Why? It's easy to install. It's easy to administer. It's Open, available and Free. It's secure by default (no open ports). It has repositories for thousands of useful and free apps that you can get from their repositories instead of downloading them from random Internet sites. It supports nearly all the hardware you've ever heard of. Server is free. Client is free. Thin client with servers is free. Clustering is free. Did I mention that client licenses are free? You can boot it from nearly any readable media. Boot time is swift even in ways you wouldn't expect it to be (pen?). It's easy to upgrade and paths are easy too -- and free. With Open Office it reads all the common Office formats, for free. It's extensible, adoptable, and free. The BSA will not be beating your door down over this one because they want you to use it.
As you'll see if you click my username, I've gotten great mileage out of this thread and I don't mind gloating about that a little bit. So I don't mind wasting a little Karma on a trivial comment like this.
... I really doubt anyone at IBM is still sore over the OS/2 thing...
If they aren't, they should be. Sharp dealing is one thing. Outright knifing your partners is another thing entirely. Maybe "sore" is not the right word. "Cautious", "Mindful", or "Alert" might be better. One would hope for at least "Aware of history". You know about history, don't you? Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
If you knew your cousin was a crackhead, would you let him borrow your car? If your date has three baby daddys supporting her lifestyle, are you still interested in hooking up? Then why, oh why, would you partner with Microsoft after they've treated you that way?
You may want to read another perspective on the subject. Everything in this thread that might be insightful was said in 1841 and 1842 by Thomas Macaulay in a speech before the British Parliament.
Teaser:
Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop.
Copyrights and patents no longer server their purpose which is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times
to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
You will find plenty more there if you're interested in joining us in the fight to abolish copyright in order to promote progress of science and useful arts.
Various flavors of "innovators" and entrepreneurs have developed middleware, 4GL, operating environments, libraries and front ends and sold them at ridiculous rates to organizations that have adopted different sets of them for 40 years. And they've sold them so well that to the people who bought them every unmade choice seems dirisible. Every choice between every option is a potential flamewar on the scale of Emacs VS vi. The odds of a new coder successfully negotiating this minefield long enough to get his code running on the very important systems that still run COBOL seems to be nearly nil. The odds of shopping this knowledge to competing companies seem exceedingly remote. This is obvious from the greybeards posting here.
Besides, who wants to get 2/3's of their way through a 30 year career as the FNG?
Thanks, but no. No COBOL for me. Not even as an historical oddity. Just no.
Very well then. I am impressed. I had made light of the situation. Your detailed and well thought comment reminds me that one measure of the quality of a tool is its durability. COBOL certainly has that.
Another measure of a programming language is the breadth and depth of tools, the utility of the applications developed in it. COBOL has this too as you note.
The times have for the most part left mainframes behind. Perhaps these virtualized mainframes you speak of will help bring a wider audience to their appeal.
You remind me also that a great well integrated team can make great code and enjoy doing it. Both are important if you would do great things and I admire your achievements.
OK then, COBOL is not dead yet.
But I understand that COBOL is habit forming and youths are not eagerly taking it up for fear of getting hooked. In the end even your great team will tire of the endless grind of recoding tax tables, amortization schedules and whatnot. In the end everybody retires. What then?
Washington, Oregon, or Nevada can expect to see an influx of previous CA residents who are sick & f'ing tired of being raped by the very people they used to work for.
Nevada is lovely. Oregon less so. They should not come to Washington though. We get one sunny day a year - usually a Wednesday. Moss grows on the sidewalks. Mold grows in the walls. The eternal gloom drives people insane. We get 100' of rain a year here. And then there are the roving packs of rabid pitbulls and their meth addicted owners. Save yourself - stay away! Nevada is lovely.
In Seattle Washington, our City Counsel just voted a 20 cent per bag (paper or plastic) tax. Indeed, the city also outlawed the sale of water in plastic single-use bottles in or on all city owned property. I believe that more and more municipalities are headed this direction.
On the street in front of the state house where this law was passed crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana are openly sold despite the laws to the contrary. Beggars, zombies and hookers shamble about. It's as lawless and dangerous place as you'll find in the wild west.
Many here are complaining of incompetence in the TSA and other government agencies.
Let me express my affinity with Sam Clemens, Thomas Jefferson and many others when I say: I prefer them this way and so should you. You have no idea how abhorrent the government could be with the trillions of dollars at their disposal. Let us pray they don't become more effective. Please?
I have to preface this comment by saying that I respect your experience and appreciate your commitment. Folks like you made it possible for us who do the modern business to get our jobs done. God Bless Grace Hopper's soul.
And then I have to say you're part of the problem. COBOL is long dead. It's so dead even the corpse has ceased to stink. It was a grand idea that contributed much to the evolution of the art, but it's over already. If, in an interview the interviewer even mentioned COBOL the smart developer would take a neat pass. It's over. I know it's hard to let go of a clever idea once dear but please - get over it.
I want to point out that the only reason I'm replying to your post is that you were moderated "+5, Insightful." In another circumstance I might be modded "troll" for this. I will escape it this time because the mods might be biased, but they're not dumb.
So it was written upon greenbar in the mode of the day, in The Tao of Programming, wherein much wisdom is stored - First Chapter, Third Verse:
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
The difference between a man who cannot read the history and one who will not is moot.
The problem is that if they're paying minimum wage they're competing against a job where the biggest stressor is remembering to say "Welcome to WalMart" when people walk in the door. That, and WalMart has to actually pay the state minimum wage, and the job is to ensure that state employees (including the programmer) get paid the lower federal minimum wage.
The bigger problem is that if Arnie-baby actually achieves this goal a lot of state employees are going to discover they are due their 20 year retirement and/or realize that real-estate prices in the rest of the country are so low they can trade their 1200 sq ft California "Ranch home" - even at fire sale prices - for a riverfront 2500 sq ft house on a 40 acre spread in Ephrata, WA and have enough money left over to fund their job search in a growth market for 20 years.
850 Sq ft on 1/20th acre. 1bd, 1bath built in 1928. Near transit. $800,000.
What, are you nucking futz? The problem with doing this to school teachers is that you also require they be good at math.
I imagine if Arnie achieves his goal the California mortgage industry could see a spike in defaults. Just guessing here.
And if Novell paid a little more attention to Evolution, which competes with Outlook, the whole Desktop could be a Windows killer in the right hands.
Novell's focus right now is getting Microsoft's IP into Linux, as I said they would do when they made their legendary deal. Mono with.NET libraries and binary Codecs (embrace, extend, you know what comes next...).
Don't look for them to save you from teh evil Redmond Monster. They're a puppet now and they must dance when Ballmer pulls their strings.
When you want to add more users what will the cost be?
I think the peak of laughability for me was when I discovered that they expect client licenses for all of the people who might access your web server. As if I might be willing to pay 15 billion dollars to appropriately license all of the billion people who could conceivably access my blog if it was hosted on their legendary IIS.
Google and Apache had better offers and I took 'em up on it because I'm not interested in stealing Microsoft's IP even if it is of such high quality that they can ask so much for it. That, and I don't have a loose 15B to blow on webserver software this year.;-)
They weren't really licensing issues. They could get over the non-exclusive licensing DOS thing. That was merely shrewd dealing. IBM's real axe to grind was OS/2. The partnered with Microsoft to codevelop it. Microsoft dragged their heels and made it buggy (some say on purpose) so that it would compare poorly with Windows. This was perhaps the initial "knife the baby" experiment that was so successful it became the default Microsoft development partnership strategy. This strategy peaked with the Sendo incident. Since they succeeded so publicly in that endeavor other phone manufacturers are brilliantly reluctant to partner with them. This is why your phone probably doesn't have a waving quadcolor flag on it.
Microsoft's real problem is that they've peaked. They've maxed their desktop share at nearly 100%. Emerging markets aren't paying. All the people who are fully committed are on a subscription basis. In the server space and the High Performance Computing space there aren't going to sway anybody they haven't already. They have no route to grow except taking ownership of the hardware market and that's a serious no-no. They have a lot of powerful friends in that arena who have an implied mutual non-aggression pact: You stay out of PC hardware and we stay out of OS software. Microsoft broke this implied pact when they partnered with a company to be the OEM for a line of PCs in India, an emerging third world market where most of the growth is expected to come from in the next decade. That was a very bad idea.
It went the other way: "Once you get rid of IBM... how do you get rid of Microsoft."
... and we wore an onion on our belt, as was the fashion of the day, yadda yadda...
Anyway, Microsoft didn't kill IBM. They just smashed their hubris. Perhaps if IBM returns the favor we will be done with the tyranny of monopoly in IT forever. Or maybe in 17 years a scrappy reborn up and coming Microsoft will be there to remind the aging monolithic giant once again that assuming the sale only goes so far.
Most people don't want to know what an OS is. Like a PVR - switch it on - and it works. Linux will succeed when the big boys start marketing it, just like the 'swill beers' that now dominate the world markets.
The advertisers of the eee pc or the new Atom netbooks don't make a big deal of the fact that there's no Windows in the box. "Like a PVR - switch it on - and it works." You are right that most people don't care to know and that is perhaps more insightful than I would have expected from your post. I would say you're very perceptive. I would expect that the lack of spyware and viruses on the PCs after six months will only be considered a pleasant bonus.
That it's actually attractive enough an idea to make it the theme of an advertising campaign is even better. Perhaps "Vista free" is this year's "Fat Free" of the computing world. Imagine the Vista logo with a red circle and strike on the box of PCs, phones, printers, scanners, external media, routers and switches along with the text: "Don't worry. This product does not contain or require Windows Vista." Or maybe this nice logo.
IBM at the end of business today had a 174.60B market capitalization - more than HP and Dell put together and within reachable range of Microsoft's 239B. IBM's trend is up (just off the 52wk high) while Microsoft's is, well, to be kind, not. Microsoft nearly killed them -- by 1994 their value had dropped to 1/10th of what it is today. For the past twelve years however IBM's stock has been as good or better as an investment than Microsoft's. IBM's value today is more than five times what it was when Microsoft was knifing their OS/2 love child in 1990. And IBM didn't just spend 7B engineering a product so abhorrent it needs this kind of "no matter what you've heard, our product doesn't suck" kind of marketing.
They can still lead Hollywood to some of the finest, most desolate environments on Earth. For a fee of course. Maybe the fee should include a fiber hookup. Eventually Hollywood will want enough access to grant it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait 'till you see what they can do with election day coverage.
I heard the 2008 Olympics were not held. John Titor told me so. Maybe that was an alternate timeline. Divergence is a bitch.
Why? It's easy to install. It's easy to administer. It's Open, available and Free. It's secure by default (no open ports). It has repositories for thousands of useful and free apps that you can get from their repositories instead of downloading them from random Internet sites. It supports nearly all the hardware you've ever heard of. Server is free. Client is free. Thin client with servers is free. Clustering is free. Did I mention that client licenses are free? You can boot it from nearly any readable media. Boot time is swift even in ways you wouldn't expect it to be (pen?). It's easy to upgrade and paths are easy too -- and free. With Open Office it reads all the common Office formats, for free. It's extensible, adoptable, and free. The BSA will not be beating your door down over this one because they want you to use it.
The better question is: "Why not Ubuntu?"
Perhaps this is a trap for you. I'm sorry about that. I am gracious but pernicious. I asked you a question. You've avoided it so I'll ask it again:
So... What then? Have you got a plan for that? Your customers deserve a plan.
As you'll see if you click my username, I've gotten great mileage out of this thread and I don't mind gloating about that a little bit. So I don't mind wasting a little Karma on a trivial comment like this.
If they aren't, they should be. Sharp dealing is one thing. Outright knifing your partners is another thing entirely. Maybe "sore" is not the right word. "Cautious", "Mindful", or "Alert" might be better. One would hope for at least "Aware of history". You know about history, don't you? Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
If you knew your cousin was a crackhead, would you let him borrow your car? If your date has three baby daddys supporting her lifestyle, are you still interested in hooking up? Then why, oh why, would you partner with Microsoft after they've treated you that way?
You may want to read another perspective on the subject. Everything in this thread that might be insightful was said in 1841 and 1842 by Thomas Macaulay in a speech before the British Parliament.
Teaser:
Copyrights and patents no longer server their purpose which is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
You will find plenty more there if you're interested in joining us in the fight to abolish copyright in order to promote progress of science and useful arts.
One thing I think may be a problem..
Various flavors of "innovators" and entrepreneurs have developed middleware, 4GL, operating environments, libraries and front ends and sold them at ridiculous rates to organizations that have adopted different sets of them for 40 years. And they've sold them so well that to the people who bought them every unmade choice seems dirisible. Every choice between every option is a potential flamewar on the scale of Emacs VS vi. The odds of a new coder successfully negotiating this minefield long enough to get his code running on the very important systems that still run COBOL seems to be nearly nil. The odds of shopping this knowledge to competing companies seem exceedingly remote. This is obvious from the greybeards posting here.
Besides, who wants to get 2/3's of their way through a 30 year career as the FNG?
Thanks, but no. No COBOL for me. Not even as an historical oddity. Just no.
Very well then. I am impressed. I had made light of the situation. Your detailed and well thought comment reminds me that one measure of the quality of a tool is its durability. COBOL certainly has that.
Another measure of a programming language is the breadth and depth of tools, the utility of the applications developed in it. COBOL has this too as you note.
The times have for the most part left mainframes behind. Perhaps these virtualized mainframes you speak of will help bring a wider audience to their appeal.
You remind me also that a great well integrated team can make great code and enjoy doing it. Both are important if you would do great things and I admire your achievements.
OK then, COBOL is not dead yet.
But I understand that COBOL is habit forming and youths are not eagerly taking it up for fear of getting hooked. In the end even your great team will tire of the endless grind of recoding tax tables, amortization schedules and whatnot. In the end everybody retires. What then?
Nevada is lovely. Oregon less so. They should not come to Washington though. We get one sunny day a year - usually a Wednesday. Moss grows on the sidewalks. Mold grows in the walls. The eternal gloom drives people insane. We get 100' of rain a year here. And then there are the roving packs of rabid pitbulls and their meth addicted owners. Save yourself - stay away! Nevada is lovely.
On the street in front of the state house where this law was passed crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana are openly sold despite the laws to the contrary. Beggars, zombies and hookers shamble about. It's as lawless and dangerous place as you'll find in the wild west.
But they can save us from shopping bags?
Many here are complaining of incompetence in the TSA and other government agencies.
Let me express my affinity with Sam Clemens, Thomas Jefferson and many others when I say: I prefer them this way and so should you. You have no idea how abhorrent the government could be with the trillions of dollars at their disposal. Let us pray they don't become more effective. Please?
I have to preface this comment by saying that I respect your experience and appreciate your commitment. Folks like you made it possible for us who do the modern business to get our jobs done. God Bless Grace Hopper's soul.
And then I have to say you're part of the problem. COBOL is long dead. It's so dead even the corpse has ceased to stink. It was a grand idea that contributed much to the evolution of the art, but it's over already. If, in an interview the interviewer even mentioned COBOL the smart developer would take a neat pass. It's over. I know it's hard to let go of a clever idea once dear but please - get over it.
I want to point out that the only reason I'm replying to your post is that you were moderated "+5, Insightful." In another circumstance I might be modded "troll" for this. I will escape it this time because the mods might be biased, but they're not dumb.
So it was written upon greenbar in the mode of the day, in The Tao of Programming, wherein much wisdom is stored - First Chapter, Third Verse:
The difference between a man who cannot read the history and one who will not is moot.
The problem is that if they're paying minimum wage they're competing against a job where the biggest stressor is remembering to say "Welcome to WalMart" when people walk in the door. That, and WalMart has to actually pay the state minimum wage, and the job is to ensure that state employees (including the programmer) get paid the lower federal minimum wage.
The bigger problem is that if Arnie-baby actually achieves this goal a lot of state employees are going to discover they are due their 20 year retirement and/or realize that real-estate prices in the rest of the country are so low they can trade their 1200 sq ft California "Ranch home" - even at fire sale prices - for a riverfront 2500 sq ft house on a 40 acre spread in Ephrata, WA and have enough money left over to fund their job search in a growth market for 20 years.
850 Sq ft on 1/20th acre. 1bd, 1bath built in 1928. Near transit. $800,000.
What, are you nucking futz? The problem with doing this to school teachers is that you also require they be good at math.
I imagine if Arnie achieves his goal the California mortgage industry could see a spike in defaults. Just guessing here.
Novell's focus right now is getting Microsoft's IP into Linux, as I said they would do when they made their legendary deal. Mono with .NET libraries and binary Codecs (embrace, extend, you know what comes next...).
Don't look for them to save you from teh evil Redmond Monster. They're a puppet now and they must dance when Ballmer pulls their strings.
I think the peak of laughability for me was when I discovered that they expect client licenses for all of the people who might access your web server. As if I might be willing to pay 15 billion dollars to appropriately license all of the billion people who could conceivably access my blog if it was hosted on their legendary IIS.
Google and Apache had better offers and I took 'em up on it because I'm not interested in stealing Microsoft's IP even if it is of such high quality that they can ask so much for it. That, and I don't have a loose 15B to blow on webserver software this year. ;-)
They weren't really licensing issues. They could get over the non-exclusive licensing DOS thing. That was merely shrewd dealing. IBM's real axe to grind was OS/2. The partnered with Microsoft to codevelop it. Microsoft dragged their heels and made it buggy (some say on purpose) so that it would compare poorly with Windows. This was perhaps the initial "knife the baby" experiment that was so successful it became the default Microsoft development partnership strategy. This strategy peaked with the Sendo incident. Since they succeeded so publicly in that endeavor other phone manufacturers are brilliantly reluctant to partner with them. This is why your phone probably doesn't have a waving quadcolor flag on it.
Microsoft's real problem is that they've peaked. They've maxed their desktop share at nearly 100%. Emerging markets aren't paying. All the people who are fully committed are on a subscription basis. In the server space and the High Performance Computing space there aren't going to sway anybody they haven't already. They have no route to grow except taking ownership of the hardware market and that's a serious no-no. They have a lot of powerful friends in that arena who have an implied mutual non-aggression pact: You stay out of PC hardware and we stay out of OS software. Microsoft broke this implied pact when they partnered with a company to be the OEM for a line of PCs in India, an emerging third world market where most of the growth is expected to come from in the next decade. That was a very bad idea.
Wouldn't you be?
It went the other way: "Once you get rid of IBM... how do you get rid of Microsoft."
... and we wore an onion on our belt, as was the fashion of the day, yadda yadda...
Anyway, Microsoft didn't kill IBM. They just smashed their hubris. Perhaps if IBM returns the favor we will be done with the tyranny of monopoly in IT forever. Or maybe in 17 years a scrappy reborn up and coming Microsoft will be there to remind the aging monolithic giant once again that assuming the sale only goes so far.
The advertisers of the eee pc or the new Atom netbooks don't make a big deal of the fact that there's no Windows in the box. "Like a PVR - switch it on - and it works." You are right that most people don't care to know and that is perhaps more insightful than I would have expected from your post. I would say you're very perceptive. I would expect that the lack of spyware and viruses on the PCs after six months will only be considered a pleasant bonus.
That it's actually attractive enough an idea to make it the theme of an advertising campaign is even better. Perhaps "Vista free" is this year's "Fat Free" of the computing world. Imagine the Vista logo with a red circle and strike on the box of PCs, phones, printers, scanners, external media, routers and switches along with the text: "Don't worry. This product does not contain or require Windows Vista." Or maybe this nice logo.
Windows client licenses are not free, you know. Not only do you have to pay them, but they actually expect you to count them. How dumb is that?
Really - who pays for client licenses on a file and print server? That's just stupid.
IBM at the end of business today had a 174.60B market capitalization - more than HP and Dell put together and within reachable range of Microsoft's 239B. IBM's trend is up (just off the 52wk high) while Microsoft's is, well, to be kind, not. Microsoft nearly killed them -- by 1994 their value had dropped to 1/10th of what it is today. For the past twelve years however IBM's stock has been as good or better as an investment than Microsoft's. IBM's value today is more than five times what it was when Microsoft was knifing their OS/2 love child in 1990. And IBM didn't just spend 7B engineering a product so abhorrent it needs this kind of "no matter what you've heard, our product doesn't suck" kind of marketing.
I hope the tide is turning. Maybe this will help.
Ibm press release.
They can still lead Hollywood to some of the finest, most desolate environments on Earth. For a fee of course. Maybe the fee should include a fiber hookup. Eventually Hollywood will want enough access to grant it.