You haven't ever needed to learn it, or, logically, ever support anything that was written in it, but you don't see why it's a big deal?
It's a big deal. Legacy COBOL is almost ALL scary code. It's not like it was sexy and clean and professional...The way they wrote that stuff is alien to modern methods. They told the COBOL person what the code needed to do, and he disappeared for a while, and came back and told them it was done. Documentation? Slim. Comments? You must be joking.
I've maintained COBOL code at three significant corporations, and there is so much "hero" code in there, it's hard to even convey to people. This 100,000 line application? It was written by one person, and no one who worked with him was capable of understanding it. No oversight, no review. When he kicked over dead it became a dark spot on the map labeled, "Here be dragons" and no one has touched it since.
Modern methods just don't work like that. In the old days, when you licensed a COBOL app from some company, they sent you the goddamn source code with it, and you could change it...Then the guy who made the changes left, and what is left behind is not supportable by the original company (and the company isn't the original company, but a company that has been bought by a company that was later bought by a different company).
So you need to bring people in, and you need to teach them this application which no one understands, and which isn't really documented, and which is written in a basically dead language, and is often written using the sort of spaghetti code methods we are all told over and over and over NOT TO EVER USE.
Re:Who Cares What Language, It Reeks of Poor Desig
on
Why COBOL Could Come Back
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yea, but a modern program could be supported and extended to provide that functionality. The COBOL? Not so much.
I can think of a few ways to do it really; most payroll apps have methods for pulling money out of paychecks (alimony, child support, Social Security). Likewise they have methods for providing payouts; trip reimbursements, whatever. Hack those up, and you're fine. Throw a liablity on the employee's salary for every minimum-wage payout, and once you start paying again, the liabilities are applied, and the checks are altered accordingly.
But doing that in a COBOL based billing system? Are you insane? I get the shakes when I have to maintain one of those, you have to test it over and over, and back everything up before you can even think about running it for the first time. No easy rollbacks, no obvious way to see what the hell it changed...It's a fricking nightmare.
Modern systems are easier to maintain and extend. The COBOL may have been quite the thing in 1983, but the world has moved on.
Re:Who Cares What Language, It Reeks of Poor Desig
on
Why COBOL Could Come Back
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Coming from someone who is currently supporting a legacy COBOL system, you're right on target.
COBOL is shit. Most legacy COBOL code is not designed with anything like what we'd consider "best practices" today. The language itself is unfriendly, and doesn't lend itself to the modern world.
What it does have is inertia. It works, right? Why replace it? It's the product of decades of business evolution, do you think you can replace that overnight? New code will never be as good.
Basically, they're comfortable with their crusty old bugs, and they don't want to deal with scary new bugs.
In my environment we've basically thrown this whole interface built on Oracle and Java on TOP of the old COBOL MPE/ix system. Placates the conservative financial types, while providing some modern functionality.
Still there are all kinds of problems with the old systems. You can end up with some really scary problems with old code, because it doesn't recover from failure like you'd expect modern code to. A java billing application running on a modern transactional database...If it crashes, you can just run it again. A COBOL app on a legacy database? That just ruined your day.
I would hope that the response to the situation would be to finally migrate your systems, not to accrete more levels of unsupportable crap by dragging COBOL programmers out of retirement, or forcing existing programmers into that outdated mold. I know the money types though; they are perfectly capable of trying to stick with the outdated method simply because it's in their comfort zone.
You are correct: all of Europe put together is competitive with the American economy. That's pretty impressive, given that they're pulling a lot of dead weight (cough, France).
In terms of actual efficiency, however, we're beating the crap out of you, and the reason why is because your labor laws are too business unfriendly. Competition is good for the market. If workers are willing to work for the wage, what's the problem? Why artificially raise the bar for businesses?
I'm not feeling a lot of sympathy for people working at Apple. Work there for a few years, and you can get a job anywhere just on the cache`.
I ran "define::ephebophile" through google and got one hit: the ever reliable wikipedia.
In light of the fact that there are no reliable sources, and that the word isn't even recognized by my spellchecker, I thought it justified to throw a WTF in the lead.
Wtf is an ephebophile? Sounds like a cold medicine...Honestly never heard that term before, though I guess it is more descriptive than "pedophile" when you're really talking about early teenagers. The attempt to popularize such a term however, smacks of a group trying to creep out from under the stigma of the pedophile label; if the law says shes too young, you're a pedo.
The idea that men should find post-pubescent females attractive is hardly novel: A man is a creature that can become aroused thinking about a hole in the ozone. It's biological hardwiring.
Fortunately for the morals of society, pop music was invented to create an insurmountable barrier between teenage girls and middle aged men who can't get dates from women their own age.
As per usual, you clearly "know" what he meant when he said it, and your interpretation is right and mine is wrong. My statement that I interpreted it in a particular way is in fact correct; I did. Your statement that you know exactly what he was thinking when he typed that is actually false, because you don't.
Dance is generally not considered a sport; rhythm gymnastics is commonly looked at askance in the same way as synchronized swimming. It's pretty and all, but is it a sport? He is entitled to his opinion. The fact that he doesn't think its a sport has no implicit bearing on his perception of it's merit as an activity despite your baseless assertion.
As for the assertion itself, I took it as tongue in cheek. Sarcasm. A piece of intentional irony, in the correct usage of that word. I may be wrong, as I have said from the very first line of my post.
You, on the other hand, are so obsessed with the idea that this is a slight that you have refused to even entertain any other possibility. In my experience, such people are arrogant, unpleasant, and unhappy. The fact that your immediate response to me is to insult my intelligence only bears that out.
The fact that he doesn't like gymnastics makes him sexist? That is hyper political correctness.
He's entitled to not like gymnastics. And he's entitled to make the same disparaging remarks about it that we commonly direct toward things that don't appeal to us...That actually is allowed. I don't think curling is a real sport; if I threw down on that "brush and hockey puck" game would it be sexist? Would anyone (aside from a few canadians) bother to put up snippy humorless responses? No.
It would have passed without notice if it wasn't that women are tangentially involved, but since they are it's all "Zomg! Misogynist!" And then he compounded the massive insult by suggesting that it's primarily women who watch it on TV, which, judging by the advertising, is borne out by the demographic data. What a bastard.
So lets just jump on that bandwagon and dump a ton of bile on someone for a casual remark that could have only offended someone who was looking to be offended.
Forgot to escape my damn bracket. Third paragraph should read:
"The whole "we're just watching it because of the VR-controlled submersibles and the picture of the hot chick" argument wears a little thin after a while since that stuff happens in the first thirty minutes, but we kept watching after she went to bed for christs sake! But if you'd asked us we'd have blamed it on her anyway; it's not only women who have defined gender roles in this society."
Yea, ya think? The way I read it was as more of a "I know all you guys watch this stuff and care, but I'm going to pretend like I believe that the only reason you watch it is because your girl makes you."
Shit. Geeks are as gooey as anyone else. I went over to a buddies house last weekend, drank a few beers hacked on some linux, talked about xen virtualization and shit like that. Then we went up to let the dogs out, and got sucked in to the last 12 minutes of Castaway and the first fucking two hours of goddamn Titanic.
The whole "we're just watching it because of the VR-controlled submersibles and the picture of the hot chick" argument wears a little thin after a while since that stuff happens bed for christs sake. But if you'd asked us we'd have blamed it on her anyway; it's not only women who have defined gender roles in this society.
The hyper political correctness gets old after a while. The worst thing he suggested in the damn title is that women might like to watch the ribbon twirling, which, judging by the fact that my wife likes to watch it, I don't think is that far fetched or degrading.
Eh. I'm going to have to go with subjective; a boxer can get more points if his punches are "better" than the other boxers, despite the other boxer having punched more. That's just another type of pretty.
You have to specifically state that you're transferring rights, when you're transferring, so really it doesn't.
The real question is how much does correspondence fall into traditional copyright protection for literary works?
The ownership of a two party conversation can be disputed; the post was a response to a request posted on the board...That could qualify it as a solicited work, which could make the copyright fall into a work for hire category, like the answer to a test question which, though written by the student, belongs to the professor.
Yea, I'm not really talking about e-machines...More like a virtual machine hosted in some sort of cloud environment (which may or may not involve clustering the client machines back in)...Fully functional, whatever you can do on a local machine, you could do on your virtual machine.
It's got the benefits of the traditional granny machine (idiot proof, low maintenance), without the huge obvious defect of having practically no functionality.
The whole thing depends on a level of bandwidth and processing that don't currently exist, but if you were microsoft and you wanted to maintain your dominance, this would be the thing to bet on. In the long run, it's practically inevitable.
This is true is you have one right now...But you're going to need a new one in a few years, and a new one a few years after that, etc, etc...
Now a gamer or a hardcore geek would be fine with buying new machines...I personally have enough to heat my house in the winter. But a family that needs three or four machines? Your grandma who doesn't want to have to think about it? That's a powerful demographic that you could sell a virtual machine to, a machine that would be far more reliable, never go obsolete, never get a virus, the works.
That's what they're pointed at. Sure it's not going to be great for gaming today, but this really isn't about today.
They'll have enough trouble trying to prove that they are the rightful heirs of the Knights Templar...Trying to get money from the church on top of that? And why not sue France? They got a huge chunk of change as well.
Not even close to being the first time someone has tried this, and it never goes anywhere. The dream of the Templars wealth keeps it going, but in reality there is no wealth to claim, no one with the right to claim it, and no one to claim it from.
You're missing the point. Local machines are relatively inefficient; so you could have a local machine that's effectively a thin client with all its processing offloaded into the cloud.
A step like this is an attempt to do away with the local machine; software as service, but also computer as service.
I know, but it's not impossible. They're not exactly flammable, and if I understand correctly, they're encased in metal (though nothing that would withstand a massive impact).
This is a pretty straightforward bit of libel...Even on the internets you have to be careful if you're explicitly slandering someone by name.
Illegal is illegal, and if these monkeys were dumb enough to put up all this crap under handles that they accessed from their homes, then they're screwed, and it's hard to see how they ought not be.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't ever needed to learn it, or, logically, ever support anything that was written in it, but you don't see why it's a big deal?
It's a big deal. Legacy COBOL is almost ALL scary code. It's not like it was sexy and clean and professional...The way they wrote that stuff is alien to modern methods. They told the COBOL person what the code needed to do, and he disappeared for a while, and came back and told them it was done. Documentation? Slim. Comments? You must be joking.
I've maintained COBOL code at three significant corporations, and there is so much "hero" code in there, it's hard to even convey to people. This 100,000 line application? It was written by one person, and no one who worked with him was capable of understanding it. No oversight, no review. When he kicked over dead it became a dark spot on the map labeled, "Here be dragons" and no one has touched it since.
Modern methods just don't work like that. In the old days, when you licensed a COBOL app from some company, they sent you the goddamn source code with it, and you could change it...Then the guy who made the changes left, and what is left behind is not supportable by the original company (and the company isn't the original company, but a company that has been bought by a company that was later bought by a different company).
So you need to bring people in, and you need to teach them this application which no one understands, and which isn't really documented, and which is written in a basically dead language, and is often written using the sort of spaghetti code methods we are all told over and over and over NOT TO EVER USE.
Yea, but a modern program could be supported and extended to provide that functionality. The COBOL? Not so much.
I can think of a few ways to do it really; most payroll apps have methods for pulling money out of paychecks (alimony, child support, Social Security). Likewise they have methods for providing payouts; trip reimbursements, whatever. Hack those up, and you're fine. Throw a liablity on the employee's salary for every minimum-wage payout, and once you start paying again, the liabilities are applied, and the checks are altered accordingly.
But doing that in a COBOL based billing system? Are you insane? I get the shakes when I have to maintain one of those, you have to test it over and over, and back everything up before you can even think about running it for the first time. No easy rollbacks, no obvious way to see what the hell it changed...It's a fricking nightmare.
Modern systems are easier to maintain and extend. The COBOL may have been quite the thing in 1983, but the world has moved on.
Coming from someone who is currently supporting a legacy COBOL system, you're right on target.
COBOL is shit. Most legacy COBOL code is not designed with anything like what we'd consider "best practices" today. The language itself is unfriendly, and doesn't lend itself to the modern world.
What it does have is inertia. It works, right? Why replace it? It's the product of decades of business evolution, do you think you can replace that overnight? New code will never be as good.
Basically, they're comfortable with their crusty old bugs, and they don't want to deal with scary new bugs.
In my environment we've basically thrown this whole interface built on Oracle and Java on TOP of the old COBOL MPE/ix system. Placates the conservative financial types, while providing some modern functionality.
Still there are all kinds of problems with the old systems. You can end up with some really scary problems with old code, because it doesn't recover from failure like you'd expect modern code to. A java billing application running on a modern transactional database...If it crashes, you can just run it again. A COBOL app on a legacy database? That just ruined your day.
I would hope that the response to the situation would be to finally migrate your systems, not to accrete more levels of unsupportable crap by dragging COBOL programmers out of retirement, or forcing existing programmers into that outdated mold. I know the money types though; they are perfectly capable of trying to stick with the outdated method simply because it's in their comfort zone.
Right. This place is chock full of libertarians, and always has been.
You are correct: all of Europe put together is competitive with the American economy. That's pretty impressive, given that they're pulling a lot of dead weight (cough, France).
In terms of actual efficiency, however, we're beating the crap out of you, and the reason why is because your labor laws are too business unfriendly. Competition is good for the market. If workers are willing to work for the wage, what's the problem? Why artificially raise the bar for businesses?
I'm not feeling a lot of sympathy for people working at Apple. Work there for a few years, and you can get a job anywhere just on the cache`.
I ran "define::ephebophile" through google and got one hit: the ever reliable wikipedia.
In light of the fact that there are no reliable sources, and that the word isn't even recognized by my spellchecker, I thought it justified to throw a WTF in the lead.
Wtf is an ephebophile? Sounds like a cold medicine...Honestly never heard that term before, though I guess it is more descriptive than "pedophile" when you're really talking about early teenagers. The attempt to popularize such a term however, smacks of a group trying to creep out from under the stigma of the pedophile label; if the law says shes too young, you're a pedo.
The idea that men should find post-pubescent females attractive is hardly novel: A man is a creature that can become aroused thinking about a hole in the ozone. It's biological hardwiring.
Fortunately for the morals of society, pop music was invented to create an insurmountable barrier between teenage girls and middle aged men who can't get dates from women their own age.
As per usual, you clearly "know" what he meant when he said it, and your interpretation is right and mine is wrong. My statement that I interpreted it in a particular way is in fact correct; I did. Your statement that you know exactly what he was thinking when he typed that is actually false, because you don't.
Dance is generally not considered a sport; rhythm gymnastics is commonly looked at askance in the same way as synchronized swimming. It's pretty and all, but is it a sport? He is entitled to his opinion. The fact that he doesn't think its a sport has no implicit bearing on his perception of it's merit as an activity despite your baseless assertion.
As for the assertion itself, I took it as tongue in cheek. Sarcasm. A piece of intentional irony, in the correct usage of that word. I may be wrong, as I have said from the very first line of my post.
You, on the other hand, are so obsessed with the idea that this is a slight that you have refused to even entertain any other possibility. In my experience, such people are arrogant, unpleasant, and unhappy. The fact that your immediate response to me is to insult my intelligence only bears that out.
The fact that he doesn't like gymnastics makes him sexist? That is hyper political correctness.
He's entitled to not like gymnastics. And he's entitled to make the same disparaging remarks about it that we commonly direct toward things that don't appeal to us...That actually is allowed. I don't think curling is a real sport; if I threw down on that "brush and hockey puck" game would it be sexist? Would anyone (aside from a few canadians) bother to put up snippy humorless responses? No.
It would have passed without notice if it wasn't that women are tangentially involved, but since they are it's all "Zomg! Misogynist!" And then he compounded the massive insult by suggesting that it's primarily women who watch it on TV, which, judging by the advertising, is borne out by the demographic data. What a bastard.
So lets just jump on that bandwagon and dump a ton of bile on someone for a casual remark that could have only offended someone who was looking to be offended.
Must suck to live like that.
Goddamn it. "After his girlfriend went to bed."
Forgot to escape my damn bracket. Third paragraph should read:
"The whole "we're just watching it because of the VR-controlled submersibles and the picture of the hot chick" argument wears a little thin after a while since that stuff happens in the first thirty minutes, but we kept watching after she went to bed for christs sake! But if you'd asked us we'd have blamed it on her anyway; it's not only women who have defined gender roles in this society."
Yea, ya think? The way I read it was as more of a "I know all you guys watch this stuff and care, but I'm going to pretend like I believe that the only reason you watch it is because your girl makes you."
Shit. Geeks are as gooey as anyone else. I went over to a buddies house last weekend, drank a few beers hacked on some linux, talked about xen virtualization and shit like that. Then we went up to let the dogs out, and got sucked in to the last 12 minutes of Castaway and the first fucking two hours of goddamn Titanic.
The whole "we're just watching it because of the VR-controlled submersibles and the picture of the hot chick" argument wears a little thin after a while since that stuff happens bed for christs sake. But if you'd asked us we'd have blamed it on her anyway; it's not only women who have defined gender roles in this society.
The hyper political correctness gets old after a while. The worst thing he suggested in the damn title is that women might like to watch the ribbon twirling, which, judging by the fact that my wife likes to watch it, I don't think is that far fetched or degrading.
Eh. I'm going to have to go with subjective; a boxer can get more points if his punches are "better" than the other boxers, despite the other boxer having punched more. That's just another type of pretty.
You have to specifically state that you're transferring rights, when you're transferring, so really it doesn't.
The real question is how much does correspondence fall into traditional copyright protection for literary works?
The ownership of a two party conversation can be disputed; the post was a response to a request posted on the board...That could qualify it as a solicited work, which could make the copyright fall into a work for hire category, like the answer to a test question which, though written by the student, belongs to the professor.
Not true actually; fair use also takes into account what distribution will do to the market value of the distributed work.
In a nutshell, if it's worthless, you're going to have a very hard time proving copyright infringement.
The only way they'll get him is in a civil suit for harrassment or libel.
Yea, I'm not really talking about e-machines...More like a virtual machine hosted in some sort of cloud environment (which may or may not involve clustering the client machines back in)...Fully functional, whatever you can do on a local machine, you could do on your virtual machine.
It's got the benefits of the traditional granny machine (idiot proof, low maintenance), without the huge obvious defect of having practically no functionality.
The whole thing depends on a level of bandwidth and processing that don't currently exist, but if you were microsoft and you wanted to maintain your dominance, this would be the thing to bet on. In the long run, it's practically inevitable.
This is true is you have one right now...But you're going to need a new one in a few years, and a new one a few years after that, etc, etc...
Now a gamer or a hardcore geek would be fine with buying new machines...I personally have enough to heat my house in the winter. But a family that needs three or four machines? Your grandma who doesn't want to have to think about it? That's a powerful demographic that you could sell a virtual machine to, a machine that would be far more reliable, never go obsolete, never get a virus, the works.
That's what they're pointed at. Sure it's not going to be great for gaming today, but this really isn't about today.
They'll have enough trouble trying to prove that they are the rightful heirs of the Knights Templar...Trying to get money from the church on top of that? And why not sue France? They got a huge chunk of change as well.
Not even close to being the first time someone has tried this, and it never goes anywhere. The dream of the Templars wealth keeps it going, but in reality there is no wealth to claim, no one with the right to claim it, and no one to claim it from.
You're missing the point. Local machines are relatively inefficient; so you could have a local machine that's effectively a thin client with all its processing offloaded into the cloud.
A step like this is an attempt to do away with the local machine; software as service, but also computer as service.
I know, but it's not impossible. They're not exactly flammable, and if I understand correctly, they're encased in metal (though nothing that would withstand a massive impact).
This is the SECOND time its happened. More like deja vu than old news...Even reality has a dupe now and then.
Sadly, I think they were recovered...Which makes this the SECOND time the launch has failed.
Who wants to lay odds on them finding the little charred capsule of ashes and making a third go of it?
This is a pretty straightforward bit of libel...Even on the internets you have to be careful if you're explicitly slandering someone by name.
Illegal is illegal, and if these monkeys were dumb enough to put up all this crap under handles that they accessed from their homes, then they're screwed, and it's hard to see how they ought not be.
Heh. Yea, that was Plato's argument. They watch themselves.
Honestly I couldn't tell what the fuck you were talking about. Thank you for clarifying.
The point is moot because, in effect, there are no more watchers since everyone is a watcher. No one has a special privilege than can be abused.