fork1

Unless you're dealing with mainframes, it's not like you see it everyday.

You can already migrate away from your mainframe and take all those JCLs, PL1 Stored Procs and other oddities into a quite standard linux box.

Germany started WW1 with the ambition to make it a limited war, with limited goals. Quickly subduing France, and breaking Russia. Most people on either side thought it was going to be a short war. It evolved differently though.

As for the second part, take the Franco-Prussian war then, and it's consequences for France, it was massive. Besides the war that went quite badly, a massive uprising happened in Paris (the Commune), under siege from both Germans and Loyalists forces. Starvation was rampant, civilian impact massive, and the final death toll quite important.

The 19th century in Europe was characterized by nationalisms, unifications of countries in blood, and liberation of a few (Greece or Serbia for ex.), again in blood.

I think you're disregarding history, in the name of your argument.

It might also be given cursory treatment for the simple reason that it was "marginal".

Take France (since i'm french), one of the big users of overseas and colonial troops, the article lists 500k colonial conscripts. Except we had 8 millions conscripts, and 1 million and a half dead soldiers. While their sacrifice mattered and was not honored enough, it's hard to focus on their specific plights, in the end, they represented ~6% of soldiers, and ~6% of casualties. I'm not even talking about the destruction wrecked in northern france.

As always, people feel more about things closer to them, especially when they experienced directly it.

There was plenty of important conflicts in Europe between WW1 and the Napoleonic wars, not on the same scale, but it was hardly peaceful. Europe was undergoing major structural changes with the advent of nationalisms.

And the causes of war are a lot more complicated than just Germany looking for export markets and colonies. It might be one of many causes (or rather consequences of other factors), but it's hardly the basic driver.

As i've made clear in my other posts in this thread, i dont believe in rewrites. I've seen lots of very painful ones though, and never quite finished, nor iso-functional. However, there are other ways to unplug the mainframe.

I would disagree with the assessment that management is too dysfunctional, it depends. But if they all were like you described, i would be out of work. And it just happens that we turned off a mainframe just 2 weeks ago.

Well, i know of at least one client that still has the binaries but not the sources of the cobol.

But for the generic case, the mainframe is quite an integrated system, and big clients tend to use a lot of the features at the same time. Even if you can produce an executable or a library, but you ll still need a transaction manager (CICS/IMS-TM), a database (DB2/IMS), MQ, RACF, Datasets, GDG, REXX/JCL, etc. You need the whole ecosystem. And all the binaries will expect a DB2, or a MQ listening on the other side, with near-perfect emulation (return codes, db behaviour such as EBCDIC sorting, etc). Just compiling wont help you much unless you have a very basic use of mostly JCL and batches.

There are alternatives, but i'm biased. See my other comment. One of the biggest hurdle we have is that the clients dont usually have many tests in place. Testing and validating a full batch night for example (ie 6 hours of intense batch work) is quite complicated.

Cobol programmers are starting to get few nowadays, and finding people that actually want to be trained in it is not that easy. Plus you dont just need programmers, but z/OS engineers, DB2 DBAs, MQ specialists, etc. And that's before you even start talking about the nice cheque you're writing for IBM every month. It does add up.

I work on cobol migrations (or anything mainframe more correctly) to x86. I've never seen a rewrite of a real application that actually worked. Some have tried but ended up throwing the towel. We've taken a different approach, by being binary compatible. Basically we rewrote a CICS/IMS/etc, as well as some z/OS layers. Depending on the clients, some want to stay in cobol, but others want to modernize, but in a controlled and progressive way. A complete rewrite is out of the question, but you can try to do it in steps.

Thanks for sharing this!

War was prevalent in primitive societies as well, it hardly appeared with currency. Currency and in a more general way, an organized society makes you better at waging war, hence their success. If anything primitive societies' wars were bloodier compared to the population base. As for crime and law enforcement, it's the same, people have killed for some gold or cows since eons.

I still fail to see how bitcoins would let us get rid of either crime or war, nor downsize the army or LEOs. Same for the "conventional power politics", it's hardly a new thing, put a 100 random people on a island and you'll see the same mechanisms at play.

We had military and law enforcement long before regular currencies. Societies were already investing significant amount of energies into these activities as well. The idea that switching to bitcoin or whatever will remove the need for either is a bit far-fetched.