AS/400 How does it look?

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 9:07 AM, Terrence Enger <tenger-P1ovA8G34VBEfu+5ix1nRw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 02:37 +0300, William Muriithi wrote:
>> Terry,
>>
>> Many thanks for your explanation. I am now more knowledgeable on
>> AS/400 platform. You really did a good job and I noticed it triggered
>> some serious conversation over there. It did even get off topic and
>> become car technology discussion. Noticed a lot of people there still
>> think a solid car is safe. Someone corrected them very well, an easily
>> collapsible car is far much safe.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> William
>
> William,
>
> I am really surprised by the level of interest over there.
>
> The self-sacrificing car seems like it should give some lesson to us in
> computing, but I am stuck trying to figure out what that lesson might
> be.

It's pretty clear:  You need to be sure to solve the *right* problem.

At first glance, having the car survive the crash *seems* like the
right idea; if it's not too badly damaged, that seems an obviously
good thing, right?

Unfortunately, its survivability distracts people from the *real*
goal, which is to preserve the lives of the passengers.

I browsed the thread; certainly some interesting points were made.
Everyone didn't agree, but that's a good sign of there being at least
some diversity in the group :-).

Something I'd be interested in hearing more about is the "jobs"
concept.  To be sure, the usual Unix notion of "oh, just run cron" is
severely deficient.  It is unfortunate that there hasn't been an
outgrowth of free software alternatives to cron that are fundamentally
better.

I have asked about this sort of thing before, both on this forum, and
elsewhere; here's some summary of my thoughts...
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2007-07/msg00034.php

I'd be interested in hearing what AS/400 (or whatever it's sold as
this week :-)) has as its "basic concept."
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