how do you know you've not got a virus if you don't run an AV scan to check?
How do you know you have a virus when the first thing any virus or malware worth its salt does is disable the virus scanner? Virus scanners do nothing but slow your system down in exchange for giving you a very, very false sense of security. I would never trust a virus scanner to tell me I had a virus. If your system got 0wned, you are well and fucked; you can't trust anything on it, even (and especially) the virus scanner.
No sir, I've never ran a virus program and don't plan to in the future. The best "virus scanner" is knowing what shit should be running on your computer and what shit shouldn't. If you see any suspicious process, consider it a red-flag. Oh yeah, and "explorer.exe" is listening to several ports, has 4 dozen TCP/IP sessions open, and is checking random POP3 mailboxes, you might have a problem too. A virus scanner wouldn't have detected any of it though, because the virus scanner would have been 0wned too.
with the savvy user on any modern OS by forcing a permission box to pop up
Assuming the worm/malware is stupid enough to raise said flags. The goal is to avoid that kind of thing and use exciting local privilege escalation exploits.
Like any other UNIX OS, OSX is less vulnerable to such attacks than Windows
This is simply unproven for all the reasons outlined in your post. Until you see *UNIX widely deployed as a "desktop" OS, all claims that UNIX is inherently more secure than Windows are nothing but untested theories.
Wake me up when *UNIX has 50% of the desktops and then we can debate which operating system is more secure.
Good thing they have. Vista has been on the market for a couple years now and unlike XP, the power management does work. I have no clue what state my computer falls asleep into, but XP never put the same hardware into that state. And it did it all by default too.
Does Firefox get treated the same as a gcc job?
This I agree with. I have no clue how you'd fix it but I do suspect that a properly designed windows application gets some kind of notification from the OS that says "dude, I'm shutting down now, is that okay?". The app, I assume, can say "fuck off, I'm busy" and the machine stays awake. In otherwords, I suspect the applications aren't taking advantage of the functionality offered by the OS. If GCC (or better, make) hook into this, it wouldn't be a problem.
I have no fucking clue what kind of power saving mode my modern computer goes into, but I do know that when it falls asleep it is deader than a doornail but manages to wake up in under 15 seconds. I dont even mange it and I have no clue when or how it decides to fall asleep. It just does... power saving on modern computers is virtually a solved problem*.
* until you factor in remote access. WOL? Yeah right... never had that work right.
This is pretty much how you should do it. Either pitch it, or bury it as a footnote in some bill. Unless the company's mission includes "make it green", nobody else will understand enough to care.
Are you sure about that? It is served in an iframe, which would mean both your page and AdSense would see digg as a referer for all of that traffic. Something tells me google probably varies the ads it dishes out based in part on the referer.
Now granted, prior to DiggBar, the referer was already "digg.com". But the way diggbar works encourages people to hand out "digg.com/5849xdfs" instead of "yoursite.com/some-article.html". Those folk then use that "digg.com" URL in their blog, which not only gives digg the link-juice, but probably throws off the targeting algorithms used by AdSense (and those like AdSense).
In otherwords, technically you are right, but I think you are oversimplifying things. You need to consider what serving in an iframe does to the referer.
PS: It will also fuck up your logs. For example, if slashdot for some insane reason ran a story here and instead of using a straight link to your site, used a "digg.com" URL, you wouldn't know from the logs where all that traffic was coming from.
It is a amazing the sheer amount of politics that goes around pagerank and search engine listing. In an environment where your whole business can go tits up with a bad listing in Google, it is no wonder such politicking exists!
If you couple that with the fact that nobody knows what the fuck, exactly, makes Google like your page and you get quite a strange brew. Books and websites all passing around spells and potions with no scientific basis. People constantly thinking Google is somehow out to get them because their website dropped three positions for the keyword "smelly cat".
I have to wonder though if it is because most of the people who are tasked with SEO stuff don't think like computer nerds. In fact, I'd say maybe I'm wrong and the the people you really want to hire for SEO are guys with PhD's in statistics. Maybe folk who were actuaries in a former life or something. In the end, the entire theory of Google Search is nothing more than a bunch of damn statistics.
Depends on what you mean by "stealing". Is the targeted site going to get any kind of pagerank bump if it is linked via the diggbar? If people start passing around the DiggBar "tinyURL" instead of the actual URL from the target site, who gets the pagerank? I dont know--only google knows (which is why pretty much all SEO advice should be taken with a grain of salt, most advice is basically folklore and superstition... nobody knows what google wants)
In other words, technically they might not be stealing traffic, but they might be stealing the value of that traffic.
I'll take a stab at this. There is a whole cottage industry built around gaming Digg. It was a sweetheart deal, the "news sites" provided top-10 lists, tin-foil-hat opinion articles and short summaries of real news articles on real news sites mixed with a heap of ads. In exchange, Digg would give these sites enough traffic to make a living. Digg just violated the rules of this little deal and tried to take more than its fair share. Of course these guys are pissed--they had a deal, blackheart!
Nobody counts on Facebook traffic, so nobody gives a shit what Facebook does. But lots of these joints *do care* what Digg does cause if Digg shuts off their traffic, the party is over and the site folds.
Didn't about.com or somebody like them try this stunt back in the.com days? Remember having to add that "break out of some assholes frame" javascript on every page? I guess nobody does that anymore, but back then it used to be standard issue. Course, back in those days people used frames, so it was probably easy to break out. Looks like digg is using an iframe to host the content. This begs a couple questions:
1) What does something like AdSense think about pages served in iframes? Will it throw off their targeting? 2) What does this mean in terms of SEO? Will google get pissy about you being in some jerk's iframe? 3) How the hell do you break out of an iframe in a cross-browser way?
I gotta say one thing though--how they have the comments "fold down" from the "Diggbar" is pretty neat. Course, the posters on Digg are all 12 year olds who find poo-poo, pee-pee jokes funny thus negating everything.
Digg is a weird place, it is like some kind of flash-crowd groupthink that is enabled by the unlimited ability to vote anything down. Slashdot's moderation system may have its faults, but it is the best damn system I've seen for a website with lots of traffic. Here, you can make a post that goes against the general "view" of the site and still get "+5 insightful" provided you are eloquent. On Digg, you could write the most insightful damn thing in the world but if it goes even a tiny bit against the bias of the article you will be buried into the floor with zero chance of getting read.
Remember that our American friends don't have beefy 240 volt 13 amp sockets like us Brits.
At least our electricity comes in the form of 60Hz like god intended. Our sockets look cooler too... not all freaky like yours:-)
Serious question though... If you take a camera made for NTSC and use it in Europe, do all the lights flicker because of the frequency? I swear I've seen flickering lights behind news reporters doing live shots. Does video equipment have to compensate for the flicker of AC power?
Pretty much every building big and small in Belltown, Downtown, First Hill and parts of Capitol Hill are heated by one of these "communist" steam companies.
In many cases, the schemes were ripped out and replaced with individual gas boilers in each apartment.
Sadly, most of the 1930's brick apartments used to have steam heat. Most were not part of Seattle Steam, but used their own private boiler. Like with you, these were ripped out in the 70's and 80's and replaced with (now very expensive) electric heaters or if you were lucky some big fan with a gas flame at the bottom. Why? Probably so they could lower your rent not having to include heat (or more likely, just keep rent the same and pocket the difference). Course, the heat they provided would have been cheaper overall... electric heat is extremely expensive.
I was lucky enough to live an building that still had "free heat" and it was great. My electric bill was only $15 a month. Plus the radiators would leak steam just enough to humidify the apartment in the winter. Cats love them too because they can sleep on top of ones that have shielding.
Interestingly, the landlady of that apartment said the building used to have gas stoves as well but those were also replaced in the 70's and 80's with electric ranges. Why? So they didn't have to take on the gas bill either. Keep in mind they didn't have individual meters for gas in the 1930's and it be almost impossible to "re-wire" all the gas-lines to meter them.
Typically the only communal things left in apartments are sewer, water and garbage.
PS: For some reason they liked to paint over the mahogany trim in the 80's as well. That and they had a penchant for carpeting over hardwood floors. I swear, nothing good came out of the 80's whatsoever... not a god damn thing.
PPS: Almost all of the old 1930's apartments still have their original iceboxes.
It is one more damn program that has to start up when I reboot (which isn't often). That slows down the startup process. It runs per-user not per-machine, which probably pisses off people running terminal server (or people who actually use the fast-user-switch stuff).
There are several reasons why Google Update runs all the time that you're missing
I cannot think a single reason. Not one. You can schedule update checks like everybody else. You can even do it hourly if you are worried about "OMG ZERO DAY EXPLOITZ!!".
There is a slider at the top of the page that lets me choose "American Fat-Cat" / Communist. By moving the slider, everyone's comments are automatically refactored to reflect my beliefs. Go ahead, say something negative about Fidel Castro. I will never see it!
Good to see you agree! Fidel isn't some capitalist pig-dog like Obama. Amazing that this site is so full of people who agree!
Did you mention the cameo appearances by Sean Hannity and the Back Street Boys?
Facebook can cache most of their content which dramatically reduces the overhead of using a scripting language
True. But writing cache code is not easy and makes your code more brittle. It increases the likely hood a user will interact with the website and do something, say "update my profile" only when they click "save", their profile hasn't updated yet because your cache sucks. Then you have to plaster your site with bullshit messages about "please allow 30 seconds to see the change".
But what is far, far, far worse is you are allocating programming resources to non-features. Caching is a non-feature that adds zero value to your website. Your users dont interact with your cache. They interact with your website--and I bet if you are like any moderatly complex site, you've got all kinds of bugs that annoy the hell out of them. So rather than allocate your developer time to fixing those annoying bugs (thus adding value) or adding new features (thus adding value), you are stuck pissing away time optimizing bullshit your users never see.
So yeah. You can cache the fuck-all out of your website. But only by stealing developer time away from working on features that make your users happy. Of course if you wrote the thing in C instead of PHP, you'd have a different set of development problems of which I could only have nightmares about.
In otherwords, engineering is always a tradeoff. Use PHP (and MySQL) and piss away developer time on caching the fuck around their weakness. Use a compiled language like C and piss away developer time doing fuck-if-I-know because you didn't free mallocs or had to write a template language from scratch or some insane shit like that. Pick your poison!
Could you imagine if the FSF guys created a programming language. Like GNUbol--the first programming language that protects your Freedom(tm). It could have freedom protecting measures like only being able to compile on Certified Free Software. The official text editor of GNUbol, EMACS, would offer Freedom Enhancements like the ability to hit META L + DEL + SHIFT + @ and get a view of the assembly code generated for every statement. You could edit the assembly code or even change the microcode on the GPL'd GNUPU (GNU processing unit, the only GNU/CPU supported (though we prefer to call every CPU GNU/CPU because they wouldn't have anything to run without award winning GNU tools like cat, y, and pushd)). Since the entire stack, from GNUPU to the text editor is licensed under the GPL, you could rest easy knowing all software you create will automatically be licensed under the GPL!
I kid, I kid. Clearly you couldn't edit the GNUPU , at least in version 0.03. Maybe in 0.1, but that is many years from now.
But yes, you are right. If there isn't a politicized language, there should be.
You know, I guess it depends. I wouldn't port an application from Perl to something else. But I'm not sure I'd base a new project on Perl either.
There are some things about perl that could be fixed that might change my mind:
1) Dump Perldoc and liberally rip from javadoc and XML comments. I know both of these got their start from perldoc, but perldoc needs to catch up. 2) Make sure the IDE actually uses said docs. Once your IDE's intellesense sucks up your comments and uses them while you are typing in a method, you are rewarded for documenting your stuff. Nothing like positive feedback to encourage good habits. 3) Finish EPIC. Perl needs IDE support. Syntax coloring and auto-indentation does not make for an IDE. 4) Get rid of this my $blah_param = shift; crap and start making function declarations that work like everybody else: sub myDopeFunction($blah_param){}. This coupled with perldoc's suckage lead to hard to maintain code 5) Give a couple million to the Template::Toolkit guys. They rock. 6) Mystery option.
Depends. Staffing is one bit of the equation. You've also got to factor in "how easy is it to extend our existing application". Can you tie your COBOL stuff into your customer-facing billing system on your website? Can your call center be updated so the CSR's are all doing data entry on a web app or a "real" desktop application? I'm sure both are possible but I'm also sure both have price structures that are insanely high, but just a notch less insane as "hire a team of devs to dump COBOL"
There is one more thing I'll toss out, but I'm not sure about. Location. If you are located in Bumbleskunk, USA, the talent pool is pretty small and you will have a hard time getting programmers to relocate (after all, if your company sucks, they are basically gonna have to move again to work some place else). I wonder if there is any correlation between "Uses COBOL" and "Is located in Bumbleskunk". In other words, how many companies headquartered in say, Boston or Silocon Valley use COBOL vs how many companies in say Cowtown use COBOL.
Dude, I haven't played with DB2 much to be able to tell you. I've used PostgreSQL in production environments for 5+ years. I *love* PostgreSQL. It is great for what I'm using it for, but I have no qualms with saying it doesn't do everything the "big boys" do. In fact, PostgreSQL will get you very far and the day you need to move over to Oracle or DB2 is a good thing. It means you got huge.
Essentially, I have no sympathy for people who's biggest complaint about gimp is 'it's not photoshop' as opposed to 'it doesn't serve it's purpose', which I believe it does
Fair enough, but don't expect GIMP to "win" any time soon with that attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know you have a virus when the first thing any virus or malware worth its salt does is disable the virus scanner? Virus scanners do nothing but slow your system down in exchange for giving you a very, very false sense of security. I would never trust a virus scanner to tell me I had a virus. If your system got 0wned, you are well and fucked; you can't trust anything on it, even (and especially) the virus scanner.
No sir, I've never ran a virus program and don't plan to in the future. The best "virus scanner" is knowing what shit should be running on your computer and what shit shouldn't. If you see any suspicious process, consider it a red-flag. Oh yeah, and "explorer.exe" is listening to several ports, has 4 dozen TCP/IP sessions open, and is checking random POP3 mailboxes, you might have a problem too. A virus scanner wouldn't have detected any of it though, because the virus scanner would have been 0wned too.
Assuming the worm/malware is stupid enough to raise said flags. The goal is to avoid that kind of thing and use exciting local privilege escalation exploits.
How would they even know what to learn in the first place?
And rightfully so. If the damn thing needs that much care and feeding, it is defective and should be returned!
This is simply unproven for all the reasons outlined in your post. Until you see *UNIX widely deployed as a "desktop" OS, all claims that UNIX is inherently more secure than Windows are nothing but untested theories.
Wake me up when *UNIX has 50% of the desktops and then we can debate which operating system is more secure.
Good thing they have. Vista has been on the market for a couple years now and unlike XP, the power management does work. I have no clue what state my computer falls asleep into, but XP never put the same hardware into that state. And it did it all by default too.
This I agree with. I have no clue how you'd fix it but I do suspect that a properly designed windows application gets some kind of notification from the OS that says "dude, I'm shutting down now, is that okay?". The app, I assume, can say "fuck off, I'm busy" and the machine stays awake. In otherwords, I suspect the applications aren't taking advantage of the functionality offered by the OS. If GCC (or better, make) hook into this, it wouldn't be a problem.
5 minutes? Who turns computers off?
I have no fucking clue what kind of power saving mode my modern computer goes into, but I do know that when it falls asleep it is deader than a doornail but manages to wake up in under 15 seconds. I dont even mange it and I have no clue when or how it decides to fall asleep. It just does... power saving on modern computers is virtually a solved problem*.
* until you factor in remote access. WOL? Yeah right... never had that work right.
Too bad I dont have mod points...
This is pretty much how you should do it. Either pitch it, or bury it as a footnote in some bill. Unless the company's mission includes "make it green", nobody else will understand enough to care.
Are you sure about that? It is served in an iframe, which would mean both your page and AdSense would see digg as a referer for all of that traffic. Something tells me google probably varies the ads it dishes out based in part on the referer.
Now granted, prior to DiggBar, the referer was already "digg.com". But the way diggbar works encourages people to hand out "digg.com/5849xdfs" instead of "yoursite.com/some-article.html". Those folk then use that "digg.com" URL in their blog, which not only gives digg the link-juice, but probably throws off the targeting algorithms used by AdSense (and those like AdSense).
In otherwords, technically you are right, but I think you are oversimplifying things. You need to consider what serving in an iframe does to the referer.
PS: It will also fuck up your logs. For example, if slashdot for some insane reason ran a story here and instead of using a straight link to your site, used a "digg.com" URL, you wouldn't know from the logs where all that traffic was coming from.
It is a amazing the sheer amount of politics that goes around pagerank and search engine listing. In an environment where your whole business can go tits up with a bad listing in Google, it is no wonder such politicking exists!
If you couple that with the fact that nobody knows what the fuck, exactly, makes Google like your page and you get quite a strange brew. Books and websites all passing around spells and potions with no scientific basis. People constantly thinking Google is somehow out to get them because their website dropped three positions for the keyword "smelly cat".
I have to wonder though if it is because most of the people who are tasked with SEO stuff don't think like computer nerds. In fact, I'd say maybe I'm wrong and the the people you really want to hire for SEO are guys with PhD's in statistics. Maybe folk who were actuaries in a former life or something. In the end, the entire theory of Google Search is nothing more than a bunch of damn statistics.
Depends on what you mean by "stealing". Is the targeted site going to get any kind of pagerank bump if it is linked via the diggbar? If people start passing around the DiggBar "tinyURL" instead of the actual URL from the target site, who gets the pagerank? I dont know--only google knows (which is why pretty much all SEO advice should be taken with a grain of salt, most advice is basically folklore and superstition... nobody knows what google wants)
In other words, technically they might not be stealing traffic, but they might be stealing the value of that traffic.
I'll take a stab at this. There is a whole cottage industry built around gaming Digg. It was a sweetheart deal, the "news sites" provided top-10 lists, tin-foil-hat opinion articles and short summaries of real news articles on real news sites mixed with a heap of ads. In exchange, Digg would give these sites enough traffic to make a living. Digg just violated the rules of this little deal and tried to take more than its fair share. Of course these guys are pissed--they had a deal, blackheart!
Nobody counts on Facebook traffic, so nobody gives a shit what Facebook does. But lots of these joints *do care* what Digg does cause if Digg shuts off their traffic, the party is over and the site folds.
Didn't about.com or somebody like them try this stunt back in the .com days? Remember having to add that "break out of some assholes frame" javascript on every page? I guess nobody does that anymore, but back then it used to be standard issue. Course, back in those days people used frames, so it was probably easy to break out. Looks like digg is using an iframe to host the content. This begs a couple questions:
1) What does something like AdSense think about pages served in iframes? Will it throw off their targeting?
2) What does this mean in terms of SEO? Will google get pissy about you being in some jerk's iframe?
3) How the hell do you break out of an iframe in a cross-browser way?
I gotta say one thing though--how they have the comments "fold down" from the "Diggbar" is pretty neat. Course, the posters on Digg are all 12 year olds who find poo-poo, pee-pee jokes funny thus negating everything.
Digg is a weird place, it is like some kind of flash-crowd groupthink that is enabled by the unlimited ability to vote anything down. Slashdot's moderation system may have its faults, but it is the best damn system I've seen for a website with lots of traffic. Here, you can make a post that goes against the general "view" of the site and still get "+5 insightful" provided you are eloquent. On Digg, you could write the most insightful damn thing in the world but if it goes even a tiny bit against the bias of the article you will be buried into the floor with zero chance of getting read.
At least our electricity comes in the form of 60Hz like god intended. Our sockets look cooler too... not all freaky like yours :-)
Serious question though... If you take a camera made for NTSC and use it in Europe, do all the lights flicker because of the frequency? I swear I've seen flickering lights behind news reporters doing live shots. Does video equipment have to compensate for the flicker of AC power?
Did you just make that up or is it based on some motion picture?
Pretty much every building big and small in Belltown, Downtown, First Hill and parts of Capitol Hill are heated by one of these "communist" steam companies.
Sadly, most of the 1930's brick apartments used to have steam heat. Most were not part of Seattle Steam, but used their own private boiler. Like with you, these were ripped out in the 70's and 80's and replaced with (now very expensive) electric heaters or if you were lucky some big fan with a gas flame at the bottom. Why? Probably so they could lower your rent not having to include heat (or more likely, just keep rent the same and pocket the difference). Course, the heat they provided would have been cheaper overall... electric heat is extremely expensive.
I was lucky enough to live an building that still had "free heat" and it was great. My electric bill was only $15 a month. Plus the radiators would leak steam just enough to humidify the apartment in the winter. Cats love them too because they can sleep on top of ones that have shielding.
Interestingly, the landlady of that apartment said the building used to have gas stoves as well but those were also replaced in the 70's and 80's with electric ranges. Why? So they didn't have to take on the gas bill either. Keep in mind they didn't have individual meters for gas in the 1930's and it be almost impossible to "re-wire" all the gas-lines to meter them.
Typically the only communal things left in apartments are sewer, water and garbage.
PS: For some reason they liked to paint over the mahogany trim in the 80's as well. That and they had a penchant for carpeting over hardwood floors. I swear, nothing good came out of the 80's whatsoever... not a god damn thing.
PPS: Almost all of the old 1930's apartments still have their original iceboxes.
If your current browser does everything you want, don't upgrade!
It is one more damn program that has to start up when I reboot (which isn't often). That slows down the startup process. It runs per-user not per-machine, which probably pisses off people running terminal server (or people who actually use the fast-user-switch stuff).
I cannot think a single reason. Not one. You can schedule update checks like everybody else. You can even do it hourly if you are worried about "OMG ZERO DAY EXPLOITZ!!".
Good to see you agree! Fidel isn't some capitalist pig-dog like Obama. Amazing that this site is so full of people who agree!
Did you mention the cameo appearances by Sean Hannity and the Back Street Boys?
Bloody yanks! The proper term is crappiæ.
True. But writing cache code is not easy and makes your code more brittle. It increases the likely hood a user will interact with the website and do something, say "update my profile" only when they click "save", their profile hasn't updated yet because your cache sucks. Then you have to plaster your site with bullshit messages about "please allow 30 seconds to see the change".
But what is far, far, far worse is you are allocating programming resources to non-features. Caching is a non-feature that adds zero value to your website. Your users dont interact with your cache. They interact with your website--and I bet if you are like any moderatly complex site, you've got all kinds of bugs that annoy the hell out of them. So rather than allocate your developer time to fixing those annoying bugs (thus adding value) or adding new features (thus adding value), you are stuck pissing away time optimizing bullshit your users never see.
So yeah. You can cache the fuck-all out of your website. But only by stealing developer time away from working on features that make your users happy. Of course if you wrote the thing in C instead of PHP, you'd have a different set of development problems of which I could only have nightmares about.
In otherwords, engineering is always a tradeoff. Use PHP (and MySQL) and piss away developer time on caching the fuck around their weakness. Use a compiled language like C and piss away developer time doing fuck-if-I-know because you didn't free mallocs or had to write a template language from scratch or some insane shit like that. Pick your poison!
Could you imagine if the FSF guys created a programming language. Like GNUbol--the first programming language that protects your Freedom(tm). It could have freedom protecting measures like only being able to compile on Certified Free Software. The official text editor of GNUbol, EMACS, would offer Freedom Enhancements like the ability to hit META L + DEL + SHIFT + @ and get a view of the assembly code generated for every statement. You could edit the assembly code or even change the microcode on the GPL'd GNUPU (GNU processing unit, the only GNU/CPU supported (though we prefer to call every CPU GNU/CPU because they wouldn't have anything to run without award winning GNU tools like cat, y, and pushd)). Since the entire stack, from GNUPU to the text editor is licensed under the GPL, you could rest easy knowing all software you create will automatically be licensed under the GPL!
I kid, I kid. Clearly you couldn't edit the GNUPU , at least in version 0.03. Maybe in 0.1, but that is many years from now.
But yes, you are right. If there isn't a politicized language, there should be.
You know, I guess it depends. I wouldn't port an application from Perl to something else. But I'm not sure I'd base a new project on Perl either.
There are some things about perl that could be fixed that might change my mind:
1) Dump Perldoc and liberally rip from javadoc and XML comments. I know both of these got their start from perldoc, but perldoc needs to catch up.
2) Make sure the IDE actually uses said docs. Once your IDE's intellesense sucks up your comments and uses them while you are typing in a method, you are rewarded for documenting your stuff. Nothing like positive feedback to encourage good habits.
3) Finish EPIC. Perl needs IDE support. Syntax coloring and auto-indentation does not make for an IDE.
4) Get rid of this my $blah_param = shift; crap and start making function declarations that work like everybody else: sub myDopeFunction($blah_param){}. This coupled with perldoc's suckage lead to hard to maintain code
5) Give a couple million to the Template::Toolkit guys. They rock.
6) Mystery option.
Depends. Staffing is one bit of the equation. You've also got to factor in "how easy is it to extend our existing application". Can you tie your COBOL stuff into your customer-facing billing system on your website? Can your call center be updated so the CSR's are all doing data entry on a web app or a "real" desktop application? I'm sure both are possible but I'm also sure both have price structures that are insanely high, but just a notch less insane as "hire a team of devs to dump COBOL"
There is one more thing I'll toss out, but I'm not sure about. Location. If you are located in Bumbleskunk, USA, the talent pool is pretty small and you will have a hard time getting programmers to relocate (after all, if your company sucks, they are basically gonna have to move again to work some place else). I wonder if there is any correlation between "Uses COBOL" and "Is located in Bumbleskunk". In other words, how many companies headquartered in say, Boston or Silocon Valley use COBOL vs how many companies in say Cowtown use COBOL.
Dude, I haven't played with DB2 much to be able to tell you. I've used PostgreSQL in production environments for 5+ years. I *love* PostgreSQL. It is great for what I'm using it for, but I have no qualms with saying it doesn't do everything the "big boys" do. In fact, PostgreSQL will get you very far and the day you need to move over to Oracle or DB2 is a good thing. It means you got huge.
Fair enough, but don't expect GIMP to "win" any time soon with that attitude.