| Chris Hedemark on Fri, 16 May 2003 07:57:20 -0400 |
|
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
I take it you have some experience with Cobol and mainframes. Would you mind telling me what it is? I work with Barry. I would describe his position within our company as "Alpha Geek", though I'm sure there's some stuffier title for what it is that he does. Here's the newer of the two mainframes that he's worked on in the last year. http://yonderway.com/gallery/Computers/DSCF0004?full=1 (no, he's not in that picture) Here's a large chunk of our online storage, attached to the mainframe: http://yonderway.com/gallery/Computers/DSCF0011 (note the tapes in the background... we've got more of these than you want to know) A couple of fairly typical Oracle servers, that I work more directly with Barry (and gr) on: http://yonderway.com/gallery/Computers/DSCF0010 http://yonderway.com/gallery/Computers/DSCF0007 (they're looking much better than that now... I should get a newer pic) And yet more online storage: http://yonderway.com/gallery/Computers/DSCF0008 Barry beats the living snot out of all of this hardware and more. I've probably learned more about performance tuning in the last 5 months working with him than I've had to learn in the last 5 years. Sometimes I don't agree with him on things. But I do consider him to be well qualified & informed to state the opinions that he has in this thread. I don't agree with the "just spider it" advice, tending to be more in favor of open government. I think that easy public access to records should be a design consideration for government systems, including the ability to dump large portions of the public record to tape or CD. I don't know Cobol myself, but I have requested public records from
COBOL is just the programming language used to manipulate data in DB2. Really you could use perl, php, probably even bash if you put your mind to it, in order to get to that data. As far as the people who wrote affidavits not knowing Cobol, you are incorrect. At least one of them did know Cobol. Here's what plug member Chris Mann wrote me recently: [snip] Before I became a BOFH I was a COBOL programmer, and yes I dealt with VSAM, DB2, JCL, ASM, etc. My recollection of "how things work" is that it shouldn't be particularly hard for you to get what you need if it is all in one place. Or, it is a matter of terminology. Mainframes don't have disks, mainframes have DASD. As the master said, "It depends on what you mean by 'it'" It is indeed verbal game play. DASD is just IBM mainframe lingo for "Direct Access Storage Device", or hard disk. Sometimes the younger greener guys look at me funny when I call hard disks on UNIX servers "DASD" apparently not knowing that is the historical term for hard disk. I haven't written a line of COBOL in the last 9 years, and I've worked hard to keep it that way, so I'm not presently qualified to counter the city lawyers' affidavits. Barry, thank you for your comments. You may well be right about the disk being a side issue. The important thing for me is that the City come clean about just how easy or hard it is for them to provide the public with copies of public records stored on their computers. Personally, I'm glad you're pushing the issue. Government has become quite closed, even though the law compels them to be more open. They have possibly incurred greater costs in stonewalling you in and out of court than they would have incurred to just give you what you asked for. - -- "The pipe marks the point at which the orangutan ends and man begins." - -Ben Jonson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAj7E0fMACgkQYPuF4Zq9lvYMuQCg7qg4rVL0qE7BwwBYPvksMoou ++UAn3RcOGIA6umM+UiiNQUqYZ1dBSEr =KL4H -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
|
|