Speaking on The Pat Kenny Show, Lagarde underscored Europe’s dependence on foreign digital payment infrastructure. “Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Alipay are all controlled by American or Chinese companies,” she noted, arguing, “We should make sure there is a European offer.”
There has been massive progress in the last 40 years in distributed computing and consensus algorithms (which is what you need for consistency in a distributed system). We don’t need 1970 style centralised systems anymore.
For normal tasks, absolutely, and if we can do it without a mainframe while maintaining the stability and redundancy of a mainframe system, then we should look into alternatives.
However, mainframes have been in continous development since they were created, there are absolutely tasks they still do better these days.
I think this is just old style thinking
Cloud and modern technologies are far superior. There is a reason why the fastest most demanding data centers do NOT use any of that old technology
Also, “continuous development since they were created” is pretty much nonsense . It’s technology, it’s all always been in continuous development
Mainframe and other technologies have stagnated for the last several decades. They haven’t developed much. IBM is the main one in the game and their main strategy is vendor lock in. Not innovation, and definitely not them updating and keeping up with the times
Even their TCP\IP network stack is decades behind other technologies.
It’s all proprietary so it’s less efficient, less innovative, less secure, too
Oh no, not the fucking cloud.
Didn’t we just talk about taking the data back?
Let’s run our own servers and not a needless third party…
Dude. They are technologies
You can make your own damn cloud if you want to. I think you missed the point entirely
Like what? I worked with some of them - they are nothing but the software that runs on them. Companies buy them to keep the ancient software they depend on running, not because they’re good or necessary. Software can be rewritten. The companies I worked with got rid of around 50% of their old propritary systems like SystemZ, POWER, Superdome, and NonStop in favour of plain Linux on amd64 in the last 20 years, and the trend is continuing.