Ha, brilliantly hoisted by my own petard, bravo.

True, but we're not all webdev nerds. I've been working in computing for almost 20 years and wasn't familiar with it. Bias of understanding based on the sector/field you work in is a real thing. Plus it really wouldn't be hard to have TFS start like this:

Perhaps with the definition linking to a Wikipedia page or something. Just helps out those of us who might work in other areas know what the article is talking about.

Totally agreed when it comes to personal systems. When it comes to enterprise stuff (and this is a story about SLES) having a distributor do the package assembly and vetting for you is immensely valuable. Luckily, at least for SUSE, the historical dependency hell of RPMs is largely gone. I remember having an absolute shit show of a time back in the early Red Hat days with such things but Zypper is pretty sorted in SUSE these days.

I think you're right, and in fact #1 on IBM Z, Red Hat didn't jump into that space as enthusiastically as SUSE did back in the early 2000s and it still shows.

Cruise ships are a form of technology and an interesting one. There are medical and biology nerds who might be interested in this story as well.

While I understand this suspicion and it may be true, IBM has a track record of contributing code back to the mainline kernel after investing substantial amounts of money in that development. It's true that I'm referring to them contributing money for development specifically for platforms they own (Z and P systems) but I hope they follow a similar model now that they have an ownership stake in the biggest x86 server side distro. I don't really see how they could say "no more derivatives" given that much of what Red Hat has done is likely derivative of GPLd projects itself. Frankly, if they take systemd and tie it up in a proprietary license I'll be happy since it'll turn it into the MiniDisk/BetaMax of init systems!

I concur. I work on both z/OS and z/VM and have never felt any pressure to get any kind of certification. Quite the opposite in fact, they have provided me with no-strings, gratis education so I can work on the products more efficiently. IBM isn't perfect but this particular problem is very much made of straw.

Mainframe (z/OS or zTPF) centric applications like CICS and WAS have native SOAP/REST interfaces now, so while it may be true that interfaces are being written because they need to understand how to actually address the data that is stored in these systems, developers are able to do so with modern APIs for the most part. Now as for the backends themselves, i.e. the programs that facilitate the business logic, that's what the COBOL and in some cases Assembler programmers are needed for!

It really isn't a stupid anecdote. Go to SHARE or GSE in Europe, you'll see representatives from the largest financial, retail and governmental industries who represent the bulk of transactional computing in the world. Practically every debit/credit/charge card swipe goes through a COBOL program, and these aren't "legacy" systems that are simply being maintained but systems in active development. I know personally of programs that have been written to facilitate new features like various NFC payment technologies recently. I will grant you that it's a largely invisible sector of the IT industry, if I wasn't in it I would probably still be ignorant to it too.

I've attended the SHARE conference for the last few years, it's been going on for more than 50. For those not in the know it's a user conference that's focused primarily on IBM System z and its associated ecosystem. Point by point on the checklist in TFA I can say it passes for the most part, there was a bit of a hiccup with one of the keynote speakers last year in San Jose but for the vast majority of the speakers I've heard they've been relevant and useful. If other parts of the computing ecosystem want to see how a user conference should be run I highly recommend they attend SHARE. Great mix of in-depth product demo sessions, hands-on labs and technical sessions that are often delivered by product experts and/or people who have or are involved in development. I can speak mainly for the z/VM and z/OS security content but there's no other conference I'd rather attend each year.

I was wondering if the giveaway from their statement is "We're sorry to leave the direct-to-consumer keyboard business". I'm wondering if that means they're going to be licensing the technology to either OS developers or other keyboard producers. I'm not sure how that business model would work but your conclusion stands nonetheless, we likely won't see the technology being open sourced.

True, but they're generally on a closed line with a central point of control and don't share rails with driver-operated trains who rely on signals to inform them as to whether they can or can't operate on a specific part of a line. This seems to be suggesting that autonomous trains would share rails with trains driven by humans. It doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to solve but it's not the same as, for example, the Docklands Light Railway or airport rail systems that don't have to contend with traffic not controlled by a central system. Similar problem to that facing driverless cars but without quite the same degree of randomness or volume of vehicles.

Title is a pretty common term in property law, it's just not used in the context of vehicles in the UK but it's not a US-specific term in general. In the specific case of vehicles it seems to be used more in the US than elsewhere though.

Eh, not really just an American problem. Plenty of Londoners will happily refer to "The City" without appending the "of London" part to refer to that oddity of a place.