If anyone wants to continue the discussion,p lease do so in an open thread and do so sans insults, please. Thanks.

I’ve read your posts, you seem to claim intimate knowledge on everything from computers to global warming to statistics. Either you are one of the world’s great polymaths or you are one of the world’s great bullshitters. I think it is the latter. Isn’t that right sparky?

We used to say ‘he’s eh-rooditter than us’. Still not sure why that makes me laugh, but it does.

- And no it wasn’t a “simple fix”, since there were always many multiple “references” to date bytes that had to chased down and feretted out. the worst thing you could have was a “mixed” set of references, for obvious reasons.

- Bang

That said, searching for the ‘time’ variable doesn’t seem all that difficult. Am I mistaken?

I have no idea what you mean by deliqunet update.

I think he meant that companies had to over-pay coders to get them to fix their computer problems in time because they waited so long.

for certain types of processing and for systems requiring nearly 100 percent uptime, cobol and mainframe systems remain remain without peer.

Bah with a capitol B! Mainframes continue in their importance, but COBOL is history. COBOL is no more stable than C, perl, or any of the database programs like SQL. If you would have said ‘less stable’ I might have agreed with you. COBOL blows, plain and simple.

Sorry, that did kind of turn into a rant. My apologies.

- Bang

Get with the program. Be alarmed and blame conservatives and prosperity even though prosperity is what has helped American get it’s environmental act together in the last 2 decades. Now only if we can make even further strides without playing the blame game (that won’t happen) and without so-called enviros thinking their solutions are the only ones to the problems we face.

- Does THAT make me an expert numbskull… Stick to safe ground like the cartoon section of the daily worker…. At least SOMETHING you know something about Sparky… Your Liberal bromides and mis-speak are as empty headed as you are.

- Bang

Yes, this true. YOU should stop saying things that you know nothing about. Reading an article in the paper does not make you an expert.

>>- Millions of dollars had to be spent upgrading “COBOL” based systems, e.g. Elevator controls, old vending machines, medical electronics etc. Most current software at the time, took a few lines of code change.

Cobol systems are part of everyone’s daily life in one way or the other. It was one of the most popular programming languages in the world prior to the emergence of desktop pcs in late 1980′s. As a result, nearly everything developed during that time frame and had to be controlled by computer had a COBOL component somewhere in the background.

If a program only included a date value, modifying a program would only involve changing a few lines of code but this was not always true. The date, for example, could be used toward the calculation of another value. Regardless, the programmer’s task was not complete after making the actual change since the output of the program had to mesh correctly with all subsequent programs. A job stream from start to data in its final form could involve hundreds of programs each of which needed to be analyzed. So, even if the actual change took a short time to make, the upfront work needed to properly make that change was tremendous.

>>The real expense was entirely self incurred by delinquent upgrades

I have no idea what you mean by deliqunet update. Do you mean a full scale migration away from cobol? Although some companies may have decided to swallow the bitter pill and launch a complete migration from cobol systems to something else. I personally know no company that did so during that time. Migrating a production system is an enormous task and requires serious commitment in time and money. The city of New York has been undergoing a migration from cobol batch processing to the people soft platform for the past two years and is not scheduled to complete the migration for at least another year.

Further, in spite of the advance of microprocessors, for certain types of processing and for systems requiring nearly 100 percent uptime, cobol and mainframe systems remain remain without peer. Many companies continue to use cobol including nearly all banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies for this reason.

Nearly every person I know in the IT field spent sometime on this issue, at my company a department was even created to deal solely with this issue. During new year’s eve 1999, some departments were completely staffed to deal with possible y2k issues. (They were partly compensated for their time by a fully catered lobster dinner complete with waiters and white linen tables brought in from the outside.) Companies do not commit this kind of resources to an effort if they do not think that failure to do so would be detrimental to their business.

- By the way, I wonder how Mexico is coming along on those Y1K problems.

- Bang

A lot of people took the opportunity to make investments beyond simply making Y2K compliance.

” Another totally improper anology to any possible Climatic changes.”

What really makes the analogy improper is the external vs. internal nature of the costs. The costs to Y2K dangers were internal — it was your systems and company that would be hurt. The Costs to global climate change are externalised. The incentives to fix are quite different.

- It would really be helpful if posters would stick to things they actually knew something about.

- Millions of dollars had to be spent upgrading “COBOL” based systems, e.g. Elevator controls, old vending machines, medical electronics etc. Most current software at the time, took a few lines of code change. The real expense was entirely self incurred by delinquent upgrades. Another totally improper anology to any possible Climatic changes.

- Bang