[Info-vax] portable sequential file formats (was: Re: Couple of questions on VMS -> world)

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Thursday, 19 March 2015 01:11:23 UTC, Stephen Hoffman  wrote:
> On 2015-03-18 23:38:21 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:
> 
> > On Wednesday, 18 March 2015 01:22:16 UTC, johnso... at gmail.com  wrote:
> >> On Tuesday, March 17, 2015 at 1:00:04 PM UTC-4, li... at openmailbox.org wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Agreed. I don't understand how anybody can use Linux or most UNIX in
> >>> production for anything.
> >> 
> >> But clearly it's been done and continues to be done. At quite large scales too.
> >> I think of organizations such as Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Google. Perhaps
> >> you are focusing on the wrong things.
> >> 
> >>> But it's still UNIX so it suffers from the same lack of naming conventions
> >>> and where Sun hasn't fixed [...]
> >> 
> >> While annoying at times, it's really not a deal breaker. It's at most a 
> >> temporary
> >> speed bump for some.
> >> 
> >>> And they're all based on C which is the root of all evil- it's
> >>> not *if* something bad is going to happen it's just when and how often.
> >> 
> >> I think you need to separate your disgust at elements of the standard C
> >> library from that of the language itself.
> >> 
> >> EJ
> > 
> > 
> > Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc are presentation-centric read-mostly
> > applications, on the whole. Nobody cares much if they work properly
> > or not, so long as they're mostly there most of the time.
> 
> The billing and ad-tracking systems are rather more robust, I'd expect. 
>  That written, Facebook and others have done some very serious work on 
> distributed computing and scaling.  <https://github.com/facebook>, 
> among others.  As for not the social sites working properly or not, 
> outages and errors are a big problem for ad-driven social sites.  If 
> the sites are not around and not keeping their users happy and 
> entertained, then the sites are not adding content and not making 
> money.  At the scale of Facebook, keeping these servers online and 
> operational and secure is not an easy problem.   VMS supports nothing 
> even close to the scale of many modern configurations, for that matter. 
>   A hundred nodes is three Moonshot boxes in ~13U, after all.
> 
> > Equally, nobody notices much if they provide wrong data or lose data
> > from time to time. These are the outfits who are the target market for
> > HP/Foxconn's Cloudline disposable/nonmanageable/nondiagnosable servers.
> 
> RAIS.   Quite popular in some quarters, particularly as the costs of 
> the servers crater.  Why bother fixing something, when your software -- 
> akin to clustering on VMS, but at much larger scale -- can simply swap 
> in another box as needed.    Yes, scribes tell us that in the 
> eldertimes, computer technicians known as Field Servants used to 
> perform component-level repairs, and servers got periodic preventive 
> maintenance visits, but can you believe the costs involved with that 
> sort of thing now?  Scribes tell us that disks were once repaired, and 
> boards and were HDAs swapped around.
> 
> BTW, it's possible to get into trouble with first-tier server gear 
> (with design and software issues), too 
> <http://jacquesmattheij.com/saving-a-project-and-a-company>
> 
> > These well known outfits buy lots of kit but how representative are they
> > of the rest of the market? If you want a disposable webfacing
> > presentation-centric public setup, why not leave it to e.g. Amazon AWS
> > and the like, and forget about the hardware altogether?
> 
> Requirements differ: 
> <http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/3/16/how-and-why-swiftype-moved-from-ec2-to-real-hardware.html> 
> 
> 
> > But if you want a traditional transactional setup where data
> > availability and integrity and security are still things that matter,
> > there may be better options.
> 
> One question there being whether VMS is one of those better options, 
> particularly for new deployments.   Up until July 2014, the answer to 
> that question was usually "no".
> 
> > One size does not fit all?
> 
> Ayup.  That's why we're not all running {whatever}.
> 
> > "separate your disgust at elements of the standard C library from that 
> > of the language itself. "
> > 
> > Lots of folk could benefit from doing that.
> 
> Ayup, and what will lists think of OpenVMS, given that more than a 
> third of OpenVMS is written in C?   I'd be inclined to use something 
> else now, but there's no-trivial cost involved in shifting languages.  
> Adding another language to the existing collection of (mostly) C, 
> Macro32 compiler code, and Bliss -- and a variety of other bits in 
> smaller quantities, including Ada -- just isn't going to be at the top 
> of most lists.  Particularly given the current team generally knows C, 
> Macro32 and Bliss pretty well, too.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

These scribes of whom you write, are they related to today's High
Priests of today's One True Way, that shall be called the Holy Cloud
(and yesterday, when it shall have been called the Virtually Holy
Window Box)?

Faith-based (or fashion-based) IT doesn't work any better than
faith-based (or fashion-based) engineering. But there's a remarkable
amount of them around. And, not surprisingly, from time to time there
are stories of people who get their fingers burned by force fitting
the trendy solution into a setup which an informed analysis might have 
said up front could really do with something else.