Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from COBOL. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to COBOL-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in COBOL. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken COBOL code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain COBOL code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in COBOL. Its because the COBOL code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."
So is this Microsoft's fault for providing the best product, or their competitor's faults for providing lesser products? Nobody is forcing people to use Microsoft's services, just most of us probably use them because they don't suck. Or are the lesser of whatever evils the available alternatives offer.
"only being able to watch on a SONY" isn't exactly right...
The more accurate analogy is that of transportation. You can have a wagon, a train or a car. Your car can be made by Dell, HP, etc. A wagon can ride on rodes but slowly. A train can't really run on roads -- it needs special tracks (enabling software). Legacy browsers are wagons. Windows PC's are cars no matter who makes them (and their is a wide variety of manufacturers very much like cars). Trains are the Macs and Uni and Lini of the world.
Actually you are technically correct but just wrong where it counts -- in the end user experience.
With each machine that I have owned for the past few years and the dozens that others have owned that I've seen Windows was installed with the software to play DVD's -- encrypted -- when they received the box. This was for business class machines and for home machines. This includes both codecs and drivers. User experience: it just works.
With Linux the user has to go out and find a "codec" (what in heck is a codec?) and download a driver (why wouldn't those "smart" guys who shipped me my box already have put the right drivers in -- don't they know what they are doing?). User experience: it doesn't work.
The user experience is the reality of the situation. It just doesn't work.
As in IE has been The Standard for the last few years on the Internet. It's what the majority of users used and your site should be developed for it.
When FireFox get's enough share (which could be happening now if the numbers are accurate) then it will become The Standard -- with any flaws it may have included in that standard.
The key point is that The Standard is really what the users expect to see -- your user base is your customers.
As to the statistics shared here -- there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies and statistics. It would be refreshing if the stats shown are good or accurate. I'm not holding my breath yet.
Is your requirement? Most stuff I deal with won't come close to that except for rudimentary support at best. After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry with 5 years being a good company/product to deal with.
And if memory serves this was when wave after wave of Mac viruses shut down the computing labs at colleges within minutes. -- It's true-- usually the virus was carried by floppy by a student, unknowingly, moving from macine to machine as each one died. it would take about 10 minutes for a lab of 50 machines to be useless.
How do you reconcile that view with Oracle? Oracle is the creme of the crop in relational DB's. Oracle is an aggressive marketer.
Oracle starts very expensive -- most expensive of any big relational DB vendor.
If you work with them at a sensitive period (end of a quarter, end of a year, etc.) you will get a large discount. Big customers can get huge discounts -- rumored to have been in some cases 95%. Most times we are talking less than 50% from what I've seen but remember -- with MSFT and Oracle list is only paid by tiny consumers and companies that neeed to have their heads examined.
The worrysome point here -- remember when Novell tried to break the mold and strike back at MSFT before? A billion dollar purchase of Word Perfect and grouping it with other apps to take on the desktop suite of the day (MS Office, how times have not changed)...
So what happened to all those satisfied Novell office suite users? They were dumped.
(Founding member disgruntled Word Perfect users anonymous)
Be very, very careful about the "they all work together on the same server" approach. That's windows selling point -- it's the sam OS across the enterprise and eveyrthing you want runs on it. The down side? You make a tweak to server for server based products and you may not want that on the desktop... you make a tweak to desktop and you probably don't want that on the server.
OK -- sub par car's? Car's that consistlently fall in the bottom of reviews? American car's that perform in the lower half of the curve?
Or -- from the recent auto show locally -- SUV's who's body panels don't line up so badly that you can't open the doors? (That car should never have been at the auto show -- why did the dealer bring it?)
Poor build quality? Outdated technology? High price/low functionality?
And the answer is... that depends... If the code does string manipulation or is waiting on back end calls (DBMS, etc.) for most of it's time you might be better served for rapid development in VB.
Hmm.. Ted is indeed giving away a third... but isn't this Gates we are talking about? The man who intends to leave little for his kids as his parents did for him -- who intends to give away the majority of it?
I've never liked Ted I admit it. I think, though, that if you investigate you will find that Bill's family history goes back a generation or two at least. Ted is two faced. Bill is pretty straight.
Umm... You mean apple which stole the whole ui from Xerox? Face it -- it's a dog eat dog world. You are much better building on others work, with proper acknowledgement, than re-inventing the wheel.
Um... external combustion -- you mean steam, right? At that point -- steam is much more expensive as a power source (or has been -- don't rightly know if development has been on-going). In a cost per mile analysis it's many, many times more expensive than gas.
Add to that the 20 minute start time to build up a good head of steam (or alternatively the warm up cost of enough fuel to boil enough water in a very, very short time...) and you have something that's not horribly viable today.
Diesel looks much better. Diesel with bio-diesel thrown in looks even better.
Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from COBOL.
"[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to COBOL-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in COBOL. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken COBOL code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain COBOL code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in COBOL. Its because the COBOL code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."
So is this Microsoft's fault for providing the best product, or their competitor's faults for providing lesser products? Nobody is forcing people to use Microsoft's services, just most of us probably use them because they don't suck. Or are the lesser of whatever evils the available alternatives offer.
"only being able to watch on a SONY" isn't exactly right...
The more accurate analogy is that of transportation. You can have a wagon, a train or a car. Your car can be made by Dell, HP, etc. A wagon can ride on rodes but slowly. A train can't really run on roads -- it needs special tracks (enabling software). Legacy browsers are wagons. Windows PC's are cars no matter who makes them (and their is a wide variety of manufacturers very much like cars). Trains are the Macs and Uni and Lini of the world.
Actually you are technically correct but just wrong where it counts -- in the end user experience.
With each machine that I have owned for the past few years and the dozens that others have owned that I've seen Windows was installed with the software to play DVD's -- encrypted -- when they received the box. This was for business class machines and for home machines. This includes both codecs and drivers. User experience: it just works.
With Linux the user has to go out and find a "codec" (what in heck is a codec?) and download a driver (why wouldn't those "smart" guys who shipped me my box already have put the right drivers in -- don't they know what they are doing?). User experience: it doesn't work.
The user experience is the reality of the situation. It just doesn't work.
As in IE has been The Standard for the last few years on the Internet. It's what the majority of users used and your site should be developed for it.
When FireFox get's enough share (which could be happening now if the numbers are accurate) then it will become The Standard -- with any flaws it may have included in that standard.
The key point is that The Standard is really what the users expect to see -- your user base is your customers.
As to the statistics shared here -- there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies and statistics. It would be refreshing if the stats shown are good or accurate. I'm not holding my breath yet.
... in the same sentence just seems not right.
You did not acquire the right to "lend" anything to a friend unless it is your creation or the original license does not forbid it (most do).
Lending a single copy is wrong -- distributing a thousand copies is wrong. You may not be the first person tagged but you are still wrong.
Is your requirement? Most stuff I deal with won't come close to that except for rudimentary support at best. After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry with 5 years being a good company/product to deal with.
My experinece:
Conservatives have been those who've lifted themselves up from the poor to middle class.
Liberals -- upper class snobs who've never worked a day in their lives.
The solution? Somewhere in the middle -- some government programs with a healthy dose of personal responsibility.
As it is not fully supported on 80+% of users machines? (just under 90% from the last Slashdot/Firefox story)
And if memory serves this was when wave after wave of Mac viruses shut down the computing labs at colleges within minutes. -- It's true-- usually the virus was carried by floppy by a student, unknowingly, moving from macine to machine as each one died. it would take about 10 minutes for a lab of 50 machines to be useless.
recommends rebooting our production AIX box at least once a month -- it serves a database only (no interactive users).
Couple of tb of disk, couple of gb of ram (or more) and a dozen cpu's and we have to reboot it monthly.
It's called maintenance. It is required.
As opposed to Linux which stops business apps dead.
Actually MSFT is successful because they have aggressive salesmen. Many others aren't because they don't.
How do you reconcile that view with Oracle? Oracle is the creme of the crop in relational DB's. Oracle is an aggressive marketer.
Oracle starts very expensive -- most expensive of any big relational DB vendor.
If you work with them at a sensitive period (end of a quarter, end of a year, etc.) you will get a large discount. Big customers can get huge discounts -- rumored to have been in some cases 95%. Most times we are talking less than 50% from what I've seen but remember -- with MSFT and Oracle list is only paid by tiny consumers and companies that neeed to have their heads examined.
The worrysome point here -- remember when Novell tried to break the mold and strike back at MSFT before? A billion dollar purchase of Word Perfect and grouping it with other apps to take on the desktop suite of the day (MS Office, how times have not changed)...
So what happened to all those satisfied Novell office suite users? They were dumped.
(Founding member disgruntled Word Perfect users anonymous)
Be very, very careful about the "they all work together on the same server" approach. That's windows selling point -- it's the sam OS across the enterprise and eveyrthing you want runs on it. The down side? You make a tweak to server for server based products and you may not want that on the desktop... you make a tweak to desktop and you probably don't want that on the server.
Actually -- we could just replace Windows with "the industry standard operating system" now couldn't we....
How about TurboTax for the web? Works on most everything...
My apologies for the ' debacle. I'll never do it again. Not.
OK -- sub par car's? Car's that consistlently fall in the bottom of reviews? American car's that perform in the lower half of the curve?
Or -- from the recent auto show locally -- SUV's who's body panels don't line up so badly that you can't open the doors? (That car should never have been at the auto show -- why did the dealer bring it?)
Poor build quality?
Outdated technology?
High price/low functionality?
Do you have a better example?
And the answer is... that depends... If the code does string manipulation or is waiting on back end calls (DBMS, etc.) for most of it's time you might be better served for rapid development in VB.
Hmm.. Ted is indeed giving away a third... but isn't this Gates we are talking about? The man who intends to leave little for his kids as his parents did for him -- who intends to give away the majority of it?
I've never liked Ted I admit it. I think, though, that if you investigate you will find that Bill's family history goes back a generation or two at least. Ted is two faced. Bill is pretty straight.
Umm... You mean apple which stole the whole ui from Xerox? Face it -- it's a dog eat dog world. You are much better building on others work, with proper acknowledgement, than re-inventing the wheel.
Um... external combustion -- you mean steam, right? At that point -- steam is much more expensive as a power source (or has been -- don't rightly know if development has been on-going). In a cost per mile analysis it's many, many times more expensive than gas.
Add to that the 20 minute start time to build up a good head of steam (or alternatively the warm up cost of enough fuel to boil enough water in a very, very short time...) and you have something that's not horribly viable today.
Diesel looks much better. Diesel with bio-diesel thrown in looks even better.