Uh, so it's not a server because it does more then one thing?

The big power boxes are really nice for a set of problems. we have a couple of big ass ones for oracle servers for very large databases and they work great. They do cost big $, as somebody said in a thread long ago when your data matters you get what you pay for. IBM makes a killing on these and the 'frames because for a lot of businesses it's easier to pay some big bucks now then later when your data is fucked. It's not as hard as you think to sell these guys, plus the virtualization is top noch, and done at the hardware level (I know you get that on wintel, I'm not sure if VMWARE the most popular solution uses it. I think sun also provides hardware assist for virtualization.)

That being said, for a lot of bulk work, I prefer linux/windows. Lots of speed on the cheap, perfect for a farm of app servers.

The largest credit card issuers make more money on transactional fees volume then on interest income, it's not even close. Not only does the issuing bank get a cut, but VISA/mastercard/etc and merchant bank get a cut.

new OCR engines can easily read amount and the other 6 MICR fields. The tech has been around for a while now and works really well.

Not to be a troll, but this sure sounds a lot like IMS. Write a program to analyze the data.

some mainframers would be laughing their asses off.

I've had my share of hell projects. Be part of the solution, folks that suck it up and fix it instead of pouting/quitting are the folks you want working with you. I'm stuck in an large organization of suck, we've pulled off stuff people said couldn't be done by working hard and staying focused.

of course there must be balance. However, If I was a hiring manager, I'd have a lot of tough questions for somebody who quit because it was 'too hard'. Being able to handle pressure is so important, especially when your fixing files by hand at 3am in the morning before a 4am deadlnie.

Anyways job pain is very subjective. I've had a lot of situations in my career that folks probably would say the pain was at 11. I worked thought it and was part of the solution instead of quitting.

Folks that quit in the middle of things are quitters. I wouldn't hire somebody who didn't want to be part of the solution, they'd bail on me as soon as things where boring.

Why would I want to work with somebody who can't stand adversity?

actually java fanbois like myself like faster CPUs, and educated ones know that threading and preloading craptons of shit into memory can't rescue bad code.

isolation? Ring 0 bugs would kill all the jails in that kernel, right?

Don't think of VMware as the right model, think about VM (maiframe OS) instead.

Right now your looking at it from a completely x86 view. Look at it from teh point of view from a hardware based system that's been doing it for years. A lot of these problems have been solved already.

Let's say you have a lot of servers at big corp. Each runs a specialized application, and each application is required to be isolated from the rest. A good VM system like zVM can help you a ton. You get a hardware platform that has tons of mature disaster recovery solutions, and a hypervisor that can dynamically allocate resorces between different VMs to the point where you don't even see it.

I mention zVM a lot because I know a lot of folks that are involved with large scale rollouts of it, in production, with great results.

The downside is that you need people who know what they're doing, and the hardware is expensive as hell.

isn't vmware esx just a specialized linux distribution that is built just to run vm's?

Everything has some overhead, sure. However, when you have hardware level virtualization (where the logic is in the firmware like the IBM mainframe systems), and not in some software hypervisor, the overhead is very minimal. On mainframes they where running LPARs with native performance over 20 years ago.

if submitting 20 small queries instead of 1 join is faster, that app must really suck. Doing network fetches isn't free, most simple joins are fine if your tables are indexed correctly (assuming your DB doesn't suck). I do joins on tables with > 100 million rows in oracle and they are very fast.

Not any more. the last of that code is gone.