[ILUG] pre history or the way we did things in those days

[Paul O'Malley]

All,

For your pleasure I thought I would put up a URL that points to the site
of a large company in Redmond, (wait do not call the nice people in
white coats yet I have not lost the plot,) and then tell you about how
when I was in school in the days of cobol, RPG2 no DOS of various types
and in a time when other such like comforts were provided by CPM.

In the old days we used to be told you can't add apples and oranges. Now
being one for a bit of fun I came up with you could count fruit, and
this would allow you to come up with a figure that could not without
further granularity make any real sense.

With this in mind I read:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp
and in particular the costs of running a mainframe against a windows
server. Being a little long in the fang I have worked with mainframes in
various roles over some of life span.

Understand this mainframes have a role in computing they are capable of
handling vast amounts of data very quickly.

So I was very interested that this made it into the public domain in any
context. While doing this I read the expression webservers in part of
title of the report - 
now let me look at that again - it costs 10 times as much to run linux
on a mainframe as a webserver as it does to run a product from the
people in Redmond on an intel computer.

Well let us just ask why it was not on the same piece of hardware - nuff
said - or is it.
I would be concerned if the boxes that were compared had been identical
and the same amount of person hours had been invested in setting them up
with or without a back end server on the same hardware (not good
security practise in my opinion, if you can afford it, each service
should be on separate machines), so yet another piece of web that we
would be better off without.

Another article on the same site is the 'small business server 2003' vs
RHE (enterprise) ehh once again I think that one should compare like
with like. I do not believe that these are suitable to compare against
each other, should these people consider soint what I suggest maybe I
may then consider it - but then again why would I want to it :-).

All the best in 2004 to you all.

Paul