I used to have that problem. Drove me bananas. The problem wasn't fixed until I got a new computer. I did find a slightly better solution than rebooting, though. I used to keep a CLI window up. If the mouse failed, I'd unload the USBHID kernel modules, then reload them. I don't remember which modules in specific, but it did provide relief without rebooting.
Unfortunately, this was a fairly common issue with the Linux kernel. There was little interest in fixing it at the time, so you may just need new hardware. (It's possible that the issue was ignored because it was caused by poor USB implementations. Which would hopefully mean that newer hardware is unaffected.)
According to TFA, the police replaced the camera equipment they swiped. I didn't see any mention in the article of them taking his computer. Only replacing "$1000 worth of camera equipment".
That's a pretty good article. And in fact, it's the first evidence (IMHO) that this rumor might be true. i.e. That Nintendo is running the show on a Blue Ocean timetable completely independent of their competition. Otherwise such an announcement wouldn't make a lick of sense.
I wouldn't count on this report being correct. Nintendo has had a pure cash cow with the Nintendo DS. Since it market does not appear to have slowed significantly or run into serious competition, why would they refresh the hardware? A few folks have suggested the iPhone as competition, but I don't see anyone purchasing iPhones as DS replacements. Instead, they appear to use their iPhone as a spectacular networked handset and the DS as a gaming platform. The market does not appear ready to confuse the two.
Perhaps the most damning evidence is that out of all these reports on a new DS, they all cite the same source: Nikkei Business Daily. No one has yet independently confirmed this. So take it with a very large grain of salt.
Calling the new DS "Gameboy DS" is incorrect. The GameBoy line of portables ended with the GameBoy Advance. The DS is known simply as the "Nintendo DS".
Sure. Imagine you're in a car showroom looking at a super-expensive car. It looks great and price is pretty good. So you tell the dealer you'll take the car. Except when you get in the car, you realize that someone had put a cardboard cutout in front of the car. The car you got in was actually an economy vehicle. Except now it's too late to undo your purchase!
Here's another one: Let's say you've got a bunch of buttons on your dash. Most of them control the radio, but one controls the ejection seat. While you're away, some neighbor kids from MIT think it's funny to come over and rewire the buttons on your radio. Now when you press the button to turn on your radio, you actually get ejected from the car. NOT FUNNY!
It's about using IFRAMES + CSS to make confusing visual elements that cause users to perform actions they didn't think they were performing. Feel better?;-)
Lynx and Links do not support IFrames, so they are not vulnerable. In fact, any browser not capable of advance CSS and/or IFrames is safe. Unfortunately, that's not very many browsers.
/me just checked email to find an official conversation going on about ClickJacking.
This is the correct answer. Salaried employees are hired to do a specific job, not work a particular number of hours. Thus it is at the discretion of the employer to decide whether or not that job is getting accomplished. If an employee manages to work only 2 hours a day but accomplishes more work than his 8-hour/day peers, why would an employer complain?
This aspect of being a salaried employee is actually codified in US law. (See: Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 for "exempt" employees) The law was configured for workers who may end up working odd hours or irregular hours or traveling for their employer. Since the job is much more complex than just "lift this item" or "cut this metal", charging on an hourly basis does not make sense.
Long story short? This is a non-story. If any employer believes that his employees performance is sub-par, he should take it up with the individual employees directly rather than concerning himself with the details of their personal internet surfing.
They don't, actually. Jones Day is a law firm. The only sites they want linking to them are the ones that say, "This is a good lawyer to hire." ANYTHING else has the potential to shed light on the details of their business. Since law practice is not always clean and pristine (as this article demonstrates), Jones day is likely to be unhappy about drawing attention to their practices.
Disclaimer: This post is an opinion and makes no factual statements. By reading this post you waive all rights to sue, counterclaim, issue official correspondence, or even look at AKAImBatman (User #238306) with a funny look on your face.
Jones Day(TM) is going to have to get in line. SCO has existing use claims on linking litigious bastards, based on their extensive use of the mark between 2002 through present.
It's too bad the legal system isn't more accessible to the common man or baseless suits with intent to crush or scare wouldn't get filed so often.
"You are about to submit a bad summary. The summary is bad. By clicking yes you are failing at Slashdot Darwin Test."
"Testing students at a University, psychologists made many of them click on a dialog box that in effect said: 'You are about to install some malware. Malware is bad. By clicking yes you are failing the Windows Darwin Test.'
Doh!
For those of you just joining us, the article says nothing of the sort. The article actually says that they created fake "Application Error" dialogs with various numbers of "fake" aspects. e.g. The cursor turning to a hand over the "Ok" button, reverse colored text, browser borders, etc. Basically, stuff that should have made it obvious that these were malware windows. Nearly half of those tested "accepted" the dialogs to get them out of the way. Some of them simply minimized them for later.
The text referred to in the summary is an image created by Ars Technica with the caption, "Even this warning might not have helped".
Or Linux. Or Solaris. Or SOMETHING other than Windows.
It seems to me that Windows and Office are far too often the culprits of accidental leaks. Microsoft's strategy has always been one of convenience rather than security, so it's no surprise to me when these things happen. If you're looking for a decent home system, fine, use Windows. If you're going to use it as an employee workstation, be paranoid. But never, ever, ever deploy it to the production floor of anything!
Not that anyone is going to listen to me. I'm just going to keep seeing more blue screens on busses, trains, airplanes, ATMs, factory floors, and anywhere else it's actually important not to use Windows.
considering 90% of the world's computer users use Windows based systems
You know what's amazing? Every one of Microsoft's competitors runs on Windows too! Wow! Isn't that cool? I bet you had no idea! </sarcasm>
mostly of the stable & solid nature based on the Windows NT-based family (2000/XP/Server2003/VISTA/Server 2008
See, now I know you're astroturfing. That right there is a bit of market-speak designed by someone who knows the psychology of advertising. Very cute using apparent typos to make yourself look like "one of the guys". But riddle me this: Who makes a different class of typo with each Operating System listed? Shouldn't the typos be consistent? And who makes so many typos when listing OSes, only to spell out "Windows NT-based family" rather than using the more succinct "WinNT family"?
So, Mr. AC. You haven't been posing as dead people lately, have you? Maybe if you took the time to make a good browser you wouldn't need the astroturf campaign.
The 2600 only has TWO sprites. The missiles and the ball are 1-bit graphics and thus aren't really counted as "sprites". So there are 5 movable objects. Then there's the playfield. The playfield plots rather long lines (4 pixels per bit IIRC?) at fixed locations. Of course, there wasn't enough memory to store an extra 20 bits to fill the screen. That would be too easy. Instead, the [i]same bits[/i] were reused to draw the second half of the scanline. You could have the playfield repeat or you could have it mirror the bits. But if you wanted to actually have a full-width playfield, you had to "race the beam".
And by "race the beam" I mean that you would time the processor cycles just right so that you would replace the bits in the registers immediately after they were written to the screen. Since you were working with only 2 1/2 bytes, and you could only write a full byte, that became somewhat challenging. Especially since the 6507 CPU was clocked at 1/3 the speed of the TIA chip. For every three pixels plotted, you'd get one CPU cycle. To add insult to injury, even the shortest instruction still used 2 CPU cycles. And God help you if you crossed a page boundary while reading or writing memory. The extra cycle you incurred would be enough to throw off the entire program and cause nothing but garbage to get written to the screen!
Making things even more difficult was the way you moved sprites around. There was no way to say "show this sprite at location X". Instead, you had to use one scanline to mark the approximate pixel location of the sprite (remember, 3 cycles per CPU clock), then use the location counter function to advance the position forward or retard it backward by a few pixels. And by a few, I mean 0-3.
As a result, you had to become a master at timing everything. You counted the cycles, you watched the memory locations, and you figured out how to beat the machine at its own game. Which (oddly enough) is more or less how the system was designed to be used. By the end of the 2600's lifetime, developers had pulled incredible graphics out of the system. Some were done with the assistance of special cart hardware, but most of it was simply the ingenuity of the developers.
It was an improvement as our programs became more memory strapped. That didn't mean that they weren't a bear to program. Heck, they were a bear to use! No one remembers it anymore, but we used to have to create boot disks for nearly every game just to get all the necessary drivers loaded while simultaneously leaving enough low-mem to run the program. It actually got to the point where I was putting a boot disk in the box of each game I purchased.
DOS Extenders did eventually get good enough to where the game effectively loaded its own Operating System. After that, you didn't care how much low memory there was. But man, was getting there ever a pain!
I never quite got how its a wonderful thing when Apple and Google cross-subsidize free-as-in-beer Internet browsers but when They Who Must Not Be Named do the same thing its evil, monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior.
You know what I can't believe? I can't believe this crap got modded up. Talk about a disingenuous argument if I ever saw one.
Call me when:
Microsoft can meet standards they helped develop. You know, simple things like DOM2.
Microsoft shows an actual interest in progress by supporting the WHATWG rather than rolling out Yet Another Proprietary Platform(TM) like Silverlight.
Microsoft actually listens to the REAL problems developers are having in their "Open" development process. Best quote I've heard so far? "I tested IE8 the other day and was unable to remove a single [standards support] hack."
Microsoft doesn't cram their browser down your throat with artificial desktop integration
Microsoft has their source code for IE available for download
Microsoft actually accepts patches for their browser
If Microsoft did even HALF of that you could act all high and mighty. But from where I stand, you're just another Microsoft shill. Be gone!!!
I believe mikael intends to refer to Atari 2600 BASIC. It was limited to 9 characters per line and that only worked because it flickered like mad. Crazy, crazy idea. The 2600 simply didn't have enough hardware to generate a text display, even if we assume that cartridges could use superchips for an extra 128 bytes of memory. 2 sprites per scanline just isn't much to work with.
The Atari 800 was a much more sophisticated piece of hardware with support for many more sprites, tillable backgrounds, and a full text display. (Most programmers don't think about it these days, but there is no real-world difference between rendering text and rendering background tiles in a game. That's why backgrounds showed up in video games. Because they needed text displays!)
The Atari 2600 isn't that hard. It may be limited, but the 6502 is actually a pretty developer friendly architecture. Modern debuggers like the one in Stella can make the process pretty straightforward. (Though I would never dispute the challenges posed by cycle counting in an effort to get better graphics out of the system!)
If you want a real challenge, try programming the IBM PC in assembler sometime. As in the original systems from the early 80's. It won't take you long to start swearing at the stupid memory segments with their stupid memory models all focused on stupid interrupt calls that are stupidly undocumented! GAH! To add insult to injury, try 80286 protected mode. (Hint: It never actually worked.) For even more fun, try dealing with EMS and XMS memory using a DOS compiler. Yay! How fun! How wonderful! How challenging! And not in a good way!
Stupid PC. It's amazing that we let it become the dominant platform. (Though in the defense of us geeks, a modern PC does look a LOT different than those beasts of yore.)
Edsger Dijkstra once said, 'the use of Cobol cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense,'
Dijkstra was not known for being conservative in his statements of opinion. His "GOTO considered harmful" essay did a lot of good, but it also did quite a bit of damage. To the point where we ended up with a variety of "considered Harmful" Considered Harmful essays.
(I wonder if ""Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful is soon to follow? Oh wait. That already happened in '87.)
A more conservative viewing of COBOL would show that it held a useful place in history, but is now antiquated. You'd need to be extremely conservative to think that COBOL has a place for growth in the modern world.
...
Oh snap. We got another one.
In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year.
Let's be realistic here.
1. 1997 was 11 years ago 2. Everyone was preparing for Y2K 3. Those billions of lines of code were often replacing billions of lines of coded that were removed
As someone who once worked with mainframes, I can tell you that COBOL isn't dead. However, it's not exactly thriving, either. Legacy systems do their jobs well, so there is little reason to replace them. Instead, many companies use technologies like Java->CICS connectors to bridge the gap between old and new. But that doesn't mean that anyone is going to be developing "millions of lines of COBOL". Quite the opposite, in fact. Business moves more quickly today than in any period in history. And with business moving so quickly, companies find they need to develop new aspects to their businesses. Those new aspects often take the form of new opportunities to develop new software.
If anything, I think COBOL is still hanging on because the mindset for technology is still external facing. Remember the Dot Com Boom? Well, one of the side effects was that technology shifted from optimizing internal operations to interacting with customers directly. Which is not a bad thing, except that internal operations shouldn't be neglected. Thus I see a lot of companies with inefficient internal procedures because they have not invested in proper internal technology infrastructure. This has left a niche where old COBOL programs are nursed along despite a growing amount of manual work for employees at many companies.
Wouldn't it be nice if technology could solve their problems? Well, it can. All we need is someone to make the investment.
With the economy going bust at the moment, I have a feeling the pendulum is going to swing back the other way. Companies are going to need to tighten their belts and become more competitive on price. Which means that they need more efficient operations. With the massive advancements in technology and ensuring code quality in the last 10 years, I fully expect that companies will soon have systems every bit as solid as their COBOL mainframes. Except they will be designed with more rapid change and flexibility in mind.
I always read it more as "having been mugged they allowed fear to take over their lives, replacing their sense of justice with a more Machiavellian approach to the world."
I think that's a naive interpretation of the saying. In this case "mugged" tends to be a metaphor for "negative experience". A negative experience does sometimes teach people to be a little harsher.
I know I tried a hands-off approach with administrating a web forum for a quite a while, and quickly found that a few disruptive members were driving away all the actual contributors to the discussions. I tried being reasonable and applying polite warnings. I mean, we were all adults, right? The only thing that happened was that these users got good at skirting the edge of the rules. They'd cross the line regularly, but tried not to do enough to warrant a perma-ban. They got especially good at pushing the buttons of other users such that otherwise contributing members became part of the problem. Then these users were able to play a game of public appeal when the mods pointed a finger at them.
In the end, there was only one solution. I clamped down. I hated doing it, I really did. But I managed to drive those users out, keep careful controls on the direction of threads, and attract many of our lost users to return. The community came together and really helped the site(s) it supported to thrive after that. I initially got some blame for the bans, but most users ended up thankful after only a short period of time. (Which I honestly didn't expect.)
I eventually relaxed the controls a bit, but I still found I had to keep vigilant or else someone would show up to attempt to ruin the forums again.
What I'm getting at is that Republicans aren't always wrong in those respects. Sometimes control and structure ARE necessary. It's just difficult for them to always know when. There's a fairly good talk from a psychologist on TED TV who echos these thoughts.
On the flip-side, I think the recent issue over deregulation shows that Republicans do try to relax controls, sometimes with disastrous effects. Which simply reinforces their ideas of control and structure.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have that problem. Drove me bananas. The problem wasn't fixed until I got a new computer. I did find a slightly better solution than rebooting, though. I used to keep a CLI window up. If the mouse failed, I'd unload the USBHID kernel modules, then reload them. I don't remember which modules in specific, but it did provide relief without rebooting.
Unfortunately, this was a fairly common issue with the Linux kernel. There was little interest in fixing it at the time, so you may just need new hardware. (It's possible that the issue was ignored because it was caused by poor USB implementations. Which would hopefully mean that newer hardware is unaffected.)
According to TFA, the police replaced the camera equipment they swiped. I didn't see any mention in the article of them taking his computer. Only replacing "$1000 worth of camera equipment".
See, I was thinking of this movie.
(Bonus Question: What blockbuster flick of this summer did the director create?)
That's a pretty good article. And in fact, it's the first evidence (IMHO) that this rumor might be true. i.e. That Nintendo is running the show on a Blue Ocean timetable completely independent of their competition. Otherwise such an announcement wouldn't make a lick of sense.
FYI, Nintendo has officially responded to this rumor:
Hmm... playing close to their chest, aren't they?
I wouldn't count on this report being correct. Nintendo has had a pure cash cow with the Nintendo DS. Since it market does not appear to have slowed significantly or run into serious competition, why would they refresh the hardware? A few folks have suggested the iPhone as competition, but I don't see anyone purchasing iPhones as DS replacements. Instead, they appear to use their iPhone as a spectacular networked handset and the DS as a gaming platform. The market does not appear ready to confuse the two.
Perhaps the most damning evidence is that out of all these reports on a new DS, they all cite the same source: Nikkei Business Daily. No one has yet independently confirmed this. So take it with a very large grain of salt.
Calling the new DS "Gameboy DS" is incorrect. The GameBoy line of portables ended with the GameBoy Advance. The DS is known simply as the "Nintendo DS".
Sure. Imagine you're in a car showroom looking at a super-expensive car. It looks great and price is pretty good. So you tell the dealer you'll take the car. Except when you get in the car, you realize that someone had put a cardboard cutout in front of the car. The car you got in was actually an economy vehicle. Except now it's too late to undo your purchase!
Here's another one: Let's say you've got a bunch of buttons on your dash. Most of them control the radio, but one controls the ejection seat. While you're away, some neighbor kids from MIT think it's funny to come over and rewire the buttons on your radio. Now when you press the button to turn on your radio, you actually get ejected from the car. NOT FUNNY!
Better? :-P
It's about using IFRAMES + CSS to make confusing visual elements that cause users to perform actions they didn't think they were performing. Feel better? ;-)
Lynx and Links do not support IFrames, so they are not vulnerable. In fact, any browser not capable of advance CSS and/or IFrames is safe. Unfortunately, that's not very many browsers.
This is the correct answer. Salaried employees are hired to do a specific job, not work a particular number of hours. Thus it is at the discretion of the employer to decide whether or not that job is getting accomplished. If an employee manages to work only 2 hours a day but accomplishes more work than his 8-hour/day peers, why would an employer complain?
This aspect of being a salaried employee is actually codified in US law. (See: Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 for "exempt" employees) The law was configured for workers who may end up working odd hours or irregular hours or traveling for their employer. Since the job is much more complex than just "lift this item" or "cut this metal", charging on an hourly basis does not make sense.
Long story short? This is a non-story. If any employer believes that his employees performance is sub-par, he should take it up with the individual employees directly rather than concerning himself with the details of their personal internet surfing.
Punish you, obviously.
I hereby call on the power of grayskull to mod parent +5 Funny!
We'll see how you like that!
They don't, actually. Jones Day is a law firm. The only sites they want linking to them are the ones that say, "This is a good lawyer to hire." ANYTHING else has the potential to shed light on the details of their business. Since law practice is not always clean and pristine (as this article demonstrates), Jones day is likely to be unhappy about drawing attention to their practices.
Disclaimer: This post is an opinion and makes no factual statements. By reading this post you waive all rights to sue, counterclaim, issue official correspondence, or even look at AKAImBatman (User #238306) with a funny look on your face.
Jones Day(TM) is going to have to get in line. SCO has existing use claims on linking litigious bastards, based on their extensive use of the mark between 2002 through present.
It's too bad the legal system isn't more accessible to the common man or baseless suits with intent to crush or scare wouldn't get filed so often.
"You are about to submit a bad summary. The summary is bad. By clicking yes you are failing at Slashdot Darwin Test."
Doh!
For those of you just joining us, the article says nothing of the sort. The article actually says that they created fake "Application Error" dialogs with various numbers of "fake" aspects. e.g. The cursor turning to a hand over the "Ok" button, reverse colored text, browser borders, etc. Basically, stuff that should have made it obvious that these were malware windows. Nearly half of those tested "accepted" the dialogs to get them out of the way. Some of them simply minimized them for later.
The text referred to in the summary is an image created by Ars Technica with the caption, "Even this warning might not have helped".
I was gonna say, "Use a Mac".
Or Linux. Or Solaris. Or SOMETHING other than Windows.
It seems to me that Windows and Office are far too often the culprits of accidental leaks. Microsoft's strategy has always been one of convenience rather than security, so it's no surprise to me when these things happen. If you're looking for a decent home system, fine, use Windows. If you're going to use it as an employee workstation, be paranoid. But never, ever, ever deploy it to the production floor of anything!
Not that anyone is going to listen to me. I'm just going to keep seeing more blue screens on busses, trains, airplanes, ATMs, factory floors, and anywhere else it's actually important not to use Windows.
You know what's amazing? Every one of Microsoft's competitors runs on Windows too! Wow! Isn't that cool? I bet you had no idea! </sarcasm>
See, now I know you're astroturfing. That right there is a bit of market-speak designed by someone who knows the psychology of advertising. Very cute using apparent typos to make yourself look like "one of the guys". But riddle me this: Who makes a different class of typo with each Operating System listed? Shouldn't the typos be consistent? And who makes so many typos when listing OSes, only to spell out "Windows NT-based family" rather than using the more succinct "WinNT family"?
So, Mr. AC. You haven't been posing as dead people lately, have you? Maybe if you took the time to make a good browser you wouldn't need the astroturf campaign.
The 2600 only has TWO sprites. The missiles and the ball are 1-bit graphics and thus aren't really counted as "sprites". So there are 5 movable objects. Then there's the playfield. The playfield plots rather long lines (4 pixels per bit IIRC?) at fixed locations. Of course, there wasn't enough memory to store an extra 20 bits to fill the screen. That would be too easy. Instead, the [i]same bits[/i] were reused to draw the second half of the scanline. You could have the playfield repeat or you could have it mirror the bits. But if you wanted to actually have a full-width playfield, you had to "race the beam".
And by "race the beam" I mean that you would time the processor cycles just right so that you would replace the bits in the registers immediately after they were written to the screen. Since you were working with only 2 1/2 bytes, and you could only write a full byte, that became somewhat challenging. Especially since the 6507 CPU was clocked at 1/3 the speed of the TIA chip. For every three pixels plotted, you'd get one CPU cycle. To add insult to injury, even the shortest instruction still used 2 CPU cycles. And God help you if you crossed a page boundary while reading or writing memory. The extra cycle you incurred would be enough to throw off the entire program and cause nothing but garbage to get written to the screen!
Making things even more difficult was the way you moved sprites around. There was no way to say "show this sprite at location X". Instead, you had to use one scanline to mark the approximate pixel location of the sprite (remember, 3 cycles per CPU clock), then use the location counter function to advance the position forward or retard it backward by a few pixels. And by a few, I mean 0-3.
As a result, you had to become a master at timing everything. You counted the cycles, you watched the memory locations, and you figured out how to beat the machine at its own game. Which (oddly enough) is more or less how the system was designed to be used. By the end of the 2600's lifetime, developers had pulled incredible graphics out of the system. Some were done with the assistance of special cart hardware, but most of it was simply the ingenuity of the developers.
It was an improvement as our programs became more memory strapped. That didn't mean that they weren't a bear to program. Heck, they were a bear to use! No one remembers it anymore, but we used to have to create boot disks for nearly every game just to get all the necessary drivers loaded while simultaneously leaving enough low-mem to run the program. It actually got to the point where I was putting a boot disk in the box of each game I purchased.
DOS Extenders did eventually get good enough to where the game effectively loaded its own Operating System. After that, you didn't care how much low memory there was. But man, was getting there ever a pain!
An excellent post, sir. I salute you. Mod parent up.
You know what I can't believe? I can't believe this crap got modded up. Talk about a disingenuous argument if I ever saw one.
Call me when:
If Microsoft did even HALF of that you could act all high and mighty. But from where I stand, you're just another Microsoft shill. Be gone!!!
I believe mikael intends to refer to Atari 2600 BASIC. It was limited to 9 characters per line and that only worked because it flickered like mad. Crazy, crazy idea. The 2600 simply didn't have enough hardware to generate a text display, even if we assume that cartridges could use superchips for an extra 128 bytes of memory. 2 sprites per scanline just isn't much to work with.
The Atari 800 was a much more sophisticated piece of hardware with support for many more sprites, tillable backgrounds, and a full text display. (Most programmers don't think about it these days, but there is no real-world difference between rendering text and rendering background tiles in a game. That's why backgrounds showed up in video games. Because they needed text displays!)
The Atari 2600 isn't that hard. It may be limited, but the 6502 is actually a pretty developer friendly architecture. Modern debuggers like the one in Stella can make the process pretty straightforward. (Though I would never dispute the challenges posed by cycle counting in an effort to get better graphics out of the system!)
If you want a real challenge, try programming the IBM PC in assembler sometime. As in the original systems from the early 80's. It won't take you long to start swearing at the stupid memory segments with their stupid memory models all focused on stupid interrupt calls that are stupidly undocumented! GAH! To add insult to injury, try 80286 protected mode. (Hint: It never actually worked.) For even more fun, try dealing with EMS and XMS memory using a DOS compiler. Yay! How fun! How wonderful! How challenging! And not in a good way!
Stupid PC. It's amazing that we let it become the dominant platform. (Though in the defense of us geeks, a modern PC does look a LOT different than those beasts of yore.)
Dijkstra was not known for being conservative in his statements of opinion. His "GOTO considered harmful" essay did a lot of good, but it also did quite a bit of damage. To the point where we ended up with a variety of "considered Harmful" Considered Harmful essays.
(I wonder if ""Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful is soon to follow? Oh wait. That already happened in '87.)
A more conservative viewing of COBOL would show that it held a useful place in history, but is now antiquated. You'd need to be extremely conservative to think that COBOL has a place for growth in the modern world.
Oh snap. We got another one.
Let's be realistic here.
1. 1997 was 11 years ago
2. Everyone was preparing for Y2K
3. Those billions of lines of code were often replacing billions of lines of coded that were removed
As someone who once worked with mainframes, I can tell you that COBOL isn't dead. However, it's not exactly thriving, either. Legacy systems do their jobs well, so there is little reason to replace them. Instead, many companies use technologies like Java->CICS connectors to bridge the gap between old and new. But that doesn't mean that anyone is going to be developing "millions of lines of COBOL".
Quite the opposite, in fact. Business moves more quickly today than in any period in history. And with business moving so quickly, companies find they need to develop new aspects to their businesses. Those new aspects often take the form of new opportunities to develop new software.
If anything, I think COBOL is still hanging on because the mindset for technology is still external facing. Remember the Dot Com Boom? Well, one of the side effects was that technology shifted from optimizing internal operations to interacting with customers directly. Which is not a bad thing, except that internal operations shouldn't be neglected. Thus I see a lot of companies with inefficient internal procedures because they have not invested in proper internal technology infrastructure. This has left a niche where old COBOL programs are nursed along despite a growing amount of manual work for employees at many companies.
Wouldn't it be nice if technology could solve their problems? Well, it can. All we need is someone to make the investment.
With the economy going bust at the moment, I have a feeling the pendulum is going to swing back the other way. Companies are going to need to tighten their belts and become more competitive on price. Which means that they need more efficient operations. With the massive advancements in technology and ensuring code quality in the last 10 years, I fully expect that companies will soon have systems every bit as solid as their COBOL mainframes. Except they will be designed with more rapid change and flexibility in mind.
I think that's a naive interpretation of the saying. In this case "mugged" tends to be a metaphor for "negative experience". A negative experience does sometimes teach people to be a little harsher.
I know I tried a hands-off approach with administrating a web forum for a quite a while, and quickly found that a few disruptive members were driving away all the actual contributors to the discussions. I tried being reasonable and applying polite warnings. I mean, we were all adults, right? The only thing that happened was that these users got good at skirting the edge of the rules. They'd cross the line regularly, but tried not to do enough to warrant a perma-ban. They got especially good at pushing the buttons of other users such that otherwise contributing members became part of the problem. Then these users were able to play a game of public appeal when the mods pointed a finger at them.
In the end, there was only one solution. I clamped down. I hated doing it, I really did. But I managed to drive those users out, keep careful controls on the direction of threads, and attract many of our lost users to return. The community came together and really helped the site(s) it supported to thrive after that. I initially got some blame for the bans, but most users ended up thankful after only a short period of time. (Which I honestly didn't expect.)
I eventually relaxed the controls a bit, but I still found I had to keep vigilant or else someone would show up to attempt to ruin the forums again.
What I'm getting at is that Republicans aren't always wrong in those respects. Sometimes control and structure ARE necessary. It's just difficult for them to always know when. There's a fairly good talk from a psychologist on TED TV who echos these thoughts.
On the flip-side, I think the recent issue over deregulation shows that Republicans do try to relax controls, sometimes with disastrous effects. Which simply reinforces their ideas of control and structure.