and you'll find:

"In a court deposition released last week, Governor Branstad acknowledged he has a Blackberry smartphone and receives email on it."

http://whotv.com/2015/03/25/go...

"The report presents a vision of 2045 with LA-style traffic jams in Nebraska... Among possible solutions outlined are self-driving cars..."

what, so you can sleep through the traffic jams?

Not large, which is sad given how good the IBM I is. Plus the sales that are made are considerable and practically all ROI installing their OS on a standardized Power hardware.

So while it makes no sense to me they would abandon this lucrative market (should be lucrative) I am keenly interested in what is happening.

thanks for the info. I am going by what I read on Alliance and don't remember the initials involved, I'm sure you know what they are, but several people commented they were approaching being eligible for some type of pension benefit, maybe a longevity clause on the 401K concerning matching or some other additional funds that IBM would be liable for, or stated they were approaching FHA(sp?) insurance eligibility. Both sounded like what I wrote in my post. Maybe you can explain a little of it. I'm mainly interested as affects the Systems group for IBM I on Power ongoing operations, although the bigger story is kicking these long time IBMers to the curb.

"You CAN compute a billion transactions in a day and then not use the hardware used for those calculations for the rest of the day now."

I program large IBM midranges running multi-billion dollar companies for 25 years now and I've never seen this burst of calculations and then you're done for the day thing. We have lots of work going on all the time that keeps large computers busy.

"Oh, and all the legacy code which is presumably irreplacable because no one understands it..."

I understand it. So do thousands of others of us who wrote it. It's not complicated. It's a pain to get up to speed but so is going into the source code of any large system, open source or not, in any language. Any of these large source code systems translated into any other language would still be just as much of a pain to get up to speed, excepting it's much easier translated into your language of preference of course.

"the rest are being laid off without being laid off."

Basically being fired, which doesn't count in their "Resource Action" numbers and doesn't cost them anything against their writeoff for it.

From reading the IBM Endicott Alliance postings, they also get a 30 day notice but as a "PIP" Performance Improvement Plan notification which in 30 days results in termination. I don't know that there are as many of that as the actual layoffs but there were plenty of posts of people who got that notice. There was also people put on some kind of retirement notice.

There was also whole units shut down, jobs were shipped to Mexico or India. Speaking of which, there was a gathering in India from representatives from high tech areas to try to organize against being laid off by high tech companies, so they are feeling the effects also.

But still the total numbers of terminated employees for this 30 day notice might be 20,000 worldwide which could be approximateky 26% of current US force which is probably the best that Cringely will be able to do for a spin. If he even tries.

"They are cutting their under-performers"

They are cutting top performers who are in their 50's and 60's and closing in on the longevity needed for certain insurance and pension benefits.

And being top performers they are relatively well paid.

Has nothing to do with under performance, although IBM instructed their management to give an underperformance review along with the termination date so they could cut the severance in half to 13 weeks or nothing when they put them on "performance improvement needed in 30 days" plan.

Looks to me from the outside like they choose the least costly way based on management's take on need from each "resource" for transition help.

"cloud services are keeping them alive for now"

Their cloud services is essentially SoftLayer which they recently acquired. With what IBM paid for them, I doubt they are even making money on cloud services yet, much less cloud services keeping them alive. Also SoftLayer's CEO Lance Crosby just resigned in the midst of this latest purge, so whatever IBM does ging forward with cloud will be without most of SoftLayer's founders. I wouldn't look for keeping them alive any time soon.

"hell even their server division!"

just their x86 "commodity" server division. They still make IBM big boxes which I program on (and have a smaller one at home - an iseries 520).

Saying "coding" is like it's learning medical billing or something. Which is probably more useful for most people.

Coding, or rather programming, is not a new literacy in the sense that exposure should be forced. Programming tools are free and there are free programming tutorial websites. That should more than suffice for today's equivalent of most of us here who did whatever we could to get our hands on a PC, type in programs to learn, taking courses by choice, and enjoying it.

We programmers are not more or less literate than other acquired skills, on that skill alone. And those who don't program are not more or less literate than us lacking that skill.

Those who want to program will have already jumped right in as soon as they were ready. There is freer access than ever now. I'm sure we'll have fine new generations of programmers to join us.

not shutting it down, sunsetting it. Content will continue to be available on static web pages for quite some time, and probably will find a home after that.

You missed my point. Your "world is becoming more and more reliant on computer technology" meets host website crashes.

Reliant software doesn't crash.

They might as well get introduced right to today's coding.

this is a post of wisdom and experience to be sure.

Amazon dropped my Kindle book listing today. I wasn't terribly shocked because I had read that they were trying to corner the e-book market, and that's how you do it. My e-book was Barnes & Noble publisher associated, so Amazon is flexing their muscles at more than the two publishers mentioned it appears to me.

Certainly will have me shopping around other book store sites now.