We have got 13 mainframes to process an average of 27 mio trx per day. That is the good part...
The bad part: Our application landscape is heavily "entangled". Nearly every application has uncontrolled dependencies to neighbor applications. So removing a part of the application landscape from the mainframe is extremely hard. Over the next 5 years, we are going to break up our landscape into smaller parts we can control. In parallel, there is an investigation going on whether we can use the J2EE platform as an high volume transaction platform.
If all pieces fall into place we can start to move parts of the application platform away from the mainframe.
Every time the subject of mainframes pops up all the retirement homes open their gates to flood us with old developers who repeat the IBM marketing rubbish they learnt 30 years ago.
The single reason why we still use mainframes is because we do not have the choice to switch away. 30 years of application development created a brittle application landscape deployed on mainframes. The platform is extremely proprietary. There is no migrating away, there is only rebuilding. So please forget about "reliability", "proven technology" and all this marketing nonsense. We are prisoners, locked up on a proprietary platform.
Have a look at companies that are not locked up. Companies that were lucky enough to start at a time when there was other technology available. Do they use mainframes? Definitely not!
This already exists, IBM calls this a Sysplex. A Sysplex is like a cluster of mainframes. Our company clusters 13 IBM mainframes together to receive the necessary performance (27 mio Trx per day!).
How comes that most people in this forum worry about loosing an advantage (military, commercial)? Do you really think scientists are in it to win an advantage? And looking backwards, scientific progress is remembered for centuries after. Do you remember who "lost" military or economical power 250 years ago? And do you care?
Maybe we should think a bit ahead...
P.S: We shall remember who invented the nuclear bomb. And we shall remember who used such weapons and what kind of target they picked.
As long as there are enough other countries realizing the importance of scientific research, I do not see a problem.
It does not really matter who is doing it as long as it gets done.
Maybe some people cannot swell with national pride but who cares about that...
When friends with kids visit, my PC typically does the baby sitting. Any Star Wars game is good to glue the kids to the screen. Unfortunately, they drool, eat chocolate, etc. while gaming. So my keyboard and the mouse get the dishwasher treatment (coz I cannot do this with the kids). I let both dry out for two, three days and things work fine afterwards.
Ahhh! The reliability myth of the mainframe! One of my favorites.
Most of the time this extremely reliable systems are used to host brittle software written in house. You paid upfront a fortune to receive a system which overall stability is lousy. And why? Because some techies who could not grasp the whole stack went out and bought the best of breed system! It is like driving your Rolls Royce to transport pigs...
And yes, I work also for a financial institution. We have mainframes because it is so expensive to get rid of them, not because we love them.
However, we are speaking about how you want to justify that your salary is higher than the one of a European or an Indian. And believe me, the only differentiation you can make is knowing your business. This is because plain vanilla IT is the same all around the world. IT knowledge became a commodity. I can buy it cheap and I can buy it everywhere.
I humbly beg your pardon that this next sentence might maybe sound offensive. It is really not meant to be and would not qualify for one in my country:
You sound like a socialist.
The fact that your eduction was so expensive and that you living costs are so high are supposed to justify your high salary? You are joking, are you?
As a company, for the salary I pay I would like to get something in return. And for higher salary I would like to get more in return. That you think your lot is harder than the one of others does not impress me.
Most companies do not care enough about your life to take these facts into consideration. The same work can be done cheaper by an European or even much cheaper by an Indian. So, guess who gets the job?
The problem is not that the labor cost in the US is one of the highest. The problem is that the labor cost is not justified.
There is nothing a US developer can do better compared to an Indian developer. So, why pay more for the same work?
Funny is the subtle racism of your post. Where you assume that the US would provide "knowledge workers", as if other countries could not do this. Or where you associate "higher paid American labor" as something positive in itself.
BTW, the risk that an American company burns down is the same like the risk of a company abroad to burn down. (I was actually once in negotiation with a US company when 9/11 occurred and the company was literally wiped out. Since the US has the tendency to get involved in wars the risk is obviously higher there.)
Well, I am not looking for trouble:-) but everybody has the feeling that prices climb extremely in his neighborhood.
However, if you look at ratings about the most expensive places to live, US cities normally do not make it in the top ten. London or Zurich do. Yet, IT people in the US have the feeling that they have a god-given right on high salaries.
And it gets worse. A lot of our IT people think that they do not have to know our business. They do IT. They do not care if we are a company selling shoes or if we are a bank. Well, people knowing Java/.NET/perl/YouNameIt I can get in India much cheaper. IT people in India speak at least two languages. Most IT people in Switzerland speak at least three languages. IT people in the US speak only English.
What do you think is justifying the salary demands of US IT people?
I work for a company having IT locations all around the world. Recently I learnt that comparing the city of London (!), Singapore, Zurich (Switzerland) and New Jersey, the IT cost is highest in New Jersey due to the salary cost.
Now for the US readers: each of the places named is an economical center of its region. IMHO, each of the non-US places has higher quality and work standards than the US.
Maybe you have got a problem in the US...
Although, the hardware of tablet PCs is supported by Linux this does not mean a lot without software. Why do you want to draw on the screen when there is no handwriting recognition to make anything usefull out of it?
I write these lines on a compaq tc4400 and I love this device. The convertion into a tablet was for me just a gag. However, meanwhile I use the device mostly as a tablet. The way to operate directly on the screen feels very intuitive.
However, from day one I said goodby to linux.
BTW: It runs slightly over four hours and is nice to use in the bus or in meetings. With the heavy add-on battery (adds one kilo) the device runs 16 hours. It comes with core 2 duo which feels powerfull enough to do development when I am travelling.
Why do you think it is more important to give to people in need in your own country?
Are they "better" poor people?
Do you judge people by their citicenship?
I am sorry to tell you but you are applicant #54283.
On my desk, there are two dozend applications. They all look fine. And HR already sorted out another 30-60 that were really weired. I am going to interview maybe four or five people. Do you think I have the time or the interest to listen to your personal story? How hard your childhood was and how unfair your criminal record?
Do you listen to the old yokel sitting in the bus beside you? Do you listen to the stories of your own grand parents?
Welcome to corporate world where nothing, absolutely nothing, works based on dictatorship. Modern corporations have a very mature idea of leadership. Decisions are created in a fashion that is based on consense and safe checks are built in to control what is going on. Hierarchies are as flat as possible to force people to discuss new ideas before they become implemented.
I have not seen a governement or an educational institution that was run as efficiently and mature as a bigger corporation. And I do live at a place which has most probably a longer experience in democracy than the place you live in...
Actually, history showed that scientists are rather good at estimating and controlling risk.
The general population, politians and military are not. Thanks to military research we doubled the radiation level on this planet. You can be as proud to be US citizen as you want but your country had its part in this as well.
Whenever non-scientist come up with regulating science things tend to go wrong. Hidden agendas come into the play and scientific research is blocked.
Stop thinking technical for a second. Do you think employees have access to copy/paste databases? On bigger banks, the customer DB is on a mainframe, you as a clerc sit in front of a pitifull PC. There is no way you get access to the mainframe DB directly. So feel free to bring in external HDs or what ever you want.
Banking applications allow you to access single customer records if your job requires you to do so. Yes, you could copy/paste these in another file but this would take ages to collect data.
I work for a bank. All our applications are browser based. You as a clerc are just given a web interface. You can never ever connect to a DB. There is no way you could leech the customer DB.
The case they described looks like serious incompetence.
Because some people conduct their business very incompetent.
I work for a Swiss bank. All notebook harddisks are encrypted by default. There is no way our employees could get access to the customer database to replicate data!!! The Swiss banking law is rather harsh on such issues. For the employee as well as the bank.
In the end, you have to severly punish enterprises for being lax with customer data. The loose of reputation is not incetive enough. It has to hurt so that execs decide to recognize the issue.
I do not want to frighten your feeble hearts but I am using Windows since years and (nearly) never had a virus scanner installed. Once a year I scan my harddisk from a CD boot disk and so far I never ever had a virus. I once also installed an anti virus software to scan the HD and again, no virus found.
How do I do it? I do not react on every exe file with a pavlovian doubleclick reaction. My everyday account has no admin rights. I have a linux firewall in the cellar. Easy.
What do I get: The CPU cycles for me and not for some virus scanner in the background.
PMFJI, but I do have to come to the rescue of the preposter. Me too, I think that the GPL is far from being clear. And your over-simplification of the legal facts does not help. There are several aspects of this license which are still under dispute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL#GPL-related_disp utes).
In the end, there is not "better" when it comes to licenses. It is your business decision which license to live with. As it the decision of the business with which embedded OS to go.
regards,
einar
P.S.: I do not believe business cases provided by engineers:-)
it was not meant as an personal attack. I am sorry if it appeared like one. It is just so that I heard your arguments too often. Borders are to protect resources. Plain and simple. Although most of us would invite the rest of the world with open arms, it becomes suddenly different when you realize the price tag.
There is social tourism. Several of my friends who worked for the state in the area of immegration changed my viewpoint quite drastically. I do not doubt that there are refugees visiting your country out of sheer necessity. However, most of them don't. Compared to some second world countries, the UK looks like a shopping mall without security cameras.
Nothing against your idealistic point of view. But the borders you complain about are not to lock you in, they are there to lock the rest of the world out.
First, I was outraged by this silly post then realized that your society is probably different.
Here is why we do not want you to live with us before we checked your background:
In my country, everybody who does not have a job receives unemployement money. Everybody receives excellent health service. When you are old, you receive a pension from which you can live. Nobody starves here, everybody has a roof over their head. There are no beggars in the street; nobody sleeps in boxes in dark backstreets. I can walk through my hometown at three o'clock in the morning without getting mugged or killed.
Now, how does this work: The huge majority of people pay taxes. Everybody pays unemployement insurance and deposits money into the retirement fund. If you arrive here with the age of 30 you probably are already 100K behind with retirement payments.
Us, the ones who payed into the common retirement system, do we want to give you a freebie?
Infrastructure and public services have a price tag. Welcome to the world of insurance math where you are just a number...
I am sorry to bring the news but most probably you will not get a work permit. The work permits have a quota per district. Naturally, the more interesting districts where the multinational companies are sitting that would hire an "only English speaker" are over their quota.
For EC citizens it is rather easy to get here. The rest of the world is more or less locked out.
Actually, I think it is our duty as nerds to stand up and dispell the governemental FUD!
So, if a security expert points out that we are doing the wrong think in the area of security then we should probably listen. And it is not always about technology. Believing that the world is a scientific system where you can clearly prove an idea to be right or wrong is rather naive. If you work long enough in organizations which are big enough then you learn that everything is always political.
Slashdot Mirror
We have got 13 mainframes to process an average of 27 mio trx per day. That is the good part...
The bad part: Our application landscape is heavily "entangled". Nearly every application has uncontrolled dependencies to neighbor applications. So removing a part of the application landscape from the mainframe is extremely hard. Over the next 5 years, we are going to break up our landscape into smaller parts we can control. In parallel, there is an investigation going on whether we can use the J2EE platform as an high volume transaction platform.
If all pieces fall into place we can start to move parts of the application platform away from the mainframe.
Every time the subject of mainframes pops up all the retirement homes open their gates to flood us with old developers who repeat the IBM marketing rubbish they learnt 30 years ago.
The single reason why we still use mainframes is because we do not have the choice to switch away. 30 years of application development created a brittle application landscape deployed on mainframes. The platform is extremely proprietary. There is no migrating away, there is only rebuilding. So please forget about "reliability", "proven technology" and all this marketing nonsense. We are prisoners, locked up on a proprietary platform.
Have a look at companies that are not locked up. Companies that were lucky enough to start at a time when there was other technology available. Do they use mainframes? Definitely not!
This already exists, IBM calls this a Sysplex. A Sysplex is like a cluster of mainframes. Our company clusters 13 IBM mainframes together to receive the necessary performance (27 mio Trx per day!).
How comes that most people in this forum worry about loosing an advantage (military, commercial)? Do you really think scientists are in it to win an advantage? And looking backwards, scientific progress is remembered for centuries after. Do you remember who "lost" military or economical power 250 years ago? And do you care?
Maybe we should think a bit ahead...
P.S: We shall remember who invented the nuclear bomb. And we shall remember who used such weapons and what kind of target they picked.
As long as there are enough other countries realizing the importance of scientific research, I do not see a problem.
It does not really matter who is doing it as long as it gets done.
Maybe some people cannot swell with national pride but who cares about that...
When friends with kids visit, my PC typically does the baby sitting. Any Star Wars game is good to glue the kids to the screen. Unfortunately, they drool, eat chocolate, etc. while gaming. So my keyboard and the mouse get the dishwasher treatment (coz I cannot do this with the kids). I let both dry out for two, three days and things work fine afterwards.
Ahhh! The reliability myth of the mainframe! One of my favorites.
Most of the time this extremely reliable systems are used to host brittle software written in house. You paid upfront a fortune to receive a system which overall stability is lousy. And why? Because some techies who could not grasp the whole stack went out and bought the best of breed system! It is like driving your Rolls Royce to transport pigs...
And yes, I work also for a financial institution. We have mainframes because it is so expensive to get rid of them, not because we love them.
Well, I am sorry it annoys you.
However, we are speaking about how you want to justify that your salary is higher than the one of a European or an Indian. And believe me, the only differentiation you can make is knowing your business. This is because plain vanilla IT is the same all around the world. IT knowledge became a commodity. I can buy it cheap and I can buy it everywhere.
I humbly beg your pardon that this next sentence might maybe sound offensive. It is really not meant to be and would not qualify for one in my country:
You sound like a socialist.
The fact that your eduction was so expensive and that you living costs are so high are supposed to justify your high salary? You are joking, are you?
As a company, for the salary I pay I would like to get something in return. And for higher salary I would like to get more in return. That you think your lot is harder than the one of others does not impress me. Most companies do not care enough about your life to take these facts into consideration. The same work can be done cheaper by an European or even much cheaper by an Indian. So, guess who gets the job?
The problem is not that the labor cost in the US is one of the highest. The problem is that the labor cost is not justified.
There is nothing a US developer can do better compared to an Indian developer. So, why pay more for the same work?
Funny is the subtle racism of your post. Where you assume that the US would provide "knowledge workers", as if other countries could not do this. Or where you associate "higher paid American labor" as something positive in itself.
BTW, the risk that an American company burns down is the same like the risk of a company abroad to burn down. (I was actually once in negotiation with a US company when 9/11 occurred and the company was literally wiped out. Since the US has the tendency to get involved in wars the risk is obviously higher there.)
Well, I am not looking for trouble :-) but everybody has the feeling that prices climb extremely in his neighborhood.
However, if you look at ratings about the most expensive places to live, US cities normally do not make it in the top ten. London or Zurich do. Yet, IT people in the US have the feeling that they have a god-given right on high salaries.
And it gets worse. A lot of our IT people think that they do not have to know our business. They do IT. They do not care if we are a company selling shoes or if we are a bank. Well, people knowing Java/.NET/perl/YouNameIt I can get in India much cheaper. IT people in India speak at least two languages. Most IT people in Switzerland speak at least three languages. IT people in the US speak only English.
What do you think is justifying the salary demands of US IT people?
I work for a company having IT locations all around the world. Recently I learnt that comparing the city of London (!), Singapore, Zurich (Switzerland) and New Jersey, the IT cost is highest in New Jersey due to the salary cost.
Now for the US readers: each of the places named is an economical center of its region. IMHO, each of the non-US places has higher quality and work standards than the US.
Maybe you have got a problem in the US...
Although, the hardware of tablet PCs is supported by Linux this does not mean a lot without software. Why do you want to draw on the screen when there is no handwriting recognition to make anything usefull out of it?
I write these lines on a compaq tc4400 and I love this device. The convertion into a tablet was for me just a gag. However, meanwhile I use the device mostly as a tablet. The way to operate directly on the screen feels very intuitive.
However, from day one I said goodby to linux.
BTW: It runs slightly over four hours and is nice to use in the bus or in meetings. With the heavy add-on battery (adds one kilo) the device runs 16 hours. It comes with core 2 duo which feels powerfull enough to do development when I am travelling.
Why do you think it is more important to give to people in need in your own country?
Are they "better" poor people?
Do you judge people by their citicenship?
I am sorry to tell you but you are applicant #54283.
On my desk, there are two dozend applications. They all look fine. And HR already sorted out another 30-60 that were really weired. I am going to interview maybe four or five people. Do you think I have the time or the interest to listen to your personal story? How hard your childhood was and how unfair your criminal record?
Do you listen to the old yokel sitting in the bus beside you? Do you listen to the stories of your own grand parents?
Get real, you would not care, we do not care.
You obviously live at the end of the food chain.
Welcome to corporate world where nothing, absolutely nothing, works based on dictatorship. Modern corporations have a very mature idea of leadership. Decisions are created in a fashion that is based on consense and safe checks are built in to control what is going on. Hierarchies are as flat as possible to force people to discuss new ideas before they become implemented.
I have not seen a governement or an educational institution that was run as efficiently and mature as a bigger corporation. And I do live at a place which has most probably a longer experience in democracy than the place you live in...
Actually, history showed that scientists are rather good at estimating and controlling risk. The general population, politians and military are not. Thanks to military research we doubled the radiation level on this planet. You can be as proud to be US citizen as you want but your country had its part in this as well. Whenever non-scientist come up with regulating science things tend to go wrong. Hidden agendas come into the play and scientific research is blocked.
That is a rather silly comment.
Stop thinking technical for a second. Do you think employees have access to copy/paste databases? On bigger banks, the customer DB is on a mainframe, you as a clerc sit in front of a pitifull PC. There is no way you get access to the mainframe DB directly. So feel free to bring in external HDs or what ever you want.
Banking applications allow you to access single customer records if your job requires you to do so. Yes, you could copy/paste these in another file but this would take ages to collect data.
I work for a bank. All our applications are browser based. You as a clerc are just given a web interface. You can never ever connect to a DB. There is no way you could leech the customer DB.
The case they described looks like serious incompetence.
Because some people conduct their business very incompetent.
I work for a Swiss bank. All notebook harddisks are encrypted by default. There is no way our employees could get access to the customer database to replicate data!!! The Swiss banking law is rather harsh on such issues. For the employee as well as the bank.
In the end, you have to severly punish enterprises for being lax with customer data. The loose of reputation is not incetive enough. It has to hurt so that execs decide to recognize the issue.
Hello dear fellow geeks,
I do not want to frighten your feeble hearts but I am using Windows since years and (nearly) never had a virus scanner installed. Once a year I scan my harddisk from a CD boot disk and so far I never ever had a virus. I once also installed an anti virus software to scan the HD and again, no virus found.
How do I do it? I do not react on every exe file with a pavlovian doubleclick reaction. My everyday account has no admin rights. I have a linux firewall in the cellar. Easy.
What do I get: The CPU cycles for me and not for some virus scanner in the background.
regards,
einar
Hi folks,
p utes).
:-)
PMFJI, but I do have to come to the rescue of the preposter. Me too, I think that the GPL is far from being clear. And your over-simplification of the legal facts does not help. There are several aspects of this license which are still under dispute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL#GPL-related_dis
In the end, there is not "better" when it comes to licenses. It is your business decision which license to live with. As it the decision of the business with which embedded OS to go.
regards,
einar
P.S.: I do not believe business cases provided by engineers
Hello Peter,
it was not meant as an personal attack. I am sorry if it appeared like one. It is just so that I heard your arguments too often. Borders are to protect resources. Plain and simple. Although most of us would invite the rest of the world with open arms, it becomes suddenly different when you realize the price tag.
There is social tourism. Several of my friends who worked for the state in the area of immegration changed my viewpoint quite drastically. I do not doubt that there are refugees visiting your country out of sheer necessity. However, most of them don't. Compared to some second world countries, the UK looks like a shopping mall without security cameras.
Nothing against your idealistic point of view. But the borders you complain about are not to lock you in, they are there to lock the rest of the world out.
regards,
einar
First, I was outraged by this silly post then realized that your society is probably different.
Here is why we do not want you to live with us before we checked your background:
In my country, everybody who does not have a job receives unemployement money. Everybody receives excellent health service. When you are old, you receive a pension from which you can live. Nobody starves here, everybody has a roof over their head. There are no beggars in the street; nobody sleeps in boxes in dark backstreets. I can walk through my hometown at three o'clock in the morning without getting mugged or killed.
Now, how does this work: The huge majority of people pay taxes. Everybody pays unemployement insurance and deposits money into the retirement fund. If you arrive here with the age of 30 you probably are already 100K behind with retirement payments.
Us, the ones who payed into the common retirement system, do we want to give you a freebie?
Infrastructure and public services have a price tag. Welcome to the world of insurance math where you are just a number...
I am sorry to bring the news but most probably you will not get a work permit. The work permits have a quota per district. Naturally, the more interesting districts where the multinational companies are sitting that would hire an "only English speaker" are over their quota.
For EC citizens it is rather easy to get here. The rest of the world is more or less locked out.
Yes, I am Swiss.
Actually, I think it is our duty as nerds to stand up and dispell the governemental FUD!
So, if a security expert points out that we are doing the wrong think in the area of security then we should probably listen. And it is not always about technology. Believing that the world is a scientific system where you can clearly prove an idea to be right or wrong is rather naive. If you work long enough in organizations which are big enough then you learn that everything is always political.