Because a LOT of people use Facebook authentication for OTHER websites, if one of them happens to be an e-commerce site you can then use their saved credit card details to buy stuffs, or stalk them etc.
The "famous poem" which was surely written by someone "special" was written in 2001. And it describes a human using a lawnmower and he kills a hedgehog. So now we have automated lawn mowers and they are doing the same thing. Why is this even news?
Anyone here ever eaten one? A hedgehog I mean, not an automated lawn mower. Wonder what they taste like?
I would say your data processing department didn't consider your report a high priority and it got shifted down the list of other shit they had to work on. It probably only took a couple hours to write in COBOL, same as in Pascal, but they only GOT to it 6 months later.
Change control can also be a pain in the ass (if they actually had any) where my wife works a small change means 3 weeks of waiting for change control approval.
Their release schedule might be 6 months as well, where my sister works they only release twice a year, unless it's an emergency bug fix.
Either that or they are a useless bunch of twats, the time taken has fuckall to do with the language it was written in.
Oh yeah, and the way it looped backwards was interesting to see in the COBOL generated, definitely not efficient, you used it with caution. But at the time to do it in COBOL would have been almost as bad, it was not designed for that (at the time). I think sometimes it's like looking at the queries the Entity Framework for MS creates when generating SQL queries, sometimes I just lean back and think "WTF is that?"
It's called XGEN - ok, tried to find a link to it and came up with lots of other crap. It WAS called XGEN, and when I first started working as a programmer, we used that. It was a 4GL language that would generate COBOL code. I liked it, and was sad when they retired it and we ended up with all this generated COBOL code to maintain. Flags fucken everywhere, it was a mess for humans to maintain. So they tried to clean it up and replace it with more human readable / maintainable code, and that was better, but still a mess. So it was decided to rewrite the whole thing in non generated COBOL - written by programmers. So they hired a plane load of Indians and got them a long term place to stay, the project was supposed to last 2 years, by the first year they were six months behind. Politics had changed, the cost had just gone way up and the project was cancelled. So we still had to maintain the generated (and slightly cleaned) code base. We eventually just start rewriting sections to make it more readable, logged it to "Code Maintenance".
The only issue I had with XGEN was sometimes you would miss a delimiter for an if or whatever, and it would give you a thousand COBOL errors when it tried to compile the XGEN to COBOL, trying to fucking find that missing delimiter was a pain in the ass.
If you think the daily calculation of interest for your savings account or home loan is "little" then you have no real understanding of the complexities involved. When I was still working for a bank one of my work colleagues was tasked with finding a 0.5 discrepancy in general ledger program. He eventually printed it out, it took a ream of paper, and he printed double sided and with as small a font as he could use and still read it. Granted, it was one of the larger programs in use, but still. You print out 99% of programs today (without supporting libraries) and it won't use up a ream of paper. That was his only work task for over a year, find the discrepancy and fix it. He printed it out so he could staple a dog's leash on it and drag it around behind him when he went for coffee. Eventually he hung a porcelain pig with feathers from the air vent in his office and stuck a half cent in it's mouth (not sure where he got the half cent - it's been out of circulation for ages) and told anyone who asked WTF that when pigs fly he will find the half cent. He broke over 3 keyboards by pounding the shit out of them, it was probably more, we stopped counting, but there were always little keyboard keys scattered around his office. Eventually he resigned and his manager / team lead took over the bug hunt, keep in mind that he wasn't the first person to attempt to find the bug. AFAIK they never found it, and each month they have to do a manual transaction to get the general ledger to balance. I worked there for almost 10 years, luckily by that time I had moved to front end, so the bug wasn't dropped on my desk.
Insurance companies too, I know of at least of logistics system running a large retailers order and payment system that is written in COBOL - I know this because my sister works there (yes she is a COBOL programmer). They have just finished a big update to the system so that it handles the automatic loading of trucks as well. Each distribution center has it's own mainframe, and when they open up more, they buy a mainframe for it. So COBOL is definitely not dead, neither are mainframes, it's just a LOT quieter than other IT industries, probably because of the stigma attached to the language, they don't want to admit working with it around non COBOL developers.
Erm, yeah are SO wrong there it's not funny. Just because you worked for a bank on their software systems that didn't interface directly with COBOL does not mean it does not exist, it just means you probably worked on a lot of their web pages. I would also bet money on the fact that somewhere in that suite of libraries you had to call to get data etc. there is a call to a COBOL mainframe, it was just wrapped up in a class you were handed to do the communication for you. Just because you didn't have to work with it directly does not mean it no longer exists, or is not still in use.
I've worked for (or with) 4 of our major banks and the settlement and clearing house in our country, they ALL use COBOL in the backend. Nice GUI front end (or web) but in the back doing the heavy lifting - is COBOL.
because people are too chicken shit or incapable of moving away from it
Wrong! COBOL is still around because there are millions of lines of it running, to rewrite that into xyz language would take YEARS and cost BILLIONS. I don't think you realize exactly how much code is running the worlds financial institutions, and how thoroughly it gets tested before going live. Don't even get me started on the cost of replacing a mainframe with a server room full of servers, but then modern mainframes can actually run Linux VM's, so technically they could still carry on using their mainframes. One other reason it's still so much in use is that an IBM mainframe is fucking stable, you don't need to reboot for AGES,. What bank in their right mind would fork up money (and a LOT of it) to replace something that works 100% and is rock solid stable for something that keeps falling over and needs a restart?
It fell out of favor for a reason, don't glorify it.
It fell out of favor because it's boring fucking work, I started out in COBOL after 4 years I was bored out of my mind and moved to front end development.
It hangs around frankly because government regulation is used to stifle innovation in the space where it dominates.
I don't know where you live, but my government is not mandating that ANY financial institution HAS to use COBOL, yes there are regulations etc. but that is more to do with how you store sensitive data, how long you have to store it etc. etc.
One thing I miss about COBOL was how it handles splitting up strings. Works like a charm, and was probably your biggest problem when trying to communicate with a COBOL program on a mainframe. It's literally built into the language, to split up a string all you have to do is define it segments in your working storage, drop the string into the 01 level and it automagically slices and dices the string into it's component parts and will even cast the string into the relevant data format (numbers etc.) No other code is required, and yes, one of the front end programs I worked on had to talk to a COBOL program (several actually) on a mainframe.
I didn't actually read the article, but I hope they also have a cordless controller, didn't count the amount of times someone tripped over the damn cord and shit went flying across the room, but it was a LOT.
FFS, let me help you out a bit concerning your apparent lack of understanding the difference between there and their
They're is short for they are.
Their shows possession. It's just like my, his, her, and our. There is a place. It's similar to here.
So your
The only thing harmed is there feelings, which cost them nothing to change.
Should have been... The only thing harmed is their feelings, which cost them nothing to change.
Also have you seen how much a psychologist costs? People's emotions or "feelings" are not controlled by dip switches, the next time your wife gets upset about something just tell her she's being silly, and she should just "change her feelings" and then find a good divorce lawyer.
Exactly, I would happily change places with a insert soul crushing job here to get paid that much money. I think I can survive long enough to retire early (and live modestly). More time with my family, more time with my myriad hobbies, where do I sign up?
I would play the fucking SIMS everyday if someone paid me that much money, fuck I would play any fucking game you wanted me to, and I wouldn't whine like a bitch about it. The problem with these twats is they are NOT saving the money. I bet they are living the high life, flying all over the place, buying shit they don't need.
Brad Pitt quote time - "We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like."
Anyways, not entirely relevant (they have the money) but you get the idea. Fuck, now I feel like watching that movie again. The point being is if that it was so soul crushing to play the same game everyday, then save up some money, invest it in property or buy up a business or twelve and fucking stop playing the game. When you are getting paid that well to play a game the whole day, and then whine about it, I don't feel ANY empathy for you, I feel like you landed with your pimply ass in the butter and are complaining that's its a tad cold.
Mark my words, the internet is a fickle place (actually the whole fucking planet, but the internet is a concentrator of fickle) save that money now, all it takes is one stupid comment about something that is taken out of context or simply a silly thing to say and all your monthly income is going to evaporate. I am sure your CV will look super attractive when all you have on it is "I played games all day". Also fortnite might be shit hot now, but new games come out all the time, when the next big hit comes out and the public all get interested in that instead of fortnite your revenue stream is going to drop drastically, and then it's a question of whether you can keep your fan base while you transition to the next big hit of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
It's spelt "gruel" by the way, but I get the idea. WTF was the "lock her up" crap about?
Because a LOT of people use Facebook authentication for OTHER websites, if one of them happens to be an e-commerce site you can then use their saved credit card details to buy stuffs, or stalk them etc.
Or lately "Software Engineer" which I think is insulting to actual engineers.
I actually just read TFA and watched the video, didn't see any doors getting blown off?
The "famous poem" which was surely written by someone "special" was written in 2001. And it describes a human using a lawnmower and he kills a hedgehog. So now we have automated lawn mowers and they are doing the same thing. Why is this even news?
Anyone here ever eaten one? A hedgehog I mean, not an automated lawn mower. Wonder what they taste like?
Or just go backwards and forwards a couple times to turn said creature into a nice red smear that will fertilize the lawn?
Erm, none - granted it could have been written better, but perhaps the problem is that you suck at English?
Sorry, replied to the wrong post, please ignore.
Erm, none - granted it could have been written better, but maybe you just suck at English.
I would say your data processing department didn't consider your report a high priority and it got shifted down the list of other shit they had to work on. It probably only took a couple hours to write in COBOL, same as in Pascal, but they only GOT to it 6 months later.
Change control can also be a pain in the ass (if they actually had any) where my wife works a small change means 3 weeks of waiting for change control approval.
Their release schedule might be 6 months as well, where my sister works they only release twice a year, unless it's an emergency bug fix.
Either that or they are a useless bunch of twats, the time taken has fuckall to do with the language it was written in.
Oh yeah, and the way it looped backwards was interesting to see in the COBOL generated, definitely not efficient, you used it with caution. But at the time to do it in COBOL would have been almost as bad, it was not designed for that (at the time). I think sometimes it's like looking at the queries the Entity Framework for MS creates when generating SQL queries, sometimes I just lean back and think "WTF is that?"
It's called XGEN - ok, tried to find a link to it and came up with lots of other crap. It WAS called XGEN, and when I first started working as a programmer, we used that. It was a 4GL language that would generate COBOL code. I liked it, and was sad when they retired it and we ended up with all this generated COBOL code to maintain. Flags fucken everywhere, it was a mess for humans to maintain. So they tried to clean it up and replace it with more human readable / maintainable code, and that was better, but still a mess. So it was decided to rewrite the whole thing in non generated COBOL - written by programmers. So they hired a plane load of Indians and got them a long term place to stay, the project was supposed to last 2 years, by the first year they were six months behind. Politics had changed, the cost had just gone way up and the project was cancelled. So we still had to maintain the generated (and slightly cleaned) code base. We eventually just start rewriting sections to make it more readable, logged it to "Code Maintenance".
The only issue I had with XGEN was sometimes you would miss a delimiter for an if or whatever, and it would give you a thousand COBOL errors when it tried to compile the XGEN to COBOL, trying to fucking find that missing delimiter was a pain in the ass.
If you think the daily calculation of interest for your savings account or home loan is "little" then you have no real understanding of the complexities involved.
When I was still working for a bank one of my work colleagues was tasked with finding a 0.5 discrepancy in general ledger program. He eventually printed it out, it took a ream of paper, and he printed double sided and with as small a font as he could use and still read it. Granted, it was one of the larger programs in use, but still. You print out 99% of programs today (without supporting libraries) and it won't use up a ream of paper. That was his only work task for over a year, find the discrepancy and fix it. He printed it out so he could staple a dog's leash on it and drag it around behind him when he went for coffee. Eventually he hung a porcelain pig with feathers from the air vent in his office and stuck a half cent in it's mouth (not sure where he got the half cent - it's been out of circulation for ages) and told anyone who asked WTF that when pigs fly he will find the half cent. He broke over 3 keyboards by pounding the shit out of them, it was probably more, we stopped counting, but there were always little keyboard keys scattered around his office. Eventually he resigned and his manager / team lead took over the bug hunt, keep in mind that he wasn't the first person to attempt to find the bug. AFAIK they never found it, and each month they have to do a manual transaction to get the general ledger to balance. I worked there for almost 10 years, luckily by that time I had moved to front end, so the bug wasn't dropped on my desk.
Perhaps, but when you slit your wrists at the thought of going to work on a Monday morning, the right price will mean little.
Insurance companies too, I know of at least of logistics system running a large retailers order and payment system that is written in COBOL - I know this because my sister works there (yes she is a COBOL programmer). They have just finished a big update to the system so that it handles the automatic loading of trucks as well. Each distribution center has it's own mainframe, and when they open up more, they buy a mainframe for it. So COBOL is definitely not dead, neither are mainframes, it's just a LOT quieter than other IT industries, probably because of the stigma attached to the language, they don't want to admit working with it around non COBOL developers.
Erm, yeah are SO wrong there it's not funny. Just because you worked for a bank on their software systems that didn't interface directly with COBOL does not mean it does not exist, it just means you probably worked on a lot of their web pages. I would also bet money on the fact that somewhere in that suite of libraries you had to call to get data etc. there is a call to a COBOL mainframe, it was just wrapped up in a class you were handed to do the communication for you. Just because you didn't have to work with it directly does not mean it no longer exists, or is not still in use.
I've worked for (or with) 4 of our major banks and the settlement and clearing house in our country, they ALL use COBOL in the backend. Nice GUI front end (or web) but in the back doing the heavy lifting - is COBOL.
Wrong! COBOL is still around because there are millions of lines of it running, to rewrite that into xyz language would take YEARS and cost BILLIONS. I don't think you realize exactly how much code is running the worlds financial institutions, and how thoroughly it gets tested before going live. Don't even get me started on the cost of replacing a mainframe with a server room full of servers, but then modern mainframes can actually run Linux VM's, so technically they could still carry on using their mainframes. One other reason it's still so much in use is that an IBM mainframe is fucking stable, you don't need to reboot for AGES,. What bank in their right mind would fork up money (and a LOT of it) to replace something that works 100% and is rock solid stable for something that keeps falling over and needs a restart?
It fell out of favor because it's boring fucking work, I started out in COBOL after 4 years I was bored out of my mind and moved to front end development.
I don't know where you live, but my government is not mandating that ANY financial institution HAS to use COBOL, yes there are regulations etc. but that is more to do with how you store sensitive data, how long you have to store it etc. etc.
One thing I miss about COBOL was how it handles splitting up strings. Works like a charm, and was probably your biggest problem when trying to communicate with a COBOL program on a mainframe. It's literally built into the language, to split up a string all you have to do is define it segments in your working storage, drop the string into the 01 level and it automagically slices and dices the string into it's component parts and will even cast the string into the relevant data format (numbers etc.) No other code is required, and yes, one of the front end programs I worked on had to talk to a COBOL program (several actually) on a mainframe.
I didn't actually read the article, but I hope they also have a cordless controller, didn't count the amount of times someone tripped over the damn cord and shit went flying across the room, but it was a LOT.
Yes, there was, first time I ever played it was on the PS1.
+1 Mod
I actually laughed out loud at that one.
No element left behind!
So your
Should have been...
The only thing harmed is their feelings, which cost them nothing to change.
Also have you seen how much a psychologist costs? People's emotions or "feelings" are not controlled by dip switches, the next time your wife gets upset about something just tell her she's being silly, and she should just "change her feelings" and then find a good divorce lawyer.
I actually laughed out loud, please mod this gentleman up.
Exactly, I would happily change places with a insert soul crushing job here to get paid that much money. I think I can survive long enough to retire early (and live modestly). More time with my family, more time with my myriad hobbies, where do I sign up?
I would play the fucking SIMS everyday if someone paid me that much money, fuck I would play any fucking game you wanted me to, and I wouldn't whine like a bitch about it. The problem with these twats is they are NOT saving the money. I bet they are living the high life, flying all over the place, buying shit they don't need.
Brad Pitt quote time - "We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like."
Anyways, not entirely relevant (they have the money) but you get the idea. Fuck, now I feel like watching that movie again. The point being is if that it was so soul crushing to play the same game everyday, then save up some money, invest it in property or buy up a business or twelve and fucking stop playing the game. When you are getting paid that well to play a game the whole day, and then whine about it, I don't feel ANY empathy for you, I feel like you landed with your pimply ass in the butter and are complaining that's its a tad cold.
Mark my words, the internet is a fickle place (actually the whole fucking planet, but the internet is a concentrator of fickle) save that money now, all it takes is one stupid comment about something that is taken out of context or simply a silly thing to say and all your monthly income is going to evaporate. I am sure your CV will look super attractive when all you have on it is "I played games all day". Also fortnite might be shit hot now, but new games come out all the time, when the next big hit comes out and the public all get interested in that instead of fortnite your revenue stream is going to drop drastically, and then it's a question of whether you can keep your fan base while you transition to the next big hit of the year.