Feb 22, 2023
Get more control over unplanned events such as natural disasters, power outages, cyber-attacks, and any other disruptive events. Software-defined data protection solution to backup your mainframe data securely.
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Get more control over unplanned events such as natural disasters, power outages, cyber-attacks, and any other disruptive events. Software-defined data protection solution to backup your mainframe data securely.
You thought they were dead didn't you? You thought "I haven't seen a mainframe since the 90s, no one uses those anymore." Well you're wrong. Dead wrong. If y...
Check out @mainframed767 and my DEF CON 23 talk from 2015.
Why mainframe forums suck...
When you (I mean you as a technical user, out there trying to figure new stuff out day in, day out) finally break down and go to the forums to seek an answer (always as a last resort), you expect to get some flack. That’s the unfortunate way forums work. You expect at least 1 of each:
- Person who asks you “Why would you want to do that anyway? I just use XYZ tool instead”
- Person who links to or copies verbatim the manual you’ve already read. (Possibly helpfully telling you to just RTFM you lazy bastard)
- Mocking jackass who adds zero value.
- A helpful answer and some useful discourse.
- Some combination of the above.
To be fair, I know there are loads of #lazyweb folks that need some/all of the above advice and are counting on others to do their work for them.
But, there are certainly cases (stackoverflow.com is full of them) where someone has a specific question, “how does this work” or “I found this instruction in some code I’m examining and I don’t understand it”, who wants to have a thorough conversation with examples and such.
Most of the types of responses I find when searching mainframe forums fall under the category of #1 or #3 above. Given the scarcity of these forums to begin with; it’s not hard to see why the boundaries for entry to this obscure platform are so high.
I give you today’s case-in-point; see the mod and global mod comments. I found this site, looking for exactly the same info the OP/2nd poster was asking about. The first reply is verbatim from the manual.
http://ibmmainframes.com/about49482.html
Yes yes, this guy may have been a chronic too-lazy-to-read; please-spoon-feed-me type user (but apparently only had 2 posts total). Were this an isolated case, I’d be ok. But I don’t really believe the moderator’s responses fit the crime, even for a lazy user (temp ban and be done?), and they do nothing to make the community more inclusive.