Funnyman(NOT): Watched Ur baa-humbug voodoo w/Au threads w/amusement & a grrrreat deal of skepticism. Of course, this will bring down upon my head the usual castigations and rushing to your defense, but so be it. Won't be the first time(g)
Your views on gold are old, outdated, and your advice on HM just plain reeks as well from where many sit. And most of us are NOT a goldbug come lately by ANY stretch of the imagination.
However, I'll just go ahead and let you spout your pseudo intellectual gold bilge and confuse the hell outta people. You don't bother those of us who actually know the score and are truly open for discussion. Your mind is very made up not only about this worthlessness of gold, but also why the sun comes up in the west every morning instead of the east where it SHOULD arise according to not only science BUT observation by the non-scientific.
CASE IN POINT...
Your pseudo-challenge, i.e, "show me how Y2K=big deal" IS a cataclysmic event, a paradigm change, and damned expensive all rolled into one, frankly. I don't care how long you have been programming or diddlin' with stocks and stockbrokers!
The following 2 posts illustrate why some of us goldbugs ARE taking the Y2K problem seriously a/w/a "putting our generators where our garage junk is!" Others, such as myself, are not just getting our runabout Honda 2 wheelers tuned up, but also branching into solar generation to conserve on ye'old petrol. BTW, do YOU know where your NON-Digital gasoline stations with their old fashioned pumps can be found? You'll wish you knew in about 500 days!!!
Anyhoo...the 2 posts:
OPEN QUOTE:
After Y2K problem is "taken care of" by the s/w tool vendor companies etc., what is the carrot on the stick to continue to spend the budget monies on more upgrading of Lines Of Code?(LOC)
With the "urgency" of an immoveable deadline removed--post Jan 1, 2000--, what's the incentive to keep spending when so much client bucks have been spent, unexpectedly on just the Y2K fix?
Thanks for any and all enlightenment!
REPLY:
Saturday, Apr 25 1998 9:06AM ET
Concerning what happens after the year 2000 rush ends, this is a complex question and does not have a simple answer.
The answer in a nutshell--which is obscure and vague--is that all the budget needed for IS (Information Systems) upgrades is being used for Y2K, or should be. After Y2K there should be a mad rush for overdue upgrades.
To talk about what gets upgraded in the world of MIS (Management Information Systems) you have to slow down and think about how big companies organize their data processing world. Small companies become a less capable, less sophisticated bunch who wannabeee just like the big guys...
MIS is organized, usually informally, into levels or 'tiers'. At the bottom of the heap is the machine on the desktop. Up from there is first the local network server, the second departmental database machines, and third then the mainframes. Each is more expensive than the last.
The reason for the expense is often thought to have to do with how powerful the machine is in processing power, but that is not the full picture and misguides many. The deeper truth is that each tier is more and more secure, reliable and trustworthy.
Imagine if Chase Manhatan lost all their account records. They would be out of business right? This justifies the expense of mainframes to keep such data, which, if lost, destroys the Chase. Mainframes have redundant hardware, full time administrators, 4 hour maintenance contracts, etc. They just don't die.
But mainframes as we know them are based on 1960's design in several ways. These old beasts are 32 bit in a world moving to 64 bits. They have old terminal-like user interfaces and old 3gl software.
What will happen to that key central data that must be protected at all costs? The Yankee Group and other high priced "think tanks" say the data will still reside on big central boxes, but software will move to lower tiers. The big central boxes will become more modern as well perhaps.
IBM has new, lower cost pre-unit of processing mainframes with new versions of operating system. At one time and more promising, was the DEC ALPHA, and big machines based on DEC's 64 bit UNIX on the 64 bit ALPHA. A fully 64 bit version of ORACLE is available for DEC's 643 bit UNIX. This technology leaves IBM in the dust, and something like it may be the future of the mainframe role.
But there is a pesky problem, software. These old applications are written in COBOL and other languages. They are written to use 'transaction monitors' that manage terminal screens. They need to be moved to new object-oriented, high-tech, high-buzzword environments to make the Yankee Group and their peers happy and keep the computer
geeks like me employed. Otherwise the old language must reside on the old mainframe.
The old language was written by the old mainframe vendor, or some partner. The old language for the software was proprietary, meaning it used vendor specific standards rather than national, international, or industry group sponsored standards. If the non-company standards were used, the application could be recompiled on another vendor's hardware and life would be easier. The use of broader standards is called 'open' and computer systems that use those standards are then known as 'open systems'.
These open systems have their problems. With no big central vendor acting as dictator, they flounder in argument a bit. Too many cooks, etc. Look at one of the most important near future standards (which may disappear or become a key standard...the jury is still out): CORBA. CORBA allows you write software that uses old mainframe applications as databases in the new object oriented world. CORBA lets you write small parts of an application that can be reused and can jump from one machine to another. CORBA is merging with JAVA to allow use on any arbitrary machine from DEC to HP to SUN to IBM.
Unfortunately, CORBA cannot yet replace mainframe applications because no one has yet built a CORBA ORB system that is fault tolerent, allowing any machine running CORBA server objects to fail without affecting application logic. This is key because they want to use mostly small, unreliable machines. Some turkeys even want to use
desktop machines, in complete denial of the fact that users turn them off, run over their power cords with the chair now and then, etc.
Assuming real high reliability vendors and engineers with a view toward high reliability products "fix CORBA", lots of mainframe COBOL may move to UNIX and NT boxes just after 2000. How? Maybe UNICAST. That is what CAST did before Y2K, take code in one computer language and 'rewrite' it in another.
Even if not CORBA, that old code needs to move to newer versions of COBOL II, of course. Some will need to move to other environments like VB or Microfocus COBOL on PCs. Much of it must move to the web, JAVA or VBscript/Jscript. This could all be revenue for Y2K cos in 2001 AD. People are making big money on web applications now, wait for this wave of changes!
In summary, after 2000 the MIS budget used to fix Y2K will then be used to move applications off platforms that are no longer viable, and onto WEB enabled and other high-buzzword environments, in theory.
.................Matt
P.S.
Before buying into this whole world, examine the revenues of companies that were doing translation before Y2K. Translation was not popular, and Y2K may change that. Also translating to the same old languages on mainframes does not look as promising as following the truly huge web trends, JAVA, etc.
Well, there you have it from a younger computer geek, funnyman. Get with it, will you?
O/49r |
