They're talking about companies using on the order of 500 virtualised machines. You bet they're going to look at alternatives to VMWare.

The mainframe solution like all others has its pros and cons, you'd be silly not to include it in a comparison table.

Surprised that a certain vigorous champion of Linux and MacOS hasn't been here yet to boast that this is far less serious than any and all faults in Windows.

Of course there could be downvoted comments lurking below my threshold but I'm not going to unlock it just to see.

Oh, dear.

My daily driver is an 8th-gen i7 with 12GB and it's fine.

I'm not compiling linux kernels or doing CAD, but if I were I'd probably need more.

And the machine I take to site visits is an 8th-gen i5 with 8GB. Again, it's mainly for browsing, RDP, word processing, that sort of thing but it's not hindering my productivity.

Don't forget nine nines of uptime.

Or hot-swapping CPU and memory modules in the unlikely event of failure.

They're not averse to change, they're averse to risk. Banks, insurance, airlines. They can't afford risk.

And they're generally quite smart when it comes to calculating risks to their business. They've figured out that there's nothing else that can do the job for the same price.

that this has been up for more than 5 minutes and there hasn't been a "just install linux" comment yet.

I'd hate to see IBM i die off, it's an operating system like nothing else at that level, i.e. competing with Windows/Linux/Unix.

But you can't run it on x86 or Arm because the OS is designed for the architecture. Mind you, they re-wrote the abstraction layer when they moved from the original CISC CPU systems to RISC. Nobody had to recompile any application software. On the gripping hand, the OS was designed first and then the hardware, to satisfy the requirements of OS400. So I'm not sure if they *could* port it to x86 or Arm.

"Alien compared to PC" is a good phrase for AS/400.

Uptime, granular control of user processes, the ability to compile CL (Control Language, somewhat akin to bash scripting) into native code, dual-abstraction making portability from the smallest to the largest a simple operation of copying the binary to the new machine, I could go on.

Recently set up a cheap TCL for a customer's AirBnB cabin.

Cannot use it for anything other than terrestrial digital TV without it being logged into a google account. Set it up and then log out? Lose all your streaming apps. Leave your own google account logged in for guests? Ha ha. Set up a dedicated google account? Double ha ha. Guests use their own? Sure, let them run through the setup wizard again, and download the latest apps again (rural area, fibre optic not available, it's 4G/5G with a weak signal), before they can watch netflix. Triple ha ha.

I told him his choices - get an AppleTV or similar, or plug an old laptop into the HDMI port, or return the TV for a pricier model without the login requirement. Obviously the first 2 options aren't ideal for a rental, so he took it back.

I offered to find out for him but he didn't want to pay me for something he could clearly do for himself. That's OK, he's going to call me again to set it up.

I want to know how to set and prove the identity and age of "Administrator"

z/OS (and IBM i / OS400) are pretty much hypervisors these days. They run VMs, not the other way around, and there isn't a platform out there that can provide the transaction throughput or uptime of a Z-series. If there were, then the mainframe would have died out a long time ago. Instead, IBM keeps on developing and refining it because there isn't an x86 platform that can do it for a competitive cost.

IIRC our AS400 took about 20-30 minutes from flicking the big red toggle switch until the console became usable.

But then it didn't happen very often, maybe once or twice a year.

I haven't bought a new laptop in years. There's a company in Australia (and many other countries I assume) who acquire ex-govt and ex-lease laptops. Business-grade laptops.

They get a new SSD and a bloat-free copy of windows, a 12-month warranty (excludes battery), and free shipping, for about 1/3 the price of a new machine. Currently typing this on a Lenovo i7-8550 with 12GB memory, a 240GB NVMe and a 500GB SSD in the spare slot. It'll do me for another couple of years.

You can keep windows or install your choice of distro. My "other" laptop has similar specs and runs Debian Trixie.

I hate seeing perfectly usable hardware go to waste, so every time I visit a pensioner with some creaking, wheezing old desktop, I point them to a "new" second-hand laptop.

You post a lot of text, only to grasp at straws. Operating system bigotry helps no-one. Someone with your experience should know that.

Have a better one.