When I worked as a contractor for the state of California IBM was making a *lot* of cash off of Z/OS and their mainframe. My project alone threw a couple hundred thousand dollars their way for a new processor and zip card. This was a small fraction of the total money that the bureau I worked under threw their way.
Oh, and the DMV modernization project? That was upgrading the assembler code to COBOL on Z/OS. I'm sure a couple million in new mainframe hardware was purchased.
Maybe it's small potatoes but it sure seemed like IBM was getting a good deal of cash from the state of California for antiquated hardware.
I would look into any companies that are doing it work for the health care industry. That's one of the few businesses that seems to be picking up in todays economy. IT is doing better than most other industries, but not well. Health care is doing really well. Combine that with IT and you are upping your chances for success.
I'd research any emerging or existing standards for digital health care records, and pursue the companies behind the standards. Many open standards also have group meetings that you may be able to attend. Although the meetings may be boring, networking opportunities can be key. Good luck!
I was in Ecuador in '05 and the price of gas was over $3/litre. Yeah, that's well over $10 per gallon. Oh, and the average yearly income was on the along the lines of $3K. Needless to say, there weren't a lot of people driving. Oh, and the military was doing exercises right next to an oil pipeline that was supposedly pulling fuel to send to the US.
Yeah, we all thought something was wrong with the picture too....
That AS/400 you mentioned may be newer than the mainframe we are using here on my current engagement with the State of California.
We're working on a simple Java app built on top of DB2 and WAS on Z/OS. A ten user load test and people a few rows over start shouting, "What the $%^&$ is going on with the mainframe?"
So yeah, do you mind if I borrow the AS/400 box and all the Apple IIe's you can spare? We obviously need the extra horsepower.
I used to think the same way, code was code. But you overlook one thing. The environment matters. And what environment does the COBOL guy coding for the state of California use? The good ole' green screen. Actually, it has been modernized, now it supports five colors. You are working on a mainframe with an editor that makes vi look modern, a file system without the ability to make files read-only, and no, I repeat no semblance of source control. How do I know all this? I am a contractor for the state and one of the COBOL guys sits right across from me.
Our biggest problem lately is the fact that the JCL code on the mainframe keeps getting accidentally changed. There is no way to lock it, no accountability for changes. There is absolutely no way to ensure that when we go into production that the code we tested is the code being executed.
Most folks writing COBOL aren't working directly on a PC, they are working on the mainframe which comes with a whole host of issues. The mainframe is good for certain tasks but as an enterprise development platform is rather lacking in facilities that many consider the norm.
Yes, these "sweatshop workers" did decided to work for Apple according to their own free will but the expectation was there that Apple would follow the law and pay them overtime if they were not managers. I suspect that the law was not followed, as has been the general practice at most software development shops.
This issue was so rampant in the late 90's early 00's that when interviewing for a "permanent" position I used to always ask what the expected hours were. When it came to salary negotiations I used to say this is my yearly rate is for a 40 hour work week. If the typical week goes long that is fine, just let me know up front and I will adjust my rate accordingly. This caught a few folks off guard but hey, the expectation was set incase the issue came up later.
Developer: "Lets see.... How long has SOA been around? The trick is to cover the entire time that SOA has been around without going way over the mark. By the way, I can say that because SOA is just a buzz word for executive types, it really means desiging a good enterprise wide API on top of a highly interoperable transport. I've been working on systems like that for years, well before the SOA buzz word became popular. So lets see... perhaps three years?"
This was the exact conversation I had today. You hit the nail on the head. I remember seeing recs looking for Java developers with ten years of experience when the language had only been around for five. Luckily the market was so good at the time I could just ignore those positions and investigate others.
Or it's possible that no state worker wants to make a change to the payroll system to lower their own pay, nevermind the pay for everyone in the state.
Even if they hire contractors to make the change, what state employees are going to work with them?
You may not be correct. It may be VSAM files. Try changing those is batch.
I'm currently working as a J2EE Architect/Developer for the state of California on a different project. After reading this story I approached our main COBOL guy on the team (also happens to be good at J2EE systems, he actually manages the dev team) and asked him about this. He seemed to think that the values for employee salaries may not be in a database. My response was, "Wow".
We are currently replacing a system that is COBOL build on top of ADABAS. This system is under ten years old. Why was it built with those technologies? That's what people around here know and the budget was pretty small. Again, "Wow".
The California DMV is currently redoing their antiquated system. It is written is assembler. They are updating it to COBOL. So I know that DMV has snatched up many of the COBOL developers in Sacramento.
Although the project I'm working on is written as Java batch jobs and a webapp deployed on WebSphere, it has a requirement that everything must run on the mainframe. The mainframe is way overused and cannot handle the load but for some reason (and the managers on the project won't tell us who controls this) we cannot deploy onto any system other than the mainframe. We estimate that with about $20K - $40K in UNIX boxes we could easily have enough performance for the production system. If that number seems high to your then please note that the project is burning through around $422K/month in development costs. But no, we'll finish performance testing and realize that we need more processing power and end up spending $124K minimum to get the second ZAP processor enabled (the hardware is installed, IBM just left it disabled until we come up with the $$$) or we'll end up purchasing another general purpose processor for about half a million.
Why all the rambling? To give others an idea of what the development world is like in the state of California. It's been an interesting lesson is scope, scale, and the cost of legacy systems.
Spring and Hibernate came out over five years shifting momentum away from EJB's, which was why most folks were using Weblogic. And JBoss had stolen a lot of BEA's momentum even before that.
So yeah, your statement about J2EE would be dead on if this was 2000-2001.
I would guess that most folks who work at a library aren't that concerned with theft. In fact, they would probably find joy in the fact that someone wanted to read so badly that they were willing to try and steal books.
and one I have not yet solved. For a while I had an office with others and that was good, but I found myself working from home a lot of the time. Now that I'm using the flexibility to my advantage and am moving around the country a bit in order to make my recreation time easier I still find that I miss the personal interaction. My advice to others in similar situations or to people thinking of telecommuting is to make sure that you at least have someone else to work with online.
Going to a coffee shop is nice but what I often find that I need is someone who will understand what I'm talking about, even if they aren't right there.
"I've just finished my light weight persistence framework for my first SWT app and I'm really happy that I found a good balance between a pure OO approach and using the Composite pattern to allow for a smart cache....blah blah blah blah"
The cute girl at the coffee shop just nods and says, "Would you like whipped cream on your mocha?"
I've had the same Alienware laptop at several companies and the little glowing alien has never been an issue. The laptop is great, it's really fast an really stable. I needed the horsepower for heavy development so a gaming laptop is ideal.
I even gave two presentations to the Atlanta Java User's Group with this laptop. It never seemed "unprofessional". Some folks thought it was cool.
I'm a 31 year old developer, I'm not worried about people thinking that I'm a "gamer". My work is good, it speaks for it's self. Who cares about the gimics, it's a nice piece of hardware.
We played with cornstarch and water when I was in school too. The teacher called it Oobleck. It was our job to scientifically test the substance and try to determine what it was. That's exactly what I thought about when I read this article.
It was really cool, it was gooey and would flow easily. They we would slam it down on a desk and it would crack, then flow back together. I'm not sure what would cause these properties, do we have a chemist in the house who would care to explain?
I drink decaf coffee BECAUSE it has caffeine in it. It has a little bit, just enough to pick up my system. I regular cup of coffee leaves me jittery and sometimes tanks my blood sugar. A cup of decaf picks me up and makes me more alert without the jitters and more importantly decaf doesn't mung up my blood sugar.
Lots of people would love a dual core laptop. I love my hyperthreaded Alienware laptop for development but would like to be back on OS X (my former laptop was a mac that was stolen so I replaced it with a used Alienware which gave me more bang for my buck). Not having a dual core or at least hyperthreaded chip in the new apple notebook is one big reason that I *would not* consider switching. I value OS X and appreciate the useful applications and high level of integration between the applications available on the Mac platform but I am a developer and raw horsepower matters, plain and simple. Right now this used Alienware kicks $@%*$& but I would love to transition to a Mac even if I had to pay a few bucks more.
I paid $2000 for the Alienware laptop. Right now it just doesn't make sense to pay about $2500 for a slower box. I would pay $2500 for a faster one though.
I understand you point about battery life but I think that problem can be solved with smart power management. Give me the horsepower when I have the box plugged in and step it down when there is no external juice. Why not have the best of both worlds? We have the technology.
And with both of these systems once you do the work of putting lot's of content in there is no way to easily extract it, meaning that all the content you loaded is locked into their product.
Nice, huh?
Yes, professors should keep local copies of all coursework organized properly. And everyone should keep a back up of all the numbers in their cell phone.
Which I (as well as many other posters) believe is a bad idea, it could be rather difficult to pin down who it was.
Yes, it is easy to go through the version control system and find out who comitted the offending line when. But it's not often one line of code that does it. What if someone adds a line of code that breaks someone else's function due to a side effect? Who get's blamed there? And what about the developer who reviewed the code? And the QA engineer who didn't test it in a proper production environment? And the manager who didn't approve QA's budget for a perfect mirror of a production environment? And on and on....
It's easy to say "let's blame the bad developer" but software is often not written by just one person and identifying the responsible party might not be that easy. Even if it was a good idea in the first place.....
Now as far as holding the companies liable, I kinda like that. Software prices will go up but perhaps companies will stop cutting corners and focus more on quality.
I agree. If you really want to hide your communications, just roll your own communications programs and/or roll your own encryption. Although you might not create the strongest encryption scheme for the "law enforcement" folks to spy on you they have to federally funded script kiddies. I'm sure they have scripts to crack main stream encryptions. If you were one of "them" wouldn't you just go after the low hanging fruit first?
It's kinda like the car alarm theory, your alarm doesn't have to prevent the vehicle from being stolen, it just has to make it sufficiently difficult so the thief doesn't want to bother.
[quote] Dr. Jusdakinaenen explains that for a population of 23 persian rabbits, 2 developed leukemia after spending 72 hours in a centrifuge while a cell phone was being operated in a room at least 20m (20.3 yards) away. I find that is very significant.
I find it a lot more significant that someone put rabits in a certrifuge.
WTF?!?!?! That's like making biodiesel out of cats.
Is there something I'm missing here?
And what is to prevent spammers from voting their own sites as relevant?
Automating the process?
From various IPs?
Google Engineer: "I'm not sure how www.happyharryslinkfarm.com got such a high user ranking, all it does is contain a bunch of seemingly unrelated links to a bunch of other sites. Hmmmmmm....."
select... from BID B inner join ITEM I on B.ITEM_ID = I.ITEM_ID inner join CATEGORY C on
I.CATEGORY_ID = C.CATEGORY_ID inner join BID SB on
I.SUCCESSFUL_BID_ID = SB.BID_ID where C.NAME like 'Laptop%' and SB.AMOUNT > 100
than this:
from Bid bid join bid.item item where item.category.name like 'Laptop%' and item.successfulBid.amount > 100
Your call.
You do have a point about the schema being the noun but that doesn't really fly in a multi-tier system. You could easily argue that a single tier system is the best approach, thereby using the schema as a noun. There are serious benifits to this but I haven't seen a system that provides the necessary front end technology straight on top of a database. Although I dissagree with you I do like the lines that you seem to be thinking along.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say half the price, closer to 50%. I just priced out a reasonable Volt vs. a reasonable Prius:
Volt: $41K
Prius $28K
Doesn't seem worth it even if the Volt is a better car.
When I worked as a contractor for the state of California IBM was making a *lot* of cash off of Z/OS and their mainframe. My project alone threw a couple hundred thousand dollars their way for a new processor and zip card. This was a small fraction of the total money that the bureau I worked under threw their way.
Oh, and the DMV modernization project? That was upgrading the assembler code to COBOL on Z/OS. I'm sure a couple million in new mainframe hardware was purchased.
Maybe it's small potatoes but it sure seemed like IBM was getting a good deal of cash from the state of California for antiquated hardware.
I would look into any companies that are doing it work for the health care industry. That's one of the few businesses that seems to be picking up in todays economy. IT is doing better than most other industries, but not well. Health care is doing really well. Combine that with IT and you are upping your chances for success.
I'd research any emerging or existing standards for digital health care records, and pursue the companies behind the standards. Many open standards also have group meetings that you may be able to attend. Although the meetings may be boring, networking opportunities can be key.
Good luck!
I was in Ecuador in '05 and the price of gas was over $3/litre. Yeah, that's well over $10 per gallon. Oh, and the average yearly income was on the along the lines of $3K. Needless to say, there weren't a lot of people driving. Oh, and the military was doing exercises right next to an oil pipeline that was supposedly pulling fuel to send to the US.
Yeah, we all thought something was wrong with the picture too....
So where again was this $1/gallon gas?
That AS/400 you mentioned may be newer than the mainframe we are using here on my current engagement with the State of California.
We're working on a simple Java app built on top of DB2 and WAS on Z/OS. A ten user load test and people a few rows over start shouting, "What the $%^&$ is going on with the mainframe?"
So yeah, do you mind if I borrow the AS/400 box and all the Apple IIe's you can spare? We obviously need the extra horsepower.
Wow, you sound just like Paris.
I used to think the same way, code was code. But you overlook one thing. The environment matters. And what environment does the COBOL guy coding for the state of California use? The good ole' green screen. Actually, it has been modernized, now it supports five colors. You are working on a mainframe with an editor that makes vi look modern, a file system without the ability to make files read-only, and no, I repeat no semblance of source control. How do I know all this? I am a contractor for the state and one of the COBOL guys sits right across from me.
Our biggest problem lately is the fact that the JCL code on the mainframe keeps getting accidentally changed. There is no way to lock it, no accountability for changes. There is absolutely no way to ensure that when we go into production that the code we tested is the code being executed.
Most folks writing COBOL aren't working directly on a PC, they are working on the mainframe which comes with a whole host of issues. The mainframe is good for certain tasks but as an enterprise development platform is rather lacking in facilities that many consider the norm.
Yes, these "sweatshop workers" did decided to work for Apple according to their own free will but the expectation was there that Apple would follow the law and pay them overtime if they were not managers. I suspect that the law was not followed, as has been the general practice at most software development shops.
This issue was so rampant in the late 90's early 00's that when interviewing for a "permanent" position I used to always ask what the expected hours were. When it came to salary negotiations I used to say this is my yearly rate is for a 40 hour work week. If the typical week goes long that is fine, just let me know up front and I will adjust my rate accordingly. This caught a few folks off guard but hey, the expectation was set incase the issue came up later.
Recruiter: "Do you have and SOA experience?"
Developer: "Yes, yes I do."
Recruiter: "How much?"
Developer: "Lets see.... How long has SOA been around? The trick is to cover the entire time that SOA has been around without going way over the mark. By the way, I can say that because SOA is just a buzz word for executive types, it really means desiging a good enterprise wide API on top of a highly interoperable transport. I've been working on systems like that for years, well before the SOA buzz word became popular. So lets see... perhaps three years?"
This was the exact conversation I had today. You hit the nail on the head. I remember seeing recs looking for Java developers with ten years of experience when the language had only been around for five. Luckily the market was so good at the time I could just ignore those positions and investigate others.
Or it's possible that no state worker wants to make a change to the payroll system to lower their own pay, nevermind the pay for everyone in the state.
Even if they hire contractors to make the change, what state employees are going to work with them?
You may not be correct. It may be VSAM files. Try changing those is batch.
I'm currently working as a J2EE Architect/Developer for the state of California on a different project. After reading this story I approached our main COBOL guy on the team (also happens to be good at J2EE systems, he actually manages the dev team) and asked him about this. He seemed to think that the values for employee salaries may not be in a database. My response was, "Wow".
We are currently replacing a system that is COBOL build on top of ADABAS. This system is under ten years old. Why was it built with those technologies? That's what people around here know and the budget was pretty small. Again, "Wow".
The California DMV is currently redoing their antiquated system. It is written is assembler. They are updating it to COBOL. So I know that DMV has snatched up many of the COBOL developers in Sacramento.
Although the project I'm working on is written as Java batch jobs and a webapp deployed on WebSphere, it has a requirement that everything must run on the mainframe. The mainframe is way overused and cannot handle the load but for some reason (and the managers on the project won't tell us who controls this) we cannot deploy onto any system other than the mainframe. We estimate that with about $20K - $40K in UNIX boxes we could easily have enough performance for the production system. If that number seems high to your then please note that the project is burning through around $422K/month in development costs. But no, we'll finish performance testing and realize that we need more processing power and end up spending $124K minimum to get the second ZAP processor enabled (the hardware is installed, IBM just left it disabled until we come up with the $$$) or we'll end up purchasing another general purpose processor for about half a million.
Why all the rambling? To give others an idea of what the development world is like in the state of California. It's been an interesting lesson is scope, scale, and the cost of legacy systems.
--
EBCDIC sig: $%##@%^$%@
Spring and Hibernate came out over five years shifting momentum away from EJB's, which was why most folks were using Weblogic. And JBoss had stolen a lot of BEA's momentum even before that.
So yeah, your statement about J2EE would be dead on if this was 2000-2001.
I would guess that most folks who work at a library aren't that concerned with theft.
In fact, they would probably find joy in the fact that someone wanted to read so badly that they were willing to try and steal books.
and one I have not yet solved. For a while I had an office with others and that was good, but I found myself working from home a lot of the time. Now that I'm using the flexibility to my advantage and am moving around the country a bit in order to make my recreation time easier I still find that I miss the personal interaction. My advice to others in similar situations or to people thinking of telecommuting is to make sure that you at least have someone else to work with online.
Going to a coffee shop is nice but what I often find that I need is someone who will understand what I'm talking about, even if they aren't right there.
"I've just finished my light weight persistence framework for my first SWT app and I'm really happy that I found a good balance between a pure OO approach and using the Composite pattern to allow for a smart cache....blah blah blah blah"
The cute girl at the coffee shop just nods and says, "Would you like whipped cream on your mocha?"
I've had the same Alienware laptop at several companies and the little glowing alien has never been an issue. The laptop is great, it's really fast an really stable. I needed the horsepower for heavy development so a gaming laptop is ideal.
I even gave two presentations to the Atlanta Java User's Group with this laptop. It never seemed "unprofessional". Some folks thought it was cool.
I'm a 31 year old developer, I'm not worried about people thinking that I'm a "gamer".
My work is good, it speaks for it's self. Who cares about the gimics, it's a nice piece of hardware.
My 2c's....
We played with cornstarch and water when I was in school too. The teacher called it Oobleck. It was our job to scientifically test the substance and try to determine what it was. That's exactly what I thought about when I read this article.
It was really cool, it was gooey and would flow easily. They we would slam it down on a desk and it would crack, then flow back together. I'm not sure what would cause these properties, do we have a chemist in the house who would care to explain?
I drink decaf coffee BECAUSE it has caffeine in it. It has a little bit, just enough to pick up my system. I regular cup of coffee leaves me jittery and sometimes tanks my blood sugar. A cup of decaf picks me up and makes me more alert without the jitters and more importantly decaf doesn't mung up my blood sugar.
Mmmmmmmm..... decaf.... good schtuff......
Lots of people would love a dual core laptop. I love my hyperthreaded Alienware laptop for development but would like to be back on OS X (my former laptop was a mac that was stolen so I replaced it with a used Alienware which gave me more bang for my buck). Not having a dual core or at least hyperthreaded chip in the new apple notebook is one big reason that I *would not* consider switching. I value OS X and appreciate the useful applications and high level of integration between the applications available on the Mac platform but I am a developer and raw horsepower matters, plain and simple. Right now this used Alienware kicks $@%*$& but I would love to transition to a Mac even if I had to pay a few bucks more.
I paid $2000 for the Alienware laptop. Right now it just doesn't make sense to pay about $2500 for a slower box. I would pay $2500 for a faster one though.
I understand you point about battery life but I think that problem can be solved with smart power management. Give me the horsepower when I have the box plugged in and step it down when there is no external juice. Why not have the best of both worlds? We have the technology.
And with both of these systems once you do the work of putting lot's of content in there is no way to easily extract it, meaning that all the content you loaded is locked into their product.
Nice, huh?
Yes, professors should keep local copies of all coursework organized properly. And everyone should keep a back up of all the numbers in their cell phone.
Right?
Right?
Which I (as well as many other posters) believe is a bad idea, it could be rather difficult to pin down who it was.
Yes, it is easy to go through the version control system and find out who comitted the offending line when. But it's not often one line of code that does it. What if someone adds a line of code that breaks someone else's function due to a side effect? Who get's blamed there? And what about the developer who reviewed the code? And the QA engineer who didn't test it in a proper production environment? And the manager who didn't approve QA's budget for a perfect mirror of a production environment? And on and on....
It's easy to say "let's blame the bad developer" but software is often not written by just one person and identifying the responsible party might not be that easy. Even if it was a good idea in the first place.....
Now as far as holding the companies liable, I kinda like that. Software prices will go up but perhaps companies will stop cutting corners and focus more on quality.
I agree. If you really want to hide your communications, just roll your own communications programs and/or roll your own encryption. Although you might not create the strongest encryption scheme for the "law enforcement" folks to spy on you they have to federally funded script kiddies. I'm sure they have scripts to crack main stream encryptions. If you were one of "them" wouldn't you just go after the low hanging fruit first?
It's kinda like the car alarm theory, your alarm doesn't have to prevent the vehicle from being stolen, it just has to make it sufficiently difficult so the thief doesn't want to bother.
At least for now.....
I find it a lot more significant that someone put rabits in a certrifuge.
WTF?!?!?! That's like making biodiesel out of cats.
Is there something I'm missing here?
Sorry dude but normally my compiler catches spelling errors.
--
The Dude
And what is to prevent spammers from voting their own sites as relevant?
Automating the process?
From various IPs?
Google Engineer: "I'm not sure how www.happyharryslinkfarm.com got such a high user ranking, all it does is contain a bunch of seemingly unrelated links to a bunch of other sites. Hmmmmmm....."
Too easy to foil. Next?
From Hibernate in Action,
... from BID B inner join ITEM I on
Would you rather type:
select
B.ITEM_ID = I.ITEM_ID inner join CATEGORY C on
I.CATEGORY_ID = C.CATEGORY_ID inner join BID SB on
I.SUCCESSFUL_BID_ID = SB.BID_ID where C.NAME like 'Laptop%' and SB.AMOUNT > 100
than this:
from Bid bid join bid.item item where
item.category.name like 'Laptop%' and
item.successfulBid.amount > 100
Your call.
You do have a point about the schema being the noun but that doesn't really fly in a multi-tier system. You could easily argue that a single tier system is the best approach, thereby using the schema as a noun. There are serious benifits to this but I haven't seen a system that provides the necessary front end technology straight on top of a database. Although I dissagree with you I do like the lines that you seem to be thinking along.