Re: [PLUG] How the IRS is able to reverse engineer Assembly

Hmm.. I feel like I am being bated. What exactly is the "mainframe" bullshit? Always interested in other perspectives. :)

Whether you know it or not, you probably touch a MF dozens of time every day.. airlines.. banks.. financial markets.. insurance. All run by mainframes. You pay social security or get a social security check? Yup, you guessed it.. all run on mainframes. Greater than 90% chance that when you use your mobile phone to check your bank account balance - you're touching a mainframe on the backend.

An insurance company that will remain nameless for the purpose of this message has been trying to leave the MF for almost a decade (a M$ alum sits on their board). They've only been able to successfully port one application (starting from scratch) and it's always down and generally performs like @(#*. Without MFs your interactions with many companies would be much worse than they are today (definitely not saying it's perfect today.) Even as "expensive" and "antiquated" as they are (the mainframe will turn 55 in 2019), they arguably still out perform and - especially when you factor in all the indirect costs - cost less than other platforms.

The good news... Some of the larger banks and insurance companies actually run Linux on the mainframe. Yep.. good old SLES, RHEL, and even Ubuntu power many mainframes. At one point Penn State was running Linux on the MF (they still might - it's been a few years since I've been out there) and they loved it. How could that be bullshit???

No, I don't work for IBM.

On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 3:46 AM, Marco Milano <marco.milano@gmx.com> wrote:

On 01/04/2018 11:07 PM, Lowell Higley wrote:

IRS is a big mainframe user. On the mainframe, most code is being moved from assembly to Java. The move has little to do with technology and more about pricing models. In mainframes there are a couple of different types of processers. General Processors (or GPs) can be very expensive because organizations like IRS have to pay IBM for the workloads that run on GPs by the MSUs consumed. The altermative is to use zIIP engines which are specialty processors for specific workloads like java. These enginres are priced at a flat rate - or "all you can eat." Yes, in the mainframe world we call processors "engines".

They need to start from scratch.

God knows how many billions were wasted on this "mainframe" bullshit.

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