Uh, so it's not a server because it does more then one thing?

The big power boxes are really nice for a set of problems. we have a couple of big ass ones for oracle servers for very large databases and they work great. They do cost big $, as somebody said in a thread long ago when your data matters you get what you pay for. IBM makes a killing on these and the 'frames because for a lot of businesses it's easier to pay some big bucks now then later when your data is fucked. It's not as hard as you think to sell these guys, plus the virtualization is top noch, and done at the hardware level (I know you get that on wintel, I'm not sure if VMWARE the most popular solution uses it. I think sun also provides hardware assist for virtualization.)

That being said, for a lot of bulk work, I prefer linux/windows. Lots of speed on the cheap, perfect for a farm of app servers.

The largest credit card issuers make more money on transactional fees volume then on interest income, it's not even close. Not only does the issuing bank get a cut, but VISA/mastercard/etc and merchant bank get a cut.

new OCR engines can easily read amount and the other 6 MICR fields. The tech has been around for a while now and works really well.

Not to be a troll, but this sure sounds a lot like IMS. Write a program to analyze the data.

some mainframers would be laughing their asses off.

I've had my share of hell projects. Be part of the solution, folks that suck it up and fix it instead of pouting/quitting are the folks you want working with you. I'm stuck in an large organization of suck, we've pulled off stuff people said couldn't be done by working hard and staying focused.

of course there must be balance. However, If I was a hiring manager, I'd have a lot of tough questions for somebody who quit because it was 'too hard'. Being able to handle pressure is so important, especially when your fixing files by hand at 3am in the morning before a 4am deadlnie.

Anyways job pain is very subjective. I've had a lot of situations in my career that folks probably would say the pain was at 11. I worked thought it and was part of the solution instead of quitting.

Folks that quit in the middle of things are quitters. I wouldn't hire somebody who didn't want to be part of the solution, they'd bail on me as soon as things where boring.

Why would I want to work with somebody who can't stand adversity?

actually java fanbois like myself like faster CPUs, and educated ones know that threading and preloading craptons of shit into memory can't rescue bad code.

isolation? Ring 0 bugs would kill all the jails in that kernel, right?

Don't think of VMware as the right model, think about VM (maiframe OS) instead.