Not every computing task needs 10 TB of common RAM. Mainframes have their place, but it's not in doing every task.

How about some of that transparency we were promised? Where's the American people's backdoor into Obama's communications?

Oh, that's right... All people are created equally until one of them is working for the government.

Fuck Obama and his spooks.

Scotland should have seceded with the UK willing to have such a daft demagogue in charge. Now he's trying to turn the UK and the rest of the world into even more of a surveillance nightmare than the street cameras London already has.

He can piss up a rope and then hang himself from it.

Nobody expects a single desktop PC to do the job of a mainframe. It's true, too, that mainframes have their place for certain types of work. Don't claim, though, that a rack full of blades can't be clustered to do a similar job. It happens all the time.

Maybe I'm old, but when I was in grade school kindergarteners on up had to walk to and from school if they lived less than a mile away unless there was some major road in between or they had a parent or babysitter ready to drive them.

I came here to moderate, but unfortunately slashdot's bug initiation team has made it so I either have to have teeny tiny print or a side scroll. Hey, slashdot, we aren't all using thirty inch monitors! Jesus, even the newspapers (most are the worst sites on the web) don't fuck up this bad.

Really, slashdot, is Dice trying to get rid of you? This is really lame. You really should hang your heads in shame.

See you at Soylent News.

Now, someone else with points please mod me offtopic. Thanks.

ASCII is fine if it's only going to be published at slashdot, but conversion is a pain in the ass I shouldn't put up with.

It seems that slashdot no longer fixes bugs, but are trying to introduce more. Today I have a choice between a tiny font and a side scroll. LAME!

I think the writing was on the wall over a year ago when they tried to shove Beta down our throats.

I miss Taco, the place worked when he was here.

I think "prevailed" is a bit overstating things. Mainframes have more "held on" despite the march of the killer micros.

My property taxes went up a couple years ago because the local residents decided to pay $2 million to have a flowage dredged and stocked with fish.

My property taxes are going up next year because the local residents decided to pay $25 million for a new sports complex at the high school.

Now, it may cost a couple mil to get a city wide fiber rollout, but after the initial build out, the monthly fees should cover peering and maintenance. So I get a 1 year bump in my taxes, and a life time of cheaper and faster internet access?

Now that's something I can get behind!

-Rick

No, but he DID speak. This theory is the dumbest theory I've seen coming from someone who should know better for years; it's already been disproven before the dumbass thought of it.

Other apes have language. Prairie dogs have language. Even dogs have language, even though the only three things they say are "I'm hurt", "I'm lonely" and "get off my property before I eat you!" Previous STUDIES have shown this.

Why do these educated morons think vocal cords evolved for in the first place??

Also, the summary is likewise retarded: "If there's one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals, it's our ability to use language."

We may use it better than other species, but this is unproven; whales and dolphins may have more sophisticated language than us, but we can't tell because we can't understand them. It may well be that we're the only species to have abstractions, but that's not proven, either.

Tools aren't even human-only; birds and other animals have been spotted using tools. So what makes us different?

Music, art, and humor. No other species laughs (Hyenas' "laughs" aren't from humor); no other species make art (the elephant doesn't count; do you really think he knows what's going on?), and no other species makes music -- and no, bird "song" isn't music, it's speech (that the idiots coming up with this absurd theory don't understand).

"It turns out that there are zillions of little apps that make businesses run. Some of them are no more robust than an excel workbook on a well known file share. Some are Access applications. Lots of VB6 apps are still keeping businesses running."

I hear ya. Been right there in the trenches for almost 20 years now doing line of business application development/management. The organization I just started with has a product catalog that has over 1000 entries, with tons of additional excel/access solutions that remain undocumented.

But this is a problem. Each of these applications involve risks, maintenance, and support. The more of them there are (and some places have mountains of them) the more maintenance and support cost, the more often those risks present themselves.

The reason these apps exist is because of a business process, and that process was likely designed in a vacuum being held over a fire. It's not that the app is flawed, but the business process itself may be the source of the issue. Working with the business units to identify processes that have multiple IT needs and finding ways to streamline the process, not the apps, will save the company vastly more than sinking time into developing yet another application.

And that's where we get to the rub. There are already hundreds of POS suites, contract managers, document management, BRMs, ERPs, HR tools, taxes and accounting apps, etc... Any core business function that a company may have has likely already been solved with a tool that is vastly cheaper than what it would cost for us to build, with refined business processes built in, and with a significantly lower TCO including maintenance and support.

The world is full of giants. Stand on their shoulders so that your IT department can spend their time on projects that take your business where others can't.

-Rick

If by celebrity we mean that good scientists get famous for actual research and get patronage to run their labs free of government funding, then hell yes.

If by celebrity we mean that their career as a "Scientist" means to be an advocate for one bit of research over others even well outside their own work, then probably not.

If you're just developing for the fun of it, have at.

But if your goal is to have a POS application, stop writing code right now. There exist hundreds of off the shelf POS apps all ready. For Windows, for Linux, thick clients, thin clients, web, desktop, green screen, etc...

Your time would be vastly better spent finding an existing product and adapting your business process to it. Especially if it is something that can tie into your accounting/inventory systems.

As the old saying goes, "Good developers write good code, great developers steal good code."

-Rick