of fat you describe to be inside of Swiss banks also allowed you finding a job.
"...atomic weapons development programs of countries like Iran"
Starting to believe in your own propaganda can be an indicator that there is something in your tap water.
What strikes me as amazing is the silence about this topic in Switzerland.
We are rather touchy about our banks and normally a leak of this magnitude would be considered top news. Yet, the topic was given no news coverage in Switzerland. After all, an internal document leaked which pointed towards illegal activities of the bank!
And before all the trolls have a party: no, this is not a normal business practice of a Swiss bank.
Disclaimer: Working for a Swiss bank, I am biased.
And this link could be interesting: https://switzerland.isyours.com/d/Bankwesen/Bankgeheimnis/novelty.html/
Every bank always used to identify their customers; for obvious reasons. Ten years ago, there was a global trend towards stronger identification of your customers. In banks we call this KYC (know your client). Basically, this goes beyond identifying your client. It includes checking the plausibility of your banking business. For example, if you are a student but you shuffle around huge amounts of money then the bank will like to know where the money comes from. You could be just a straw man for whoever.
A lot of the rumors about Swiss banks come from silly movies. It is not true that you can enter a Swiss bank with a bag of money and open a secret account based on a code number. The so called "numbered accounts" are nothing more than ordinary bank accounts which are internally identified by a number. Only very few employees have access to the information who is the owner of the account. However, the bank does know who owns the account. There are good reasons for such accounts. Assume you work yourself for the bank and you want to prevent your team colleagues from checking your account.
Additionally, the Swiss tax law is different from most other countries. Switzerland distinguishes between tax fraud and "tax withholding". Not declaring all your income to the tax authorities is not necessarily a crime in Switzerland. And if it is no crime here, a foreign country cannot ask for legal support during investigations.
Now you can claim that the Swiss banks together with the Swiss tax regulation help criminals to cheat their own tax authorities. However, you can also claim that the Swiss banks together with the Swiss tax regulation protect people around the world from being robbed by their local dictators. It depends on the viewpoint.
Personally, I like the idea that there is one place in the world where you can safely place your assets and they are protected, --- even against your own government if necessary.
I work in the IT of private banking.
Against common believe, there is no anonymous banking in Switzerland.
Swiss law requires every bank to have an ID of each customer. As a Swiss bank customer you are not anonymous. The local regulations to prevent money laundry are one of the most strict in the world. Much stricter than the regulation in the UK for example.
Disclaimer: I am Swiss and I work for a Swiss bank.
At the end of the year, it will be easier for the new parts of the EU to receive a residential perm in Switzerland.
Switzerland is not part of Schengen. IANAL but I am Swiss.
Your "notions" of Poland are probably just prejudice.
Well, although I would not expect an off-the-shelf PC to catch fire, I always felt strange about my self assembled PCs. Let's face it, there are components in my server which were never certified to work together. And this machine runs day and night.
However, there is a simple solution: a small Cyprian company (FirePro http://www.firepro.info/products.php) offers aerosol fire extinguishers. You can basically have a protection solution like it is used in data centers; --- but on a shoestring budget.
So far it was not put to the test but it feels like proactive insurance.
Somehow the whole discussion here takes the side of the consumer who would like to have something for free. Fine. However, did you ever though about where it comes from?
In central Europe we have a problem with MythTV because the electronic program guide is hard to come by. So, I though I could develop such a service. The cost side was quickly estimated. My time for the development, the time to maintain the service, the cost to collect the program information (some TV stations demand money for this information). A quick look showed that the market would be big enough to sustain a business case based on a moderate monthly fee for my service.
The results of a quick survey were disastrous: Many people easily agreed to pay 5-10 EUR per year because they could share the program information with four, five friends. In the end, I had to factor in the people just sharing the information from the service. Due to this, there was no market left, the business case collapsed.
No, I did not spend my time and my money to develop an electronic program guide for MythTV in central Europe.
Did you ever though at how many maybe useful things we do not have because your attitude as a consumer did not make it worthwhile?
Well, I feel less threatened from Iran than I feel from the US. I met several Iranians and they are decent folks. Never ever did any of them mention that they consider themselves to be the world police, the sole superpower or the number one.
They just recently came out of a revolution which got rid of a dictatorship (people fighting for their freedom, you might have heard about it...). I would give them some time to get to a stable situation and to develop a democratic tradition.
Fact is that they already have more women in their parliament than most western countries.
Oh, and I would not hesitate to sell them all the CPUs they desire. This is because I live in a free country and neither US propaganda nor US law applies to me.
(P.S.: Do not ask. We do not want you.)
Well, you can do the math yourself. You need 500 volunteers collecting 100 signatures. Basically, it is not that difficult. Typically, it is more difficult to collect signatures for ideas which are complicated to explain to the public. DMCA might be a difficult one.
As a Swiss, I am surprised that I have to learn about this law on slashdot! I am going to check the law and see what can be done.
Direct Democracies tend to fall apart with large numbers of people.
How did this get insightful? There is no fact backing up the claim. To my knowledge only Austria (similar size than Switzerland) has a limited from of direct democracy.
I am biased (I am Swiss) but I do think that direct democracy is a rather advanced form of democracy. A huge part of the US constitution is about balancing the right of the people against the government. However, the proposed solutions appear rather naive. How many of you would fetch their rifle to fight against an unjust government? Get real... In the last years you lost basic rights and you were unable to prevent this.
Being able to just stop unjust laws in the beginning changes the balance of power tremendously.
Order them directly from th US.
For example, use ewiz.com or similar shops. However, do this only if it is worth once you include shipping and tax.
In the end, remember that globalization is a good thing as long as it also works for consumers! If products are too expensive, go abroad!
For customers, middleware is not that important anymore. We have all the middleware we could need. We are served, thanks.
Typically, customers look for business solutions. They look for standardized packages for their business domain. This is were SAP is getting stronger. (BTW, we had to tell SAP that we did not need middleware from their side...)
The whole SOA trend goes in this direction. To stop thinking about integration as technical plumbing but as connections with a business meaning. This is an arena where BEA has not a lot to offer. Their expertise is in plumbing (although they are very good at doing this).
Sorry folks, we speak here about enterprise computing. Nobody really cares for open source until it is a proven product. And JBoss is not in this league. If you run several million transactions per day and each transaction makes you one EUR or more, there is nothing open source can give you:
BEA has a track record for enterprise products which in my personal experience is better than the one of IBM. IBM can get it right but it takes five years and several versions of their product. BEA can get introduce a new product in reasonable time and you do not have to wait three releases until it runs stable.
My bet is that OAS will disappear.
OAS has not really any market penetration and ISVs typically support WSA or WLS. The new think for WLS would be that Oracle can "force" customers to adopt it. Most customers use Oracle DBs anyway and the WLS app server could become a necessary part of it. Oracle already tried this with OAS, just that it did work due to the lacking ISV support. IBM uses a similar schema with WSA.
We spoke with several bigger companies in Switzerland who made the same experience you did. You install linux on the mainframe and the system behaves like a very expensive Unix box.
There is nothing magical about mainframes. They are build for a special task (transaction processing) which is rather IO intensive. A transaction request comes in, a small processing footprint touches the database and out goes the reply. Due to the characteristic of this processing style, you can run such machines under high load using 80% of their capacity. If you install linux on them then they behave like Unix machines: idling around at 10-20% to have enough resources left for the next spike of processing.
Virtualization helps to distribute the load better. However, this has nothing to do with the mainframe. It is the ability of virtualization itself.
Yes, the number sounds realistic.
However, a lot is probably gained from licensing fees as well. Typically, this works for a year or two until the vendor realizes that you run their software now on a mainframe. Then they start to change license agreements and cost goes up again.
Currently, IBM is trying to lure software on their mainframe with huge license discounts (special JAVA cpus that are close to for free, linux on z/OS which has a reduced license fee, etc.). You can guess what wil happen once your application platform is migrated...