The only problem I have with that statement is that a co-worker came to me today with a bug in a COBOL routine. Now, I honestly have not written a line of COBOL in 25 years, but I do know how to read it. So I looked, and saw that there were multiple return codes being kept in a variable, that an IF statement was reusing that variable within its conditional, and the following IF statement was expecting the original value to still be in there. I was absolutely astounded. I had long ago forgotten that some languages did not have the concept of "scope" or "local variables". I had assumed that every language had solved this problem 15 years ago.
Yet there it was, larger than life. A bug that a developer would have had to go out of their way to create in a modern language, one based on one of the founding principles of OO (encapsulation.) I tried to explain the concept of local variables to this guy, and he said "oh, sure we have those. We put those in the WORKING-STORAGE SECTION."
So no, COBOL itself still leads old programmers into mistakes that modern languages cure. That's the problem I have with it.
Perhaps you should be grateful that they're teaching you at least one commercially viable language.
When I was in school, we learned several languages that have only microscopic utility in the business world today, and many that exist now only in moldy documentation and hazy memories. Trust me, SNOBOL and PL/1 are not going to get you in any doors. FORTRAN might get you into a few aerospace industries (the kind where the engineers still wear slide rules on their belts.) Pascal morphed into Delphi, and yes, there are jobs for those people (or so I hear.) LISP may still be big (in the (parenthetical (world)) of AI), but good luck finding that job. And I learned half a dozen assemblers for architectures that have now been out of production for over 20 years. Most of today's commercially valuable languages weren't even invented back then: C++, Java, Smalltalk, or any of the.Net flavors. They didn't even teach us C because it hadn't reached our school yet.
But they taught us COBOL. What other languages have you had to take that you know will still be in use 30 years from today?:-)
Yes and no. In the financial industry, for example, COBOL mainframes hang on primarily because their reliable.
BS. In the financial industry COBOL mainframes hang on because they're PAID FOR.
Almost. The mainframes are definitely not paid for (we continue to lease and upgrade our mainframes), but the COBOL code is.
Mainframes hang on because they have a huge legacy base of working code. Replacing all that is seen as a giant expensive effort for no immediate gain. And because we have more and more work to do with that data, we keep adding more and more code to the legacy base.
It'll take a mandate from on high to get us to stop adding to the morass. And that's not forthcoming, because honestly the COBOL work is still as cheap as anything else, especially for the giant record-oriented processing work that we ask of the beasts. They may not be glamorous, but their ugliness is well understood, and has a stable price tag.
Hey, this is awesome! Screw electronic voting. Screw pre-printed ballots in general! Just think -- if candidates were forced to rely on a write-in only process, voting participation would drop like a stone because the average American couldn't be bothered. Only the activists would show up, and the polls wouldn't be tainted by idiots who know nothing other than the contents of TV ads.
More than anything, this is an indictment on the scientists who pressured the good doctor out of his posting. He was bullied out for a misquote.
Unfortunately, rather than engage in a reasonable debate over the unreasonable subject, he rationally decided to avoid the controversy completely by leaving.
No matter what, the Royal Society is the loser here. Once they realized they were debating a misquote, the reasonable approach would have been to end the matter. Instead, they let the issue fester until a good man stepped down with a now-tarnished reputation.
Yes, there are obstinate and stupid people out there, but not everyone with those questions is either. And the moment we respond to a question like the one above with a groan or a "duh!" comment, we do become condescending and anti-business.
You're too kind. They've taken a chunk of my sanity, having to resolve arguments by defining words only to discover their meaning of the word sort. It's because their vocabulary is too limited to use the right word, or any other word, to describe what they want.
Careful, that's also a steep slope down into being labeled anti-business. We all have to deal with users whose only stated requirement is "Make it work like how I want it to work!" Everyone in IT knows that the users themselves are not capable of describing in perfect technical terms what they need. A good business analyst learns how to probe deeper to uncover the real requirements, and to uncover a more complete set of them.
It sounds like you could benefit from learning a few techniques as to how to elicit requirements from your users. Check the SWEBOK, and see Chapter 2 section 3 for ways to get at them.
Programmers have to learn the gist of how a business works, in order to do their job.
Someone on the IT side has to understand the business problem domain and be able to speak the language of tech. Whether that's a developer or a business analyst is more a function of your company's structure than anything else.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business?
on
Tech Vs. Business?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'd say your post is a prime example of "anti-business" in the sense of TFA.
As IT people, we look at the world logically; we know that if A follows B and B follows C then A must also follow C. We know that if the user wants to view the balance on an account, they bloody well better have the account number before viewing it.
But business people don't seem to have that same view. We assume they aren't interested, or that they're illogical when they say "why do I have to enter the account number to view the account balance?"
The problem I find is usually one of language. For example, in the question above I figured out the business person wasn't being ignorant of the need for an account number. They simply wanted to *scan* it, not *enter* it. To us IT people, there's absolutely no difference how the number gets into the system, but to them that difference seemed so great they had to point it out that they never wanted to *enter* it again.
Yes, there are obstinate and stupid people out there, but not everyone with those questions is either. And the moment we respond to a question like the one above with a groan or a "duh!" comment, we do become condescending and anti-business. The best way to deal with these questions is to keep the dialog from degenerating. Rephrase the question, restate your problem with their assertion, and get them to confirm it again. Something such as "well, we need the account number before we can show the account balance, so where do you want us to get the account number from?"
Keep the discussion friendly, don't get patronizing or condescending, and try not to sound like Scotty ("I canna' break the laws o' physics!") Try hard to discover the real root of their issue. It's critical to treat them like peers, and not talk down to them. Remember that they must bring some value to someone in the business, so try to respect that. And yes, sometimes it's harder than others, and sometimes it's just never, ever going to sink in. Try bringing in other people to moderate the discussion, or to bring alternate suggestions.
I'm getting pretty sick of the whole "drunk as in beer, not as in scotch" disclaimer crap. Everything has its limits, and petty squabbles about "mine is freer than yours" serve only to enrage a flock of wannabe first amendment lawyers. They fill the blog'O'sphere with masturbatory rants about "you published your peanut butter without my chocolate disclaimer!"
Can't we find something better to squabble endlessly about? Like why Firefox's spell checker didn't complain about the word "masturbatory"?
Like everything else, it takes external pressures to get companies to spend where they haven't had to before.
In the case of retail stores, it's the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) that requires merchants to submit to security audits in order for them to continue accepting credit cards.
In the case of pharmacies, it's the threat of HIPPA/Privacy suits that encourages them to protect their data. For publicly traded firms, it's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). For banks, it's the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
For industries that aren't feeling those pressures, sometimes breaches of security will motivate them. For the rest, nothing will likely happen until something else changes.
Absolutely. The..AA is attempting to duplicate the commercially successful implementations of DRM. FairPlay seems successful because it works on iPods, and iPods are the music players. AACS seems successful because Blu-Ray has been accepted by the HDTV crowd.
But like anything else, this is a delay tactic. Most iPod customers don't yet understand that someday they may want a music player that isn't an iPod. Some have been burned as they try to move their iTunes music to their non-iPhone cell phones. The real reason AACS is effective today is that most people don't yet have the bandwidth or storage to make copies of 50GB movies, so they settle for lesser quality (DVD) rips. The..AA is still trying to protect their revenue stream for as long as they can. Continually shifting and moving targets, format squabbles (HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray), all these things which appear to be the markets settling down, they're all useful delays that make it appear to be "standards" and "processes" that are broken, not DRM getting in the way. Once things have settled down (as if) that's when the public will get annoyed at the DRM.
I think we'll eventually find out what turned things around, although you can bet a large number of people won't believe it. Personally, I believe it's the Anbar Awakening that's had the most impact. After years of anti-American propaganda and war, the Iraqis are coming to realize that if they cooperate with the Americans, we'll leave their country faster and less damaged, and that we weren't lying to them about helping them rebuild.
In some ways this is paralleling Japan in WWII. The Pentagon has always said stuff like, "We're going in there with a copy of the Marshall Plan." But they've always made it sound like "as soon as the Plan is laid out Iraq will cooperate," and that's been nothing but a sack of crap. Perhaps the reason the Marshall Plan succeeded so well in Japan is not that the Plan was so great, or that the Emperor said "lay down your weapons", but that the country was simply exhausted from years of endless war and bombardment. Iraq is now almost as beaten down as Japan was, making the Awakening possible.
Hm. The Administration has said almost from the beginning that this would take years. If this was actually their strategy all along, it was a criminal act of mass murder to perpetrate it.
I'm picturing the "hunter-seekers" from the Dune novels. They were anti-gravity hypodermic needles of death, guided by a hidden operative nearby. Ultra cool, and it's almost impossible to see them coming.
So, maybe we have ultra quiet electric R/C planes flying around with a single-shot weapon of some sort (perhaps it's explosive.) Maybe they're carried to the site by a Predator at a high altitude, then dropped and silently glide to their targets where they detonate.
Of course the bigger problem with the insurgency is locating them in the first place. This wouldn't help with that problem at all.
So we don't spend all day trying to answer questions about, say, how we came to be, as opposed to trying to figure out why our bow and arrow doesn't shoot as straight as we'd like.
VEG-e-tar-i-an - Native American for 'bad hunter with crooked arrow.'
Congratulations. You quoted a Slashdot story filled with cautions about how questionable or reliable the study was, and how they never disclosed how they arrived at the "magic numbers" used for computing the basis for the "fact" you quoted.
If you're going to troll, you should at least google for some stories that don't expose the bias you're trying to hide.
Time to find a new mechanic. Anybody that would try to spread that load of horseshit is likely to have no problem charging you for refilling your muffler fluid and changing your starter belt.
Thanks, that explains why there was damage after the refueling. Someone told me "congealed fuel" but it didn't quite make sense. (I now assume that was the "mechanic-to-manager explanation" that made it out to the rest of us.) An near empty tank providing a concentrated mix of rust particles, impure water, and diesel fuel explains it much better.
VR sims are nowhere near ready for prime time. If the best we've got is exemplified by a 360 degree quicktime tour of a house like on most realty sites, there's no reason to bother at all. Those blow like a $2 Bangkok streetwalker.
If you're going to take that particular attitude, at least make an effort to preserve it until decent virtualization recording equipment exists.
For the opposite experience, if you ever get the chance, take a tour of the United States' Cryptologic Museum, just outside of Fort Meade and the NSA's headquarters.
My wife and I received a personal tour from one of the docents that had retired from the NSA (and was old enough to have been there at its founding.) While there was certainly a lot he couldn't tell us, the parts he could were absolutely enthralling to both of us. (And my wife's neither a crypto geek nor a history buff -- he was simply an outstanding guide.)
The last time I was in England I noticed most British historical sites were staffed by volunteers who work basically for tips. Perhaps changing their pay scale would help attract qualified tour guides?
Perhaps they're still embarrassed by the Alan Turing fiasco, and don't want to ever bring it up again?
Seriously, there's no reason to ignore this chapter in their history. It was certainly one of Britain's finest, and this from a country that prides themselves on their many fine contributions to history.
Slashdot Mirror
So COBOL is outdated and verbose. True. So what.
The only problem I have with that statement is that a co-worker came to me today with a bug in a COBOL routine. Now, I honestly have not written a line of COBOL in 25 years, but I do know how to read it. So I looked, and saw that there were multiple return codes being kept in a variable, that an IF statement was reusing that variable within its conditional, and the following IF statement was expecting the original value to still be in there. I was absolutely astounded. I had long ago forgotten that some languages did not have the concept of "scope" or "local variables". I had assumed that every language had solved this problem 15 years ago.
Yet there it was, larger than life. A bug that a developer would have had to go out of their way to create in a modern language, one based on one of the founding principles of OO (encapsulation.) I tried to explain the concept of local variables to this guy, and he said "oh, sure we have those. We put those in the WORKING-STORAGE SECTION."
So no, COBOL itself still leads old programmers into mistakes that modern languages cure. That's the problem I have with it.
I think you underestimate how many banks are actually run by immortal (daywalking) vampires.
Two less.
Perhaps you should be grateful that they're teaching you at least one commercially viable language.
When I was in school, we learned several languages that have only microscopic utility in the business world today, and many that exist now only in moldy documentation and hazy memories. Trust me, SNOBOL and PL/1 are not going to get you in any doors. FORTRAN might get you into a few aerospace industries (the kind where the engineers still wear slide rules on their belts.) Pascal morphed into Delphi, and yes, there are jobs for those people (or so I hear.) LISP may still be big (in the (parenthetical (world)) of AI), but good luck finding that job. And I learned half a dozen assemblers for architectures that have now been out of production for over 20 years. Most of today's commercially valuable languages weren't even invented back then: C++, Java, Smalltalk, or any of the .Net flavors. They didn't even teach us C because it hadn't reached our school yet.
But they taught us COBOL. What other languages have you had to take that you know will still be in use 30 years from today? :-)
Yes and no. In the financial industry, for example, COBOL mainframes hang on primarily because their reliable.
BS. In the financial industry COBOL mainframes hang on because they're PAID FOR.
Almost. The mainframes are definitely not paid for (we continue to lease and upgrade our mainframes), but the COBOL code is.
Mainframes hang on because they have a huge legacy base of working code. Replacing all that is seen as a giant expensive effort for no immediate gain. And because we have more and more work to do with that data, we keep adding more and more code to the legacy base.
It'll take a mandate from on high to get us to stop adding to the morass. And that's not forthcoming, because honestly the COBOL work is still as cheap as anything else, especially for the giant record-oriented processing work that we ask of the beasts. They may not be glamorous, but their ugliness is well understood, and has a stable price tag.
I bet you a dollar that Colbert would beat Bob Barr by an order of magnitude!
Although he might lose to the Mythbuster fans. His picture looks like a cross between Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. :-)
Hey, this is awesome! Screw electronic voting. Screw pre-printed ballots in general! Just think -- if candidates were forced to rely on a write-in only process, voting participation would drop like a stone because the average American couldn't be bothered. Only the activists would show up, and the polls wouldn't be tainted by idiots who know nothing other than the contents of TV ads.
Ooh! Ooh! My turn!
*ahem*
"You must be new here."
Thank you, thank you! I'll be here all the week! Tip your servers.
Do you have references or an example? That's an interesting point that might mean the R.S. had an ulterior motive for drumming him out.
More than anything, this is an indictment on the scientists who pressured the good doctor out of his posting. He was bullied out for a misquote.
Unfortunately, rather than engage in a reasonable debate over the unreasonable subject, he rationally decided to avoid the controversy completely by leaving.
No matter what, the Royal Society is the loser here. Once they realized they were debating a misquote, the reasonable approach would have been to end the matter. Instead, they let the issue fester until a good man stepped down with a now-tarnished reputation.
My latest poison is Nadurra, 16 years old. Just a touch of water. Mmmmm...
Yes, there are obstinate and stupid people out there, but not everyone with those questions is either. And the moment we respond to a question like the one above with a groan or a "duh!" comment, we do become condescending and anti-business.
You're too kind. They've taken a chunk of my sanity, having to resolve arguments by defining words only to discover their meaning of the word sort. It's because their vocabulary is too limited to use the right word, or any other word, to describe what they want.
Careful, that's also a steep slope down into being labeled anti-business. We all have to deal with users whose only stated requirement is "Make it work like how I want it to work!" Everyone in IT knows that the users themselves are not capable of describing in perfect technical terms what they need. A good business analyst learns how to probe deeper to uncover the real requirements, and to uncover a more complete set of them.
It sounds like you could benefit from learning a few techniques as to how to elicit requirements from your users. Check the SWEBOK, and see Chapter 2 section 3 for ways to get at them.
Programmers have to learn the gist of how a business works, in order to do their job.
Someone on the IT side has to understand the business problem domain and be able to speak the language of tech. Whether that's a developer or a business analyst is more a function of your company's structure than anything else.
As IT people, we look at the world logically; we know that if A follows B and B follows C then A must also follow C. We know that if the user wants to view the balance on an account, they bloody well better have the account number before viewing it.
But business people don't seem to have that same view. We assume they aren't interested, or that they're illogical when they say "why do I have to enter the account number to view the account balance?"
The problem I find is usually one of language. For example, in the question above I figured out the business person wasn't being ignorant of the need for an account number. They simply wanted to *scan* it, not *enter* it. To us IT people, there's absolutely no difference how the number gets into the system, but to them that difference seemed so great they had to point it out that they never wanted to *enter* it again.
Yes, there are obstinate and stupid people out there, but not everyone with those questions is either. And the moment we respond to a question like the one above with a groan or a "duh!" comment, we do become condescending and anti-business. The best way to deal with these questions is to keep the dialog from degenerating. Rephrase the question, restate your problem with their assertion, and get them to confirm it again. Something such as "well, we need the account number before we can show the account balance, so where do you want us to get the account number from?"
Keep the discussion friendly, don't get patronizing or condescending, and try not to sound like Scotty ("I canna' break the laws o' physics!") Try hard to discover the real root of their issue. It's critical to treat them like peers, and not talk down to them. Remember that they must bring some value to someone in the business, so try to respect that. And yes, sometimes it's harder than others, and sometimes it's just never, ever going to sink in. Try bringing in other people to moderate the discussion, or to bring alternate suggestions.
free as in beer but not free as in speech
What of free from fear Of corporate over-reach?
I'm getting pretty sick of the whole "drunk as in beer, not as in scotch" disclaimer crap. Everything has its limits, and petty squabbles about "mine is freer than yours" serve only to enrage a flock of wannabe first amendment lawyers. They fill the blog'O'sphere with masturbatory rants about "you published your peanut butter without my chocolate disclaimer!"
Can't we find something better to squabble endlessly about? Like why Firefox's spell checker didn't complain about the word "masturbatory"?
I would much rather take my PC to a IT guy who cheated, then be represented by the lawyer/Accountant, etc that cheated.
Why? Law and Accounting are probably the two professions where you most want a cheater on your side.
As far as lawyers go, they're kind of hard to avoid ...
I kid, I kid. I know that it's only 99% of the lawyers make the other 1% look bad.
Like everything else, it takes external pressures to get companies to spend where they haven't had to before.
In the case of retail stores, it's the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) that requires merchants to submit to security audits in order for them to continue accepting credit cards. In the case of pharmacies, it's the threat of HIPPA/Privacy suits that encourages them to protect their data. For publicly traded firms, it's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). For banks, it's the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
For industries that aren't feeling those pressures, sometimes breaches of security will motivate them. For the rest, nothing will likely happen until something else changes.
Absolutely. The ..AA is attempting to duplicate the commercially successful implementations of DRM. FairPlay seems successful because it works on iPods, and iPods are the music players. AACS seems successful because Blu-Ray has been accepted by the HDTV crowd.
But like anything else, this is a delay tactic. Most iPod customers don't yet understand that someday they may want a music player that isn't an iPod. Some have been burned as they try to move their iTunes music to their non-iPhone cell phones. The real reason AACS is effective today is that most people don't yet have the bandwidth or storage to make copies of 50GB movies, so they settle for lesser quality (DVD) rips. The ..AA is still trying to protect their revenue stream for as long as they can. Continually shifting and moving targets, format squabbles (HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray), all these things which appear to be the markets settling down, they're all useful delays that make it appear to be "standards" and "processes" that are broken, not DRM getting in the way. Once things have settled down (as if) that's when the public will get annoyed at the DRM.
I think we'll eventually find out what turned things around, although you can bet a large number of people won't believe it. Personally, I believe it's the Anbar Awakening that's had the most impact. After years of anti-American propaganda and war, the Iraqis are coming to realize that if they cooperate with the Americans, we'll leave their country faster and less damaged, and that we weren't lying to them about helping them rebuild.
In some ways this is paralleling Japan in WWII. The Pentagon has always said stuff like, "We're going in there with a copy of the Marshall Plan." But they've always made it sound like "as soon as the Plan is laid out Iraq will cooperate," and that's been nothing but a sack of crap. Perhaps the reason the Marshall Plan succeeded so well in Japan is not that the Plan was so great, or that the Emperor said "lay down your weapons", but that the country was simply exhausted from years of endless war and bombardment. Iraq is now almost as beaten down as Japan was, making the Awakening possible.
Hm. The Administration has said almost from the beginning that this would take years. If this was actually their strategy all along, it was a criminal act of mass murder to perpetrate it.
I'm picturing the "hunter-seekers" from the Dune novels. They were anti-gravity hypodermic needles of death, guided by a hidden operative nearby. Ultra cool, and it's almost impossible to see them coming.
So, maybe we have ultra quiet electric R/C planes flying around with a single-shot weapon of some sort (perhaps it's explosive.) Maybe they're carried to the site by a Predator at a high altitude, then dropped and silently glide to their targets where they detonate.
Of course the bigger problem with the insurgency is locating them in the first place. This wouldn't help with that problem at all.
So we don't spend all day trying to answer questions about, say, how we came to be, as opposed to trying to figure out why our bow and arrow doesn't shoot as straight as we'd like.
VEG-e-tar-i-an - Native American for 'bad hunter with crooked arrow.'
Congratulations. You quoted a Slashdot story filled with cautions about how questionable or reliable the study was, and how they never disclosed how they arrived at the "magic numbers" used for computing the basis for the "fact" you quoted.
If you're going to troll, you should at least google for some stories that don't expose the bias you're trying to hide.
Time to find a new mechanic. Anybody that would try to spread that load of horseshit is likely to have no problem charging you for refilling your muffler fluid and changing your starter belt.
Thanks, that explains why there was damage after the refueling. Someone told me "congealed fuel" but it didn't quite make sense. (I now assume that was the "mechanic-to-manager explanation" that made it out to the rest of us.) An near empty tank providing a concentrated mix of rust particles, impure water, and diesel fuel explains it much better.
OK, I'll feed the troll.
VR sims are nowhere near ready for prime time. If the best we've got is exemplified by a 360 degree quicktime tour of a house like on most realty sites, there's no reason to bother at all. Those blow like a $2 Bangkok streetwalker.
If you're going to take that particular attitude, at least make an effort to preserve it until decent virtualization recording equipment exists.
For the opposite experience, if you ever get the chance, take a tour of the United States' Cryptologic Museum, just outside of Fort Meade and the NSA's headquarters.
My wife and I received a personal tour from one of the docents that had retired from the NSA (and was old enough to have been there at its founding.) While there was certainly a lot he couldn't tell us, the parts he could were absolutely enthralling to both of us. (And my wife's neither a crypto geek nor a history buff -- he was simply an outstanding guide.)
The last time I was in England I noticed most British historical sites were staffed by volunteers who work basically for tips. Perhaps changing their pay scale would help attract qualified tour guides?
Perhaps they're still embarrassed by the Alan Turing fiasco, and don't want to ever bring it up again?
Seriously, there's no reason to ignore this chapter in their history. It was certainly one of Britain's finest, and this from a country that prides themselves on their many fine contributions to history.