Recently my company conducted a "climate survey." One of the items that came up over and over and over again in the climate survey--and not just in IT--is that we are underpaid compared to other similar companies in our geographic area.
So what did the PHBs do? Decide that they obviously weren't telling us enough about the salary survey that they use that shows that we aren't underpaid. This despite the fact that people in my department know what programmers at other companies are making, and it's consistently 10-20% more for the same level of experience and responsibility, whether a mainframe programmer, VB code monkey, or DBA.
The trick is, they figure in the extra sick time (that we're not allowed to take due to deadlines), the pension plan (that we will never see because we'll get laid off before then), the 401(k) (that they no longer match contributions to), the health insurance (same as everybody else in town), and the free parking spaces (w00t) into our "compensation." So they underpay us, and then say, "Well, you get 15 sick days a year, nobody else gets that!" Uh, yeah, and the last guy I knew that took double-digit sick days a year got shitcanned...what's your point?
As somebody who just left WWIIOL last month because I got a bit burned out, I'll back up everything the reviewer said in his article. WWIIOL is dated in a lot of areas, but the days of the botched release are long, long behind it. CRS has a pretty good relationship with most of the playerbase, as well.
The interesting thing he barely touched on is that the warring armies--British and French on one side, German on the other--have command structures completely staffed by players. For example, I played in a squad called 3CD (Third Canadian Division). 3CD and its internal subunits were part of the Corps de Cavalrie, 1re Armee, Armee Francais. At each intermediate level, there were player COs, XOs, and subordinate officers, all the way up to a Supreme Commander for each side, Allied and Axis.
CRS codes the org charts for each side into the game, to a point. But the leadership positions are staffed by players who volunteer to take the time and do it. And it's on those players' shoulders that much of the success or failure of an entire "army" rests. Army CinCs probably spend more time out of the game working on "administrative" things than they do actually playing...it's practically a second job.
I've gotten two spams recently with an alternate version of this technique. They don't use random words, they use random gibberish. There's ten or so lines of "xyswieour iowruskldjf sfzzsfds, sdfklsjl weroius xyzzy."-type stuff at the bottom. I don't get spammed enough to need a spam filter (yet), so I don't know anything about Bayseian filters--do garbage characters like this defeat them?
In the US, altitudes below 18,000 feet are expressed in feet with the plane's altimeter set to the local barometric pressure. Above 18,000 feet, they use "flight levels" (example: flight level 250, FL250 = 25,000 feet) based on setting the altimeter to a standard setting of 29.92 inches mercury, or 1013 millibars. In other countries, that "transition level" varies.
And no, I'm not a pilot, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...
We don't know, those could've been the storage devices that they stole. Heck, they could've stolen a rack of Wintel servers and since it came from a room with a raised floor and a chiller going wide open, some reporter who thinks he knows IT would call it a "mainframe server."
"Mainframe server" = "big box that lives behind the glass door and has lots of blinky lights on the front" to most people.
Oh man, I'd forgotten Mark Hamill. His "acting" in WC: Prophecy was pretty good proof of why his career crashed and burned like Farm Boy's snowspeeder on Hoth, especially when he was in the alien ship at the end. THAT was MST3K quality cheese.
Heck, WC IV and Prophecy both were full of lousy acting. In IV, you had Malcolm McDowell chewing scenery like a madman (although it did have the redeeming feature of that cute dark-haired helmsperson, Sosa).
Prophecy had even more cheese. You had:
- the ice-queen redheaded female pilot with her hair pulled back so tight her face was about to rip off; - the hot blonde doctor who was always in the bar slamming shooters; - Disposable Wingman whose best line was "I...am so hosed".
And then, there's Maniac. Best thing about the acting in both games. Truly somebody who you just wanted to reach through the screen and smack the shit out of.
MS Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight is going for about US$55 in stores now. FS2004 has pretty damn nice eye candy and an interesting selection of historic aircraft (Spirit of St. Louis, Douglas DC-3, Lockheed Vega 5, DH.88 Comet, Vickers Vimy) along with the usual FS collection of Cessnas, Learjet 45, Boeing heavy iron, etc. The weather and default terrain are impressive.
X-Plane's flight model pwns FS2004's in terms of realism, but you can head down to the store and pick up FS2004 now for less as opposed to X-Plane, which you have to get via snailmail. (Both programs require the CD in the drive for copy protection.) The global scenery for X-Plane is $20 extra, and Mars is $10 over that, so a full X-Plane install is almost $90. (You can download the global scenery if you want to, but their servers are throttled to 2-3 kb/s, if they're even up.)
X-Plane's interface, not to put too fine a point on it, blows. It is very difficult to use compared to FS2004, it's very non-Windoze-standard. FS2004 owns it on graphics quality as well. Both sims can use real weather downloaded off the Internet (built-in w/FS2004, requires a downloadable utility for X-Plane). The big plus for X-Plane is that it comes with world scenery and aircraft builder tools, which FS2004 doesn't.
FS2004 is (IMO) the better buy for those who just want to pretend they're a pilot. X-Plane is better for the hardcore pilot who wants maximum flight model realism, the "what if" hobbyist that wants to design and try out their own aircraft, and for folks who aren't scared off of a clunky interface. And, a big plus, X-Plane works on OS X.
You can check out x-plane at www.xplane.com. You can download the 122 MB program there, it's the full program but unless you have an X-Plane CD in your drive, (a) it's limited to the Southern California area, and (b) it disables your joystick after 6 minutes.
Sonic booms were one thing with the Concorde, but the sheer engine noise of the plane was just as big a factor.
I worked in a building a mile and a half off the south end of runway 1L at Washington Dulles in the late '80s (the AT&T building at Dulles Corner, next to the Dulles Corner Hyatt, for any who know the area--we had a killer view of the continuous rebuilding of the Va 28/Dulles Toll Road interchange). When the Concorde would run up its engines prior to its takeoff roll, the noise was incredible even inside a 10-story office building a mile and a half away. 747s were barely a whisper, but that thing was loud enough that if you were near the windows (which were rattling), you had to raise your voice a bit. And that was a mile and a half away and off to one side, not even directly behind or under it. If you were in the parking garage, you had to yell to be heard.
Until they can make an SST that isn't any louder on takeoff than a modern jumbo, you won't see them again. The people living around the airports won't stand for it.
And your point, Trollholio? This wasn't just some formatting getting stripped, I figured on that happening (and, in fact, it did, OO de-centered some centered text). Re-adding formatting is no big deal, it just takes a couple of minutes to fix. Dropping an entire page worth of text is another matter entirely.
However, now that it's in OO, I wouldn't take it back to Word if I could. I like Writer. It's solid, it works well, and it's not like you can beat the price!
I'm going to wait until 1.1 comes out, install it, and try the.doc version of the document there. If converting it to Writer format still munges it up, then I'll definitely submit it to them as a bug.
No subtle troll here. I WANT to see OO work and succeed. Alternatives to Office are always a good thing.
If I do anything fancier than a three-column brochure, I probably will have to go to a fancier desktop publishing app. But, originally, I did the brochure as more of an "oh crap, we've got a craft show coming up and a brochure would be nice, and I've got some pictures over in this folder, I better get to typing" kind of thing.
Is there any decent desktop publishing software for Windoze that doesn't cost an arm, a leg, and a testicle?
Back on OO, I don't want to be seen as slamming it. I like it. I like it enough that I haven't bothered to five-finger a copy of Office 2k from work. I'll upgrade to 1.1 when it comes out of beta. I keep tabbed sales spreadsheets for my wife's business on Calc and it works great. The app could be faster, especially with regard to document load times and initial app load time, but it's certainly fast enough once it's loaded.
Speaking of that company, OpenOffice.org is superb at converting Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files into its own open formats.
Superb? Uh...no. I recently built a new computer and rather than pay for (or try to bootleg) a copy of Office, I downloaded and installed OO 1.0.3.
I've since tried to open several different Word 2000 documents in OO and not one has converted properly. The worst one was a brochure I did for my wife's jewelry business--a standard two-page three-column brochure with some imbedded pictures, nothing too out of the ordinary. When I imported it, the contents of the entire second page of the document were gone. The page was there, the framing for the pictures were there, but the text and pictures themselves weren't. I ended up having to retype it.
I think OO itself isn't a bad application, it's slower than Office but just as useful. And I've got one less piece of Microsoftware on my box. But, jeez, "superb" at converting documents isn't anywhere near the truth unless they drastically improved the import/export filters in 1.1.
Actually, people have done that. There's an Asheron's Call player with the nom de plume of "Fist de Yuma" that's posted a weekly column about his doings on AC on his site for a couple years now. And yes, people donate to keep it going--although I think Fist has a job.
Nothing moves data like a mainframe and nothing stays up like a mainframe. They are the most reliable platforms out there. IBM used the phrase "five nines" to describe it--99.999% uptime.
Now they're going to companies that already have a big mainframe investment in physical plant and people and saying, "Look, buy this new bigger box and move all your legacy COBOL apps over onto it. You'll still have enough room left over to run DB2 on it and use it as a database server, AND, set up several hundred instances of Linux and run Apache to run your website." The company gets to keep its old platform until such time as they want to move off it, they get a godawful fast database server, and they get a "Webserver farm" inside one box with far superior reliability to racks and racks of off-the-shelf PCs.
IBM jumping on the Linux bandwagon is really out of character, but it's a smart move.
Where I work, their idea of "retraining" us COBOL jockeys was to send us to MCSD 5-day cram refresher classes--never mind that none of us had coded VB6 before in our lives--and then expect us to get an MCSD certification, without EVER using the stuff in the wild. Once they realized that we couldn't do that, all training was withdrawn. Anything we want we have to get on our own, which is OK, that's the way things go--but we won't be given any opportunity to actually use the stuff unless we take a 50% pay cut to go to work as a "junior" programmer somewhere else.
Meanwhile, we see MCSDs,.NET and VB6/COM+ specialists, brought in off the street at higher pay grades and more money than 20-year veteran employee COBOL programmers. Unless they're on H-1Bs, in which case they get brought in at $20k under what even we're making.
If somebody is smart enough to be a good COBOL programmer for 15 years, they can learn new tools, even ones radically different. But instead companies will throw their older workers away--even though they're the ones that know the business processes--and bring in younger ones that they can work 90 hours a week and/or underpay.
Now it's time to leave school and enter the real world...
I work for a financial institution. We run a fairly small IBM mainframe using OS/390. Our basic software for keeping up our loan accounts is 95% VS COBOL II and 5% Easytrieve Plus (a report writer language). Our files are straight VSAM--no databases to be found. Yes, it's antiquated, and yes, it works. We process information on about 150,000 loans nightly.
Several years ago, our CIO decided that mainframes are teh sux0r and that he wanted to replace it, and our COBOL loan systems, with "state-of-the-shelf" technology. He embarked on a four-year search to find a server-based system that could do what our users wanted and still process accruals, maintenance, and all the other assorted number-crunching on 150,000 loans, every night. Meanwhile, he decreed that all future development would be done using Microsoft technology--Windows NT/2000 as the platform, SQL Server as the database, Visual Basic 6.0 (!) as the language.
The first client/server development effort went twelve months over schedule and $2 million over budget. The second, in my programming group, only went in on time (but way overbudget) because we got some kick-ass VB6 programmers willing to work 75-hour weeks for 3 months. We quickly expanded to have a dizzying number of "data marts" and databases and report writers and little disconnected client/server apps...all of them fed by the mainframe. From nothing, we went to 300+ servers in 3 years at tremendous cost and tremendous headache.
Now, they are rewriting another bank system off COBOL--oh, but Microsoft no longer supports us using VB6/COM+, so now it's.NET. So all the staff have to be retrained on.NET, at great expense and time. (But not us mainframe toads, of course, everybody KNOWS you can't teach a COBOL dog new tricks, just fire them when they've served their usefulness.)
Meanwhile, six of us keep those COBOL loan applications purring like an old Chrysler 225 slant six engine. It's not pretty, but by God, it works. Day after day after day, with no real drama, the numbers crunch and the money rolls in. They could be doing everything new still on the mainframe with some of the newer mainframe tools--but basically, our upper management has decided that Green Screens Are Evil. That's the only reason we're spending the money we're spending.
Oh yeah, that four-year journey for a replacement system? Ended in failure. No NT/W2000-based distributed system out there could even get close to the performance we required. Unix systems came closer, but Unix is a four-letter word around here--it's Microsoft or bust, baby, we ARE Bill Gates' bitch!
There's no substitute for a mainframe and COBOL when you've got to move huge amounts of data around on mission-critical financial systems, and do it with near-perfect reliability. Distributed systems don't have the rock-solid reliability, yet. They may someday, but not now.
So welcome to reality, Junior. COBOL isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Better pay attention in class! Either that, or learn to say, "Would you like a McTurnover with that?"
I get a ton of these in South Carolina as well--1 to 2 telemarketer calls a night. If the phone rings and I'm not where I can see the caller ID, I grab it, and 2/3 of the time, it's dead silence followed by a hangup. Somebody told me once that some telemarketing companies dial three numbers at once and talk to the first one that answers--the other two get empty air. But I can't confirm that.
We don't have more than four in central South Carolina--but our Fox affiliate is channel 57, and the UPN/WB station in in Sumter (20 miles away) on channel 63 I believe. Fortunately they are both on the local (Time Warner must die) cable system.
Still, it's not just somebody with a low-power UHF transmitter making a Thai version of "Wayne's World" in their basement that could get screwed by this. There are places that have network affiliates on the higher UHF channels. Heck, we only have one VHF station here (10) and four UHF (19, 25, 57, 63). And remember that people from LA have mentioned sixteen or more different UHF stations in their metro area.
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Recently my company conducted a "climate survey." One of the items that came up over and over and over again in the climate survey--and not just in IT--is that we are underpaid compared to other similar companies in our geographic area.
So what did the PHBs do? Decide that they obviously weren't telling us enough about the salary survey that they use that shows that we aren't underpaid. This despite the fact that people in my department know what programmers at other companies are making, and it's consistently 10-20% more for the same level of experience and responsibility, whether a mainframe programmer, VB code monkey, or DBA.
The trick is, they figure in the extra sick time (that we're not allowed to take due to deadlines), the pension plan (that we will never see because we'll get laid off before then), the 401(k) (that they no longer match contributions to), the health insurance (same as everybody else in town), and the free parking spaces (w00t) into our "compensation." So they underpay us, and then say, "Well, you get 15 sick days a year, nobody else gets that!" Uh, yeah, and the last guy I knew that took double-digit sick days a year got shitcanned...what's your point?
As somebody who just left WWIIOL last month because I got a bit burned out, I'll back up everything the reviewer said in his article. WWIIOL is dated in a lot of areas, but the days of the botched release are long, long behind it. CRS has a pretty good relationship with most of the playerbase, as well.
The interesting thing he barely touched on is that the warring armies--British and French on one side, German on the other--have command structures completely staffed by players. For example, I played in a squad called 3CD (Third Canadian Division). 3CD and its internal subunits were part of the Corps de Cavalrie, 1re Armee, Armee Francais. At each intermediate level, there were player COs, XOs, and subordinate officers, all the way up to a Supreme Commander for each side, Allied and Axis.
CRS codes the org charts for each side into the game, to a point. But the leadership positions are staffed by players who volunteer to take the time and do it. And it's on those players' shoulders that much of the success or failure of an entire "army" rests. Army CinCs probably spend more time out of the game working on "administrative" things than they do actually playing...it's practically a second job.
I've gotten two spams recently with an alternate version of this technique. They don't use random words, they use random gibberish. There's ten or so lines of "xyswieour iowruskldjf sfzzsfds, sdfklsjl weroius xyzzy."-type stuff at the bottom. I don't get spammed enough to need a spam filter (yet), so I don't know anything about Bayseian filters--do garbage characters like this defeat them?
Well, they're losing my paltry $6.95 a month as of tonight. This is BS.
Thankfully, I'm not using their adware-infested version of Roger Wilco. I use either TeamSpeak 2 or an older, pre-Gamespy version of RW.
The Pilot G2 05, .5mm fine point. Awesome pen. The 07 is good too, but I'm a fine point snob. :)
In the US, altitudes below 18,000 feet are expressed in feet with the plane's altimeter set to the local barometric pressure. Above 18,000 feet, they use "flight levels" (example: flight level 250, FL250 = 25,000 feet) based on setting the altimeter to a standard setting of 29.92 inches mercury, or 1013 millibars. In other countries, that "transition level" varies.
And no, I'm not a pilot, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...
We don't know, those could've been the storage devices that they stole. Heck, they could've stolen a rack of Wintel servers and since it came from a room with a raised floor and a chiller going wide open, some reporter who thinks he knows IT would call it a "mainframe server."
"Mainframe server" = "big box that lives behind the glass door and has lots of blinky lights on the front" to most people.
Oh man, I'd forgotten Mark Hamill. His "acting" in WC: Prophecy was pretty good proof of why his career crashed and burned like Farm Boy's snowspeeder on Hoth, especially when he was in the alien ship at the end. THAT was MST3K quality cheese.
Heck, WC IV and Prophecy both were full of lousy acting. In IV, you had Malcolm McDowell chewing scenery like a madman (although it did have the redeeming feature of that cute dark-haired helmsperson, Sosa).
Prophecy had even more cheese. You had:
- the ice-queen redheaded female pilot with her hair pulled back so tight her face was about to rip off;
- the hot blonde doctor who was always in the bar slamming shooters;
- Disposable Wingman whose best line was "I...am so hosed".
And then, there's Maniac. Best thing about the acting in both games. Truly somebody who you just wanted to reach through the screen and smack the shit out of.
God, I wish I had mod points right now. Mod this guy up.
"And if ya don't be quiet, I'm, aaaah, gonna shoot ya!" Never knew they were recruiting stormtroopers from North Dakoooota and Minneesooota...
X-Plane's flight model pwns FS2004's in terms of realism, but you can head down to the store and pick up FS2004 now for less as opposed to X-Plane, which you have to get via snailmail. (Both programs require the CD in the drive for copy protection.) The global scenery for X-Plane is $20 extra, and Mars is $10 over that, so a full X-Plane install is almost $90. (You can download the global scenery if you want to, but their servers are throttled to 2-3 kb/s, if they're even up.)
X-Plane's interface, not to put too fine a point on it, blows. It is very difficult to use compared to FS2004, it's very non-Windoze-standard. FS2004 owns it on graphics quality as well. Both sims can use real weather downloaded off the Internet (built-in w/FS2004, requires a downloadable utility for X-Plane). The big plus for X-Plane is that it comes with world scenery and aircraft builder tools, which FS2004 doesn't.
FS2004 is (IMO) the better buy for those who just want to pretend they're a pilot. X-Plane is better for the hardcore pilot who wants maximum flight model realism, the "what if" hobbyist that wants to design and try out their own aircraft, and for folks who aren't scared off of a clunky interface. And, a big plus, X-Plane works on OS X.
You can check out x-plane at www.xplane.com. You can download the 122 MB program there, it's the full program but unless you have an X-Plane CD in your drive, (a) it's limited to the Southern California area, and (b) it disables your joystick after 6 minutes.
OK, it was the north end of runway 19L now that I think about it...some days I'm lexdysic.
Sonic booms were one thing with the Concorde, but the sheer engine noise of the plane was just as big a factor.
I worked in a building a mile and a half off the south end of runway 1L at Washington Dulles in the late '80s (the AT&T building at Dulles Corner, next to the Dulles Corner Hyatt, for any who know the area--we had a killer view of the continuous rebuilding of the Va 28/Dulles Toll Road interchange). When the Concorde would run up its engines prior to its takeoff roll, the noise was incredible even inside a 10-story office building a mile and a half away. 747s were barely a whisper, but that thing was loud enough that if you were near the windows (which were rattling), you had to raise your voice a bit. And that was a mile and a half away and off to one side, not even directly behind or under it. If you were in the parking garage, you had to yell to be heard.
Until they can make an SST that isn't any louder on takeoff than a modern jumbo, you won't see them again. The people living around the airports won't stand for it.
And the other 99.2% haven't.
And your point, Trollholio? This wasn't just some formatting getting stripped, I figured on that happening (and, in fact, it did, OO de-centered some centered text). Re-adding formatting is no big deal, it just takes a couple of minutes to fix. Dropping an entire page worth of text is another matter entirely.
However, now that it's in OO, I wouldn't take it back to Word if I could. I like Writer. It's solid, it works well, and it's not like you can beat the price!
I'm going to wait until 1.1 comes out, install it, and try the .doc version of the document there. If converting it to Writer format still munges it up, then I'll definitely submit it to them as a bug.
No subtle troll here. I WANT to see OO work and succeed. Alternatives to Office are always a good thing.
If I do anything fancier than a three-column brochure, I probably will have to go to a fancier desktop publishing app. But, originally, I did the brochure as more of an "oh crap, we've got a craft show coming up and a brochure would be nice, and I've got some pictures over in this folder, I better get to typing" kind of thing.
Is there any decent desktop publishing software for Windoze that doesn't cost an arm, a leg, and a testicle?
Back on OO, I don't want to be seen as slamming it. I like it. I like it enough that I haven't bothered to five-finger a copy of Office 2k from work. I'll upgrade to 1.1 when it comes out of beta. I keep tabbed sales spreadsheets for my wife's business on Calc and it works great. The app could be faster, especially with regard to document load times and initial app load time, but it's certainly fast enough once it's loaded.
Superb? Uh...no. I recently built a new computer and rather than pay for (or try to bootleg) a copy of Office, I downloaded and installed OO 1.0.3.
I've since tried to open several different Word 2000 documents in OO and not one has converted properly. The worst one was a brochure I did for my wife's jewelry business--a standard two-page three-column brochure with some imbedded pictures, nothing too out of the ordinary. When I imported it, the contents of the entire second page of the document were gone. The page was there, the framing for the pictures were there, but the text and pictures themselves weren't. I ended up having to retype it.
I think OO itself isn't a bad application, it's slower than Office but just as useful. And I've got one less piece of Microsoftware on my box. But, jeez, "superb" at converting documents isn't anywhere near the truth unless they drastically improved the import/export filters in 1.1.
Actually, people have done that. There's an Asheron's Call player with the nom de plume of "Fist de Yuma" that's posted a weekly column about his doings on AC on his site for a couple years now. And yes, people donate to keep it going--although I think Fist has a job.
Nothing moves data like a mainframe and nothing stays up like a mainframe. They are the most reliable platforms out there. IBM used the phrase "five nines" to describe it--99.999% uptime.
Now they're going to companies that already have a big mainframe investment in physical plant and people and saying, "Look, buy this new bigger box and move all your legacy COBOL apps over onto it. You'll still have enough room left over to run DB2 on it and use it as a database server, AND, set up several hundred instances of Linux and run Apache to run your website." The company gets to keep its old platform until such time as they want to move off it, they get a godawful fast database server, and they get a "Webserver farm" inside one box with far superior reliability to racks and racks of off-the-shelf PCs.
IBM jumping on the Linux bandwagon is really out of character, but it's a smart move.
Mod this guy up.
.NET and VB6/COM+ specialists, brought in off the street at higher pay grades and more money than 20-year veteran employee COBOL programmers. Unless they're on H-1Bs, in which case they get brought in at $20k under what even we're making.
Where I work, their idea of "retraining" us COBOL jockeys was to send us to MCSD 5-day cram refresher classes--never mind that none of us had coded VB6 before in our lives--and then expect us to get an MCSD certification, without EVER using the stuff in the wild. Once they realized that we couldn't do that, all training was withdrawn. Anything we want we have to get on our own, which is OK, that's the way things go--but we won't be given any opportunity to actually use the stuff unless we take a 50% pay cut to go to work as a "junior" programmer somewhere else.
Meanwhile, we see MCSDs,
If somebody is smart enough to be a good COBOL programmer for 15 years, they can learn new tools, even ones radically different. But instead companies will throw their older workers away--even though they're the ones that know the business processes--and bring in younger ones that they can work 90 hours a week and/or underpay.
Now it's time to leave school and enter the real world...
.NET. So all the staff have to be retrained on .NET, at great expense and time. (But not us mainframe toads, of course, everybody KNOWS you can't teach a COBOL dog new tricks, just fire them when they've served their usefulness.)
I work for a financial institution. We run a fairly small IBM mainframe using OS/390. Our basic software for keeping up our loan accounts is 95% VS COBOL II and 5% Easytrieve Plus (a report writer language). Our files are straight VSAM--no databases to be found. Yes, it's antiquated, and yes, it works. We process information on about 150,000 loans nightly.
Several years ago, our CIO decided that mainframes are teh sux0r and that he wanted to replace it, and our COBOL loan systems, with "state-of-the-shelf" technology. He embarked on a four-year search to find a server-based system that could do what our users wanted and still process accruals, maintenance, and all the other assorted number-crunching on 150,000 loans, every night. Meanwhile, he decreed that all future development would be done using Microsoft technology--Windows NT/2000 as the platform, SQL Server as the database, Visual Basic 6.0 (!) as the language.
The first client/server development effort went twelve months over schedule and $2 million over budget. The second, in my programming group, only went in on time (but way overbudget) because we got some kick-ass VB6 programmers willing to work 75-hour weeks for 3 months. We quickly expanded to have a dizzying number of "data marts" and databases and report writers and little disconnected client/server apps...all of them fed by the mainframe. From nothing, we went to 300+ servers in 3 years at tremendous cost and tremendous headache.
Now, they are rewriting another bank system off COBOL--oh, but Microsoft no longer supports us using VB6/COM+, so now it's
Meanwhile, six of us keep those COBOL loan applications purring like an old Chrysler 225 slant six engine. It's not pretty, but by God, it works. Day after day after day, with no real drama, the numbers crunch and the money rolls in. They could be doing everything new still on the mainframe with some of the newer mainframe tools--but basically, our upper management has decided that Green Screens Are Evil. That's the only reason we're spending the money we're spending.
Oh yeah, that four-year journey for a replacement system? Ended in failure. No NT/W2000-based distributed system out there could even get close to the performance we required. Unix systems came closer, but Unix is a four-letter word around here--it's Microsoft or bust, baby, we ARE Bill Gates' bitch!
There's no substitute for a mainframe and COBOL when you've got to move huge amounts of data around on mission-critical financial systems, and do it with near-perfect reliability. Distributed systems don't have the rock-solid reliability, yet. They may someday, but not now.
So welcome to reality, Junior. COBOL isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Better pay attention in class! Either that, or learn to say, "Would you like a McTurnover with that?"
The job market must be a damnsight better where you are than where I am. COBOL programming jobs are few and far between.
...last year, for "employee appreciation week", we received a "special gift" from executive management. The gift consisted of:
- A plastic company-logoed beer cup. Not a stadium cup, but one of those disposable ones.
- A bookmark with the words to "God Bless America" printed on it.
- One (1) bag of Act II microwave vending machine popcorn, still in the plastic wrapper.
I get a ton of these in South Carolina as well--1 to 2 telemarketer calls a night. If the phone rings and I'm not where I can see the caller ID, I grab it, and 2/3 of the time, it's dead silence followed by a hangup. Somebody told me once that some telemarketing companies dial three numbers at once and talk to the first one that answers--the other two get empty air. But I can't confirm that.
Pisses me off, it does.
Still, it's not just somebody with a low-power UHF transmitter making a Thai version of "Wayne's World" in their basement that could get screwed by this. There are places that have network affiliates on the higher UHF channels. Heck, we only have one VHF station here (10) and four UHF (19, 25, 57, 63). And remember that people from LA have mentioned sixteen or more different UHF stations in their metro area.