Even though the capital of Canada is Ottawa, Ontario, some people have increasingly been trying to include Hull, Quebec and now Gatineau (an amalgamated city including Hull) as part of the capital of Canada. I haven't heard the government saying anything about it, and in fact they have been locating federal government buildings in Gatineau. Personally, I would rather they didn't until talk of Quebec separation ceased. A lot of people outside of Quebec see it as an appeasement to Quebecers (I purposely did not say Québecois).
Re:Socrates would be disappointed
on
New Ice Age Theory
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Whenever you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
-- Sherlock Holmes
Yeah, I took the defencive driving courses too (first time, ahem, 28 years ago, cough, cough, [feeling old]). I think now that making them all preventable is a goal, but like the man said, shit happens. I really do think some things are not preventable. There are always going to be things beyond our control, so I think 10 out of 10 is what they want us to think like so that pay attention better... a good thing. Otherwise too many people will get lazy and just believe they couldn't do anything about it (just like they drive faster and worse now that subconsciously they know the new safety systems in cars protect them better now).
A contract does not necessarily need a piece of paper... but it helps... a lot. He was given time off work and a computer to work on this program by his employers. From the article we are given to understand that this is the only reason he received these things. So they were expecting a program. That is, he was working for them when he wrote the program. So he couldn't get it all done during work hours, or he wanted to do more. It was still for work (the fact they gave him time off to do this AND a computer to do it on speaks volumes to that). I haven't seen any place were someone writes programs that the company doesn't own the source unless there was a verifiable contract to the contrary.
At best he should be able to keep a copy and retain rights to use it. This is like a software case of the spilling coffee on your lap because you were stupid enough to squeeze hot coffee between your thighs in a moving vehicle. It was his responsibility to make sure the boundaries of the work were understood. I would have hoped a police officer would have been capable of better critical thinking that what he displayed. I wonder if he was one of those cops who just won't give anyone a break when he catches someone in a minor infraction, or whether he is a more relaxed kind of fellow.
Anyway, this is a real life lesson that the rest of us should learn from.
That's a bit like trying to get satisfaction from Ford due to your bad tires.
Your analogy is just wrong. The tires are not part of the mechanics of the car. They can be replaced and have no influence on the mechanics that make the car a car. A problem with a third party mouse would be a fitting analogy to bad tires.
A better analogy would be a problem with an on-board computer in the car. And sure, the person could go to the manufacturer of the on-board computer, but why should they? Ford (my apologies to Ford... but continuing from your analogy) is the vendor of the package that is the car. We don't know what they might have had done to customize it to meet the needs of the specific vehicle design. And maybe it wasn't the on-board computers fault at all. Maybe it was something in the way it was connected or in the communication interface from the rest of the system. As a customer it is not reasonable to be expected to find the answers, so you go to the manufacturer of the car to get them to fix the faulty device. They can deal with the chip manufacturer because you paid the car company for a properly functioning product. The same is true when you purchase anything, including a computer. Just because you can troubleshoot computers you build doesn't mean you should have to when you purchase a computer. That is why you spend the incredibly big bucks that it costs to buy a Mac. It is supposed to work. And they are supposed to give good customer support.
Bottom line is you as a customer should never have to return or troubleshoot a part that makes up a piece of a larger product you purchased. The people who sold it to you (in this case Apple) should take the responsibility to fix it.
Because everyone knows phishers don't know how to write html and copy your company's (or anyone else's company's) html email layout. In fact I bet they wouldn't even try to spoof the URL links in the html emails because the average user always checks to see where that link really points to.
If it makes it harder for spammers and phishers then I have no problem with it. If it drives people from Outlook (which I doubt will happen), then even better.
If your customers are afraid of phishing, why don't you point the new customers to a web site that they can log into and have it provide a personalized message? Much easier to know who it is when the plain text email has a link to MYCOMPANY.COM... rather than a link text saying Paypal, and a real URL to phishers.com
Specific to this, I was wondering about resolution. The screen resolution on my 19" LCD needs to be 1280x1024 for best results. A CRT can be used at various resolutions without degrading the picture quality. Will that be the case with these new CRT-like screens? With my sight I would prefer 1152x864 but right now I can't because it starts to look worse because of the nature of the LCD screen. However the convenience of more desk space etc. outweighs this until I get older.;-)
Don't make the mistake that all those who believe in God also think evolution is a lie.
I didn't.
I didn't really think you did. But you made the association that (a lot of) atheists put Darwin fish on their cars as a sort of counter proclamation to 'Christians'. And I agree with that. But there are a lot of literalists around here too... so while I wasn't disagreeing with you, I just wanted to point out that some/many who believe in God also believe in evolution.:-)
BTW, when living in the mid-west there were often times I used to have to include somewhere in a conversation with strangers, "do you believe in evolution?". For example if we were talking about eating vegetarian and I would say something like, "well I believe we evolved being omnivores and meat is part of our diet"... I would get a hostile look and would be told that evolution isn't real. And sometimes these people would be scientists and engineers. After enough of that I put the evolution fish on my car... and started asking the question... it would let me know if they were intelligent enough to keep talking to.
I agree that the tumour has to be removed, but I was thinking of the Slashdot article Stem Cells At The Core of Cancer? That one says if you kill the cancer stem cells, the tumour stops growing... but doesn't really say if it goes away... maybe the body would then be able to catch up and kill off the rogue cells, I don't know. We already know how to cut out most cancers with a knife (that just requires a high tech mechanic... errrr surgeon), but then the patients have a relapse and die anyway. It strikes me that this new technique is really just a finer grained control of the knife. Physically cutting out the cancerous cells (by starvation) without affecting the good cells. Meanwhile the cancer stem cells may not be affected by the blood supply being cut off. So my thought is that maybe they can target the cancerous cells and find some marker on the cancer stem cells to target them too.:-)
From the news article referred to within the linked article above:
"A lot is known about the genetics of colon cancer, but despite all our knowledge, too many people keep relapsing and dying," said John Dick, the senior scientist at the University of Toronto and Princess Margaret Hospital who led the work.
(Darwin fish and the FSM come to mind), there are "saints" (I'm lazy tonight... so I'll hit up Darwin again)
Don't make the mistake that all those who believe in God also think evolution is a lie. Some believe that evolution could just be a mechanism and that the bible is full of metaphors and not everything in it is literal. I am one of those. It is also why I loathe most *organized* religions who seem to require everything they read to the literal truth and forget that the book was written by plain ol' men. I don't usually like nor get along with most religious literalists/legalists, or those who can only mimic what ever they read in a book... ANY book... religious or not. You can choose to agree with the book, but it is best if you understand why you agree as opposed to some who just do without thought.
I believe in God. I also have a Darwin fish on the back of my car. It was my protest while living in the bible belt against the ubiquitous Jesus fish that was on so many of the cars there (St. Louis), and the nearly absolute religious literalists that drove those cars (thank goodness not everyone was like that there!). That was were I first ran into the pseudo science creationism of intelligent design... but that is another story already raked over the coals.:-)
The reasons for this "one size fits all" (OSFA)
strategy include the following:
Engineering costs...
Sales costs...
Marketing costs...
What about the cost of maintenance for the customer?
Maybe people will keep buying 'one size fits all' DBMSs if they meet enough of their requirements and they don't have to hire specialists for each type of databases they might have for each type of application. That is, it is easier and cheaper to maintain a smaller number of *standard* architectures (e.g. one) for a company. Otherwise you have to pay for all sorts of different types of specialists. Now if your company only does say, data warehousing, then that is another matter and it is smart to purchase a specialized system. Or if you are a mega corporation you might be able to afford to have a number of specialist teams for each type of system. But I think smaller shops might need to make do with the poor old vanilla DBMS.
I was thinking about the last big cancer breakthrough that said doctors were targeting the wrong thing when trying to fight cancer for the last however many decades. They try to kill the tumour but leave the cancer stem cells that perpetuate the disease. That's why when they remove the tumour, the cancer just eventually grows back. If they can target the cancer stem cells with the nano-particles that would be cool. Get rid of the the symptoms and the disease.
In Canada we've had a system called Interac for several years now.
I've been using it at stores since at least 1985 when I started using it in Winterpeg Manisnowba (Winnipeg Manitoba;-)... which was many thousands of miles/kms ago). Stores are increasingly requiring the customer to swipe their card as a few years ago their was a rash unscrupulous types running the cards through their own machines to steal the info from the magnetic strips (double swiping the cards). In the 22 years I have been using this, I have only heard of theft like this in the news media. Granted, better security is appreciated as long as it doesn't make it so that actually going to the bank becomes easier.
I don't think this is obfuscation. For the black hatters, it is more like the economics of mining precious metal. If you had several ore loads to choose from, and limited resources to mine them with, you choose the ore load with the richest deposits of gold. It doesn't mean the gold in either deposit is worth any less per ounce, it is just the economy of scale dictates that all other things being equal, you go where the most gold is. Why spend the time and effort to hack an OS that doesn't have 90% of the market share when there is such an OS?
I am sure that if enough people used Linux or OS X or brand X, and it became worth the effort, those OSs would be attacked for more. And Linux et al apps do have flaws that can be exposed (to say they don't would be very arrogant) and are routinely patched (how many megs per yum update if you wait a couple weeks?). And yes I know, in many cases the patching is faster, but the openings are still there, and more will be found if more black hatters start looking as much as they do with MS right now.
And by the way, obfuscation is a useful and valid tool when used with other security precautions. For example, a good firewall set up doesn't just block incoming connections to ports you want closed against port scanning, it will also drop the messages silently so that the sender doesn't have an indication that they actually reached something at that IP address. (TCP/IP allows the option to firewalls et al to tell the sender that the connection was refused. And some firewalls allow you the option to configure this.) A good firewall protects you by actively blocking packets and obscuring your computer. Much better than blocking and letting the sender know it was blocked. In that case the sender would have an IP address it knows for sure has something on the other end to work on. There are likely dozens of good uses of obfuscation (how about not letting others see your PIN when you use the bank machine? Even though you have the only valid card and are taking it with you, you still shouldn't show your PIN).
It seems unlikely to me that any 20-30 year-old piece of code would adequately represent good design principles, have good documentation, and be well-understood. Most of the software rewrites I've seen are done not just because the body of code is dysfunctional, but because the design and implementation are out-of-touch with modern principles and techniques. Like something that should have been O-O but wasn't, and looks like cruft because the design-paradigm just wasn't well-known; or the design wasn't scalable in the right places.
The key part that I looked at is this:
software rewrites I've seen are done not just because the body of code is dysfunctional, but because the design and implementation are out-of-touch with modern principles and techniques
What I am saying is that the only time companies should upgrade their software is when it is dysfunctional, and you are saying that you would also spend the money to change the code just to bring it to a modern design principles.
Perhaps you you implied that you would upgrade to O-O code only if it paid for itself, and just leave it alone or have them hire a Cobol programmer to fix a problem if it didn't. But it didn't read that way to me.
One of my pet peeves is upgrading to the 'new fangled thing' when it is not needed. I agree O-O is far better... heck, even C is far better than Cobol, but if a company doesn't have anything in the works to harness the power of O-O code, then I would leave the Cobol be... even if something needed fixing or tweaking and they had to hire a Cobol programmer. I apologize for sounding so harsh.
I have seen 30 year old code and older in use that is being maintained by 40 year olds (and younger) who were hired to replace the 65 year olds. And the only time I have seen the code replaced was if there was a business case for it. If there is a strong business case that says there won't be any more Cobol programmers alive soon, then so be it (but I don't believe that will happen). I too have seen the cases where a company has been short sighted and early retired a bunch of programmers who maintained their business systems leaving one 'get hit by a bus' weak link programmer. But that is a problem with short sighted/bad management and not the software. I think it's more akin to hiring visual basic.Net programmers to maintain Java code.
Anyway, as I alluded to in my previous post, after cobbling together so many different systems over 30 or 40 years, there will certainly come a time when there is a good business case to make the change to a modern design. I wonder how long our new code will last before our modern 'the right way' designs also become obsolete.;-)
Most of the software rewrites I've seen are done not just because the body of code is dysfunctional, but because the design and implementation are out-of-touch with modern principles and techniques.
You may be in touch with modern software principles but sadly you are out of touch with business principles. Ideology does not make a company money. And a company is about making money not writing code conforming to modern code design.
To make a business case for code change, you need to back up your reasoning by showing how it will either 1) save the company money within 5 years or less (including paying off all the money spent for the code upgrade which at large companies could run into hundreds of millions of dollars) or 2) earn more money for the company (including paying for the code changes) within 5 years or less. You could argue that these are the same things but I look at them differently as one causes earnings to increase indirectly through savings, and the other directly though increased revenue.
If you can't do either, then forget it. If you don't understand why, think about where your paycheque comes from and how the company is going to be able to afford to pay you to work on no-gain projects. If you don't want to understand why, then stay a coder... not even an analyst, stay a coder. You must justify the costs of these kinds of expenditures. Now it is possible and even likely that someone was able to justify the costs of fixing design issues on projects you worked on. However, in corporate life, wholesale 'fixing' of 30 or 40 year old stable code is not usually justifiable for design sake alone.
For example on on projects I have worked on where large companies have modernized their systems (often replacing Cobol code) it always involved monetary reasons. Many times Cobol systems are built on other Cobol systems, which are built on other Cobol systems... Business domains begin crossing back and forth across system boundaries and things (for example customer service) become a nightmare.
Take a customer order management process: Customer wants three things, it might take three systems to order it, two different customer service reps, and if something goes wrong, support has to track things across 3 systems. If you want to create a new product package it takes too much time to coordinate between systems and one or more might need programming changes which might mean data conversions if the interfaces change between the systems, etc. If the pain threshold gets to high by holding back the company in effectively competing because their systems piss the users off, piss the customers off, and hold back introduction of competitive products (in other words, if it is costing them more money keeping the old system than replacing it will cost), then they will consider replacing the old systems.
Since we are talking Cobol and financial transactions, we are talking *mostly* about the corporate world. When you are talking about large corporations, the cost to replace even an ordering and billing system can run well into the hundred million dollar range or more. Tens of millions is not uncommon either. Projects in the million dollar range are a dime a dozen in the corporate world.
Note: I don't particularly like Cobol... actually I don't like it period (I like C/C++/Java syntax better because I understadn it:-). But for me to justify something to a customer, it must solve a customers problem. The first thing to remember is their main problem is how to make more money. Period. It is not about supporting good code design. They could have something in place that was the worst coding job in the history of the planet, but if it makes them money it won't matter. Unless of course you can show them in concrete terms that a good design will pay for itself by directly or indirectly making them more money.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though the capital of Canada is Ottawa, Ontario, some people have increasingly been trying to include Hull, Quebec and now Gatineau (an amalgamated city including Hull) as part of the capital of Canada. I haven't heard the government saying anything about it, and in fact they have been locating federal government buildings in Gatineau. Personally, I would rather they didn't until talk of Quebec separation ceased. A lot of people outside of Quebec see it as an appeasement to Quebecers (I purposely did not say Québecois).
"Whenever you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
-- Sherlock Holmes
Duelling quotations. :-p
How many Libraries of Congress come OUT of an elephant in a year?
You call it 'Old Faithful' and tourists come to watch.
Yeah, I took the defencive driving courses too (first time, ahem, 28 years ago, cough, cough, [feeling old]). I think now that making them all preventable is a goal, but like the man said, shit happens. I really do think some things are not preventable. There are always going to be things beyond our control, so I think 10 out of 10 is what they want us to think like so that pay attention better... a good thing. Otherwise too many people will get lazy and just believe they couldn't do anything about it (just like they drive faster and worse now that subconsciously they know the new safety systems in cars protect them better now).
"Eight out of 10 automobile accidents are preventable, according to a study put out by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute."
So for the 80% that are preventable, what else other than carelessness is there?
Like diarrhoea.
A contract does not necessarily need a piece of paper... but it helps... a lot. He was given time off work and a computer to work on this program by his employers. From the article we are given to understand that this is the only reason he received these things. So they were expecting a program. That is, he was working for them when he wrote the program. So he couldn't get it all done during work hours, or he wanted to do more. It was still for work (the fact they gave him time off to do this AND a computer to do it on speaks volumes to that). I haven't seen any place were someone writes programs that the company doesn't own the source unless there was a verifiable contract to the contrary.
At best he should be able to keep a copy and retain rights to use it. This is like a software case of the spilling coffee on your lap because you were stupid enough to squeeze hot coffee between your thighs in a moving vehicle. It was his responsibility to make sure the boundaries of the work were understood. I would have hoped a police officer would have been capable of better critical thinking that what he displayed. I wonder if he was one of those cops who just won't give anyone a break when he catches someone in a minor infraction, or whether he is a more relaxed kind of fellow.
Anyway, this is a real life lesson that the rest of us should learn from.
Your analogy is just wrong. The tires are not part of the mechanics of the car. They can be replaced and have no influence on the mechanics that make the car a car. A problem with a third party mouse would be a fitting analogy to bad tires.
A better analogy would be a problem with an on-board computer in the car. And sure, the person could go to the manufacturer of the on-board computer, but why should they? Ford (my apologies to Ford... but continuing from your analogy) is the vendor of the package that is the car. We don't know what they might have had done to customize it to meet the needs of the specific vehicle design. And maybe it wasn't the on-board computers fault at all. Maybe it was something in the way it was connected or in the communication interface from the rest of the system. As a customer it is not reasonable to be expected to find the answers, so you go to the manufacturer of the car to get them to fix the faulty device. They can deal with the chip manufacturer because you paid the car company for a properly functioning product. The same is true when you purchase anything, including a computer. Just because you can troubleshoot computers you build doesn't mean you should have to when you purchase a computer. That is why you spend the incredibly big bucks that it costs to buy a Mac. It is supposed to work. And they are supposed to give good customer support.
Bottom line is you as a customer should never have to return or troubleshoot a part that makes up a piece of a larger product you purchased. The people who sold it to you (in this case Apple) should take the responsibility to fix it.
Because everyone knows phishers don't know how to write html and copy your company's (or anyone else's company's) html email layout. In fact I bet they wouldn't even try to spoof the URL links in the html emails because the average user always checks to see where that link really points to.
If it makes it harder for spammers and phishers then I have no problem with it. If it drives people from Outlook (which I doubt will happen), then even better.
If your customers are afraid of phishing, why don't you point the new customers to a web site that they can log into and have it provide a personalized message? Much easier to know who it is when the plain text email has a link to MYCOMPANY.COM... rather than a link text saying Paypal, and a real URL to phishers.com
And you can include Jazz, R&B, etc. etc. etc. And they all sit on the shoulders of Blues... the basis of it all.
Specific to this, I was wondering about resolution. The screen resolution on my 19" LCD needs to be 1280x1024 for best results. A CRT can be used at various resolutions without degrading the picture quality. Will that be the case with these new CRT-like screens? With my sight I would prefer 1152x864 but right now I can't because it starts to look worse because of the nature of the LCD screen. However the convenience of more desk space etc. outweighs this until I get older. ;-)
Why hasn't anyone picked up on this. Al Gore IS a school teacher. More precisely he was a professor the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Awesome movie... which one is Sojourner? Huey, Dewey or Louie?
I didn't really think you did. But you made the association that (a lot of) atheists put Darwin fish on their cars as a sort of counter proclamation to 'Christians'. And I agree with that. But there are a lot of literalists around here too... so while I wasn't disagreeing with you, I just wanted to point out that some/many who believe in God also believe in evolution. :-)
BTW, when living in the mid-west there were often times I used to have to include somewhere in a conversation with strangers, "do you believe in evolution?". For example if we were talking about eating vegetarian and I would say something like, "well I believe we evolved being omnivores and meat is part of our diet"... I would get a hostile look and would be told that evolution isn't real. And sometimes these people would be scientists and engineers. After enough of that I put the evolution fish on my car... and started asking the question... it would let me know if they were intelligent enough to keep talking to.
I agree that the tumour has to be removed, but I was thinking of the Slashdot article Stem Cells At The Core of Cancer? That one says if you kill the cancer stem cells, the tumour stops growing... but doesn't really say if it goes away... maybe the body would then be able to catch up and kill off the rogue cells, I don't know. We already know how to cut out most cancers with a knife (that just requires a high tech mechanic... errrr surgeon), but then the patients have a relapse and die anyway. It strikes me that this new technique is really just a finer grained control of the knife. Physically cutting out the cancerous cells (by starvation) without affecting the good cells. Meanwhile the cancer stem cells may not be affected by the blood supply being cut off. So my thought is that maybe they can target the cancerous cells and find some marker on the cancer stem cells to target them too. :-)
From the news article referred to within the linked article above:
:-D
Don't make the mistake that all those who believe in God also think evolution is a lie. Some believe that evolution could just be a mechanism and that the bible is full of metaphors and not everything in it is literal. I am one of those. It is also why I loathe most *organized* religions who seem to require everything they read to the literal truth and forget that the book was written by plain ol' men. I don't usually like nor get along with most religious literalists/legalists, or those who can only mimic what ever they read in a book... ANY book... religious or not. You can choose to agree with the book, but it is best if you understand why you agree as opposed to some who just do without thought.
I believe in God. I also have a Darwin fish on the back of my car. It was my protest while living in the bible belt against the ubiquitous Jesus fish that was on so many of the cars there (St. Louis), and the nearly absolute religious literalists that drove those cars (thank goodness not everyone was like that there!). That was were I first ran into the pseudo science creationism of intelligent design... but that is another story already raked over the coals. :-)
What about the cost of maintenance for the customer?
Maybe people will keep buying 'one size fits all' DBMSs if they meet enough of their requirements and they don't have to hire specialists for each type of databases they might have for each type of application. That is, it is easier and cheaper to maintain a smaller number of *standard* architectures (e.g. one) for a company. Otherwise you have to pay for all sorts of different types of specialists. Now if your company only does say, data warehousing, then that is another matter and it is smart to purchase a specialized system. Or if you are a mega corporation you might be able to afford to have a number of specialist teams for each type of system. But I think smaller shops might need to make do with the poor old vanilla DBMS.
I was thinking about the last big cancer breakthrough that said doctors were targeting the wrong thing when trying to fight cancer for the last however many decades. They try to kill the tumour but leave the cancer stem cells that perpetuate the disease. That's why when they remove the tumour, the cancer just eventually grows back. If they can target the cancer stem cells with the nano-particles that would be cool. Get rid of the the symptoms and the disease.
I don't think this is obfuscation. For the black hatters, it is more like the economics of mining precious metal. If you had several ore loads to choose from, and limited resources to mine them with, you choose the ore load with the richest deposits of gold. It doesn't mean the gold in either deposit is worth any less per ounce, it is just the economy of scale dictates that all other things being equal, you go where the most gold is. Why spend the time and effort to hack an OS that doesn't have 90% of the market share when there is such an OS?
I am sure that if enough people used Linux or OS X or brand X, and it became worth the effort, those OSs would be attacked for more. And Linux et al apps do have flaws that can be exposed (to say they don't would be very arrogant) and are routinely patched (how many megs per yum update if you wait a couple weeks?). And yes I know, in many cases the patching is faster, but the openings are still there, and more will be found if more black hatters start looking as much as they do with MS right now.
And by the way, obfuscation is a useful and valid tool when used with other security precautions. For example, a good firewall set up doesn't just block incoming connections to ports you want closed against port scanning, it will also drop the messages silently so that the sender doesn't have an indication that they actually reached something at that IP address. (TCP/IP allows the option to firewalls et al to tell the sender that the connection was refused. And some firewalls allow you the option to configure this.) A good firewall protects you by actively blocking packets and obscuring your computer. Much better than blocking and letting the sender know it was blocked. In that case the sender would have an IP address it knows for sure has something on the other end to work on. There are likely dozens of good uses of obfuscation (how about not letting others see your PIN when you use the bank machine? Even though you have the only valid card and are taking it with you, you still shouldn't show your PIN).
Here is what you said:
The key part that I looked at is this:
What I am saying is that the only time companies should upgrade their software is when it is dysfunctional, and you are saying that you would also spend the money to change the code just to bring it to a modern design principles.
Perhaps you you implied that you would upgrade to O-O code only if it paid for itself, and just leave it alone or have them hire a Cobol programmer to fix a problem if it didn't. But it didn't read that way to me.
One of my pet peeves is upgrading to the 'new fangled thing' when it is not needed. I agree O-O is far better... heck, even C is far better than Cobol, but if a company doesn't have anything in the works to harness the power of O-O code, then I would leave the Cobol be... even if something needed fixing or tweaking and they had to hire a Cobol programmer. I apologize for sounding so harsh.
I have seen 30 year old code and older in use that is being maintained by 40 year olds (and younger) who were hired to replace the 65 year olds. And the only time I have seen the code replaced was if there was a business case for it. If there is a strong business case that says there won't be any more Cobol programmers alive soon, then so be it (but I don't believe that will happen). I too have seen the cases where a company has been short sighted and early retired a bunch of programmers who maintained their business systems leaving one 'get hit by a bus' weak link programmer. But that is a problem with short sighted/bad management and not the software. I think it's more akin to hiring visual basic .Net programmers to maintain Java code.
Anyway, as I alluded to in my previous post, after cobbling together so many different systems over 30 or 40 years, there will certainly come a time when there is a good business case to make the change to a modern design. I wonder how long our new code will last before our modern 'the right way' designs also become obsolete. ;-)
Remember though that they must be used in conjunction with small (possibly granite) stones to read them.
You may be in touch with modern software principles but sadly you are out of touch with business principles. Ideology does not make a company money. And a company is about making money not writing code conforming to modern code design.
To make a business case for code change, you need to back up your reasoning by showing how it will either 1) save the company money within 5 years or less (including paying off all the money spent for the code upgrade which at large companies could run into hundreds of millions of dollars) or 2) earn more money for the company (including paying for the code changes) within 5 years or less. You could argue that these are the same things but I look at them differently as one causes earnings to increase indirectly through savings, and the other directly though increased revenue.
If you can't do either, then forget it. If you don't understand why, think about where your paycheque comes from and how the company is going to be able to afford to pay you to work on no-gain projects. If you don't want to understand why, then stay a coder... not even an analyst, stay a coder. You must justify the costs of these kinds of expenditures. Now it is possible and even likely that someone was able to justify the costs of fixing design issues on projects you worked on. However, in corporate life, wholesale 'fixing' of 30 or 40 year old stable code is not usually justifiable for design sake alone.
For example on on projects I have worked on where large companies have modernized their systems (often replacing Cobol code) it always involved monetary reasons. Many times Cobol systems are built on other Cobol systems, which are built on other Cobol systems... Business domains begin crossing back and forth across system boundaries and things (for example customer service) become a nightmare. Take a customer order management process: Customer wants three things, it might take three systems to order it, two different customer service reps, and if something goes wrong, support has to track things across 3 systems. If you want to create a new product package it takes too much time to coordinate between systems and one or more might need programming changes which might mean data conversions if the interfaces change between the systems, etc. If the pain threshold gets to high by holding back the company in effectively competing because their systems piss the users off, piss the customers off, and hold back introduction of competitive products (in other words, if it is costing them more money keeping the old system than replacing it will cost), then they will consider replacing the old systems.
Since we are talking Cobol and financial transactions, we are talking *mostly* about the corporate world. When you are talking about large corporations, the cost to replace even an ordering and billing system can run well into the hundred million dollar range or more. Tens of millions is not uncommon either. Projects in the million dollar range are a dime a dozen in the corporate world.
Note: I don't particularly like Cobol... actually I don't like it period (I like C/C++/Java syntax better because I understadn it :-). But for me to justify something to a customer, it must solve a customers problem. The first thing to remember is their main problem is how to make more money. Period. It is not about supporting good code design. They could have something in place that was the worst coding job in the history of the planet, but if it makes them money it won't matter. Unless of course you can show them in concrete terms that a good design will pay for itself by directly or indirectly making them more money.