Or maybe flash it has a serverCertificaticate method you can call on a socket to retrieve the certificate.

Is there any way to detect this server-side?

Yes, and no.. Its detectable client side with javascript on certain browsers. You could then post the information back to your server and blacklist/whatever the resulting IP (likely behind NAT which would then affect the browsers that you cannot detect it on).

For examples with firefox see:

https://developer.mozilla.org/...

And why should I upgrade my machine just to run an OS that slows it down to what I already have?

Exactly, my 5 Y/O XP machine with an SSD/recent GPU feels faster than _ANY_ win7 machine I have ever used.

And, I own a fair number of machines. But the two "desktops" that get the most use are the win XP machine connected to the large monitors/scanner/etc in the "computer" room at home and the win2k3-64 machine I use for work. Both of those machines are running SSD's recent GPUs and processors that are just a few years old. The OS's have been tweaked up to boot/respond fast (menushow delay and stuff like that).

I have a win7 machine that is probably the most powerful machine I own (recent processor/SSD/etc).. And a win8.1/openSUSE dual boot laptop. But I find win7 to be annoying and slow even after tweaking the UI for lower latency. So the machine sits in the garage mostly unused. Plus, a crapload of my old ass software/hardware, with my old ass data won't work natively on it. The laptop spends most of its useful time in opensuse because even with classic shell win8.1 is garbage.

Then I spend most of my surfing/netflix/gaming time using a touchpad/ipad/kindle.

So, basically XP works great, and saves me the trouble of fighting with win 7 to get all my hardware/apps working. Or forcing me to buy a new scanner/etc because while the scanner works fine for the dozen or so things I scan a year, it doesn't have win7 drivers. Nor do the assortment of 32-bit applications I have with 16-bit installshield. Many of these things (JTAG programmers, GPIB interface for logic analyzer/etc) are not cheaply replaced.

So, a windows 7/8 upgrade besides having an interface I find annoying to do the removal of classic mode in 7, will probably cost me >$5k in hardware/software upgrades plus another 8-20 hours of my free time to get all those applications/etc working on the new machine.

Many of which are _NOT_ improvements (see office 2003 vs pretty much any recent office).

they sell lots of overpriced software like Cognos that is a huge PITA to set up, use, support and you need a maintenance contract since the documentation is crappola

That pretty much describes the entire mainframe business. The technology has evolved but its still managed like it was in the 1970's, which as you can imagine is a nightmare. Imagine a modern piece of hardware with hundreds of CPUs/etc managed like a early 80's era DOS machine where you have a:-zz:, have to set all the IRQ's of your hundreds of devices by hand, and everything is managed using an early version of edlin and text files. Plus, you have to hack the OS in assembly to do simple things like roll your logs or get notification of certain events.

Its been a joke where I work that the zSeries is IBM's contribution to creating a jobs program to boost employment because things that take 30 seconds in vmware or with a modern OS can take days with z/vm or z/OS. Just installing and configuring the OS for basic operation can take weeks unless you clone an existing system.

IBM recently put a lot of their stuff behind a pay wall too.

I remember in the late 80s early 90s when a lot of companies suddenly started charging for "support".. Back then there was a pretty big pushback in the circles I knew, with people going so far as demanding refunds and the like once they had proven that the problem was actually the vendor's product. That is probably why shortly after everything started shipping with cards that basically say "Our stuff is shit, it probably won't work, and we aren't responsible when it doesn't, so don't try to sue."

I have steered away from vendors that put their updates behind pay walls for a few years now. CISCO, oracle, and now IBM and HP are on my "avoid" list.

Not that I like the HP DL series machines anyway. I started back in ~2005 or so when they decided that the 3.5 drive form factor was dead and promptly replaced all the models with 3.5 drives with crap capacity 2.5 chassis, and subpar cciss controllers that they wanted to charge through the nose for.

The license fees for the advanced ILO license necessary to get IP virtual consoles was silly too, especially since most of the whitebox machines include it on their IPMI implementations for free. Plus, its actually less expensive to buy an IP KVM with a dozen ports than pay the license fees for a couple machines.

The first time I saw that, I thought it was a cold idea.. It filters out the people who can't code and don't have little hobby projects to sharpen their skills.

Then I got thinking about it..

My git hub account has like 1 thing on it, my sourceforge has 3 or 4 abandoned projects (a couple with a fair number of downloads too). And I have dozens and dozens that never made it to the see if anyone else can use it stage.

What does that tell a potential employer? I can't finish projects? Well that isn't what happens at work, I do the fun stuff and I trudge through the boring parts of supporting and maintaining it too. That is why its work...

Now I have a family, and that seriously eats into the time I have for hobby projects (especially if I work 60 hours), leaving what? The time I'm at work? Unless your google working on a hobby project at work is a major NO NO.

So, really what are they getting from your github account? That your unemployed and have time to spend maintaining an open source project? That you don't have a family life, or instead of working 60 hours at your job you work 40 and spend 20 hours on a hobby project?

In the end, I'm betting most of the people who have large active projects on github that aren't their day jobs, don't actually make very good employees.

BTW: LTO6 half height internal tape drive (aka normal 5 1/4" drive bay) from CDW today is $2242.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/produc...

B&N did the same to me a couple years ago with the touchpad fire sale. They even took my money and had to refund it a month later when they discovered they sold a million of the things but only had 5 in stock.

However, not everyone can spend about $6000 for the drive

Vs hiring a bunch of engineers to build an optical jukebox, which is what happened in the article in question...

I don't know, i'm betting you could have bought a really big tape library with a lot of tapes/drives for the price it cost facebook to build that thing using $100k+/year engineers.

T10000 tapes are the same size and store 5TB uncompressed

Now see you missed one of the cool things about the "enterprise" drives (vs LTO). Those T1k carts you purchased last year that stored 5TB, can now magically store 8.5 TB uncompressed with the latest T1kD tape drive.

Spend a few tens of thousands on new drives increases the capacity of your existing media investment by 60%, not bad if you happen to have a exabyte of capacity.

What we need are some judges that realize that just because you didn't find the critical security hole when you tested said product, doesn't mean that the company isn't liable for assuring that the product you purchased remains useful for its intended purpose.

Instead what we have are companies giving you shit, and then trying to charge you to fix their mistakes. Most other industries worked this out years ago, someone discovers your refrigerator's defrost unit catches fire and burns peoples houses down after its been in the market for a few years, the original company is generally on the hook to repair it.

A few years ago, GE sent me a nice notice telling me that I should immediately contact a repair organization to replace the door on my 10 year old dish washer, or alternatively they would give me a $200 discount off the purchase of a new unit... All because it turns out they were catching fire.

Sounds like what they really want is tape..

Besides the difficulty of dealing with 174 bluray disks instead of 1 tape... You have to wonder about the reliability of those disks sitting around on a shelf for ten years..

Oh, and you can write said tapes at 500+ MByte/sec.

Plus, tape is well understood, and there are tons of media management applications that track whats on the tape, when it expires, where its located, what encryption keys are used to decrypt it.. Basically 40 years of data management infrastructure.

However, Software wise z/OS is now so far behind it gets harder and harder to find people who want to work with it.

I agree. No one expects to have to write assembly to basically roll some logs, but that is exactly what I found myself doing a couple years ago. Hacking up the example hooks to install a piece of functionality that should be part of any sane OS.

Or for that matter spending 2 days installing/configuring z/VM and editing the configuration with text editors that would have been put to shame by the editors found on home computers of the early 80s. All this for a configuration similar to what could be archived on a PC in less than 15 minutes with few mouse clicks and vmware.

System i is already hosted on x86

Really? Didn't know that, I thought you had to have a POWER compute node in your pureflex system to run IBM i... Do you have a link indicating that it will run on the x86 compute nodes ?

Frankly, i'm skeptical. I've seen the presentations and I don't ever remember seeing anything about IBM i/i5/i5OS/as400 nodes being hosted on x86, only on POWER. Sure you can put them in the same cabinet, but that is really nothing new, just now you can manage them from the same console. With a crapload of limitations of course. It takes about 3 seconds to find all kinds of issues with the way IBM is managing the systems.. I blew some minds when I asked if I could manage vmware and powerVM instances from the same console (the answer was no at the time).

You mean z and i.... p has been struggling due to the onslaught of x86's with Linux.

Sure p/i are the same hardware now and can run linux too. But in the end its far easier to switch from linux/power or aix/power to linux/x86 than it is to switch from IBM i/zos to some other platform.

So, both of those markets are nice, but IBM will continue to try an milk them like HP does with nonstop/openvms/etc. Its only a matter of time before the margins on those start to get squeezed as people decide paying ten million dollars for something they can port to linux and run on $50k a year of hardware is stupid. Or more likely, a 3rd party starts providing similar services as the in house applications and the bean counters decide to outsource the whole shebang (seen that a couple times recently).

Frankly, both IBM i and AIX could be ported to x86 and the whole power hardware division go away in 5 or 6 years while still maintaining the existing software lock.

zOS, probably not so much unless they use one of the emulation technologies they have locked away in the vault.