The problem we are having here is that legal code for one browser fails in the latest IE browser. It's manageable tho. We've had minor rewrites for IE7, IE8, and probably will for IE9. The code mostly passed W3C parsers back when it was written tho it is possible some individual programmers may not have been as thorough as others.
We *are* the customer. The company doesn't want to spend another several million dollars to rewrite something that was already done once.
We are headed heavily in the direction of packages and containing any business rules in either the packages or in generic programming languages which we won't have to recode again.
Fluffy layer (presentation) in whatever is the flavor of the day throw away layer business layer --- not microsoft database layer --- arbitrary and swappable.
We are using MQ for communications- which has a lot more problems than promised by IBM.
I've experience in a half dozen languages and a couple assembly languages and have been a project manager for projects involving up to a dozen programmers (and maybe 30 resources)-- so small projects (nothing even medium sized).
Based on my experience, I imagine that 6 programmers would start on it, there would be scope creep and changes required by executives, and they would have some cool ideas as well, and some controls are no longer available so they would have to find or write that functionality which was previously "drop in" and three month deadline would be missed a half dozen times despite the fact they were working 60+ hour weeks.
Finally, a barely working piece of crap would be delivered without the iterative testing I requested and they would then spend the next five years fixing bug after bug after bug.
However, given a solid design and leaving them alone- they could probably do a decent job in a year with iterative testing and a solid pair of good adversarial quality testing people.
Re:Gartner is shilling
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not to be disagreeable but patches have already disabled one part of the software. That's how we became aware of this risk.
Also, Microsoft has told us they do not test all combinations and possibilities- it's unsupported. And support is $50k+$100k+$150k+(x+$50k/year) so even for a multi-billion dollar corporation, support is practically non-existent.
If they change some sort of DLL for a current software, they do not warranty that it won't have a side effect on the VB6 application.
What you are saying may be true for smaller VB6 programs but this is a monster with lots of external DLLs, controls, etc.
Yes but it was also sarcastic so he could have been shooting for funny. and now he's stuck with informative and crying in his coffee, once again misunderstood by a cruel world that never comprehends his jests.
Re:Gartner is shilling
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The VB6 crap is a stand alone application. It took a dozen programmers about 2 years to write it. It's big. It does a lot. And, I've had to manage projects for updating it so I can say it has a pretty good design.
When the decision was made to go with VB back in 1999, it was reasonable to assume there would be a VB7 which would mean it would take a few months to rewrite it.
Instead we got.Net and no upgrade path.
So this means it would again take half dozen programmers another 2 years to rewrite it (half the programmers due to the good design). Some of the custom controls were written with closed source by companies which haven't existed for closing on a decade now.
On the other hand, our java order entry system has fared better. While the front end has been replaced with another prettier language, the core business rules continue to chug along.
Will C# be supported in 10 years? Maybe-- no way to know. Will Java be supported in 10 years-- probably.
In either case- if we simply buy a package, we don't have to code or maintain anything.
It's less flexible but an order of magnitude cheaper. We are larger now and no longer need as much flexibility to hold customers since our costs are so much cheaper than all of our competitors. And to be honest, being flexible probably ate up over 100% of the money we made on some customers (I.e. we spent $50k to keep the business of a $40k profit customer).
Personally, I think there are downsides to the packages BUT we do share development costs with several thousand other companies (and for one of them several tens of thousands) so things like legal compliance become much easier and much less expensive. It really sucks with a brittle old system being told some new law requires changes within 90 days and fully regression testing it takes 21 days alone.
Java is good for core business rules in my opinion- but anything else, it's no better than several other languages and a bit harder to develop in.
Wow. someone unloaded a big can of reduntant whupass. Never seen so many posts downmodded so fast.
OTH, the parent post is now up to a 5, so it's all good.
Re:Gartner is shilling
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Another lesson my company is painfully learning is:
Do not write large applications in microsoft languages for microsoft operating systems.
We are going to hardware and operating system agnostic packages in a big way.
For the problem software tho, it's going to be a rough road until the packages are rolled out (and that will take a couple years). At any point, our current software could be killed by an arbitrary microsoft patch since the language (vb6) is out of support.
Re:XP is the 90's?
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I don't even see how this was offensive enough to be downmodded.
And: Windows XP Release date was August 24, 2001 so it's informative.
I was very impressed with Jackson's work which was reasonably faithful and also very entertaining. I fell asleep in Bakshi's animated/rotoscoped lord of the rings.
Fans of particular characters or scenes will quibble but I do not think we will ever see one this good again in our lifetimes.
I was happy with the potter movies as long as they stayed as true as possible to the books as well (1-3), I saw them multiple times. I think it's the 4th one where they went modern clothing that i disliked- I was okay with the next one but only saw it once. Oddly, I know they took liberties with #6 (I mean, for god's sake why NAME it the half blood prince and then not even explain why???" but enjoyed the movie for it's own sake and for the interesting idea of a sort of realistic look at the crushes and angst of teenage wizards.
In our society hard work is only enough to get into the top 20%. The top 5% is mostly locked in and handed down the children of people already there. Since that's going to happen in any society, hard work isn't enough. Heck, these days a dumb novel idea (pet rock, holy bear, etc.) is more likely to vault you into wealth than hard work.
Communism promises 100% of the people will have the lifestyle of the 50% level. It doesn't promise everyone will be rich. Just that everyone will be roughly equal.
The movie wasn't bad. Every time molinas was on the screen it came alive as a good movie. The rest of the time it was a cliche- which isn't too bad for the $4 I paid for it.
Getting tired of Ben playing the same character over and over. I thought... Hmmm maybe they are putting him here to fool us.. but no.. it was the same arrogant snivelly character I'm so full of.
Wondering if losing megan fox will hurt the next T3 film because clearly a somewhat pretty female is not a generic quality. Fox has something beyond mere looks-- some kind of fun attitude maybe.
- Suppliers (whose goods will be inspected to not be laced with Cadmium, lead, etc) Funny thing about this- the mcdonalds glasses supposedly are legal-- they just do not meet new standards. Not sure if that is corporate propaganda or what.
- Programmers (hey!) Definitely see and agree with this. But less expensive programmers overseas get better every day. However, even so it's likely to be a couple thousand jobs tops.
- robotics jobs (growing a small industry in America) I read about a robotic factories in japan that has no workers today. So basically owners and vendors and robot repair people.
- robotics management (assembly lines still have workers feeding material, etc. I.E.: i-love-lucy).
Not so much. They can currently catch objects in the air and can pick arbitrary objects out of a mixed bin faster than humans.
--- As a PPS: given modular robots, I do not see the need for robot repair men. Pretty much a low level driver position.
If there is a market for 100 engineers worldwide, what do you think happens to engineer wages when there are 10,000 qualified engineers?
If there is a market for 100 opera flutists in the country, what do you think happens to their salaries when there are 1,000 of them?
If there are 1,000 qualified java coders in india willing to work for $5,000 per year. Do you think it lowers or raises wages in France for java coders?
We only need 5% to 10% (and that's really pushing it) of our population to be that educated.
Indians and Chinese, living in low cost of living areas, are competing with and taking those higher education jobs.
A college degree has lost a lot of it's value as too many people get them.
Meanwhile, colleges have raised tuitions like crazy. I read about poor kids graduating with $50,000 to $90,000 debt unable to get jobs above $14 an hour- or in some cases unable to find any job period.
"Yet even when these frills are tacked onto the annual compensation of Knight himself, the paycheck hovers around $2.6 million."
Hmmm. This is no "Home Depot" guy taking home tens of millions in bonuses.
So why is Knight so wealthy? Nike Stock.
How has Nike Stock done lately?
Not bad-- it's gone up 40% in the last 3 years despite the recession.
It has a low dividend but still has one.
Perhaps all that extra money is going into the stock-- but if they are truly making this enormous profit, it has to be going somewhere. Perhaps they are saving it in cash (which I have a hard time reading for).
Looks like most of us could buy 100 shares (6900 bucks as of today).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem we are having here is that legal code for one browser fails in the latest IE browser. It's manageable tho. We've had minor rewrites for IE7, IE8, and probably will for IE9. The code mostly passed W3C parsers back when it was written tho it is possible some individual programmers may not have been as thorough as others.
We *are* the customer. The company doesn't want to spend another several million dollars to rewrite something that was already done once.
We are headed heavily in the direction of packages and containing any business rules in either the packages or in generic programming languages which we won't have to recode again.
Fluffy layer (presentation) in whatever is the flavor of the day
throw away layer
business layer --- not microsoft
database layer --- arbitrary and swappable.
We are using MQ for communications- which has a lot more problems than promised by IBM.
You have an excellent imagination!
I've experience in a half dozen languages and a couple assembly languages and have been a project manager for projects involving up to a dozen programmers (and maybe 30 resources)-- so small projects (nothing even medium sized).
Based on my experience, I imagine that 6 programmers would start on it, there would be scope creep and changes required by executives, and they would have some cool ideas as well, and some controls are no longer available so they would have to find or write that functionality which was previously "drop in" and three month deadline would be missed a half dozen times despite the fact they were working 60+ hour weeks.
Finally, a barely working piece of crap would be delivered without the iterative testing I requested and they would then spend the next five years fixing bug after bug after bug.
However, given a solid design and leaving them alone- they could probably do a decent job in a year with iterative testing and a solid pair of good adversarial quality testing people.
Not to be disagreeable but patches have already disabled one part of the software. That's how we became aware of this risk.
Also, Microsoft has told us they do not test all combinations and possibilities- it's unsupported. And support is $50k+$100k+$150k+(x+$50k/year) so even for a multi-billion dollar corporation, support is practically non-existent.
If they change some sort of DLL for a current software, they do not warranty that it won't have a side effect on the VB6 application.
What you are saying may be true for smaller VB6 programs but this is a monster with lots of external DLLs, controls, etc.
Yes but it was also sarcastic so he could have been shooting for funny. and now he's stuck with informative and crying in his coffee, once again misunderstood by a cruel world that never comprehends his jests.
The VB6 crap is a stand alone application. It took a dozen programmers about 2 years to write it. It's big. It does a lot. And, I've had to manage projects for updating it so I can say it has a pretty good design.
When the decision was made to go with VB back in 1999, it was reasonable to assume there would be a VB7 which would mean it would take a few months to rewrite it.
Instead we got .Net and no upgrade path.
So this means it would again take half dozen programmers another 2 years to rewrite it (half the programmers due to the good design). Some of the custom controls were written with closed source by companies which haven't existed for closing on a decade now.
On the other hand, our java order entry system has fared better. While the front end has been replaced with another prettier language, the core business rules continue to chug along.
Will C# be supported in 10 years? Maybe-- no way to know. Will Java be supported in 10 years-- probably.
In either case- if we simply buy a package, we don't have to code or maintain anything.
It's less flexible but an order of magnitude cheaper. We are larger now and no longer need as much flexibility to hold customers since our costs are so much cheaper than all of our competitors. And to be honest, being flexible probably ate up over 100% of the money we made on some customers (I.e. we spent $50k to keep the business of a $40k profit customer).
Personally, I think there are downsides to the packages BUT we do share development costs with several thousand other companies (and for one of them several tens of thousands) so things like legal compliance become much easier and much less expensive. It really sucks with a brittle old system being told some new law requires changes within 90 days and fully regression testing it takes 21 days alone.
Java is good for core business rules in my opinion- but anything else, it's no better than several other languages and a bit harder to develop in.
Wow. someone unloaded a big can of reduntant whupass. Never seen so many posts downmodded so fast.
OTH, the parent post is now up to a 5, so it's all good.
Another lesson my company is painfully learning is:
Do not write large applications in microsoft languages for microsoft operating systems.
We are going to hardware and operating system agnostic packages in a big way.
For the problem software tho, it's going to be a rough road until the packages are rolled out (and that will take a couple years). At any point, our current software could be killed by an arbitrary microsoft patch since the language (vb6) is out of support.
I don't even see how this was offensive enough to be downmodded.
And: Windows XP Release date was August 24, 2001 so it's informative.
I agree with you on lord of the rings.
I was very impressed with Jackson's work which was reasonably faithful and also very entertaining. I fell asleep in Bakshi's animated/rotoscoped lord of the rings.
Fans of particular characters or scenes will quibble but I do not think we will ever see one this good again in our lifetimes.
I was happy with the potter movies as long as they stayed as true as possible to the books as well (1-3), I saw them multiple times. I think it's the 4th one where they went modern clothing that i disliked- I was okay with the next one but only saw it once. Oddly, I know they took liberties with #6 (I mean, for god's sake why NAME it the half blood prince and then not even explain why???" but enjoyed the movie for it's own sake and for the interesting idea of a sort of realistic look at the crushes and angst of teenage wizards.
In our society hard work is only enough to get into the top 20%. The top 5% is mostly locked in and handed down the children of people already there.
Since that's going to happen in any society, hard work isn't enough. Heck, these days a dumb novel idea (pet rock, holy bear, etc.) is more likely to vault you into wealth than hard work.
Communism promises 100% of the people will have the lifestyle of the 50% level.
It doesn't promise everyone will be rich. Just that everyone will be roughly equal.
Her voice was annoying.
The movie wasn't bad. Every time molinas was on the screen it came alive as a good movie. The rest of the time it was a cliche- which isn't too bad for the $4 I paid for it.
Getting tired of Ben playing the same character over and over. I thought ... Hmmm maybe they are putting him here to fool us.. but no.. it was the same arrogant snivelly character I'm so full of.
Wondering if losing megan fox will hurt the next T3 film because clearly a somewhat pretty female is not a generic quality. Fox has something beyond mere looks-- some kind of fun attitude maybe.
- Suppliers (whose goods will be inspected to not be laced with Cadmium, lead, etc)
Funny thing about this- the mcdonalds glasses supposedly are legal-- they just do not meet new standards. Not sure if that is corporate propaganda or what.
- Programmers (hey!)
Definitely see and agree with this. But less expensive programmers overseas get better every day.
However, even so it's likely to be a couple thousand jobs tops.
- robotics jobs (growing a small industry in America)
I read about a robotic factories in japan that has no workers today. So basically owners and vendors and robot repair people.
- robotics management (assembly lines still have workers feeding material, etc. I.E.: i-love-lucy).
Not so much. They can currently catch objects in the air and can pick arbitrary objects out of a mixed bin faster than humans.
---
As a PPS: given modular robots, I do not see the need for robot repair men. Pretty much a low level driver position.
If there is a market for 100 engineers worldwide, what do you think happens to engineer wages when there are 10,000 qualified engineers?
If there is a market for 100 opera flutists in the country, what do you think happens to their salaries when there are 1,000 of them?
If there are 1,000 qualified java coders in india willing to work for $5,000 per year. Do you think it lowers or raises wages in France for java coders?
We only need 5% to 10% (and that's really pushing it) of our population to be that educated.
Indians and Chinese, living in low cost of living areas, are competing with and taking those higher education jobs.
A college degree has lost a lot of it's value as too many people get them.
Meanwhile, colleges have raised tuitions like crazy. I read about poor kids graduating with $50,000 to $90,000 debt unable to get jobs above $14 an hour- or in some cases unable to find any job period.
If the shoes are really selling for that much extra money, then why has no one cut in with a competitor and where are the profits going?
Either someone is getting filthy rich off of nike shoes, or a long chain of people are making decent income.
Some older articles say that Nike executives don't make a ton of money (could have changed recently)
http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2002/05/06/focus7.html
"Yet even when these frills are tacked onto the annual compensation of Knight himself, the paycheck hovers around $2.6 million."
Hmmm. This is no "Home Depot" guy taking home tens of millions in bonuses.
So why is Knight so wealthy?
Nike Stock.
How has Nike Stock done lately?
Not bad-- it's gone up 40% in the last 3 years despite the recession.
It has a low dividend but still has one.
Perhaps all that extra money is going into the stock-- but if they are truly making this enormous profit, it has to be going somewhere.
Perhaps they are saving it in cash (which I have a hard time reading for).
Looks like most of us could buy 100 shares (6900 bucks as of today).
More recent information has china and the us at near parity with china passing us in 2011 or 2012.
Which is reasonable since the country has 3x the population.
Sorry bud, but I have friends who fled Chicago due to corruption only 10 years ago.
The fact is, most of us can't afford to live in an america where everything is made by people who are paid $46,000 a year.
It's been said, a pair of $75 nike's would cost $300 if made by americans.
I think the next step will be more versatile machines (aka robots). Which leaves the issue of jobs for americans still unsolved.
Pay $50k for a robot, and run it 3 years, and you undercut even a $20k job. (not including social security taxes, etc.).
That was hot!
Natalie Portman /. Olivia Munn slash fiction!
While a really nasty comment, I don't think this is trollish. Perhaps even a little insightful!
Yes, it's dumping money in a hole.
And the couple was just lucky this wasn't 20-30 years ago. They may have never made it home.
I have a bad memory. It seems to have pointers to memories but sometimes can't retrieve the memories.
With the internet, I can use the pointer to find what I was trying to recall.
I considered 4th wall, but the stage is three dimensional while slashdot is two dimensional.
okay.. yuh got me.... I'm lying.
I just fucked it up.