With Sun gone, will Oracle wreck Java, or set it free? For years Sun dominated the Java world, to the fury of rivals like IBM, Oracle and Google. Now that Oracle is about to inherit the keys to the Java kingdom, it's time to ask whether Big Bad Larry will spark open warfare with the ...

Can you build a mainframe computer at home in your spare time? On your kitchen table? Using only common utensils and your bare hands? And no, I don’t mean a toy mainframe, but a real one – one that runs all of IBM’s most powerful software, including CICS, DB2, the classic MVS ...

Arnold Schwarzenegger and California’s Controller John Chiang are still jousting over the status of that supposedly dead computer language, Cobol. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Schwarzenegger has ordered Chiang to slash salaries of California state workers in order to conserve cash until the bitterly divided State Assembly gets ...

The New York Times and the Sacramento Bee are reporting an amusing story out of California about how Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to knock some sense into the state’s free spending legislators is being stymied by an antiquated mainframe computer system. You see, California is having its annual summer shouting match between angry pols who ...

Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS? The Community ENTerprise Operating System is an identical binary clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (minus the trademarks), compiled from the source code RPMs that Red Hat conveniently provides on its FTP site. It is also completely free, as in beer. CentOS provides no paid ...

Not all message queues are made equal. In the simplest case, a message queue is synonymous with an asynchronous protocol in which the sender and the receiver do not operate on the message at the same time. However, while this pattern is most commonly used to decouple distinct services (an intermediate mailbox, of sorts), the ...