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I would say the reason is the support........
But that isn't really true anymore. Microsoft is a terrible partner to wish on anyone, but the alternative is script kiddies. And you don't trust a fortune to script kiddies unless you want a dot com bust.
Linux may be on the verge of getting it's feet into corporate America with it's support from IBM, but like all things IBM it will probably be a branded version. Right now they have bet the farm on JAVA and it's portability. Jury is still out on that one.
Until you can get a stable version of unix that is installable on big iron, you won't get a material difference in the stats.
I was in one of Oracles early classes on SQL in 1994. Larry said if you were not programming in SQL in 5 years you wouldn't be programming. At the time it too had performance issues. I challenged them then to speed it up or get out of the way. We didn't have time to wait on their bolt on database language to give us the answers. One sweet young lady who had sat through the class soaking it in got up and left at that point. I stopped her and asked why. She told me that this was great technology, but she had 120 data centers that she needed to poll for 1M+ transactions a piece, each and every night, and their little pc's couldn't even call that many, much less transfer and summarize the data. Larry was wrong, it took longer than five years, but most of us use something like SQL nowdays. He missed his bet because those tools were not pushed out to the big iron first. They were developed on the bleeding edge and are just now getting to be boiler plate technology.
I helped to develop a system in 1980 that used interactive control language, the DOD precursor for SQL. It had a lot of features that SQL still lacks. But the point is that tech for tech sake, doesn't get the job done. You have to move transactions through databases. You have to summarize data. And you have to report on it. Do this right and you keep your job for another two weeks.
One of my favorite commercials is talking about a bank that has the largest clearance of checks without errors. When asked how they clear that many without any errors, the boss said the secret was to get the process down so that a single check processes correctly every time, then duplicate the process 10 million times a day. That is big iron.
These little unix boxes of all flavors, just do not have the price points to push mainframe transactions reliably. Never have. With Moores Law, that should have changed a few years ago, but corporate bean counters capitalize over five or six years and it will probably be a couple more before the majority replace the big iron with newer boxes/os/db. And while the hardware is subject to Moores Law, the software has just not kept up. That is where IBM shines. It's OS was doing all of this stuff 20 years ago, and they haven't stood still since then either, and IBM hardware is subject to Moores Law as well.
We in the AS400 world laughed when everyone talks about going to 32/64/128 (you choose a number) bit CPU's, quad cores, etc. We have been living there for ages. Now the hot thing is Virtual Machines, (been there done that), parrallel processing (live there), clustering, you name it IBM has led the way for years. And every IBM mainframe is either plug replaceable or in place upgradeable. Shoot they even have some processor clusters that you can throw a software switch and turn additional processors on and off (You only pay for what you use). I don't know what the current limit on processors are, either 24 or 32, may be higher than that, but I'm pretty sure there are real world 16 way processors out there, and not little PC processors either, these are the big boys. We are talking about systems that you can pull a card and upgrade to a new machine in an afternoon. You pay for it, but it is doable. And if you can stay on the leading edge without getting to the bleeding edge, it's all a budgetable expense. So you can acurately predict what it will cost you. That is invaluable for corporate bean counters.
The one area that IBM has let us down is in the graphics arena. They have everything everyone else does, but using it is just not as easy as the rest of their systems. And the websphere stuff is just not cost effective for most intranets. Speed is also a problem with large transaction sets that are washed through websites. I'm sure they have something out there with a commerce flavor that will do the job, but nothing as cheap as a windows server with odbc drivers on it.
As for skill sets, the bread and butter skill sets are programming in whatever main language the corporation uses. Mine is
RPG-ILE currently. That pays the bills, but most of my days are spent running SQL against massive databases and data mining for answers for management. Or writing interfaces for data transfer and transformation. And yes, the training is very expensive. Usually around two thousand dollars per class. So it's probably accurate to say an IBM education will cost you about 150K to get really good and productive. But you can't handle that much education all at once anyway. It takes time to become an expert. Take a bunch of classes on the front end to get on the box, then a couple a year to acquire new skills. Over a lifetime of programming, it adds up. But once you are, you have it. It doesn't go out like Microsoft Certifications. We still have applications running that were written on System3-15D's back in 1982. They are occasionally updated, but any of our people can work on them. IBM makes things that last, and are upgradeable.
I also spend a lot of time updating content on the intranet. We use it to store departmental policies and things like that. I picked up most of the DotNet/HTML/ASP/IIS/CGI stuff on the side. It is way to complicated, but it does look nice. I have a few driver programs, a few communication programs, and a few interfaces written in the PC side, but most of that stuff is just facing for mainframe data or control of hardware devices.
Marketing took over the external web site last year, and farmed it out to some script kiddies using php and unix servers. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF. They said it was to allow increased functionality, but we haven't seen any yet. Just a different look and feel. Maybe someday the functionality promised will be there. Right now we are just thankful that the artists over in marketing are telling someone else what is wrong with the way the site looks.....
Linux may be on the verge of getting it's feet into corporate America with it's support from IBM, but like all things IBM it will probably be a branded version. Right now they have bet the farm on JAVA and it's portability. Jury is still out on that one.
Until you can get a stable version of unix that is installable on big iron, you won't get a material difference in the stats.
I was in one of Oracles early classes on SQL in 1994. Larry said if you were not programming in SQL in 5 years you wouldn't be programming. At the time it too had performance issues. I challenged them then to speed it up or get out of the way. We didn't have time to wait on their bolt on database language to give us the answers. One sweet young lady who had sat through the class soaking it in got up and left at that point. I stopped her and asked why. She told me that this was great technology, but she had 120 data centers that she needed to poll for 1M+ transactions a piece, each and every night, and their little pc's couldn't even call that many, much less transfer and summarize the data. Larry was wrong, it took longer than five years, but most of us use something like SQL nowdays. He missed his bet because those tools were not pushed out to the big iron first. They were developed on the bleeding edge and are just now getting to be boiler plate technology.
I helped to develop a system in 1980 that used interactive control language, the DOD precursor for SQL. It had a lot of features that SQL still lacks. But the point is that tech for tech sake, doesn't get the job done. You have to move transactions through databases. You have to summarize data. And you have to report on it. Do this right and you keep your job for another two weeks.
One of my favorite commercials is talking about a bank that has the largest clearance of checks without errors. When asked how they clear that many without any errors, the boss said the secret was to get the process down so that a single check processes correctly every time, then duplicate the process 10 million times a day. That is big iron.
These little unix boxes of all flavors, just do not have the price points to push mainframe transactions reliably. Never have. With Moores Law, that should have changed a few years ago, but corporate bean counters capitalize over five or six years and it will probably be a couple more before the majority replace the big iron with newer boxes/os/db. And while the hardware is subject to Moores Law, the software has just not kept up. That is where IBM shines. It's OS was doing all of this stuff 20 years ago, and they haven't stood still since then either, and IBM hardware is subject to Moores Law as well.
We in the AS400 world laughed when everyone talks about going to 32/64/128 (you choose a number) bit CPU's, quad cores, etc. We have been living there for ages. Now the hot thing is Virtual Machines, (been there done that), parrallel processing (live there), clustering, you name it IBM has led the way for years. And every IBM mainframe is either plug replaceable or in place upgradeable. Shoot they even have some processor clusters that you can throw a software switch and turn additional processors on and off (You only pay for what you use). I don't know what the current limit on processors are, either 24 or 32, may be higher than that, but I'm pretty sure there are real world 16 way processors out there, and not little PC processors either, these are the big boys. We are talking about systems that you can pull a card and upgrade to a new machine in an afternoon. You pay for it, but it is doable. And if you can stay on the leading edge without getting to the bleeding edge, it's all a budgetable expense. So you can acurately predict what it will cost you. That is invaluable for corporate bean counters.
The one area that IBM has let us down is in the graphics arena. They have everything everyone else does, but using it is just not as easy as the rest of their systems. And the websphere stuff is just not cost effective for most intranets. Speed is also a problem with large transaction sets that are washed through websites. I'm sure they have something out there with a commerce flavor that will do the job, but nothing as cheap as a windows server with odbc drivers on it.
As for skill sets, the bread and butter skill sets are programming in whatever main language the corporation uses. Mine is
RPG-ILE currently. That pays the bills, but most of my days are spent running SQL against massive databases and data mining for answers for management. Or writing interfaces for data transfer and transformation. And yes, the training is very expensive. Usually around two thousand dollars per class. So it's probably accurate to say an IBM education will cost you about 150K to get really good and productive. But you can't handle that much education all at once anyway. It takes time to become an expert. Take a bunch of classes on the front end to get on the box, then a couple a year to acquire new skills. Over a lifetime of programming, it adds up. But once you are, you have it. It doesn't go out like Microsoft Certifications. We still have applications running that were written on System3-15D's back in 1982. They are occasionally updated, but any of our people can work on them. IBM makes things that last, and are upgradeable.
I also spend a lot of time updating content on the intranet. We use it to store departmental policies and things like that. I picked up most of the DotNet/HTML/ASP/IIS/CGI stuff on the side. It is way to complicated, but it does look nice. I have a few driver programs, a few communication programs, and a few interfaces written in the PC side, but most of that stuff is just facing for mainframe data or control of hardware devices.
Marketing took over the external web site last year, and farmed it out to some script kiddies using php and unix servers. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF. They said it was to allow increased functionality, but we haven't seen any yet. Just a different look and feel. Maybe someday the functionality promised will be there. Right now we are just thankful that the artists over in marketing are telling someone else what is wrong with the way the site looks.....
Posted by rclark@...
19th Oct 2006
