Posts by Jim Noeth 14 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2007
Who wants to believe a study funded by a company who sells a product that the study shows to be invaluable? Sounds like marketing to me. When they can sell a spam filter that is guaranteed not to throw away the good with the bad, then, maybe I'd be interested. And, not noted is that the environmental foot print of email spam is trivial compared to the footprint of snail mail spam.
Actually, the biblical account of creation (from the book of Genesis) does not preclude life on other planets. So, finding life elsewhere does not prove anything regarding God, at least from the Jewish/Christian perspective. I know others may debate this, but, just because the biblical account of creation only talks about life on earth doesn't mean that life was not created elsewhere.
There's nothing wrong with COBOL, it has gotten a bad rap because schools and vendors wanted to push their 'new magic solutions'. Sure it's a little wordy, but, having programmed in COBOL for about 30 years, there's little I've found that I couldn't do with it. I also regularly program in Java, C, C++, C#, Perl, assembler (several different architectures), each has their good points and bad points. If I were to write a Payroll system, COBOL would be the language of choice for me. If I were writing a compiler, the C would probably the language of choice.
As to all that 'spaghetti code', imagine a system written in any language that had been around for as many years as some of these COBOL systems, they'd look like spaghetti as well. Also, since much of the code was written when computing resources were very expensive, hence things like 2 digit years.
Giving a gun (of any type) to a youth doesn't make them a killer. In fact, in this setting, they can be taught gun safety. If one of these youth really want to murder someone, I'm sure they can find a way to obtain a gun. Most murders, using a gun, in the United States utilized an illegally obtained gun. I own multiple guns, and have not shot, nor even attempted to shoot, a person. A church that I attended in the past had regular trap/skeet shooting events. Many a clay pigeon lost its life, but, no harm ever came to a person as a result.
By the way, the Bible doesn't say 'Thou shalt not kill', it says 'Thou shalt not commit murder', although some translations do state the former. If you look at the Hebrew text, it definitely is the latter. There is a difference between killing and murder. Also, the new testament mentions that there is a time to kill and a time to let live.
I don't agree with what Drew did, but, I'm also in agreement that she really didn't break any laws. I'm from the St. Louis area (Yea, I'm a Yank), so I've probably heard more details on this than the average person. What Drew said (in her alter person, Josh) was not really anything that an average teen would not have said in real life. Don't know if the teens on the right side of the pond talk like this, or even if they talk that way in other parts of the US. But, if you listen to teens, especially those in their early teens talk, such a statement 'the world would be better off without you' would be pretty common. If this pushed Megan over the edge, she was on the verge of going over anyway.
My big fear is the slippery slope we'll be on if this case is deemed to have any merit at all.
I believe that comments should be kept to a minimum. I will also agree with the 'why' and not the 'what'. If you want to know what a piece of code does, reading the comments won't help. In fact, it will probably cause you to make wrong assumptions. Remember, the comments don't execute, the code does.
Reading the article reminded me of the IBM 'buzz word bingo' commercial. Lots of buzz words to say that nothing (except the buzz words) has changed much over the years. Programmers have been using these same concepts for decades, thing is, we just didn't make up fancy names for them.
Oh, and what James Anderson said about the Y2K fiasco (I second that). It really irritates me when people refer to it as a bug or a programming mistake. It was done, on purpose, for some very good business reasons. And, those of us who knew much about computers knew that the century change would be at most an irritation, no airplanes falling out of the sky.
Unless you're developing some system that is completely stand alone, and you get to pick all the design/implementation criteria, the hafta method is what you hafta use. Most of the time, you need to interface with some third party package, or some existing system. Couple that with corporate standards regarding hardware, operating systems, languages, methodologies, etc., you're in the hafta realm.
I've seen places where everything is built using the ideal world, but, what you wind up with is a bunch of stand alone systems that don't work together and are unmaintainable.
Funny thing is that today's fashionable service-oriented model looks very similar to the service-oriented model that was being used when I first got into the IT field (over 30 years ago). The only difference is that today, the communication between the application and the service is via a Web/Soap interface. Gee, we were even doing B2B services back then.
I agree with an earlier poster, that the mainframe had all these features. And, it can even do Web/Soap too.
There's another angle that I haven't seen addressed in this lengthy chain of responses. That is that there is a tax built into the cost of gasoline, diesel, petrol, etc. that (in the United States anyway) helps to pay for the roads (and line some people's pockets). While this can be built into an electrical charging infrastructure, it wouldn't be as effective. If I had an electric car, I could quite easily recharge from the mains in my home. But, it would be pretty impractical for me to manufacture my own gasoline at a reasonable cost. Yes, I know that there are some people who recycle grease from restaurants as a substitute for diesel, but, that's pretty small scale.
The same problem occurs when vehicles start getting better mileage, the tax revenues drop off. So, it's in the best interest of the government to keep the existing system in place.
As for me, though, I'll keep on driving my full size pickup truck as I want at least a little protection from those 40 ton (US) monsters that I have to share the road with.
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