will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

[Mike Coleman]

Jim Herrmann <b3d at kc.rr.com> writes:
> Spoken like a *nix hacker.  ;-)  No, Sprint is still, and will be for a very long
> time, a mainframe shop.

Well, what do *I* know?  ;-)

(The impression I had, I formed at PCS; I didn't realize Sprint was so
different.)

> IMS fast path is still the very fastest data base in the world, and is used by
> companies that need extremely high transaction volume.  Were talking tens of
> thousands of transactions per second.

I don't doubt this, but I wonder why they don't participate in the TPC
benchmarks (see www.tpc.org).

> Unix variants are pretty reliable, but not compared to the mainframe.
> OS/390 has something like an average 99.9999% uptime.

It'd be interested to track down exactly how and why this is (or isn't) true.
In my limited experience in a industrial Unix environment, virtually all of
the downtime seems to be caused by operator error, or, to a lesser degree,
application errors.

Just handwaving a bit, maybe 390's extreme reliability is due to the
(possible) fact that very few new people are learning 390 and very little new
code is being written for it.  If this were true, I suppose it would have the
effect of significantly increasing the reliability of the platform (since the
people would mostly be masters, and the code would mostly be debugged).

> The mainframe is NOT dead.  It's merely been reinvented as a REALLY big
> server.  :-)

Yes.

Hardware is hardware, I think.  If OS/390 is anywhere near as ugly and
primitive as OS/400 though <donning my flame suit>, I'd much rather use Linux
on mainframe hardware instead.

-- 
Mike Coleman, mkc at mathdogs.com                                      Windows XP
http://www.mathdogs.com                                               Linux :)
problem solving, expert software development