I completely agree with you. This was one my biggest concerns when the idea of using a wiki was brought up at my company. We know that the real power of a wiki comes from the users, but management likely won't see it that way. You didn't quote the rest of that point where I indicate that I'm pushing for the user populace to have edit privileges;-)
If management is concerned about editing important documents, then they should encourage authors/owners of documents to keep tabs on edits and try to "investigate why the change has been made and if it might be actually a welcome change." (if you really need immutable documents, use attachments).
Well, yes and no. The idea behind the wiki is two-fold. It's not just that users should be able to quickly and easily edit documents, but also that they still be accurate. Consider a hypothetical situation in which procedures may be changing semi-frequently in a customer-facing department, such as a call center. You want all procedures to be up-to-date, and it shouldn't take a lot effort to publish and re-publish the content, but you also don't want Joe McNewbie making changes when he may not completely understand what he is talking about. From the time he makes the (poor informed and/or possibly incorrect) change to the time at which someone spots the mistake and corrects it any number of other reps may have read the same material and used it during their calls. So now you have reps who are providing incorrect information, and possibly forcing the company to spend time/money/resources correcting those mistakes. User involvement will of course go a long way towards finding and correcting mistakes, but there is still the possibility that those mistakes will cause problems in the mean time. Of course, you could also argue that a wiki may not be the best solution in a case such as this.
Ok, so I realize I sound like I'm arguing against myself here, but what it really means is I can see both sides of the fence. Personally I'd rather give more power to the users, but I understand management's point of view as well. I suppose what it really boils down to is how much you trust your users to self-manage the wiki, and how much risk you're willing to take on by giving them the ability to make changes.
Ha, I was so thinking the same thing. The gist of this "story" is that they had a problem getting Vista and Ubuntu to work together (*mock gasp* I've never heard of such a thing!) and then proceeded to fix it. *yawn* To top it all off the linked article is a blog post from the submitter. Give me a break.
Someone has already mentioned accurateness, but what that really means is correctness + point of view + timestamp of information, and these things are rarely if ever tracked normally, let alone in a wiki. Sure wiki's usually track all changes, but that doesn't mean the information is correct at the time of entry, nor that you necessarily know who's point of view is being described.
I agree with most of your post, but you are basing this statement off of the assumption that the content of a wiki is open to interpretation. In a business setting (which the OP is apparently operating in) there is a high probability that the contents of a wiki will reflect policies, procedures, knowledge common to the company, and other information which the company has a stake in keeping everyone on the same page with. Opinion and interpretation aren't even factors in cases such as these. So the equation you mentioned really breaks down as correctness + timestamp.
I'm actually in a situation which is very similar to the OP's. The company I work for has a number of training/procedural documents which currently exist in.mht format (of all things), and we're in the process of migrating those documents into the wiki which comes built into MOSS (the latest version of SharePoint). I won't go into detail about how horribly crippled the MOSS wiki is, except to say it is. Anyway, I was asked to write a "Wiki Best Practices" document and I tried to include a few ideas on what makes a successful wiki because I knew the business users were pretty clueless about them (not that I claim to be an expert here). These were some of the points I tried to address:
First and foremost are the users able to find what they are looking for? If they can't find it in the wiki they'll go somewhere else for it, and the wiki will fall on its face.
Is the information accurate? If you're not meeting these two criteria your wiki is probably worthless, and your users will almost certainly resort to another source of information.
Does your wiki exhibit signs of growth? By this I mean new pages/sections/categories being added when new information becomes available, and edits being performed to improve the quality of existing information. I think one of the biggest hurdles companies will have to overcome for this criteria is the fact that there tends to be a very top-down approach to the distribution of new information (This is definitely the case in my company). In order to allow the wiki to grow there must be enough users with create/edit privileges to keep it up to date. The more users there are who are actively involved in the wiki, the more likely it is to be successful. Of course, if management doesn't want to allow the user populace to be able to edit the wiki the task will probably fall to a select few, and they will inevitably become involved in their other tasks at which point the wiki will fall by the wayside and die a quick death. This is the battle I'm currently fighting, and I'm not entirely sure I'll win.
Ask your users what they think. This one is pretty obvious, but easy to overlook if you're doing things like checking page hit counts and sizes. Put together a survey and ask them if they find the wiki to be easier/more useful than the previous method, if it saves them time (and if so how much), and what they think should be done to improve it. Ask them if the information they find is accurate or not. Finally, ask them what they did/didn't like about the previous method, and whether or not that issue has been addressed by the wiki.
Ah, ok, you got me on foreach, I could've sworn that was a PHP5 thing. As for eval, you gotta admit that is a pretty poor substitute for try..catch blocks.
Also, you could type cast in php4 as well.
I'm not talking about type-casting, I'm talking about type-hinting. Instead of defining function foo($myVar) you can define function bar(MyClass $foo), so you (supposedly) know what you're getting as a parameter. Of course it only works on objects and arrays, but hey, better than nothing right?
I know what you mean about Perl though. If you're coming from a strong OO background, using objects in Perl can be shock.
The bad news: Lots of unsupported legacy code in the wild.
The good news: Any conversion that needs to happen means more work for developers all around! Yay for a paycheck!
Seriously though, PHP4 was fine for what it was, but it definitely had its drawbacks. Poor object support, poor error handling (No try..catch blocks? Seriously?), no type-hinting, no foreach statement, etc. PHP5 is so much easier to work with, and honestly most sites should've made the switch a few years back if they haven't already.
Bush does not have an approx. 30% approval rating for no reason.
What does anything the GP was talking about have to do with Bush? He's talking about businesses selling private information, something they've been doing long before Bush was in office.
An unlimited subway pass for a month in NYC is $81.00. How much do you spend on Gas, Insurance, maintenance, parking and tickets over a month? I rest my case.
First of all good for you that you take public transit, not everyone has that choice. Secondly, you are right, it is more expensive to own a car, but I get the benefit of personal freedom. I'm not restricted to going only where the train/subway/bus will travel. If I want to go somewhere off the transit system I can get there no problem. By the way, I also don't have the benefit of a reliable transit system where I live. COTA (local bus transit) runs irregularly and only to the most frequented area, meaning downtown and campus and that's about it. It is much the same in other midwest cities.
I agree that many communities are spread out--but that is the problem. We should not be enabling the mistakes but rectifying them. The mistake WAS building so spread out.
As for it being a mistake to allow communities to spread out, what kind of crack are you smoking exactly? Not everyone can live in the heart of the city, and certainly not everyone wants to. I know I don't. What do you propose? You can't exactly draw a line around a certain area and say "You can't develop beyond this point!" In case you haven't noticed the world population keeps going up, and all those people have to live somewhere.
You may like your stuff, pal, but this planet cannot take much more. You should have your freedom to own your stuff and you should pay for the true cost of owning that stuff. *snip* If you are willing to pay the real cost of that pollution, go right ahead and buy your stuff. But don't expect our children to pay the true costs.
Big words coming from someone busily plugging away at a keyboard which is attached to a computer that is certainly sucking up its share of electricity. Gee, where you do you think that energy is coming from? Does your house/apartment/whatever run completely on solar/hydro/wind power? Do you grow and eat your own food? Does the transportation you use rely on any kind of renewable energy? Please, get over yourself. I want to be as environmentally friendly as the next human on the planet and do my part, but none of your suggestions are anything close to reality.
The system is far from perfect, and we need to do something to fix it, but it is ridiculous to suggest that we add an environmental tax to everything. Hell, things cost too much as it is! What you're suggesting is a recipe for disaster. Our focus should be on producing cleaner recyclables and generating energy from alternative sources, not punishing people for living their lives in a broken system.
I agree, we should absolutely be pursuing alternative energy sources such as the ones you mentioned. If we are ever going to make headway in clean, affordable energy we need to start yesterday.
What he and the GOP don't like is the obvious need to encourage commuting by bicycle and public transit--as we have here in NYC--so that people like me can gleefully sell their cars and live without one.
I'm not defending McCain's POV in any way here, but I the issue is much more complicated than you make it sound. NYC already has a well established public transit system, and (as far as I know) much of the population is centrally located, making the public transit system's job much easier. This is not the case in many other cities in the country. Many metro areas in the midwest are quite spread out and rely heavily on personal transport to get people from point A to point B. I live in Columbus myself, and while I would love to see something along the lines of a light rail system I can see a number of hurdles as well. How will it be paid for? Where will it run and how often will it make stops? Columbus is also rather small as cities come, and I only imagine that these problems will increase in larger cities (think Houston, or St. Louis). As for you suggestion that more people commute by bicycle, I'm sorry but that is simply absurd in cities which are geographically spread out. I already commute 25 minutes to work by car, it would be impossible by bike (and I'm sure as hell not going to move closer to work and nearly double my rent in the process).
The other issue you seem to be ignoring is that people like their freedom, and most of them like their "stuff" as well. I personally enjoy having my own car which allows me (and my family) to go where I need to when I need, as well as to carry whatever necessities (such as groceries) with me. The idea of being able to drive anywhere you want, whenever you want has been so ingrained into people's minds that even if public transit were to suddenly be given a green light all over the country most people still would not use it. The bottom line is cars are here to stay, the only thing that will change is what they use for fuel.
that it is not the CEO's fault that you or other people have the wrong skills.
What about those CEOs whose companies go out of their way to avoid hiring qualified candidates so they can justify giving the job to someone else who will do it for half the cost? I'm not saying that all companies do this, but it's obvious these practices exist.
That being said I agree with you that investing in your skillset is always a good idea, but that only goes so far when companies decide to game the system.
I agree that there are definitely better tools available now. All I'm really saying is that given the work that has been done with it and the amount of code which is still in existence and is actually functional, it deserves its due credit. Believe me though, given the choice between maintaining legacy COBOL and working with an OO language I'll take the OO language every time.
Columbus State Community College still teaches it as a major part of their CS curriculum. I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, but considering that Nationwide Insurance owns a large part of downtown Columbus and most of their business runs off of legacy COBOL I can understand their reasons for keeping it. I'm guessing the other colleges that still teach it do so for much the same reason.
Re:Who Cares What Language, It Reeks of Poor Desig
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COBOL is shit. Most legacy COBOL code is not designed with anything like what we'd consider "best practices" today. The language itself is unfriendly, and doesn't lend itself to the modern world.
The language itself is fine. Yes it's verbose, and yes it's old, but it does what it needs to do, which is solving business problems. Look, you need to keep a historical perspective here. COBOL was created back in the "bad old days" before all the best practices were written, because at the time they were still being written.
Basically, they're comfortable with their crusty old bugs, and they don't want to deal with scary new bugs.
Ever heard the phrase if it's not broke don't fix it? By your logic we need to pull out core modules in the Linux kernel just because they've been in there for 10+ years! (Note: I don't actually know what the lifespan of code in the kernel is, but you hopefully get my point.)
Still there are all kinds of problems with the old systems. You can end up with some really scary problems with old code, because it doesn't recover from failure like you'd expect modern code to. A java billing application running on a modern transactional database...If it crashes, you can just run it again. A COBOL app on a legacy database? That just ruined your day.
Not to ruin your rant here or anything, but you're comparing a modern language using a modern transactional db with a legacy language using a legacy db. Of COURSE you're going to see a difference in your ability to recover from a failure! It's not as if you can't code for a proper recovery in COBOL if you're using a modern transactional db on the backend.
I know the money types though; they are perfectly capable of trying to stick with the outdated method simply because it's in their comfort zone.
I think you're forgetting why most of us are employed as developers. 95% of us (I'm speaking about employed devs, mind) are not here to write code simply to write code, we're here to solve problems, and most of the time that is for a business that is out to make money. Also most of the time if there is no business case to update the code then it doesn't get updated. As for outdated models, how is it outdated if the model still serves it's purpose?
You must've missed the part where I said they've done some great things. Look, I support NASA and the work they've done. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean I'm blind to the fact that they're less than 100% successful in their missions. In the context of the mission that the GP suggested I'm saying that there is a high risk of failure, and that given the consequences of failing in that particular mission it's possible that another method might have a higher success rate.
Assuming this is even possible what are the chances of the asteroid's orbit decaying and having it plummet to the earth anyway? How long would it stay in orbit before this occurred?
Going back to whether or not this is possible it seems like it would take monumental effort to make it happen with the possibility of little to no gain (aside from the obvious "we're not going to die from this particular asteroid"). Lets see, we would need to:
Precisely plan a time to intercept.
Actually intercept it with a manned mission or an unmanned interceptor.
Slow it down enough and change it's course to one which will result in a geosynchronous orbit.
Actually begin the operation of mining its contents and sending them back to earth (and no, Bruce Willis and Steve Buschemi won't be available for this one).
While your idea is an interesting one I'm going to go with the idea that at this point in time, with our current technology and knowledge, we're boned if anything larger than a kilometer in diameter is heading our way. Lets face it, while NASA has done a lot of great things their success rate hasn't exactly been spectacular. I'm not saying it is a completely impossible idea, just that it is highly improbable that we could successfully execute this plan.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with any of those jobs, but let's face it - they're not exactly riveting, and yet we are the mad ones...
I understand what you're trying to say, but keep in mind that a lot of people don't do their jobs because they're looking for a challenge or because their jobs are all that interesting. Most folks work so they can provide for their families (or themselves as the case may be), and if they make enough to get by or maybe even get ahead they're mostly happy. Just as you said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, it's just the way a lot of people see work.
I worked in retail for quite a long time before having the opportunity to work as a developer, and a great many of the people I worked with were satisfied with what they were doing. A number of them were very intelligent and had degrees in a variety of fields (I knew a guy who had an engineering degree who pushed carts and chucked mulch all day and wouldn't give it up for the world.) and when I asked them what in the world they were doing there the most common answer I got back was they enjoyed the work and didn't miss the stress.
I guess the bottom line is to each his own, and for a lot of "us" that means doing something we find challenging.
I thought Harvey Dent was amazing. The hype for this movie was all about the Joker and even though Harvey Dent was in the movie, they didn't suggest that he actually became Two-Face. And then as he started to become unhinged he flipped a coin. And then there was the two-heads coin. And then his face was pressed into gasoline. The foreshadowing was so thick that you could tell where it was going, but for what was billed as a Joker movie, it was surprising nonetheless.
You must've been lucky enough to avoid all the viral marketing. There was a video that come out a couple of weeks before the release showing the scene with Two Face in the bar (camera placed behind him however, so his face wasn't visible). I know what you mean though, this movie was definitely billed as more about The Joker than about Two Face even though he was an integral part of the story.
Personally I find Harvey Dent/Two Face to be a much more interesting character than The Joker. The whole fall from grace speaks to me more than a complete psychopath who defies all social norms.
So I can see Dent wanting to kill Gordon but I don't quite see him making the transfer of guilt onto the kids.
I think that by that point in the movie he had bought into the Joker's "Chaos is the only true fair thing in the world" idea lock, stock, and barrel. To his way of thinking he was being completely fair about it. I agree with you that it would've been more tragic if he had hesitated, but it would've also been at odds with the idea that he had devolved into something less than human (which I still maintain happened too quickly heh).
Ever notice how many of Batman's enemies get killed in falls? Note to self: if I ever fight Batman, I will do so on the ground.
He's Batman, he'd figure out your weakness (acrohomosapienchiropterapugilaphobia?) and force you to fight him at the top of a skyscraper:-D
Re:Harvey to Two Face felt forced
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So in other words you are here to troll in a discussion specifically about Batman. Seriously man, if you don't have the "time or interest" to actually come up with something interesting to say why even bother? Also how would you know what I watch or don't watch? If you're trying to make a statement about the quality of cinema today then make it already.
I'd be just as happy if they don't have the Joker in another movie. I think this one really epitomizes his character, and how much more of a story could they tell about the Joker after this?
Re:Harvey to Two Face felt forced
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Batman Discussion
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Thank you for showing me once again how much easier it is to criticize someone else's preferences without actually putting any thought into a response. Kudos to you.
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I completely agree with you. This was one my biggest concerns when the idea of using a wiki was brought up at my company. We know that the real power of a wiki comes from the users, but management likely won't see it that way. You didn't quote the rest of that point where I indicate that I'm pushing for the user populace to have edit privileges ;-)
Well, yes and no. The idea behind the wiki is two-fold. It's not just that users should be able to quickly and easily edit documents, but also that they still be accurate. Consider a hypothetical situation in which procedures may be changing semi-frequently in a customer-facing department, such as a call center. You want all procedures to be up-to-date, and it shouldn't take a lot effort to publish and re-publish the content, but you also don't want Joe McNewbie making changes when he may not completely understand what he is talking about. From the time he makes the (poor informed and/or possibly incorrect) change to the time at which someone spots the mistake and corrects it any number of other reps may have read the same material and used it during their calls. So now you have reps who are providing incorrect information, and possibly forcing the company to spend time/money/resources correcting those mistakes. User involvement will of course go a long way towards finding and correcting mistakes, but there is still the possibility that those mistakes will cause problems in the mean time. Of course, you could also argue that a wiki may not be the best solution in a case such as this.
Ok, so I realize I sound like I'm arguing against myself here, but what it really means is I can see both sides of the fence. Personally I'd rather give more power to the users, but I understand management's point of view as well. I suppose what it really boils down to is how much you trust your users to self-manage the wiki, and how much risk you're willing to take on by giving them the ability to make changes.
Ha, I was so thinking the same thing. The gist of this "story" is that they had a problem getting Vista and Ubuntu to work together (*mock gasp* I've never heard of such a thing!) and then proceeded to fix it. *yawn* To top it all off the linked article is a blog post from the submitter. Give me a break.
I agree with most of your post, but you are basing this statement off of the assumption that the content of a wiki is open to interpretation. In a business setting (which the OP is apparently operating in) there is a high probability that the contents of a wiki will reflect policies, procedures, knowledge common to the company, and other information which the company has a stake in keeping everyone on the same page with. Opinion and interpretation aren't even factors in cases such as these. So the equation you mentioned really breaks down as correctness + timestamp.
I'm actually in a situation which is very similar to the OP's. The company I work for has a number of training/procedural documents which currently exist in .mht format (of all things), and we're in the process of migrating those documents into the wiki which comes built into MOSS (the latest version of SharePoint). I won't go into detail about how horribly crippled the MOSS wiki is, except to say it is. Anyway, I was asked to write a "Wiki Best Practices" document and I tried to include a few ideas on what makes a successful wiki because I knew the business users were pretty clueless about them (not that I claim to be an expert here). These were some of the points I tried to address:
First and foremost are the users able to find what they are looking for? If they can't find it in the wiki they'll go somewhere else for it, and the wiki will fall on its face.
Is the information accurate? If you're not meeting these two criteria your wiki is probably worthless, and your users will almost certainly resort to another source of information.
Does your wiki exhibit signs of growth? By this I mean new pages/sections/categories being added when new information becomes available, and edits being performed to improve the quality of existing information. I think one of the biggest hurdles companies will have to overcome for this criteria is the fact that there tends to be a very top-down approach to the distribution of new information (This is definitely the case in my company). In order to allow the wiki to grow there must be enough users with create/edit privileges to keep it up to date. The more users there are who are actively involved in the wiki, the more likely it is to be successful. Of course, if management doesn't want to allow the user populace to be able to edit the wiki the task will probably fall to a select few, and they will inevitably become involved in their other tasks at which point the wiki will fall by the wayside and die a quick death. This is the battle I'm currently fighting, and I'm not entirely sure I'll win.
Ask your users what they think. This one is pretty obvious, but easy to overlook if you're doing things like checking page hit counts and sizes. Put together a survey and ask them if they find the wiki to be easier/more useful than the previous method, if it saves them time (and if so how much), and what they think should be done to improve it. Ask them if the information they find is accurate or not. Finally, ask them what they did/didn't like about the previous method, and whether or not that issue has been addressed by the wiki.
This gives a whole new meaning to "EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE!"
Careful, you're dating yourself there ;-)
that if you have multiple email addresses you have multiple personalities?
Ah, ok, you got me on foreach, I could've sworn that was a PHP5 thing. As for eval, you gotta admit that is a pretty poor substitute for try..catch blocks.
I'm not talking about type-casting, I'm talking about type-hinting. Instead of defining function foo($myVar) you can define function bar(MyClass $foo), so you (supposedly) know what you're getting as a parameter. Of course it only works on objects and arrays, but hey, better than nothing right?
I know what you mean about Perl though. If you're coming from a strong OO background, using objects in Perl can be shock.
The bad news: Lots of unsupported legacy code in the wild.
The good news: Any conversion that needs to happen means more work for developers all around! Yay for a paycheck!
Seriously though, PHP4 was fine for what it was, but it definitely had its drawbacks. Poor object support, poor error handling (No try..catch blocks? Seriously?), no type-hinting, no foreach statement, etc. PHP5 is so much easier to work with, and honestly most sites should've made the switch a few years back if they haven't already.
What does anything the GP was talking about have to do with Bush? He's talking about businesses selling private information, something they've been doing long before Bush was in office.
First of all good for you that you take public transit, not everyone has that choice. Secondly, you are right, it is more expensive to own a car, but I get the benefit of personal freedom. I'm not restricted to going only where the train/subway/bus will travel. If I want to go somewhere off the transit system I can get there no problem. By the way, I also don't have the benefit of a reliable transit system where I live. COTA (local bus transit) runs irregularly and only to the most frequented area, meaning downtown and campus and that's about it. It is much the same in other midwest cities.
As for it being a mistake to allow communities to spread out, what kind of crack are you smoking exactly? Not everyone can live in the heart of the city, and certainly not everyone wants to. I know I don't. What do you propose? You can't exactly draw a line around a certain area and say "You can't develop beyond this point!" In case you haven't noticed the world population keeps going up, and all those people have to live somewhere.
Big words coming from someone busily plugging away at a keyboard which is attached to a computer that is certainly sucking up its share of electricity. Gee, where you do you think that energy is coming from? Does your house/apartment/whatever run completely on solar/hydro/wind power? Do you grow and eat your own food? Does the transportation you use rely on any kind of renewable energy? Please, get over yourself. I want to be as environmentally friendly as the next human on the planet and do my part, but none of your suggestions are anything close to reality.
The system is far from perfect, and we need to do something to fix it, but it is ridiculous to suggest that we add an environmental tax to everything. Hell, things cost too much as it is! What you're suggesting is a recipe for disaster. Our focus should be on producing cleaner recyclables and generating energy from alternative sources, not punishing people for living their lives in a broken system.
I agree, we should absolutely be pursuing alternative energy sources such as the ones you mentioned. If we are ever going to make headway in clean, affordable energy we need to start yesterday.
I'm not defending McCain's POV in any way here, but I the issue is much more complicated than you make it sound. NYC already has a well established public transit system, and (as far as I know) much of the population is centrally located, making the public transit system's job much easier. This is not the case in many other cities in the country. Many metro areas in the midwest are quite spread out and rely heavily on personal transport to get people from point A to point B. I live in Columbus myself, and while I would love to see something along the lines of a light rail system I can see a number of hurdles as well. How will it be paid for? Where will it run and how often will it make stops? Columbus is also rather small as cities come, and I only imagine that these problems will increase in larger cities (think Houston, or St. Louis). As for you suggestion that more people commute by bicycle, I'm sorry but that is simply absurd in cities which are geographically spread out. I already commute 25 minutes to work by car, it would be impossible by bike (and I'm sure as hell not going to move closer to work and nearly double my rent in the process).
The other issue you seem to be ignoring is that people like their freedom, and most of them like their "stuff" as well. I personally enjoy having my own car which allows me (and my family) to go where I need to when I need, as well as to carry whatever necessities (such as groceries) with me. The idea of being able to drive anywhere you want, whenever you want has been so ingrained into people's minds that even if public transit were to suddenly be given a green light all over the country most people still would not use it. The bottom line is cars are here to stay, the only thing that will change is what they use for fuel.
What about those CEOs whose companies go out of their way to avoid hiring qualified candidates so they can justify giving the job to someone else who will do it for half the cost? I'm not saying that all companies do this, but it's obvious these practices exist.
That being said I agree with you that investing in your skillset is always a good idea, but that only goes so far when companies decide to game the system.
I agree that there are definitely better tools available now. All I'm really saying is that given the work that has been done with it and the amount of code which is still in existence and is actually functional, it deserves its due credit. Believe me though, given the choice between maintaining legacy COBOL and working with an OO language I'll take the OO language every time.
Columbus State Community College still teaches it as a major part of their CS curriculum. I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, but considering that Nationwide Insurance owns a large part of downtown Columbus and most of their business runs off of legacy COBOL I can understand their reasons for keeping it. I'm guessing the other colleges that still teach it do so for much the same reason.
The language itself is fine. Yes it's verbose, and yes it's old, but it does what it needs to do, which is solving business problems. Look, you need to keep a historical perspective here. COBOL was created back in the "bad old days" before all the best practices were written, because at the time they were still being written.
Ever heard the phrase if it's not broke don't fix it? By your logic we need to pull out core modules in the Linux kernel just because they've been in there for 10+ years! (Note: I don't actually know what the lifespan of code in the kernel is, but you hopefully get my point.)
Not to ruin your rant here or anything, but you're comparing a modern language using a modern transactional db with a legacy language using a legacy db. Of COURSE you're going to see a difference in your ability to recover from a failure! It's not as if you can't code for a proper recovery in COBOL if you're using a modern transactional db on the backend.
I think you're forgetting why most of us are employed as developers. 95% of us (I'm speaking about employed devs, mind) are not here to write code simply to write code, we're here to solve problems, and most of the time that is for a business that is out to make money. Also most of the time if there is no business case to update the code then it doesn't get updated. As for outdated models, how is it outdated if the model still serves it's purpose?
You must've missed the part where I said they've done some great things. Look, I support NASA and the work they've done. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean I'm blind to the fact that they're less than 100% successful in their missions. In the context of the mission that the GP suggested I'm saying that there is a high risk of failure, and that given the consequences of failing in that particular mission it's possible that another method might have a higher success rate.
Seems like a mighty big "if" if you ask me. It's not as if we've never had satellite's fall from an orbit we put them into before.
Assuming this is even possible what are the chances of the asteroid's orbit decaying and having it plummet to the earth anyway? How long would it stay in orbit before this occurred?
Going back to whether or not this is possible it seems like it would take monumental effort to make it happen with the possibility of little to no gain (aside from the obvious "we're not going to die from this particular asteroid"). Lets see, we would need to:
While your idea is an interesting one I'm going to go with the idea that at this point in time, with our current technology and knowledge, we're boned if anything larger than a kilometer in diameter is heading our way. Lets face it, while NASA has done a lot of great things their success rate hasn't exactly been spectacular. I'm not saying it is a completely impossible idea, just that it is highly improbable that we could successfully execute this plan.
I understand what you're trying to say, but keep in mind that a lot of people don't do their jobs because they're looking for a challenge or because their jobs are all that interesting. Most folks work so they can provide for their families (or themselves as the case may be), and if they make enough to get by or maybe even get ahead they're mostly happy. Just as you said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, it's just the way a lot of people see work.
I worked in retail for quite a long time before having the opportunity to work as a developer, and a great many of the people I worked with were satisfied with what they were doing. A number of them were very intelligent and had degrees in a variety of fields (I knew a guy who had an engineering degree who pushed carts and chucked mulch all day and wouldn't give it up for the world.) and when I asked them what in the world they were doing there the most common answer I got back was they enjoyed the work and didn't miss the stress.
I guess the bottom line is to each his own, and for a lot of "us" that means doing something we find challenging.
You must've been lucky enough to avoid all the viral marketing. There was a video that come out a couple of weeks before the release showing the scene with Two Face in the bar (camera placed behind him however, so his face wasn't visible). I know what you mean though, this movie was definitely billed as more about The Joker than about Two Face even though he was an integral part of the story.
Personally I find Harvey Dent/Two Face to be a much more interesting character than The Joker. The whole fall from grace speaks to me more than a complete psychopath who defies all social norms.
I think that by that point in the movie he had bought into the Joker's "Chaos is the only true fair thing in the world" idea lock, stock, and barrel. To his way of thinking he was being completely fair about it. I agree with you that it would've been more tragic if he had hesitated, but it would've also been at odds with the idea that he had devolved into something less than human (which I still maintain happened too quickly heh).
He's Batman, he'd figure out your weakness (acrohomosapienchiropterapugilaphobia?) and force you to fight him at the top of a skyscraper :-D
So in other words you are here to troll in a discussion specifically about Batman. Seriously man, if you don't have the "time or interest" to actually come up with something interesting to say why even bother? Also how would you know what I watch or don't watch? If you're trying to make a statement about the quality of cinema today then make it already.
I'd be just as happy if they don't have the Joker in another movie. I think this one really epitomizes his character, and how much more of a story could they tell about the Joker after this?
Thank you for showing me once again how much easier it is to criticize someone else's preferences without actually putting any thought into a response. Kudos to you.