Being the only guy who understands the wacky AS400 Accounting system because it relies on an obscure system of joined excel tables spread across the network? That is job security. I have seen it happen plenty in financial institutions. Usually those programmers are worshiped as the only ones capable of understanding the systems (of course, they only understand it because they wrote it and have maintained it for 25 years).
I'm one of those guys. There is no "the" wacky AS400 Accounting system (there is apparently your company's accounting system). There is no obscure system of joined Excel tables (yes, users download data to spreadsheets like everyone else). And we can understand anything with source code, not just the people who wrote it.
Yes, I expect I encountered an unusual glitch to hang responses to links (X lit and no response on any link after clicking Stop and trying some additional links). Hopefully I or no one else will encounter it again.
Like I said though, it's good, responsive, the way a technical forum should be, but doesn't carry a crapload of images that typical users burden forums with (from multiple sites) and the typical ad links which paralyze web pages. I'm all for high quality programming like these guys use though.
I had to try it with a response like that. It started out very responsive but hung after I clicked on Discussion Index and tried the link for Google Summer of Code link. Tried backing out to a couple of pages but links hang.
It's the way a good technical discussion forum should be but if used by typical users with all the image overhead they bring with them and the hangups of typical links to ad sites it would be slowed down like the rest of them.
Thanks for the insight from your posts. I thought the description of your requirements and thinking were very reasonable. Good luck on filling out your team and on a successful project.
cancer is not evolution....it is caused, for most cancers, by a local mutation of somatic cells that produces cancer cells in a specific tissue. The mutation is due to environmental conditions (poor nutrition, poor habits, etc).
I'm reading some fascinating stuff (Biology of Cancer - Weinberg) that says there are huge amounts of point mutations taking place throughout the body all the time from oxidants. Also with LOH and inherited loss of genetic viability, indications were that while there are certain effective carcinogens, probably most cancers are not caused by poor nutrition and poor habits as you say.
I think a point to be made is that the opposite of accellerated aging due to lack of AUF1 (and its effect on causing repairing ends of DNA) is not delaying aging and prolonging life, it's normal aging.
And while delaying aging based on perpetually repairing ends of DNA, as an interested layman reading Weinberg's Biology of Cancer, cell immortalization "is a step that appears to govern the development of all human cancers."
In other words, that's one of the universal mutations that enable human cancer, as I understand it. Otherwise the cells with critical mutations enabling cancer would die off.
I actually read once that a lot of the old gear is kept due to its resilience to the radiation out there. The larger circuit traces from that gear was supposedly less susceptible.
I think you're referring to the electronics that was certified for spacecraft. None of that is applicable to mainframes. IBM constantly refreshes the electronics, now on ever newer Power CPU's.
I'm curious as to what makes COBOL the right tool for data processing tasks.
I was under the impression that much of the reason it was still around is generally because there are existing large projects already written in it, and it is generally deemed to expensive to try to convert to some more modern language. You make it sound like there is more to it than just that (although surely it plays a part).
What makes it a better language than say Java or Python for data processing tasks? If one chooses to use those languages in a more purely procedural style (rather than an object oriented style) would they not produce similarly straightforward code, but with the advantage of having a much larger pool of developers?
That's a fair question. I'll try to give a quick answer without starting a language flame war.:)
First, to be fair, good programmers can do just about anything with any language. We've done remarkable things though the decades with very little. Now that computers are relatively infinite in capability, even bad programmers have a shot at doing anything with any language. So it doesn't matter as much anymore.
But as an IBM RPG programmer, which has similar attributes as COBOL, the reasons are high speed transaction processing with language and even hardware support for binary decimal data type and direct disk IO, not limited to SQL for database IO. Programs are written with typed variables and compiled. Efficiency used to be paramount to accomplish what needed to be done, and it still is highly efficient.
The IBM mainframes and midranges these programs run on can be smaller but scale to very, very large environments that are very secure. Java also runs on these systems and we write systems with it and is used extensively, but generally not for the hardcore data processing jobs.
When something is processed, be it a screen, something from a web page, a record from an input file, etc., we usually hit several files in validating and updating info, on a transaction by transaction basis. It can be emulated with extremely complex SQL statements, I've seen some of them, but it takes quite a bit of engineering to attempt to do all the IO we routinely do for transactions.
The IBM midrange (i OS) and mainframe operating systems are also a big part of the success of RPG and COBOL, respectively.
I've always said that if i OS were written today by an OSS team you guys would think it was the second coming of operating systems.
Or you can start from scratch, and write new specs for the system and build a system with new kick ass functionality, then you end up spending millions getting the stakeholders together to write the specs, then millions more actually writing the new kick ass software, and decade later, it's been deployed with all of the major bugs worked out (or worked around). Except that whatever kick ass software you chose to write it in is no longer kick ass, so you need to start over again with something more kick ass.
This is what the US government has been doing since the 90's. Except the deployment part. And several of the failed projects are in the hundreds of millions per failure.
Have these guys had a successful large scale federal software project yet? They appear to be the "something more kick ass" failure phase.
Posted by an active 60 year old IBM midrange RPG programmer (AS/400, iseries, IBM i, etc.) in response to the dude that thinks 60 year old IBM programmers are an hallucination.
I don't think he started the courses (if they even existed). It sounds like his accounting degree morphed into a double major degree in CS as well when he was a candidate to become CEO of Paypal based on what I've read in news.
I'll have to see how you enable verbatim search, because Google seems to be ignoring + or even +"" anymore.
I'm just using them a lot less now (and therefore seeing a lot less paid ads - your choice, Google). Maybe verbatim will restore some of how Google search used to work.
Precisely! Upgrading for the sake up upgrading is the hobgoblin of little minds. I'll be running Firefox 3.6 and Win XP 64-bit until developers get over the current trend toward minimalism.
Along those lines, a quote in TFA on why women had all the eggs they will have in the beginning and don't make eggs:
"Then why would women have menopause?"
I found that less than compelling reasoning from scientists.
I was shocked to find that the biology I've been reading that says that a woman (and all female mammals) has all her eggs in the beginning is really just conjecture and that no one has ever seen the eggs stored. There's quite a lot of reasoning involved, about how important it is for integrity of DNA germ line in eggs to be produced in the beginning with a minimum of accumulated DNA damage, the opposite of male sperm being produced on an ongoing basis.
Appears to be more wishful thinking and rationalization than anything else.
Those manufacturing jobs let a person support a family with several children and a stay at home mom to raise them. It wasn't enough to supply each child with the extravagent nonsense of today but I would say we were better off without it.
The so called affluence of America after outsourcing much of our jobs is based strictly on borrowing. While outsourcing we have borrowed 14 trillion dollars since 1980. That is our affluence, and the bill has come due but we keep borrowing more to stave it off.
When that gambit runs out you'll find out more about so called outsourcing affluence than you ever imagined.
Life on Earth is essentially biomolecular cells powered by ATP.
Can something that resembles life on another planet be made up of something different? Theoretically robots that manufactured replicas of themselves and otherwise behaved like an intelligent being would normally have to be considered a form of life, except that we know from our own experience that it is software and hardware that replicates the life experience and was created and put into place by actual life at some point. It couldn't have evolved into that condition from elements.
Could there be actual organic life powered by something other than ATP? Earth life is already miraculous enough, that life could have developed from a different combination of elements and still work in all the complexity that makes up life would be incomprehensible odds, in my opinion.
I already think that the odds that our life evolved in the complexity it has is incomprehensible enough.
Are you kidding me? This is the equivalent of a miracle if the protein works in humans as it does in mice, the holy grail of Alzeimer's research. One thing to be able to stop the spread of it, totally unexpected to be able to reverse the damage.
This is great thinking and research to associate this cancer drug with Alzeimer's and find this result. My hat's off to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Being the only guy who understands the wacky AS400 Accounting system because it relies on an obscure system of joined excel tables spread across the network? That is job security. I have seen it happen plenty in financial institutions. Usually those programmers are worshiped as the only ones capable of understanding the systems (of course, they only understand it because they wrote it and have maintained it for 25 years).
I'm one of those guys. There is no "the" wacky AS400 Accounting system (there is apparently your company's accounting system). There is no obscure system of joined Excel tables (yes, users download data to spreadsheets like everyone else). And we can understand anything with source code, not just the people who wrote it.
Yes, I expect I encountered an unusual glitch to hang responses to links (X lit and no response on any link after clicking Stop and trying some additional links). Hopefully I or no one else will encounter it again.
Like I said though, it's good, responsive, the way a technical forum should be, but doesn't carry a crapload of images that typical users burden forums with (from multiple sites) and the typical ad links which paralyze web pages. I'm all for high quality programming like these guys use though.
I had to try it with a response like that. It started out very responsive but hung after I clicked on Discussion Index and tried the link for Google Summer of Code link. Tried backing out to a couple of pages but links hang.
It's the way a good technical discussion forum should be but if used by typical users with all the image overhead they bring with them and the hangups of typical links to ad sites it would be slowed down like the rest of them.
t's too bad that Delphi didn't win out. It was a much better language/environment that VB6.
Microsoft, as is their history, determined that by destroying Borland in making the Delphi team an offer they couldn't refuse. C# was created by them.
Thanks for the insight from your posts. I thought the description of your requirements and thinking were very reasonable. Good luck on filling out your team and on a successful project.
cancer is not evolution....it is caused, for most cancers, by a local mutation of somatic cells that produces cancer cells in a specific tissue. The mutation is due to environmental conditions (poor nutrition, poor habits, etc).
I'm reading some fascinating stuff (Biology of Cancer - Weinberg) that says there are huge amounts of point mutations taking place throughout the body all the time from oxidants. Also with LOH and inherited loss of genetic viability, indications were that while there are certain effective carcinogens, probably most cancers are not caused by poor nutrition and poor habits as you say.
I think a point to be made is that the opposite of accellerated aging due to lack of AUF1 (and its effect on causing repairing ends of DNA) is not delaying aging and prolonging life, it's normal aging.
And while delaying aging based on perpetually repairing ends of DNA, as an interested layman reading Weinberg's Biology of Cancer, cell immortalization "is a step that appears to govern the development of all human cancers."
In other words, that's one of the universal mutations that enable human cancer, as I understand it. Otherwise the cells with critical mutations enabling cancer would die off.
How does Slashdot accept such a crappy post?!
I believe they welcome this stuff with open arms, and add an obscure summary with sensational headline to boot.
And slashdotters tear it aprt even while complaining. Win-win for everyone.
I actually read once that a lot of the old gear is kept due to its resilience to the radiation out there. The larger circuit traces from that gear was supposedly less susceptible.
I think you're referring to the electronics that was certified for spacecraft. None of that is applicable to mainframes. IBM constantly refreshes the electronics, now on ever newer Power CPU's.
I'm curious as to what makes COBOL the right tool for data processing tasks.
I was under the impression that much of the reason it was still around is generally because there are existing large projects already written in it, and it is generally deemed to expensive to try to convert to some more modern language. You make it sound like there is more to it than just that (although surely it plays a part).
What makes it a better language than say Java or Python for data processing tasks? If one chooses to use those languages in a more purely procedural style (rather than an object oriented style) would they not produce similarly straightforward code, but with the advantage of having a much larger pool of developers?
That's a fair question. I'll try to give a quick answer without starting a language flame war. :)
First, to be fair, good programmers can do just about anything with any language. We've done remarkable things though the decades with very little. Now that computers are relatively infinite in capability, even bad programmers have a shot at doing anything with any language. So it doesn't matter as much anymore.
But as an IBM RPG programmer, which has similar attributes as COBOL, the reasons are high speed transaction processing with language and even hardware support for binary decimal data type and direct disk IO, not limited to SQL for database IO. Programs are written with typed variables and compiled. Efficiency used to be paramount to accomplish what needed to be done, and it still is highly efficient.
The IBM mainframes and midranges these programs run on can be smaller but scale to very, very large environments that are very secure. Java also runs on these systems and we write systems with it and is used extensively, but generally not for the hardcore data processing jobs.
When something is processed, be it a screen, something from a web page, a record from an input file, etc., we usually hit several files in validating and updating info, on a transaction by transaction basis. It can be emulated with extremely complex SQL statements, I've seen some of them, but it takes quite a bit of engineering to attempt to do all the IO we routinely do for transactions.
The IBM midrange (i OS) and mainframe operating systems are also a big part of the success of RPG and COBOL, respectively.
I've always said that if i OS were written today by an OSS team you guys would think it was the second coming of operating systems.
Or you can start from scratch, and write new specs for the system and build a system with new kick ass functionality, then you end up spending millions getting the stakeholders together to write the specs, then millions more actually writing the new kick ass software, and decade later, it's been deployed with all of the major bugs worked out (or worked around). Except that whatever kick ass software you chose to write it in is no longer kick ass, so you need to start over again with something more kick ass.
This is what the US government has been doing since the 90's. Except the deployment part. And several of the failed projects are in the hundreds of millions per failure.
Have these guys had a successful large scale federal software project yet? They appear to be the "something more kick ass" failure phase.
Posted by an active 60 year old IBM midrange RPG programmer (AS/400, iseries, IBM i, etc.) in response to the dude that thinks 60 year old IBM programmers are an hallucination.
My RPG open source site:
http://code.google.com/p/rdwrites/downloads/list
three seats, not one. And they want to maximize their 6% ownership of Yahoo, so they are not seeking firesale sales.
I don't think he started the courses (if they even existed). It sounds like his accounting degree morphed into a double major degree in CS as well when he was a candidate to become CEO of Paypal based on what I've read in news.
editors should add your post to TFS, but that would take all the fun out of it.
and so bad it had to be submitted by an AC.
hmmm... what we need is a search engine that does no evil.
They're either too distracted to comment or too undistracted to comment.
thanks for the link.
I'll have to see how you enable verbatim search, because Google seems to be ignoring + or even +"" anymore.
I'm just using them a lot less now (and therefore seeing a lot less paid ads - your choice, Google). Maybe verbatim will restore some of how Google search used to work.
well said. Thanks for taking this project public.
Precisely! Upgrading for the sake up upgrading is the hobgoblin of little minds. I'll be running Firefox 3.6 and Win XP 64-bit until developers get over the current trend toward minimalism.
agreed. That's what I'm doing.
Along those lines, a quote in TFA on why women had all the eggs they will have in the beginning and don't make eggs:
"Then why would women have menopause?"
I found that less than compelling reasoning from scientists.
I was shocked to find that the biology I've been reading that says that a woman (and all female mammals) has all her eggs in the beginning is really just conjecture and that no one has ever seen the eggs stored. There's quite a lot of reasoning involved, about how important it is for integrity of DNA germ line in eggs to be produced in the beginning with a minimum of accumulated DNA damage, the opposite of male sperm being produced on an ongoing basis.
Appears to be more wishful thinking and rationalization than anything else.
Those manufacturing jobs let a person support a family with several children and a stay at home mom to raise them. It wasn't enough to supply each child with the extravagent nonsense of today but I would say we were better off without it.
The so called affluence of America after outsourcing much of our jobs is based strictly on borrowing. While outsourcing we have borrowed 14 trillion dollars since 1980. That is our affluence, and the bill has come due but we keep borrowing more to stave it off.
When that gambit runs out you'll find out more about so called outsourcing affluence than you ever imagined.
Mules and other sterile offspring, for starters.
Life on Earth is essentially biomolecular cells powered by ATP.
Can something that resembles life on another planet be made up of something different? Theoretically robots that manufactured replicas of themselves and otherwise behaved like an intelligent being would normally have to be considered a form of life, except that we know from our own experience that it is software and hardware that replicates the life experience and was created and put into place by actual life at some point. It couldn't have evolved into that condition from elements.
Could there be actual organic life powered by something other than ATP? Earth life is already miraculous enough, that life could have developed from a different combination of elements and still work in all the complexity that makes up life would be incomprehensible odds, in my opinion.
I already think that the odds that our life evolved in the complexity it has is incomprehensible enough.
Are you kidding me? This is the equivalent of a miracle if the protein works in humans as it does in mice, the holy grail of Alzeimer's research. One thing to be able to stop the spread of it, totally unexpected to be able to reverse the damage.
This is great thinking and research to associate this cancer drug with Alzeimer's and find this result. My hat's off to them.