Posts by JimTO

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Solution looking for a problem?

If you look at all 5 "new" fonts there is very little difference from Calibri. This smells like someone in MS marketing trying to justify their existence.

IBM warns mainframe shops of 2013 price hike

The FWLC products almost all pre-date 2001 and very few of these products are still being marketed by IBM. Most customers are on current hardware will not be affected by these changes, or only minimally.

Re: Meaningful comparison metrics anyone ?

I would beg to disagree. The zPCR benchmarks used by IBM to determine MIPS are reflective of what customers use mainframes for. zPCR provides comparisons of the different IBM mainframe servers, for which MIPS is a valid comparison. To quote SPEC, "SPEC designed CPU2006 to provide a comparative measure of compute-intensive performance across the widest practical range of hardware using workloads developed from real user applications." While the current mainframes would probably perform well (the zEC12 is a 5.5GHz processor) how they perform doing compute intensive work is not relevant to mainframe customers workloads. The SPEC Java benchmarks may be more relevant, and it would be interesting to see how WebSphere 8.5 Liberty Profile on z/OS or Linux on System z performs there.

IBM fires Power-powered Penguins at x86's weak spots

Linux-only mainframes

You make a statement at the end of this article "IBM has also dabbled off and on with Linux-only mainframes, the last of which were announced back in December 2009." According to IBM about 20% of the installed mainframe capacity is running Linux. The most recent mainframes for Linux are the zEnterprise 196 (announced in July 2010) and the zEnterprise 114 (announced in July 2011). Any mainframe can be Linux only (i.e. all Integrated Facility for Linux processors).