The slums are not eco-friendly because they are slums but because the people there have a low standard of living.
Burning materials in a non well-controlled way, having houses with little isolation only works in areas where people throw away a lot of burnables and the climate is warm.
A disclaimer: i am a physicist (phd) working in an area unrelated to climate research. I am personally convinced that putting the ecosystem out of balance so far as we are doing it now is a terrible idea.
To the question of gray literature.
a) politically: excluding gray literature would hit the skeptics harsh. So yes, you are welcome to ask for that. At the same time we should ask to review the talks which are given by industry-payed lobbyists in backrooms in Washington (and other capitals) for references to such gray literature and track this. The politics has to decide if they want to base their decisions on Science or Lobbyist money. Excluding gray literature reduces Lombards pseudo-arguments in his book to shambles. BTW: in that case also kiss Creationism good bye.
b) empirically about non-peer reviewed publications: The overwhelming majority of scientists/persons who circumvent peer review know why they do so. The overwhelming majority of non-peer reviewed papers strongly opposing a common scientific viewpoint is proven to be utterly wrong later. Half of what climate skecptics cite can be debunked by anybody with elementary physics knowlegde (e.g. a bachelor).
c) observation of conspiracy theories: the Skeptics generate some conpiracy theories. Statistically most conspiracy theories are bullshit. But we in science compiracies blocking publications have been rumored about from time to time. Empirically i think they are small. Science has shown that it adopts new ideas quickly (e.g. theory of relativity, quantum physics took only a few years - and for sure against quite some establishment)
d) Scientific misconduct in the climate community: Yes. It exists. As it does in any other field in the science. And yes, people have buddies and discuss with them to skip one or the other data point. Sadly. In comparison to how much was lied in the beginning of nuclear technology, the misconduct which i have seen published are small. In gray publications there is no code at all for scientific misconduct.
e) IPCC boards: The more scientific working groups had no problems. The real problems where the working groups who should estimate the consequences (non-scientists). Ironically instead of asking the scientist in the IPCC they copied non-peer reviewed material (written by non-scientists).
A manipulated verification procedure for software to be installed *is* a security problem. If the procedure is manipulated, then it is imaginable that binaries transferred from the appstore to the phone get manipulated on the way and that apple is liable for the damage from that. If the promise is a safe delivery of an application, then, as a customer you probably can sue them if you can prove that apple got knowledge about this and did *not* inform you. So technically speaking, an jailbroken iphone is a system which is damaged in a way which prevents a security feature (the use of is -for whatever reason- mandatory) needed for the safe use of the app. store from working. That the "Security" coindcides with Apples best interests and that Apple did not give a possibility to turn off this feature, is written on another sheet of paper.
And-actually-i highly doubt that it is a legal right of a iphone owner to use the app store forever. Nobody stops you from using the iphone as you wish, i mean that was the primary purpose of jailbreaking, wasnt it?
BTW: My Nokia E63 has a way of turning the certificate checking off and on in a controlled way.
..an using some Microkernel OS in which something like this would come as a well-controlled feature, we are using a monolithic kernel and self-modifying code?
AFAIU US is not going to build more of them. Let it replicate by the chinese, they can test i a few times and when it find you buy it back for 1/4 of the price it cost you to build it in the US. Works for iphones, thinkpads, should also work for shuttles. Even better: Develop the next generation together with china.
that many posters here see this as a security bug "because it enables you to install any exploit found in any package". That is true and untrue at the same time. A good idea would be that no user may create a setuid root binary. But all escalations based on system call implementation errors can be provoked by the user himself by picking out the right code from the source of the packages and compiling it himself using the gcc which is most likely available on many systems.
An even better idea view would be an per-user-view of the computer.
a) the one who does duct type because he did not understand what all "these new" programming techniques *can* do for him *iff* handled correctly. (i.e. he tried it, he failded and decided it is not his incompetence but something different)
b) the one who does duct type because he decides that this is the best route at some point (no i dont need a design pattern to filter a text file line by line - usually).
c) the one who uses duct type because the people around him dont have certain experiences
That much said, let me tell you a little story. I am an experimental physicist and a -taken that into account- a quite proficient programmer. I love programming in all flavors. And while i don't ship programs -i have to ship results acquired with the programs- i and some colleagues usually use the measurement software i write. The fist approach i had was quick to write and extremely ducted. It was a C program with a graphical display in java, which could be scripted by perl. Needless to say nobody used it or wanted it (because it contained 2 language bindings to be maintained - even when done with SWIG this goes beyond the limits).
I dropped it directly after my masters thesis. I then wrote just a quite clean c to java binding, and scripted the software in jython. In my oipinion nowadays this was the *best* (best like the guy standing besides you table and telling you how greatly jython enables solid scripting of java ignoring some *minor* problems) solution.. This way found some acceptance (i.e. i was not the only one to use it), however other social problem in the chair prevented it from being used. Moreover there are not many physicist who can write these three languages.
Then i did a decision which saved my phd thesis. I switched to matlab (the program would run under octave, but it used the instrument control toolbox). Yes. Matlab can be a pain in the ass. Yes i curse regularly at the data structures. I curse at the non-existence of multi threading, on the strange way of programming the ui and on many things more. However these restrictions make it - after some time - really easy to write extremely predictable and easy to debug code. Yes, i am feeling like being in the 80s again when i call the drawnow function to force an update of the ui. On the other hand, no thread replotting over and over is eating the processor resources. After the thing was settled, essentially the whole group started to use it (respectively a derived version of a co-worker who stayed there longer and was more keen on GUIs).
After that (in 2006) i joined another group as a post-doc. The guys used either labview (the duct tape language #1 - in the bad sense) or tcl. After having looked at it (i avoided tcl for a long time) i decides to jump on tcl. I looked at the old software and decided it needs a complete rewrite. I looked at the oo extensions of tcl. I asked my colleagues - none of them knew anything about oop. So i skipped oo, but kept some parts of the program like i would do in oop. Writing the program was actually wasier than i though. tcl also is a very predictable language unless you are doing nasty things. The program is accepted well - because it works - and new features are easy to add - because the interactions with the old are easy to understand.
So, yes, i am happy that i resisted the urge to over-engineer the solution and just implemented good ideas - and i am observing that i am better the more i duct-tape (with a vast amount of thinking before where NOT to duct-tape). However i am also happy that i did not start to use or extend the spaghetti code from my colleague - whose program is covered in several layers duct tape.
They are so totally supressing open source, that is why they have a list of TV products containing GPL (the page containing the linux downloads for their cameras was featured some time ago on slashdot) www.sony.com/linux
Lets note it - this is not the usual 20-levels-CMSd-put-in-by-trainee URL we see so often when it comes to barely fulfilling the GPL (usually only to avoid beeing sued) by offering the source *somewhere* on the companies HP. This is a top-level one-word-link on their domain. I am sure such a thing has to be approved pretty high up in the hierachy.
Look at it. To say it clearly: Sony openly open sourced thing long before other big players. No i am not a fanboy of Sony. As a matter of fact i made a decision not to buy their (great) P-series portable, because i did not want to spend time installing linux myself. I don't own a PS3. However i understand (other than the FP) that
a) Sony has many BIG departments, where each probably has its own interests.
b) Sony as a whole company obviously has *NO* strong anti-linux position (otherwise there would *NOT* be several departments publishing linux products).
c) The Games department has probably to worry abot things different from linux right now. Also, i personally understand that they do not want to waste time on providing the possibility to subsidize computing power. (If you buy a console you know that it is subsidized, there is no lie about that. Nobody is holding a gun against your head forcing you to buy it).
And one more thing: should the guy be in finacial trouble, then pointing this out to the whole world is *extremly* stupid. Prople in financial trouble are susceptible tomoney from the bad guys
0) He had the urge to go to Bejing by the trans-Siberian railway.
1) He took the money an ran
2) He has a small business/large personal spending, mixed up the accounts, his business lost money and at some point there was no cover-up possible
3) he had a heart attack or another bad medical condition and is lying unconsciously in the Hospital.
4) He has psychological problems (e.g. depression)
5) He got father and forgot to tell the others
6) He killed himself
7) He got hit by a truck (or died unexpectedly in another way)
Lets see in which cases the letter helps: *maybe* 5
Lets see in which cases the letter makeas a constructive solution less probable: 1,2,4
Lets see the cases in which it does not matter: 0,3,6,7
To give up the chances to negotiate sth for the personally understandable urge to write a open embarrassing letter to somebody it *stupid*. I understand that the guys are pissed, but this wont help, and, most likely, hurt. I dont know which case it is, in my professional life and as member of some voluntary organizations i already was confronted with cases 0-6. And from that experience i would say, normally you can correct 0,2-6 constructively and *maybe* even 1, but after such a letter that is reduce to 5
There are some people who have reasonable objections against pressing data in a relational scheme because they really understand what it cant do for them and there are some people who have unreasonable objections against it because they really dont understand what it can do for them.
Disclaimer: I hold a phd in physics, so whoever wants to discard my words, because i belong to the "ecosocialist" scientific establishment which puts critical scientists into mental hospitals, where we torture and brainwash them, feel free to do so.
A BS in physics does make you a scientist - you can use the scientific method without as BS. The scientific method includes, opposed to what you have learned in elementary school, more than just making observations. It also consists of presenting them. Presenting results in science happens solely but peer-reviewed publications. Nothing else counts in your CV. The funny thing is that the Journals give skeptical readers ways to express their skepticism in place. Funnily neither the evolutionists nor the (oil-money-soaked) "global warming skepticists" stick to that way. I have learned that reading things which were not even intended to be peer-reviewed usually is a big waste of time. That is true particularly in subjects which are not my expertise (i am a solid state physicist). Only after some referee with expertise has helped the authors to order the text, i thrust that i can read it without a big headache.
I made the mistake of reading some texts which were published by skepticists. I am not sure what they tried to tell me, because it was more an accusation of others paper being wrong instead of own content (for this we don't write an article, but a comment). Usually they did not focus on a single, important message, but spread a general aura of mystic and predjudices against certain methods. So instead of trying to explain me what is wrong with discretizing certain PDEs, which would be interesting, they just claimed that these are non-solvable and imprecise. If they would hva had a coherent message about that, then would have been *absolutely* no reason to discuss five other topics in the same paper. And believe me, the agencies funding the supercomputers for climate research would be interedeted *and* willing to hear *why* you *in princliple* can not use model-based simulations for simulating the climate, while the same models seem to work for designing airplanes.
so there are two possibilities
a) a huge conpiracy theory driving the "climate skepticals" so mad by the use of drugs that they are not able to present their thoughts in an coherent, ordered and comprehensive manner
b) no arguments, but some people who are paid by lobbyists to create doubt in press releases.
Recently there was an even more biased article on slashdot about the topic.....
ok a few short thoughts
a) Watch old movies and tell me hoe many people you see in the cockpit in a transatlantic flight. Tell me how many you see today. Automation helps reducing work. You can invest that free work into more safety (e.g. pilots beeing able to look onto the map for the next few hours instead of beeing busy with what is goin on now) or you can redice costs (or both)
b) has it ever occure to the people criticizing the automated systems that these may have opened new limits of where (height) you can operate a airplane for a given cost (e.g. fuel). Without advanded controll systems one should probably avoid unsuitable height os have an additional espeed/ngine controller person
c) Even if you have an engine controller, if you would ask e who is better at maintaining the right engine power, it take the automated system. I seriously doubt that humans having the same sensor data would make a better decistion in average
Hiding the password is not for increasing the security, but for decreasing user embarrassment. Nobody needs to know the name of you favorite porn actress/porn actor (especially if he has the same sex or makes BDSM movies).
a) no external library dependences b) programmers stuck to a good style. c) the languages are well-suited to be translated into each other (otherwise the code may be unmaintainable)
and a rewrite of your program every 30 years may save even more future maintainance, because i do not believe that the software will takes the old code *and* split it into classes/sort it to patterns in the same way an (intelligent?) human programmer would. So what you may get is java Code, but very different from the normal java style. I cite from the linked article:
------- strongly object-oriented architecture of resulting Java objects in order to maximize the effect of all controls done by compiler. As example, each old COBOL programs becomes a Java class whose existence is checked at compile-time by rather than at runtime. Very useful when your application is 4 millions lines of code like ours and when you want to track down every typing mistake in a continuous integration architecture like ours ------
A whole old program is converted into a class? Sounds directly like from a design pattern book.
----- pre-allocation of all program variable structures (COMMAREA of COBOL) to further improve performances but also to minimize garbage collection that freezes the system while running. -----
This sounds like a really funny way of saying: sorry guys, we *had* some performance problem, which we fixed by a workaround to get it working.... No, we dont have anny memory leaks/allocation times. We just allocate everything the program may ever need.
---- many levels of cache to maximize performances of the new Java version of the old application. Through them, our Java-transcoded transactions and batches have better performances than their Cobol ancestors used to have on mainframe. ----
Do they want so say, that the performance was inacceptable when turning caches off?
Slashdot Mirror
The slums are not eco-friendly because they are slums but because the people there have a low standard of living. Burning materials in a non well-controlled way, having houses with little isolation only works in areas where people throw away a lot of burnables and the climate is warm.
A disclaimer: i am a physicist (phd) working in an area unrelated to climate research. I am personally convinced that putting the ecosystem out of balance so far as we are doing it now is a terrible idea. To the question of gray literature. a) politically: excluding gray literature would hit the skeptics harsh. So yes, you are welcome to ask for that. At the same time we should ask to review the talks which are given by industry-payed lobbyists in backrooms in Washington (and other capitals) for references to such gray literature and track this. The politics has to decide if they want to base their decisions on Science or Lobbyist money. Excluding gray literature reduces Lombards pseudo-arguments in his book to shambles. BTW: in that case also kiss Creationism good bye. b) empirically about non-peer reviewed publications: The overwhelming majority of scientists/persons who circumvent peer review know why they do so. The overwhelming majority of non-peer reviewed papers strongly opposing a common scientific viewpoint is proven to be utterly wrong later. Half of what climate skecptics cite can be debunked by anybody with elementary physics knowlegde (e.g. a bachelor). c) observation of conspiracy theories: the Skeptics generate some conpiracy theories. Statistically most conspiracy theories are bullshit. But we in science compiracies blocking publications have been rumored about from time to time. Empirically i think they are small. Science has shown that it adopts new ideas quickly (e.g. theory of relativity, quantum physics took only a few years - and for sure against quite some establishment) d) Scientific misconduct in the climate community: Yes. It exists. As it does in any other field in the science. And yes, people have buddies and discuss with them to skip one or the other data point. Sadly. In comparison to how much was lied in the beginning of nuclear technology, the misconduct which i have seen published are small. In gray publications there is no code at all for scientific misconduct. e) IPCC boards: The more scientific working groups had no problems. The real problems where the working groups who should estimate the consequences (non-scientists). Ironically instead of asking the scientist in the IPCC they copied non-peer reviewed material (written by non-scientists).
The jailbroken iphones/ipods i have seen up to now did *not* have 30% apps from the app-store
A manipulated verification procedure for software to be installed *is* a security problem. If the procedure is manipulated, then it is imaginable that binaries transferred from the appstore to the phone get manipulated on the way and that apple is liable for the damage from that. If the promise is a safe delivery of an application, then, as a customer you probably can sue them if you can prove that apple got knowledge about this and did *not* inform you. So technically speaking, an jailbroken iphone is a system which is damaged in a way which prevents a security feature (the use of is -for whatever reason- mandatory) needed for the safe use of the app. store from working. That the "Security" coindcides with Apples best interests and that Apple did not give a possibility to turn off this feature, is written on another sheet of paper.
And-actually-i highly doubt that it is a legal right of a iphone owner to use the app store forever. Nobody stops you from using the iphone as you wish, i mean that was the primary purpose of jailbreaking, wasnt it?
BTW: My Nokia E63 has a way of turning the certificate checking off and on in a controlled way.
l4? qnx?
..an using some Microkernel OS in which something like this would come as a well-controlled feature, we are using a monolithic kernel and self-modifying code?
AFAIU US is not going to build more of them. Let it replicate by the chinese, they can test i a few times and when it find you buy it back for 1/4 of the price it cost you to build it in the US. Works for iphones, thinkpads, should also work for shuttles. Even better: Develop the next generation together with china.
that many posters here see this as a security bug "because it enables you to install any exploit found in any package". That is true and untrue at the same time. A good idea would be that no user may create a setuid root binary. But all escalations based on system call implementation errors can be provoked by the user himself by picking out the right code from the source of the packages and compiling it himself using the gcc which is most likely available on many systems.
An even better idea view would be an per-user-view of the computer.
a) the one who does duct type because he did not understand what all "these new" programming techniques *can* do for him *iff* handled correctly. (i.e. he tried it, he failded and decided it is not his incompetence but something different)
b) the one who does duct type because he decides that this is the best route at some point (no i dont need a design pattern to filter a text file line by line - usually).
c) the one who uses duct type because the people around him dont have certain experiences
That much said, let me tell you a little story. I am an experimental physicist and a -taken that into account- a quite proficient programmer. I love programming in all flavors. And while i don't ship programs -i have to ship results acquired with the programs- i and some colleagues usually use the measurement software i write. The fist approach i had was quick to write and extremely ducted. It was a C program with a graphical display in java, which could be scripted by perl. Needless to say nobody used it or wanted it (because it contained 2 language bindings to be maintained - even when done with SWIG this goes beyond the limits).
I dropped it directly after my masters thesis. I then wrote just a quite clean c to java binding, and scripted the software in jython. In my oipinion nowadays this was the *best* (best like the guy standing besides you table and telling you how greatly jython enables solid scripting of java ignoring some *minor* problems) solution.. This way found some acceptance (i.e. i was not the only one to use it), however other social problem in the chair prevented it from being used. Moreover there are not many physicist who can write these three languages.
Then i did a decision which saved my phd thesis. I switched to matlab (the program would run under octave, but it used the instrument control toolbox). Yes. Matlab can be a pain in the ass. Yes i curse regularly at the data structures. I curse at the non-existence of multi threading, on the strange way of programming the ui and on many things more. However these restrictions make it - after some time - really easy to write extremely predictable and easy to debug code. Yes, i am feeling like being in the 80s again when i call the drawnow function to force an update of the ui. On the other hand, no thread replotting over and over is eating the processor resources. After the thing was settled, essentially the whole group started to use it (respectively a derived version of a co-worker who stayed there longer and was more keen on GUIs).
After that (in 2006) i joined another group as a post-doc. The guys used either labview (the duct tape language #1 - in the bad sense) or tcl. After having looked at it (i avoided tcl for a long time) i decides to jump on tcl. I looked at the old software and decided it needs a complete rewrite. I looked at the oo extensions of tcl. I asked my colleagues - none of them knew anything about oop. So i skipped oo, but kept some parts of the program like i would do in oop. Writing the program was actually wasier than i though. tcl also is a very predictable language unless you are doing nasty things. The program is accepted well - because it works - and new features are easy to add - because the interactions with the old are easy to understand.
So, yes, i am happy that i resisted the urge to over-engineer the solution and just implemented good ideas - and i am observing that i am better the more i duct-tape (with a vast amount of thinking before where NOT to duct-tape). However i am also happy that i did not start to use or extend the spaghetti code from my colleague - whose program is covered in several layers duct tape.
lets you drop abstractions.... i am not sure for which language this is making a point.....
I would not count the cellphone as a $50 device either. If you loose a subsidized phone (and i guess it is subsidized), you have still to pay the fee.
The supervisor of the exam in theoretical physics was not ugly enough. I want to get the same chances as the female co-students.
http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/common/search.html
(Would i have cheched that before, maybe i'd have bought a p-series. The "instant mode" is linux)
They are so totally supressing open source, that is why they have a list of TV products containing GPL (the page containing the linux downloads for their cameras was featured some time ago on slashdot)
www.sony.com/linux
Lets note it - this is not the usual 20-levels-CMSd-put-in-by-trainee URL we see so often when it comes to barely fulfilling the GPL (usually only to avoid beeing sued) by offering the source *somewhere* on the companies HP. This is a top-level one-word-link on their domain. I am sure such a thing has to be approved pretty high up in the hierachy.
Look at it. To say it clearly: Sony openly open sourced thing long before other big players. No i am not a fanboy of Sony. As a matter of fact i made a decision not to buy their (great) P-series portable, because i did not want to spend time installing linux myself. I don't own a PS3. However i understand (other than the FP) that
a) Sony has many BIG departments, where each probably has its own interests.
b) Sony as a whole company obviously has *NO* strong anti-linux position (otherwise there would *NOT* be several departments publishing linux products).
c) The Games department has probably to worry abot things different from linux right now. Also, i personally understand that they do not want to waste time on providing the possibility to subsidize computing power. (If you buy a console you know that it is subsidized, there is no lie about that. Nobody is holding a gun against your head forcing you to buy it).
maybe they should put in Weapons stores in the same map....
And one more thing: should the guy be in finacial trouble, then pointing this out to the whole world is *extremly* stupid. Prople in financial trouble are susceptible tomoney from the bad guys
The reasosn i can imagine are
0) He had the urge to go to Bejing by the trans-Siberian railway.
1) He took the money an ran
2) He has a small business/large personal spending, mixed up the accounts, his business lost money and at some point there was no cover-up possible
3) he had a heart attack or another bad medical condition and is lying unconsciously in the Hospital.
4) He has psychological problems (e.g. depression)
5) He got father and forgot to tell the others
6) He killed himself
7) He got hit by a truck (or died unexpectedly in another way)
Lets see in which cases the letter helps: *maybe* 5
Lets see in which cases the letter makeas a constructive solution less probable: 1,2,4
Lets see the cases in which it does not matter: 0,3,6,7
To give up the chances to negotiate sth for the personally understandable urge to write a open embarrassing letter to somebody it *stupid*. I understand that the guys are pissed, but this wont help, and, most likely, hurt. I dont know which case it is, in my professional life and as member of some voluntary organizations i already was confronted with cases 0-6. And from that experience i would say, normally you can correct 0,2-6 constructively and *maybe* even 1, but after such a letter that is reduce to 5
There are some people who have reasonable objections against pressing data in a relational scheme because they really understand what it cant do for them and there are some people who have unreasonable objections against it because they really dont understand what it can do for them.
Disclaimer: I hold a phd in physics, so whoever wants to discard my words, because i belong to the "ecosocialist" scientific establishment which puts critical scientists into mental hospitals, where we torture and brainwash them, feel free to do so.
A BS in physics does make you a scientist - you can use the scientific method without as BS. The scientific method includes, opposed to what you have learned in elementary school, more than just making observations. It also consists of presenting them. Presenting results in science happens solely but peer-reviewed publications. Nothing else counts in your CV. The funny thing is that the Journals give skeptical readers ways to express their skepticism in place. Funnily neither the evolutionists nor the (oil-money-soaked) "global warming skepticists" stick to that way. I have learned that reading things which were not even intended to be peer-reviewed usually is a big waste of time. That is true particularly in subjects which are not my expertise (i am a solid state physicist). Only after some referee with expertise has helped the authors to order the text, i thrust that i can read it without a big headache.
I made the mistake of reading some texts which were published by skepticists. I am not sure what they tried to tell me, because it was more an accusation of others paper being wrong instead of own content (for this we don't write an article, but a comment). Usually they did not focus on a single, important message, but spread a general aura of mystic and predjudices against certain methods. So instead of trying to explain me what is wrong with discretizing certain PDEs, which would be interesting, they just claimed that these are non-solvable and imprecise. If they would hva had a coherent message about that, then would have been *absolutely* no reason to discuss five other topics in the same paper. And believe me, the agencies funding the supercomputers for climate research would be interedeted *and* willing to hear *why* you *in princliple* can not use model-based simulations for simulating the climate, while the same models seem to work for designing airplanes.
so there are two possibilities
a) a huge conpiracy theory driving the "climate skepticals" so mad by the use of drugs that they are not able to present their thoughts in an coherent, ordered and comprehensive manner
b) no arguments, but some people who are paid by lobbyists to create doubt in press releases.
Recently there was an even more biased article on slashdot about the topic..... ok a few short thoughts a) Watch old movies and tell me hoe many people you see in the cockpit in a transatlantic flight. Tell me how many you see today. Automation helps reducing work. You can invest that free work into more safety (e.g. pilots beeing able to look onto the map for the next few hours instead of beeing busy with what is goin on now) or you can redice costs (or both) b) has it ever occure to the people criticizing the automated systems that these may have opened new limits of where (height) you can operate a airplane for a given cost (e.g. fuel). Without advanded controll systems one should probably avoid unsuitable height os have an additional espeed/ngine controller person c) Even if you have an engine controller, if you would ask e who is better at maintaining the right engine power, it take the automated system. I seriously doubt that humans having the same sensor data would make a better decistion in average
Hiding the password is not for increasing the security, but for decreasing user embarrassment. Nobody needs to know the name of you favorite porn actress/porn actor (especially if he has the same sex or makes BDSM movies).
Yes. Automated tools work iff
a) no external library dependences
b) programmers stuck to a good style.
c) the languages are well-suited to be translated into each other (otherwise the code may be unmaintainable)
and a rewrite of your program every 30 years may save even more future maintainance, because i do not believe that the software will takes the old code *and* split it into classes/sort it to patterns in the same way an (intelligent?) human programmer would. So what you may get is java Code, but very different from the normal java style. I cite from the linked article:
-------
strongly object-oriented architecture of resulting Java objects in order to maximize the effect of all controls done by compiler. As example, each old COBOL programs becomes a Java class whose existence is checked at compile-time by rather than at runtime. Very useful when your application is 4 millions lines of code like ours and when you want to track down every typing mistake in a continuous integration architecture like ours
------
A whole old program is converted into a class? Sounds directly like from a design pattern book.
-----
pre-allocation of all program variable structures (COMMAREA of COBOL) to further improve performances but also to minimize garbage collection that freezes the system while running.
-----
This sounds like a really funny way of saying: sorry guys, we *had* some performance problem, which we fixed by a workaround to get it working.... No, we dont have anny memory leaks/allocation times. We just allocate everything the program may ever need.
----
many levels of cache to maximize performances of the new Java version of the old application. Through them, our Java-transcoded transactions and batches have better performances than their Cobol ancestors used to have on mainframe.
----
Do they want so say, that the performance was inacceptable when turning caches off?
Hey, i based my future plans on learning Cobol and translating it to some of the more modern languges i know.
we lower the efficiency of burning fossile fuels? You know that sounds like a really good idea to me....
IP over WOW dance movements....