The long and short of the article and discussion seems to be that the situation small businesses are in isn't distinguishable from spam in many cases. The moral of this story is don't be a small business.
Reverse lookups are often not under your control. Your ISP gives you IP addresses that they maintain the reverse lookups for.
You might be a "fool" if there's an infected machine on your network, but many small businesses are putting out too many fires to see what sorts of unauthorized machines are getting set up, and it only takes a few hours to turn out enough spam to get someone blacklisted.
A small business I know was blacklisted by a government agency who couldn't get their e-mail -- it was auto-deleted as spam -- and there was absolutely no reason at all. It just was, and the amount of effort required to change it was slightly higher than paying off the deficit.
Complaint: Why is anything written by Mossberg, Dvorak, Cringely, etc put on slashdot almost instantly? I mean, these guys are lightweights and hardly "stuff that matters".
Speaking of Mossberg, the only hope the WSJ had of attracting any new subscribers for their technical content was to offer Mossberg early retirement and give the column to Katie Boheret.
What happened to Katie? Haven't seen her byline in some time.
No one cares if anyone responds to spam or not. Spammers are the lowest of the low on the food chain. What people who peddle immorality want is a steady stream of junk mail coming into your inbox hour after hour, day after day, and year after year. Eventually, it's going to weaken you - being exposed to all the viagra, penny stock, erase your credit without paying, etc etc etc - pretty soon you'll think this stuff is normal, and when you have to make a moral decision someplace else (someplace more profitable, I might add) this has to play some role in weakening you to think this stuff is normal. You'll be more likely to make a bad moral decision, and they'll profit from it. So the vast web of affiliate programs, spammers, botnets, etc is a low-cost investment for the real sleaze merchants and criminals. You can entice someone else to spam as an affiliate. They hire a botnet. Etc. The real people who profit from spam don't touch it, as is usual for this sort of thing.
Back when amazon.com was a new company struggling to get customers, they said they would never share your personal information with anyone -- and then a few years later stabbed everyone in the back by reversing this policy. At that time, I did not want to be their customer anymore and wanted my customer data expunged. I was told that there was no way to stop being a customer and have historical information purged.
Why must the entire nation implement DRM, anyway? If the RIAA members don't want their stuff broadcast for fear of piracy, why don't they simply withdraw it and not allow it to be broadcast? Anything you publish is out there for pirates. This makes absolutely no sense. If piracy is a problem, the members of the RIAA should simply not put it on the airwaves. It's their content. Why should every free broadcaster have to deal with a layer of useless DRM? How could it be enforced, anyway? If some university doesn't DRM their creative commons lectures, the government is going to do what to them?
WordPerfect 4.x was almost perfect - NO CLUTTER AT ALL. What was on the screen was your document. WP5.1 hid its menus nicely - they were GONE unless you needed them, then you could Alt-= and see them. Still no clutter while editing. Windows programs originally had a menu bar, but were mostly clutter free. Then they got a row of icons (SmartIcons in Ami Pro, later added to MS Office) and a status bar. Word then got a row of menus, TWO ROWS OF ICONS, and a status bar. Now there's more clutter - a "ribbon bar" (and I've only seen screen shots, not used it) and who knows what else. Meanwhile, the point of a word processor is to process your words, not deal with all the clutter on the screen. Anything that sacrifices screen real estate that belongs to your document's words for anything else is not an improvement and not progress. I think in all the race to add features to Word, they've completely forgotten the point of the program.
Actually, DOS programs work great on Linux with DOSBox and DOSEmu. No reason to upgrade there if your program works for you. As far as a DOS platform goes, Linux is probably the best thing going right now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
There is a book by Paul Zane Pilzer called "Unlimited Wealth" that discusses the zero-sum game of wealth -- his main argument is that in a knowledge-based economy, scarcity of resources from the industrial age doesn't exist any longer and there are no limits -- although, unfortunately, I think this book is out of print. Worth tracking down, though, if you can, because it was written long before the Internet era as we know it, and quite a bit of what he says seems prophetic in hindsight.
What I've always seen in college classes and books on methodology is that there is some mythical "requirements" known in advance but in the real world I've never, ever seen any project which actually has known requirements and sticks to them over the project. I guess software development would be easy if that were the case. What usually happens is as the software is developed, requirements emerge and diverge and go amok during the time it takes to develop the software. Not true in other fields: When you've got a die or something you pour stuff into, you aren't going to change it after you make a few widgets. You're not going to port your die to Oracle after casting it for DB2. You're pretty much stuck, and if people don't like tail fins that year, you've got to start over from scratch. Software isn't like that, and any known methodology from engineering and science breaks down. The closest thing I've seen that works is some of the agile methods that say deliver as little as possible as soon as possible. But even that doesn't tell how to do it. What I have discovered is that the best way to meet changing requirements is to build applications with an object model that does the base functionality and a scripting language like Python to drive it. Then, as new requirements emerge, you can mold and shape the object model into new "applications" using the rapid-development scripting language. If the user wanted a desktop GUI and suddenly wants a web interface - if the user wanted a GUI but now wants it to run in batch - if the user wants something new no one thought of six months ago - whatever, the scripting language makes major changes much easier as long as they're not asking for big changes to the basic object model that does what the application does. (Or, you can add new stuff to the object model without breaking the working scripts.) Push the changeable stuff off into a scripting language that makes it really easy to change stuff, and write the guts of the app in your core language like Java or C++. I don't have a catch name for this approach, but it's worked remarkably well in practice.
Two great tastes that taste great together... too bad there's not a free COBOL.NET for Mono - if people could hack COBOL (don't laugh, there's an Emacs editing mode for it, ask me how I know) on a Linux box, they'd be more apt to learn it. If I saw there was a demand for COBOL programmers, I would buy Mike Murach's book and work through it with my Mono COBOL compiler. The real problem is there's no open-source COBOL compiler. IBM has COBOL compilers. They ought to take one of them, retarget the back end code generator for Mono or the JVM, and release it under AlphaWorks or something. Then people could learn COBOL very easily. (I know IBM had a COBOL compiler for OS/2 and Windows - they could almost release it as-is for the x86 Linux architecture. I mean, you'd have to change the I/O calls to use UNIX-style I/O, but you can almost be sure the runtime library is written in C and could be ported easily.) That's my beef - there's a skills shortage!!! Well, why not release better tools so people can learn? Not everyone has a mainframe. Although I guess you could get an old VS COBOL II tape image and run it under the MVS 3.8 turnkey Hercules system....
Currently COBOL does have support for dynamic memory allocation and pointers. Historically it did not. But that was largely irrelevant, because programs used ISPF table services and the CICS equivalent for this. The pointer datatype makes interfacing with mixed languages easier.
MicroFocus is the "hot potato" of the COBOL world - it changes hands every few years as someone buys it, realizes they'll never turn it into a profit center, and spins it off. Some really weird companies you'd never think of have owned it. I think MF is independent now. Hard to make a go of it, because the product itself has certain deficiencies that make doing what it's supposed to do (offline development) difficult. Hopefully newer versions fix that, but for a long long time the guts of the product (compiler, tools) was static and not developed. They just kept renaming it.
Sorry, but I have to rant: Whoever wrote this has no idea what they're talking about.
COBOL is the glue language in a stack of application components sold by IBM including CICS (or ISPF), VSAM, DB2, etc. These are quite modern and up-to-date, and run on the mainframes that make the world go around by providing reliability and uptime at load levels beyond the wildest dreams of PC and Linux users. Sure, anyone could learn COBOL basics in a day or two, but you're not going to learn and certainly not going to "modernize" a COBOL program running against a DB2 database. COBOL is a glue language that glues together high-performance relational database access, high-performance presentation-layer management (CICS makes Windows API programming look simple!), etc to process umpty transactions per second, where umpty is a number beyond the reach of most Linux boxes. You're never going to "modernize" this stuff because it's the only thing around that can do what it does at that throughput level. The COBOL part is just a driver among the different components. Even the business logic has been factored out into stored procedures now.
There is no problem bolting on web access to databases and data warehouses, or stuff like that, but whoever wrote that (imagine that, a consulting group who will come in and modernize everything for you!) has absolutely no idea what COBOL applications are or do. You are most definitely not going to port legacy applications to new platforms that use CICS or ISPF for their presentation layer! Get a clue. And what platform are you going to port your COBOL program to? The mainframe is already the highest end platform of all time - there's nothing with more throughput - I doubt a company would take the notion of porting to MySQL on an Intel box very seriously. The bottom line is people use the IBM application stack because it works, at a performance level where nothing else works.
Sure, it would be fantastic to have an open source COBOL compiler with a MySQL precompiler so people could learn the language (ever tried to parse COBOL!?). And a Mono COBOL compiler would be fantastic. But no one is going to port their mission-critical business applications from a mainframe to a virtual machine runtime environment. You might use C# or Python to create new apps to access the data in new ways, offline, but you're not going to port mission-critical stuff.
Wait til Google offers this as a service to other companies! Why would they develop something this sophisticated just for internal use? Google is becoming an identity aggregator - if you log in, they can track all your searches and group posts. Now they've got google checkout which can track all your purhases online, aggregating all your purchases from multiple stores. They have your gmail that they already index and search through for ads. (Nevermind tracking your embarassing moments on youtube.) Now they want your job application. You could read the terms and services, but what good would that do? Remember amazon.com stabbed its customers in the back - to get a customer base, they promised that they would NEVER share your personal information, and a few years later when they were self-sustaining, they unilaterally changed that. And there was no way you could quit being a customer or have your data expunged. Google's intentions seem pretty clear at this point - become a single point of aggreagation for online identity. So what are they planning to do with all this information?
I don't know who Microsoft tests these radical changes on, but it is not an everyday user. I have seen many people struggle with Office over the years and I have seen how they learn to do specific tasks click by click. If you change the way to do a task, the users are crippled. I remember there were changes in bullets and numbering around Office 2000, and I saw how it was almost impossible to do what used to be simple. I've had to go in and disable most of the auto-editing features for some users. Changes may be "better" but not if users already know how to do tasks. So now MS wants people to re-learn everything they've ever learned?
Someone at MS ought to go out and watch everyday users struggle with Office for a while. Then they would think different (oops, wrong tag line) about radical changes.
The bottom line: If someone added a WordPerfect compatibility mode to OpenOffice with Reveal Codes, the entire universe would switch in a single, massive quantum leap. There are still lots and lots of people who have never really gotten beyond Reveal Codes. Don't laugh - WordPerfect 5.x was still actively in use well into the 2000s in legal offices. It is probably still in use. Add a keystroke-compatibility mode to Open Office and then add Reveal Codes, and watch the world beat a path to your door...
I stick to Delphi 5, too. It isn't dead. I was pleased to find that it runs great in Wine, so I can even dump Windows and still support legacy stuff. By Delphi 5, Delphi did everything you could want the product to do - I never saw any reason to upgrade. Most of the later versions were just "enterprise" stuff that didn't have new features to make desktop apps. Delphi may have been a victim of its own success, because version 5 was a natural place to say "this is the stable version we're developing apps on!" and not upgrade.
Funny this story breaks after I spend all morning getting Delphi 5 to run under WINE, to support a legacy app that was written back when Delphi 1 was an exciting new thing.
Watching Delphi die horribly was sad. Delphi originally did one thing very, very, VERY well - it was a rapid development platform to make GUI apps in Windows very fast, that you could distribute as standalone applications that ran very fast. No VBXes or vbrun.dll. I knew Delphi was doomed when Borland changed the defaults to NOT create a standalone app. "They just don't get it." Then version after version took Delphi away from its mission. Delphi was not going to work as an enterprise database tool, an Active X control construction tool, a.NET language, etc. That wasn't why Delphi faithful liked it. Borland just didn't get what made Delphi great. Plus the price became outrageous with all this "enterprise" nonsense.
So...
Why not open source Kylix/Delphi? Linux has no real rapid GUI development tool. Let real developers fix whatever is wrong with it. See if anyone uses it. After all, Turbo Pascal is as dead as dead can get.
I have used GNU Emacs since I did my first web page in '93 or '94 or whenever. Other tools have come and gone. Emacs works more or less the same on all plaforms. You can use the same muscle-memory keystrokes to edit any file. It hasn't changed since the 70s (you can boot up ITS in an emulator and Emacs' keystrokes are basically the same ones). It supports every new language that's come along like Java and PHP. It isn't going to get bought out, the next version isn't going to be ruined by "improvements", turn into abandonware, etc. It will be ported to whatever the successor to Linux will be. It will support whatever the next hot language is (is Ruby still hot, or is it passe yet?). It's very difficult to make a case for not using Emacs to a professional programmer whose livelihood is on the line and results matter. Fads come and go (is Eclipse still hot, or is it passe yet?) but Emacs is where I go when I need to get work done.
Spam isn't effective and is the domain of bottom feeders. The big players like spam because it wears people down so they're more likely to spend money for other things. Every day, for years, you see -- sex enhancers, mortgage scams, credit scams, worthless herbal drugs, scams, gambling, etc etc etc -- it absolutely must wear people down. The next time they have to make a moral decision in life, the years of seeing this junk in their inboxes have to give it some sort of weight, even subconsciously. After years and years of daily seeing that the worth of men is solely based on their penis size, and that women are only sex objects, that has to make a certain percentage of people more susceptible to buying porn. The big players encourage spam because it essentially costs nothing - no reason not to have this fire-hose of desensitizing garbage being spewed into every inbox on the planet for years on end. No one makes money off of spam, I don't think, except the spammers themselves - it's just that bottom feeder frenzy for a few crumbs.
Try to find out how patient the candidate is. The hardest thing about entry-level support is that most users are utterly clueless about systematic troubleshooting, and getting information to troubleshoot the problem will be like the blind men feeling the elephant. It's hard for some users to explain problems logically or coherently. A good support person (I'd never make it) will be able to patiently elicit enough symptoms from a user to make a problem diagnosis. Also, this good support person will be able to methodically troubleshoot a problem step by step using a system, despite user hysteria. I could list potential scenarios all day - the user who brought in a file on a bad diskette (aren't they all?), the user who couldn't type "ping" at a command prompt, etc - pick some and see what the candidate will do! Or just get the office's clueless computer user (you know who this is) and have the candidate troubleshoot a live problem... you probably won't have to wait long...
I've been using W2K since I got it on a MSDN CD many years ago. It's a fantastic desktop OS that does everything I want it to do. I liked Windows 95/98 and was reluctant to switch. What eventually sold me was (at the time) I did some software development on Windows and the W2K platform was significantly more stable than W95/98. Since then, though, I have skipped Windows ME (yuck), XP (DRM), and Vista (ultra-DRM). The #1 reason I have not upgraded is I build my own PCs, and do not want to buy an XP license when changing hardware could invalidate it. I don't want XP, or Vista, and I don't want to buy a new PC - I use my PC as a terminal emulator and VNC client! Other than that, I use Paint Shop Pro, a few MP3 utilities, Delphi 5 for one legacy appy, and nothing that is all that taxing. My W2K is behind a firewall, so I don't care too much about security updates since I don't install commercial software (I seriously dislike the Corel version of Paint Shop Pro and stick with v 9) or spyware. Something like FireFox might have a security bug, but that doesn't affect the OS. Microsoft's biggest problem right now is that they got it right with W2K. It's fantastic. Why would I want to "upgrade" to some DRM thing that will make my system unusable if I change the hardware? Plus, there have been no substantial changes in the OS in 7 years - maybe on the enterprise level, remote admin and patching and stuff, but not for individuals. With W2K getting old, I'm looking at migrating totally off of Microsoft software and moving to Linux.
"It seems he has got the point (DRM is bad for consumers)" - "But we don't have the right thing here in terms of simplicity" - no, he doesn't get it. The problem is not the complexity/simplicity of DRM, but its existence. No one wants it, and they wouldn't want it if it was simple and interoperable. Unless the RIAA can buy every used CD on the planet, it's always going to be better to buy a used CD and rip it. Even if they quit making rippable CDs, they have to deal with two decades of CDs already in existence. Bummer for them, especially because used CDs are usually cheaper per song than any DRM stuff.
The fundamental appeal of the computer to a hacker (in the real sense, not cracker sense) is what you can do with it. The totally unlimited potential of the machine. MS limits what you can do with your computer. You have to have permission to install the OS. You can't tinker with the hardware, or the OS will quit working. They want to put DRM on your media files to restrict what you can do with them. You can't get rid of stuff you don't want when you consider it a loss (like Outlook Express - apparently it's the cockroach of Windows and survives any attempt to get rid of it). Now they want to have DRM in Office documents so other people can control what you can and can't do with information. Throw in Palladium, which has never taken off, and MS could control every aspect of your computer. Now that the average desktop computer is more powerful than the original LISP hackers ever imagined a computer being, and blows away the high-end UNIX workstations of the early 90s, the potential to use the computer is more unlimited than ever. So why is it MS's mission to limit the potential?
I was shocked to read the article - a saavy, technical guy who talked to groklaw before going was taken to MS headquarters at a huge expense, and then subjected to marketing droids who couldn't or wouldn't answer any of his legit questions. The description was like walking into a marketing brochure. Why would they blow all this money for nothing? Seems dumb! If they want to evangelize to the Linux world, why not get someone who could offer real answers to legit, serious questions? None of the answers was anything that wasn't already on a web site. I can't imagine what this was supposed to accomplish.
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The long and short of the article and discussion seems to be that the situation small businesses are in isn't distinguishable from spam in many cases. The moral of this story is don't be a small business.
Reverse lookups are often not under your control. Your ISP gives you IP addresses that they maintain the reverse lookups for.
You might be a "fool" if there's an infected machine on your network, but many small businesses are putting out too many fires to see what sorts of unauthorized machines are getting set up, and it only takes a few hours to turn out enough spam to get someone blacklisted.
A small business I know was blacklisted by a government agency who couldn't get their e-mail -- it was auto-deleted as spam -- and there was absolutely no reason at all. It just was, and the amount of effort required to change it was slightly higher than paying off the deficit.
Complaint: Why is anything written by Mossberg, Dvorak, Cringely, etc put on slashdot almost instantly? I mean, these guys are lightweights and hardly "stuff that matters".
Speaking of Mossberg, the only hope the WSJ had of attracting any new subscribers for their technical content was to offer Mossberg early retirement and give the column to Katie Boheret.
What happened to Katie? Haven't seen her byline in some time.
No one cares if anyone responds to spam or not. Spammers are the lowest of the low on the food chain. What people who peddle immorality want is a steady stream of junk mail coming into your inbox hour after hour, day after day, and year after year. Eventually, it's going to weaken you - being exposed to all the viagra, penny stock, erase your credit without paying, etc etc etc - pretty soon you'll think this stuff is normal, and when you have to make a moral decision someplace else (someplace more profitable, I might add) this has to play some role in weakening you to think this stuff is normal. You'll be more likely to make a bad moral decision, and they'll profit from it. So the vast web of affiliate programs, spammers, botnets, etc is a low-cost investment for the real sleaze merchants and criminals. You can entice someone else to spam as an affiliate. They hire a botnet. Etc. The real people who profit from spam don't touch it, as is usual for this sort of thing.
Back when amazon.com was a new company struggling to get customers, they said they would never share your personal information with anyone -- and then a few years later stabbed everyone in the back by reversing this policy. At that time, I did not want to be their customer anymore and wanted my customer data expunged. I was told that there was no way to stop being a customer and have historical information purged.
Why must the entire nation implement DRM, anyway? If the RIAA members don't want their stuff broadcast for fear of piracy, why don't they simply withdraw it and not allow it to be broadcast? Anything you publish is out there for pirates. This makes absolutely no sense. If piracy is a problem, the members of the RIAA should simply not put it on the airwaves. It's their content. Why should every free broadcaster have to deal with a layer of useless DRM? How could it be enforced, anyway? If some university doesn't DRM their creative commons lectures, the government is going to do what to them?
WordPerfect 4.x was almost perfect - NO CLUTTER AT ALL. What was on the screen was your document. WP5.1 hid its menus nicely - they were GONE unless you needed them, then you could Alt-= and see them. Still no clutter while editing. Windows programs originally had a menu bar, but were mostly clutter free. Then they got a row of icons (SmartIcons in Ami Pro, later added to MS Office) and a status bar. Word then got a row of menus, TWO ROWS OF ICONS, and a status bar. Now there's more clutter - a "ribbon bar" (and I've only seen screen shots, not used it) and who knows what else. Meanwhile, the point of a word processor is to process your words, not deal with all the clutter on the screen. Anything that sacrifices screen real estate that belongs to your document's words for anything else is not an improvement and not progress. I think in all the race to add features to Word, they've completely forgotten the point of the program.
Actually, DOS programs work great on Linux with DOSBox and DOSEmu. No reason to upgrade there if your program works for you. As far as a DOS platform goes, Linux is probably the best thing going right now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
There is a book by Paul Zane Pilzer called "Unlimited Wealth" that discusses the zero-sum game of wealth -- his main argument is that in a knowledge-based economy, scarcity of resources from the industrial age doesn't exist any longer and there are no limits -- although, unfortunately, I think this book is out of print. Worth tracking down, though, if you can, because it was written long before the Internet era as we know it, and quite a bit of what he says seems prophetic in hindsight.
What I've always seen in college classes and books on methodology is that there is some mythical "requirements" known in advance but in the real world I've never, ever seen any project which actually has known requirements and sticks to them over the project. I guess software development would be easy if that were the case. What usually happens is as the software is developed, requirements emerge and diverge and go amok during the time it takes to develop the software. Not true in other fields: When you've got a die or something you pour stuff into, you aren't going to change it after you make a few widgets. You're not going to port your die to Oracle after casting it for DB2. You're pretty much stuck, and if people don't like tail fins that year, you've got to start over from scratch. Software isn't like that, and any known methodology from engineering and science breaks down. The closest thing I've seen that works is some of the agile methods that say deliver as little as possible as soon as possible. But even that doesn't tell how to do it. What I have discovered is that the best way to meet changing requirements is to build applications with an object model that does the base functionality and a scripting language like Python to drive it. Then, as new requirements emerge, you can mold and shape the object model into new "applications" using the rapid-development scripting language. If the user wanted a desktop GUI and suddenly wants a web interface - if the user wanted a GUI but now wants it to run in batch - if the user wants something new no one thought of six months ago - whatever, the scripting language makes major changes much easier as long as they're not asking for big changes to the basic object model that does what the application does. (Or, you can add new stuff to the object model without breaking the working scripts.) Push the changeable stuff off into a scripting language that makes it really easy to change stuff, and write the guts of the app in your core language like Java or C++. I don't have a catch name for this approach, but it's worked remarkably well in practice.
Two great tastes that taste great together ... too bad there's not a free COBOL .NET for Mono - if people could hack COBOL (don't laugh, there's an Emacs editing mode for it, ask me how I know) on a Linux box, they'd be more apt to learn it. If I saw there was a demand for COBOL programmers, I would buy Mike Murach's book and work through it with my Mono COBOL compiler. The real problem is there's no open-source COBOL compiler. IBM has COBOL compilers. They ought to take one of them, retarget the back end code generator for Mono or the JVM, and release it under AlphaWorks or something. Then people could learn COBOL very easily. (I know IBM had a COBOL compiler for OS/2 and Windows - they could almost release it as-is for the x86 Linux architecture. I mean, you'd have to change the I/O calls to use UNIX-style I/O, but you can almost be sure the runtime library is written in C and could be ported easily.) That's my beef - there's a skills shortage!!! Well, why not release better tools so people can learn? Not everyone has a mainframe. Although I guess you could get an old VS COBOL II tape image and run it under the MVS 3.8 turnkey Hercules system....
Currently COBOL does have support for dynamic memory allocation and pointers. Historically it did not. But that was largely irrelevant, because programs used ISPF table services and the CICS equivalent for this. The pointer datatype makes interfacing with mixed languages easier.
MicroFocus is the "hot potato" of the COBOL world - it changes hands every few years as someone buys it, realizes they'll never turn it into a profit center, and spins it off. Some really weird companies you'd never think of have owned it. I think MF is independent now. Hard to make a go of it, because the product itself has certain deficiencies that make doing what it's supposed to do (offline development) difficult. Hopefully newer versions fix that, but for a long long time the guts of the product (compiler, tools) was static and not developed. They just kept renaming it.
Sorry, but I have to rant: Whoever wrote this has no idea what they're talking about.
COBOL is the glue language in a stack of application components sold by IBM including CICS (or ISPF), VSAM, DB2, etc. These are quite modern and up-to-date, and run on the mainframes that make the world go around by providing reliability and uptime at load levels beyond the wildest dreams of PC and Linux users. Sure, anyone could learn COBOL basics in a day or two, but you're not going to learn and certainly not going to "modernize" a COBOL program running against a DB2 database. COBOL is a glue language that glues together high-performance relational database access, high-performance presentation-layer management (CICS makes Windows API programming look simple!), etc to process umpty transactions per second, where umpty is a number beyond the reach of most Linux boxes. You're never going to "modernize" this stuff because it's the only thing around that can do what it does at that throughput level. The COBOL part is just a driver among the different components. Even the business logic has been factored out into stored procedures now.
There is no problem bolting on web access to databases and data warehouses, or stuff like that, but whoever wrote that (imagine that, a consulting group who will come in and modernize everything for you!) has absolutely no idea what COBOL applications are or do. You are most definitely not going to port legacy applications to new platforms that use CICS or ISPF for their presentation layer! Get a clue. And what platform are you going to port your COBOL program to? The mainframe is already the highest end platform of all time - there's nothing with more throughput - I doubt a company would take the notion of porting to MySQL on an Intel box very seriously. The bottom line is people use the IBM application stack because it works, at a performance level where nothing else works.
Sure, it would be fantastic to have an open source COBOL compiler with a MySQL precompiler so people could learn the language (ever tried to parse COBOL!?). And a Mono COBOL compiler would be fantastic. But no one is going to port their mission-critical business applications from a mainframe to a virtual machine runtime environment. You might use C# or Python to create new apps to access the data in new ways, offline, but you're not going to port mission-critical stuff.
Wait til Google offers this as a service to other companies! Why would they develop something this sophisticated just for internal use? Google is becoming an identity aggregator - if you log in, they can track all your searches and group posts. Now they've got google checkout which can track all your purhases online, aggregating all your purchases from multiple stores. They have your gmail that they already index and search through for ads. (Nevermind tracking your embarassing moments on youtube.) Now they want your job application. You could read the terms and services, but what good would that do? Remember amazon.com stabbed its customers in the back - to get a customer base, they promised that they would NEVER share your personal information, and a few years later when they were self-sustaining, they unilaterally changed that. And there was no way you could quit being a customer or have your data expunged. Google's intentions seem pretty clear at this point - become a single point of aggreagation for online identity. So what are they planning to do with all this information?
I don't know who Microsoft tests these radical changes on, but it is not an everyday user. I have seen many people struggle with Office over the years and I have seen how they learn to do specific tasks click by click. If you change the way to do a task, the users are crippled. I remember there were changes in bullets and numbering around Office 2000, and I saw how it was almost impossible to do what used to be simple. I've had to go in and disable most of the auto-editing features for some users. Changes may be "better" but not if users already know how to do tasks. So now MS wants people to re-learn everything they've ever learned?
Someone at MS ought to go out and watch everyday users struggle with Office for a while. Then they would think different (oops, wrong tag line) about radical changes.
The bottom line: If someone added a WordPerfect compatibility mode to OpenOffice with Reveal Codes, the entire universe would switch in a single, massive quantum leap. There are still lots and lots of people who have never really gotten beyond Reveal Codes. Don't laugh - WordPerfect 5.x was still actively in use well into the 2000s in legal offices. It is probably still in use. Add a keystroke-compatibility mode to Open Office and then add Reveal Codes, and watch the world beat a path to your door ...
I stick to Delphi 5, too. It isn't dead. I was pleased to find that it runs great in Wine, so I can even dump Windows and still support legacy stuff. By Delphi 5, Delphi did everything you could want the product to do - I never saw any reason to upgrade. Most of the later versions were just "enterprise" stuff that didn't have new features to make desktop apps. Delphi may have been a victim of its own success, because version 5 was a natural place to say "this is the stable version we're developing apps on!" and not upgrade.
Funny this story breaks after I spend all morning getting Delphi 5 to run under WINE, to support a legacy app that was written back when Delphi 1 was an exciting new thing.
Watching Delphi die horribly was sad. Delphi originally did one thing very, very, VERY well - it was a rapid development platform to make GUI apps in Windows very fast, that you could distribute as standalone applications that ran very fast. No VBXes or vbrun.dll. I knew Delphi was doomed when Borland changed the defaults to NOT create a standalone app. "They just don't get it." Then version after version took Delphi away from its mission. Delphi was not going to work as an enterprise database tool, an Active X control construction tool, a .NET language, etc. That wasn't why Delphi faithful liked it. Borland just didn't get what made Delphi great. Plus the price became outrageous with all this "enterprise" nonsense.
So ...
Why not open source Kylix/Delphi? Linux has no real rapid GUI development tool. Let real developers fix whatever is wrong with it. See if anyone uses it. After all, Turbo Pascal is as dead as dead can get.
I have used GNU Emacs since I did my first web page in '93 or '94 or whenever. Other tools have come and gone. Emacs works more or less the same on all plaforms. You can use the same muscle-memory keystrokes to edit any file. It hasn't changed since the 70s (you can boot up ITS in an emulator and Emacs' keystrokes are basically the same ones). It supports every new language that's come along like Java and PHP. It isn't going to get bought out, the next version isn't going to be ruined by "improvements", turn into abandonware, etc. It will be ported to whatever the successor to Linux will be. It will support whatever the next hot language is (is Ruby still hot, or is it passe yet?). It's very difficult to make a case for not using Emacs to a professional programmer whose livelihood is on the line and results matter. Fads come and go (is Eclipse still hot, or is it passe yet?) but Emacs is where I go when I need to get work done.
Spam isn't effective and is the domain of bottom feeders. The big players like spam because it wears people down so they're more likely to spend money for other things. Every day, for years, you see -- sex enhancers, mortgage scams, credit scams, worthless herbal drugs, scams, gambling, etc etc etc -- it absolutely must wear people down. The next time they have to make a moral decision in life, the years of seeing this junk in their inboxes have to give it some sort of weight, even subconsciously. After years and years of daily seeing that the worth of men is solely based on their penis size, and that women are only sex objects, that has to make a certain percentage of people more susceptible to buying porn. The big players encourage spam because it essentially costs nothing - no reason not to have this fire-hose of desensitizing garbage being spewed into every inbox on the planet for years on end. No one makes money off of spam, I don't think, except the spammers themselves - it's just that bottom feeder frenzy for a few crumbs.
Seems like spam obfuscation techniques will be useful against this sort of scan, too, if someone really wanted to infringe on copyright.
Try to find out how patient the candidate is. The hardest thing about entry-level support is that most users are utterly clueless about systematic troubleshooting, and getting information to troubleshoot the problem will be like the blind men feeling the elephant. It's hard for some users to explain problems logically or coherently. A good support person (I'd never make it) will be able to patiently elicit enough symptoms from a user to make a problem diagnosis. Also, this good support person will be able to methodically troubleshoot a problem step by step using a system, despite user hysteria. I could list potential scenarios all day - the user who brought in a file on a bad diskette (aren't they all?), the user who couldn't type "ping" at a command prompt, etc - pick some and see what the candidate will do! Or just get the office's clueless computer user (you know who this is) and have the candidate troubleshoot a live problem... you probably won't have to wait long...
I've been using W2K since I got it on a MSDN CD many years ago. It's a fantastic desktop OS that does everything I want it to do. I liked Windows 95/98 and was reluctant to switch. What eventually sold me was (at the time) I did some software development on Windows and the W2K platform was significantly more stable than W95/98. Since then, though, I have skipped Windows ME (yuck), XP (DRM), and Vista (ultra-DRM). The #1 reason I have not upgraded is I build my own PCs, and do not want to buy an XP license when changing hardware could invalidate it. I don't want XP, or Vista, and I don't want to buy a new PC - I use my PC as a terminal emulator and VNC client! Other than that, I use Paint Shop Pro, a few MP3 utilities, Delphi 5 for one legacy appy, and nothing that is all that taxing. My W2K is behind a firewall, so I don't care too much about security updates since I don't install commercial software (I seriously dislike the Corel version of Paint Shop Pro and stick with v 9) or spyware. Something like FireFox might have a security bug, but that doesn't affect the OS. Microsoft's biggest problem right now is that they got it right with W2K. It's fantastic. Why would I want to "upgrade" to some DRM thing that will make my system unusable if I change the hardware? Plus, there have been no substantial changes in the OS in 7 years - maybe on the enterprise level, remote admin and patching and stuff, but not for individuals. With W2K getting old, I'm looking at migrating totally off of Microsoft software and moving to Linux.
"It seems he has got the point (DRM is bad for consumers)" - "But we don't have the right thing here in terms of simplicity" - no, he doesn't get it. The problem is not the complexity/simplicity of DRM, but its existence. No one wants it, and they wouldn't want it if it was simple and interoperable. Unless the RIAA can buy every used CD on the planet, it's always going to be better to buy a used CD and rip it. Even if they quit making rippable CDs, they have to deal with two decades of CDs already in existence. Bummer for them, especially because used CDs are usually cheaper per song than any DRM stuff.
The fundamental appeal of the computer to a hacker (in the real sense, not cracker sense) is what you can do with it. The totally unlimited potential of the machine. MS limits what you can do with your computer. You have to have permission to install the OS. You can't tinker with the hardware, or the OS will quit working. They want to put DRM on your media files to restrict what you can do with them. You can't get rid of stuff you don't want when you consider it a loss (like Outlook Express - apparently it's the cockroach of Windows and survives any attempt to get rid of it). Now they want to have DRM in Office documents so other people can control what you can and can't do with information. Throw in Palladium, which has never taken off, and MS could control every aspect of your computer. Now that the average desktop computer is more powerful than the original LISP hackers ever imagined a computer being, and blows away the high-end UNIX workstations of the early 90s, the potential to use the computer is more unlimited than ever. So why is it MS's mission to limit the potential?
I was shocked to read the article - a saavy, technical guy who talked to groklaw before going was taken to MS headquarters at a huge expense, and then subjected to marketing droids who couldn't or wouldn't answer any of his legit questions. The description was like walking into a marketing brochure. Why would they blow all this money for nothing? Seems dumb! If they want to evangelize to the Linux world, why not get someone who could offer real answers to legit, serious questions? None of the answers was anything that wasn't already on a web site. I can't imagine what this was supposed to accomplish.