it doesn't grant you to say things like "COBOL runs on vacuum tubes"
You apparently don't know what the word "analogous" means.
"mainframes are dead".
There's a difference between "are" and "should be". Mainframes are very much alive. COBOL should be dead, and I'm not sure how much longer mainframes should survive, either.
It doesn't seem like many on Slashdot are unaware of how much COBOL is used. It seems more like most of us wish it would die a well-deserved death.
to be excluded from the very definition of judaism.
Well, nor were my parents, grandparents, nor anyone at the synagogue I went to...
At some point, you'll have to accept that your paranoid delusions are just that -- delusions. That is, unless you have some evidence for me to consider...
False dichotomy. Even IBM is selling Linux on mainframes these days.
If it isn't broke, you don't 'fix' it.
If it's not maintainable, it's broke.
Visual this or that.
If you pull your nose out of your COBOL for a few minutes and bother to actually learn something, you'll find that Microsoft is one small part of a large ecosystem of languages and development tools, most of which are not called "visual" anything, and most of which are better than COBOL.
One, the complexities of a GUI makes codes many times more intricate, making the job more difficult (and more error prone),
I doubt this is much of an issue. GUIs can certainly be abstracted to the point where it's not an issue.
programmers today look at problems differently.
Well, some programmers. (Hire me!)
I do agree, but recent programmers certainly don't have a monopoly on WTFs. I think you've got something of the success effect here -- that is, your old COBOL system was necessarily reliable, because if it wasn't, it wouldn't have lasted this long. So the old COBOL apps that are still in production are likely at least somewhat reliable.
But reliable and maintainable are different things. I'd argue rewriting them just to make them more maintainable -- carefully, of course, so they're reliable, but you also want to be able to open them up twenty years from now and make a minor change without pulling your hair out.
they will soon exist only in cases where you need very fast access to all of very large data sets.
Which is quite often.
And honestly, clustering filesystems and databases are solving that problem too.
Except that clustering filesystems almost always have to compromise on one of the ACID properties. For example, Amazon's Dynamo and CouchDB are highly available, redundant, and fast, but allow conflicts, assuming the application will correct for them. Ok, but that fails for a banking application -- if I were to withdraw my entire balance from two different nodes simultaneously, I'd have a massive overdraft, but I'd also have the money.
You could imagine trying to shard it instead, but what happens when you transfer money between two shards? You still need a transaction, only now it needs to be synchronized between two nodes. What do you do? Do you lock both nodes at once? Now you've got a possibility of deadlocks.
Clusters will rule nearly every aspect of large computing because they are the only thing more reliable than a mainframe.
Reliability can be defined in several ways. Clusters are more available than a mainframe -- if your mainframe goes down, you're down. But clusters are less consistent than a mainframe, unless you're willing to take such massive hits from synchronization that the performance advantage is gone.
For the vast majority of applications, some inconsistency is acceptable. Take Amazon's example -- if you tell one node to add item A to your cart, and another node to add item B, producing two conflicting versions of your cart, the cart application should be smart enough to merge them. The only synchronization needed is checkout, and here, all you'd need to do is refer to a specific version of that record in the form that's submitted.
But for applications which can't tolerate that inconsistency, unless there's some clustering method I'm unaware of, you're still going to want something like a mainframe.
Stable, reliable, well-understood, and bug-free are true of many more recent languages.
I dispute that it's the best suited to the purpose for which it's used. Show me a construct in COBOL that wouldn't be much easier in something modern -- even Java, if we have to.
Apple has already chosen their way of avoiding DLL hell,
It is, however, neither the only nor the most efficient way of avoiding DLL hell.
If nothing else, it's a bit more delay and an unnecessary waste of battery if those Qt libs have to be loaded from that drive with each app -- to say nothing of if Apple ever allowed background apps.
It's not "external" if it's in your app.
Better hope Apple interprets it the same way. Or, assume that the person Apple has reviewing your app interprets it the same way. Because they've definitely filtered out individual apps by targeting specific frameworks.
That would be a good argument for why I should learn to do math on pencil and paper, not just with Maxima or Mathematica.
But I think using cursive instead of a keyboard of some sort is a bit like using a horse-drawn carriage instead of a car. Quaint, in its own way beautiful, but of no practical or educational value -- in other words, functionally obsolete.
Not really relevant -- you're assuming that it'll only be used for FM, when with that CC license, it could be used anywhere.
It also avoids any sort of generational loss -- for example, last I checked, Internet Radio has to be MP3. If you're going to have it be lossy, push that loss as far back as possible.
Why would you be insulted by a company offering its market space only to products it finds worth selling?
Way to not read my comment.
Here, let me quote myself:
Then let them have their app store, and throw up a little warning if I try to install apps through other channels -- downloading from a website, say. Users who really trust Apple to protect them can stick to the officially approved apps, and users who want to be more adventurous shouldn't have to jailbreak their phone.
So, to answer your question:
Do you get insulted when you go to a mall and don't see the stores you like?
No, but I would be insulted if my car would only go to that one mall -- if I couldn't go to the stores I like.
Do you get insulted when gun manufacturers put safeties on their guns? They are literally protecting you from yourself.
Pathetic. Safeties don't actually prevent me from doing anything I want with a gun. They just make it harder for me to do something by accident.
The App Store does try to prevent me from doing dangerous things, on purpose -- that would be like selling a gun with the safety welded in the "on" position. Crippled, much?
Its a sort of quality control, protecting the user from possible bad experiences so that the company's name doesn't get tarnished.
Let's hope the company's name gets tarnished enough by the numerous apps that consumers actually want, and developers want to write, but Apple won't approve.
The majority like that the company is protecting them.
Then let them have their app store, and throw up a little warning if I try to install apps through other channels -- downloading from a website, say. Users who really trust Apple to protect them can stick to the officially approved apps, and users who want to be more adventurous shouldn't have to jailbreak their phone.
Yes, we could buy other phones, and I intend to. But isn't it a bit insulting to realize you're essentially letting Apple protect you from yourself?
Everyone else doesn't get it, they think that just because we have a free market that means that a company has to make their products open to tinker with and if they don't it's some crime.
A lot of people seem to have this assumption that anyone who disagrees with them is either stupid ("doesn't get it") or evil.
No, I accept that the free market means that as long as the iPhone doesn't become a monopoly, they can pretty much do what they want. I'm a bit appalled that the free market is failing to correct such an obvious inefficiency, though.
But the fact that something is legal doesn't make it ok. It's entirely legal for me to link to goatse right here, but it would make me an ass, so I don't do it.
Why isn't anyone bitching at Microsoft for not letting any 3rd party apps on the Zune HD? Because no one even wants the device?
Most likely. But also because the iPhone has been available, and high profile, for awhile now. Zune HD apps of any kind weren't available till this point.
I don't really mind a device that's "crippled", but designed for a specific purpose, to be an appliance -- as others point out, if there's a Linux inside my TV to draw the menus, as much as it might be cool to hack it, I really don't care. My current cell phone is some cheap Motorola crap that can run Verizon-approved apps, and nothing else -- and I don't care, because I didn't buy it for the ability to run apps, I bought it for the ability to make phone calls -- and later discovered that it could take decent pictures, and play music, which is kind of a nice bonus.
I don't even have too much of a problem with game consoles, although I'd much prefer an open device, where homebrew games can be sold without going through a third party.
Where I have a problem is when something is sold as a general-purpose computing device -- and don't kid yourself, the iPhone is not sold as "just a phone", it's sold as "there's an app for that" -- and is then crippled. On top of that, you have Apple's seemingly random approval process...
I mean, take this:
Apple is open about rejecting apps, they aren't trying to trick devs/customers into thinking they can get any app accepted.
Developers, no. But customers aren't going to be much aware of this until it starts to bite them -- until there's an app they want, but can't have, because Apple has rejected it.
Again: It's sold as "There's an app for that." Not as "There might be an app for that, if we allow it."
The Internet web 2 cloud computing buzzword age is ridden with little substance and lots of marketing doublespeak
I'll grant that this happens, a lot.
However, web apps and utility computing (two possible things "cloud computing" could mean) are a Good Thing, and they are here to stay. Indeed, like it or not, that's exactly what you used to post this comment, and it's exactly what you're using to read my reply -- if you really and truly don't want to buy into it, go back to newsgroups.
Where I have a problem is where people build yet another walled garden this way. I have no problem with Gmail, but then, Gmail is built entirely on interoperable open standards -- IMAP, SMTP, and Jabber. I do have a problem with Facebook, as you're pretty much funneled through the website -- they could have built it using things like XFN, RSS, OpenID, and SMTP (seriously, why would you implement a private messaging system, when you could just do email forwarding?) -- instead, they pretty much funnel you through their system to the point where some people would probably be happy with an Internet appliance that just did facebook.com.
And as others have pointed out, it's funny that you mentioned Google and Apple, but not Microsoft. Microsoft is part of the reason our world isn't as amazing as it could be right now. How long did IE hold back the web? How long will it continue to do so?
I will agree with this much, though:
Our world COULD be amazing in 20 years but I bet it's more restricted and more frustrating than ever.
But I refuse to just roll over and accept that. I run Linux, I refuse to have a Facebook account, and if I'm going to spend any significant amount of money on a phone, it'll be something hackable -- either Android or Maemo. Calling people "sheep" for choosing the popular choice doesn't work if you can't offer them an alternative.
I know -- back when the iPod was becoming popular, I often warned people away -- I'd point out that the iPod was twice as expensive as the competition, and half the features, and not really that much easier to use. People listened, and were quite receptive -- and asked me what the alternative was.
Seems people just like to throw "DRM" word around because of its bad image here on slashdot.
Anti-cheat software, however, employs similar tactics and has similar effects. Example: Blizzard's Warden checks for certain programs running in the background. SecuROM does the same thing. Only difference is, SecuROM doesn't like DaemonTools, while Warden probably cares more about Glider (if it still exists).
The biggest difference between DRM and anti-cheat in general is motivation -- legitimate players actually do benefit, much more directly, if the anti-cheat software works, whereas if DRM could ever work, legitimate players would be no better off than with no DRM at all.
However, in the bigger picture, you still have the same problems -- false positives and general headaches (rootkit-like behavior, anyone? Hello?) for people forced to use anti-cheat software, which are the same problems as people forced to use DRM.
So while it may not be technically accurate, it does make sense.
Is there some sort of hidden fee I wasn't aware of?
I mean, it sounds like a lot, but looking at this calculator, with all the optional extras turned on (except Buy It Now, because they'd have to be stupid to do that), it adds up to less than 5% with a final bid of 10 million.
Ferengi tend to be disappointed if they only get half.
It all boils down to whether or not you believe in it.... there are people who could benefit.
Ignorance is bliss...
But see, I can't help but wonder if the placebo can be accomplished by, again, spending that money on something which may actually have a chance, rather than on complete garbage.
See GP. If the hardware I want isn't supported by Solaris, but is supported by Linux, I'll want to use that.
OpenSolaris will run rsync just fine
It'll also run NFS, so if the hardware will support it, you do have a point -- even if I "needed" Linux for some reason, I could still use Solaris for the physical storage.
Slashdot Mirror
it doesn't grant you to say things like "COBOL runs on vacuum tubes"
You apparently don't know what the word "analogous" means.
"mainframes are dead".
There's a difference between "are" and "should be". Mainframes are very much alive. COBOL should be dead, and I'm not sure how much longer mainframes should survive, either.
It doesn't seem like many on Slashdot are unaware of how much COBOL is used. It seems more like most of us wish it would die a well-deserved death.
to be excluded from the very definition of judaism.
Well, nor were my parents, grandparents, nor anyone at the synagogue I went to...
At some point, you'll have to accept that your paranoid delusions are just that -- delusions. That is, unless you have some evidence for me to consider...
The one thing that COBOL does better than any mainstream modern language is record handling and formatting.
Formatting? Really?
Record handling, I dispute. Formatting, if it was really so much better, I'm sure I can build a library to replicate it.
Having a manufacturer and machine and OS-independent standard.
Java does this, but not an implementation-independent standard.
Ruby is close to this. C, Javascript, and many others have had this for probably a decade or more.
Quasi human-readable code.
Anything is "quasi human-readable". Lowercase is easier on the eyes, for one. And Ruby is a hell of a lot more readable than COBOL.
Then again, I don't know a lot of COBOL, and can't comment on MOVE CORRESPONDING.
COBOL is solid. WinDoze is flakey.
False dichotomy. Even IBM is selling Linux on mainframes these days.
If it isn't broke, you don't 'fix' it.
If it's not maintainable, it's broke.
Visual this or that.
If you pull your nose out of your COBOL for a few minutes and bother to actually learn something, you'll find that Microsoft is one small part of a large ecosystem of languages and development tools, most of which are not called "visual" anything, and most of which are better than COBOL.
One, the complexities of a GUI makes codes many times more intricate, making the job more difficult (and more error prone),
I doubt this is much of an issue. GUIs can certainly be abstracted to the point where it's not an issue.
programmers today look at problems differently.
Well, some programmers. (Hire me!)
I do agree, but recent programmers certainly don't have a monopoly on WTFs. I think you've got something of the success effect here -- that is, your old COBOL system was necessarily reliable, because if it wasn't, it wouldn't have lasted this long. So the old COBOL apps that are still in production are likely at least somewhat reliable.
But reliable and maintainable are different things. I'd argue rewriting them just to make them more maintainable -- carefully, of course, so they're reliable, but you also want to be able to open them up twenty years from now and make a minor change without pulling your hair out.
they will soon exist only in cases where you need very fast access to all of very large data sets.
Which is quite often.
And honestly, clustering filesystems and databases are solving that problem too.
Except that clustering filesystems almost always have to compromise on one of the ACID properties. For example, Amazon's Dynamo and CouchDB are highly available, redundant, and fast, but allow conflicts, assuming the application will correct for them. Ok, but that fails for a banking application -- if I were to withdraw my entire balance from two different nodes simultaneously, I'd have a massive overdraft, but I'd also have the money.
You could imagine trying to shard it instead, but what happens when you transfer money between two shards? You still need a transaction, only now it needs to be synchronized between two nodes. What do you do? Do you lock both nodes at once? Now you've got a possibility of deadlocks.
Clusters will rule nearly every aspect of large computing because they are the only thing more reliable than a mainframe.
Reliability can be defined in several ways. Clusters are more available than a mainframe -- if your mainframe goes down, you're down. But clusters are less consistent than a mainframe, unless you're willing to take such massive hits from synchronization that the performance advantage is gone.
For the vast majority of applications, some inconsistency is acceptable. Take Amazon's example -- if you tell one node to add item A to your cart, and another node to add item B, producing two conflicting versions of your cart, the cart application should be smart enough to merge them. The only synchronization needed is checkout, and here, all you'd need to do is refer to a specific version of that record in the form that's submitted.
But for applications which can't tolerate that inconsistency, unless there's some clustering method I'm unaware of, you're still going to want something like a mainframe.
Stable, reliable, well-understood, and bug-free are true of many more recent languages.
I dispute that it's the best suited to the purpose for which it's used. Show me a construct in COBOL that wouldn't be much easier in something modern -- even Java, if we have to.
Sadly, no. I was raised Jewish, but I was never let in on this supposed conspiracy.
But you did make my point for me -- to believe Israel is behind this pretty much requires you to believe Jews control everything.
Are you actually claiming Israel controls Gmail and Yahoo?
Apple has already chosen their way of avoiding DLL hell,
It is, however, neither the only nor the most efficient way of avoiding DLL hell.
If nothing else, it's a bit more delay and an unnecessary waste of battery if those Qt libs have to be loaded from that drive with each app -- to say nothing of if Apple ever allowed background apps.
It's not "external" if it's in your app.
Better hope Apple interprets it the same way. Or, assume that the person Apple has reviewing your app interprets it the same way. Because they've definitely filtered out individual apps by targeting specific frameworks.
That would be a good argument for why I should learn to do math on pencil and paper, not just with Maxima or Mathematica.
But I think using cursive instead of a keyboard of some sort is a bit like using a horse-drawn carriage instead of a car. Quaint, in its own way beautiful, but of no practical or educational value -- in other words, functionally obsolete.
I have nothing useful to add to this discussion, but this mouse could use a treadmill.
Not really relevant -- you're assuming that it'll only be used for FM, when with that CC license, it could be used anywhere.
It also avoids any sort of generational loss -- for example, last I checked, Internet Radio has to be MP3. If you're going to have it be lossy, push that loss as far back as possible.
You know, people have made Millions, millions from one app.
Of which Apple has certainly taken their cut. But I don't see what your point is.
You are so ignorant if you think that a few rejections, and there have not been that many, are going to change anything.
All it takes is one killer app being rejected, then implemented on a competing platform.
I'm sure buggy-whip manufacturers made a fair profit in their time. What does that prove?
It's also barely over a megabyte. Lossless would be, what, 5 megs? 10?
Lossy compression only makes sense when you actually need that disk space.
Why would you be insulted by a company offering its market space only to products it finds worth selling?
Way to not read my comment.
Here, let me quote myself:
Then let them have their app store, and throw up a little warning if I try to install apps through other channels -- downloading from a website, say. Users who really trust Apple to protect them can stick to the officially approved apps, and users who want to be more adventurous shouldn't have to jailbreak their phone.
So, to answer your question:
Do you get insulted when you go to a mall and don't see the stores you like?
No, but I would be insulted if my car would only go to that one mall -- if I couldn't go to the stores I like.
Do you get insulted when gun manufacturers put safeties on their guns? They are literally protecting you from yourself.
Pathetic. Safeties don't actually prevent me from doing anything I want with a gun. They just make it harder for me to do something by accident.
The App Store does try to prevent me from doing dangerous things, on purpose -- that would be like selling a gun with the safety welded in the "on" position. Crippled, much?
Its a sort of quality control, protecting the user from possible bad experiences so that the company's name doesn't get tarnished.
Let's hope the company's name gets tarnished enough by the numerous apps that consumers actually want, and developers want to write, but Apple won't approve.
The majority like that the company is protecting them.
Then let them have their app store, and throw up a little warning if I try to install apps through other channels -- downloading from a website, say. Users who really trust Apple to protect them can stick to the officially approved apps, and users who want to be more adventurous shouldn't have to jailbreak their phone.
Yes, we could buy other phones, and I intend to. But isn't it a bit insulting to realize you're essentially letting Apple protect you from yourself?
Everyone else doesn't get it, they think that just because we have a free market that means that a company has to make their products open to tinker with and if they don't it's some crime.
A lot of people seem to have this assumption that anyone who disagrees with them is either stupid ("doesn't get it") or evil.
No, I accept that the free market means that as long as the iPhone doesn't become a monopoly, they can pretty much do what they want. I'm a bit appalled that the free market is failing to correct such an obvious inefficiency, though.
But the fact that something is legal doesn't make it ok. It's entirely legal for me to link to goatse right here, but it would make me an ass, so I don't do it.
Why isn't anyone bitching at Microsoft for not letting any 3rd party apps on the Zune HD? Because no one even wants the device?
Most likely. But also because the iPhone has been available, and high profile, for awhile now. Zune HD apps of any kind weren't available till this point.
I don't really mind a device that's "crippled", but designed for a specific purpose, to be an appliance -- as others point out, if there's a Linux inside my TV to draw the menus, as much as it might be cool to hack it, I really don't care. My current cell phone is some cheap Motorola crap that can run Verizon-approved apps, and nothing else -- and I don't care, because I didn't buy it for the ability to run apps, I bought it for the ability to make phone calls -- and later discovered that it could take decent pictures, and play music, which is kind of a nice bonus.
I don't even have too much of a problem with game consoles, although I'd much prefer an open device, where homebrew games can be sold without going through a third party.
Where I have a problem is when something is sold as a general-purpose computing device -- and don't kid yourself, the iPhone is not sold as "just a phone", it's sold as "there's an app for that" -- and is then crippled. On top of that, you have Apple's seemingly random approval process...
I mean, take this:
Apple is open about rejecting apps, they aren't trying to trick devs/customers into thinking they can get any app accepted.
Developers, no. But customers aren't going to be much aware of this until it starts to bite them -- until there's an app they want, but can't have, because Apple has rejected it.
Again: It's sold as "There's an app for that." Not as "There might be an app for that, if we allow it."
I was with you up to this point:
The Internet web 2 cloud computing buzzword age is ridden with little substance and lots of marketing doublespeak
I'll grant that this happens, a lot.
However, web apps and utility computing (two possible things "cloud computing" could mean) are a Good Thing, and they are here to stay. Indeed, like it or not, that's exactly what you used to post this comment, and it's exactly what you're using to read my reply -- if you really and truly don't want to buy into it, go back to newsgroups.
Where I have a problem is where people build yet another walled garden this way. I have no problem with Gmail, but then, Gmail is built entirely on interoperable open standards -- IMAP, SMTP, and Jabber. I do have a problem with Facebook, as you're pretty much funneled through the website -- they could have built it using things like XFN, RSS, OpenID, and SMTP (seriously, why would you implement a private messaging system, when you could just do email forwarding?) -- instead, they pretty much funnel you through their system to the point where some people would probably be happy with an Internet appliance that just did facebook.com.
And as others have pointed out, it's funny that you mentioned Google and Apple, but not Microsoft. Microsoft is part of the reason our world isn't as amazing as it could be right now. How long did IE hold back the web? How long will it continue to do so?
I will agree with this much, though:
Our world COULD be amazing in 20 years but I bet it's more restricted and more frustrating than ever.
But I refuse to just roll over and accept that. I run Linux, I refuse to have a Facebook account, and if I'm going to spend any significant amount of money on a phone, it'll be something hackable -- either Android or Maemo. Calling people "sheep" for choosing the popular choice doesn't work if you can't offer them an alternative.
I know -- back when the iPod was becoming popular, I often warned people away -- I'd point out that the iPod was twice as expensive as the competition, and half the features, and not really that much easier to use. People listened, and were quite receptive -- and asked me what the alternative was.
...why a fart noise when you could play the Brown Noise?
Seems people just like to throw "DRM" word around because of its bad image here on slashdot.
Anti-cheat software, however, employs similar tactics and has similar effects. Example: Blizzard's Warden checks for certain programs running in the background. SecuROM does the same thing. Only difference is, SecuROM doesn't like DaemonTools, while Warden probably cares more about Glider (if it still exists).
The biggest difference between DRM and anti-cheat in general is motivation -- legitimate players actually do benefit, much more directly, if the anti-cheat software works, whereas if DRM could ever work, legitimate players would be no better off than with no DRM at all.
However, in the bigger picture, you still have the same problems -- false positives and general headaches (rootkit-like behavior, anyone? Hello?) for people forced to use anti-cheat software, which are the same problems as people forced to use DRM.
So while it may not be technically accurate, it does make sense.
Makes you wonder why they chose to encase latinum with worthless gold...
Is there some sort of hidden fee I wasn't aware of?
I mean, it sounds like a lot, but looking at this calculator, with all the optional extras turned on (except Buy It Now, because they'd have to be stupid to do that), it adds up to less than 5% with a final bid of 10 million.
Ferengi tend to be disappointed if they only get half.
It all boils down to whether or not you believe in it.... there are people who could benefit.
Ignorance is bliss...
But see, I can't help but wonder if the placebo can be accomplished by, again, spending that money on something which may actually have a chance, rather than on complete garbage.
Why bother?
See GP. If the hardware I want isn't supported by Solaris, but is supported by Linux, I'll want to use that.
OpenSolaris will run rsync just fine
It'll also run NFS, so if the hardware will support it, you do have a point -- even if I "needed" Linux for some reason, I could still use Solaris for the physical storage.