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underplankon AresDB: Uber's GPU-Powered Open Source, Real-Time Analytics Engine

I think its a good idea to remove implicit bias where ever you can. But doing that by making a structure that does exist be invisible is dangerous. That hierarchy does exist. Even if it's not in your face. It's human nature and it's a good thing in some situations. I think the better angle on this is to have an open culture where the discussion can happen and everyone listens and asks the questions without fear, consensus is built and those with power (because there is always someone with power) wield it sparingly. This is much harder to get to, but it's more sustainable.

underplankon IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transactional memory.

I used to develop software for system-z(2 years ago). As someone else said, if you are already using mainframes, get another one. If you arent, pretty much you can ignore them. Their hardware is of higher quality, but I think their uptime has more to do with the hermetic seal of human process that exists around the installations. You can't get anything changed in production, ever. And thats fine, because banks have been doing the same thing for the last 30 years.

I don't actually think performance wise they have anything on a cluster of x86 servers. But its hard to benchmark things like that accurately.

From a developer point of view, its not a great technology stack to work on. Its old and out dated, and is pretty incompatible with other platforms. EBCDIC is a pain, 3270 terminal is a pain. Having to allocate files manually is a pain. Having actually about 7 different types of files is a pain.

Its really all a pain. Just dont go there.

Also, I found that guys who had been working on mainframes for a really long time have a pretty outdated view of what the "distributed" world has to offer. A lot of the time they dont understand what "web Scale" at the level of google, facebook et al are operating at.

As an additional funny annecdote, the I/O that a lot of people have been talking about is now conventional if high end disk array's AFAIK. But internally the disks are emulated for the OS to look like the disks it was using back in like 1975. Thats how it gets backwards compatibility, just dont change anything.