If by false sense you mean I don't know what a drive by attack ois, you're right.

I looked it up and it says it requires tricking the user into loading a piece of malicious code. I thought I made it clear but apparently you didn't understand. Nothing gets installed unless I say so (which requires disabling auto stuff, such as executing jpg's, autorunning CD's, autoshowing emails, executing attachments, and on and on. All the dumb things that happen automatically. I disabled that.

Also, anti virus scans downloads of everything. So no I am not affected by drive by's, trojan authors, or any other malware.

[XP is] prone to malware, gradually degrading performance for no particular reason (requiring re-installs every 3-6 months), and an ugly, intrusive GUI.

I'm no Windows expert, but I still use XP on my three Windows PC's. I like the GUI better than Linux which I have installed on a fourth PC (OpenSuse KDE 12).

I have 7 at work and prefer XP. I haven't reinstalled in all these years using it but have had several PC's crash with fatal hardware errors. I'm not blaming XP for that.

I've had no malware ever but I run Symantec or Kaspersky anti-virus and I disable auto anything so that nothing happens unless I tell it to. I also install Windows updates.

I'll keep running XP as long as I can find a PC that'll run it.

couldn't agree more. well said.

good thinking, but problem is you're just taking the latest happy number lies from these huge defense contractors and doing what they intended you to do with them. There have been very few completed large projects for US Federal government for more than 20 years as far as I can tell. They're all disasters and none working very well. If there are success stories I'd like to hear about them but haven't.

Mostly true for large projects at all government levels. People blame governments but I blame the software industry who have been unsuccessfully trying to replace what us graybeards were able to do with limited computing power.

I was in Air Force supply (enlisted) during Nam. The Air Force's supply system ran locally on a UNIVAC 1050-II with drum barrel storage and card readers, and teletypes for interactive processing.

We had parts for aircraft and everything to run a base so yes, it's complicated. And our Air Force logistics system handled the workloads of busy Air Force bases.

We practiced procedures for war exercise which included the computer being down and I would put all the transactions performed during the week long or longer exercide in big stacks of cards in a certain order. We would have them run through at end of exercise and were measured on errors. We won the European Air Force Supply Command award one year that I handled that.

I've been an ERP programmer in RPG on the AS/400 line (now IBM i) for 23 years now (8 years 8086/Z-80 assembler before that), and yes writing ERP software or customizing ERP package software is hard. I did a couple of years of consulting at SSA for their BPCS package in mid 90's which ran many of the largest manufacturing companies in the world (although many switched to SAP for Y2K because of SSA insistence on rewriting to their CASE tool product for Y2K).

I've been working on all custom ERP since then for Fortune 500's. It takes good software programming but it's all doable, at least for us graybeards in RPG or COBOL on an IBM large midrange or mainframe.

Being the only guy who understands the wacky AS400 Accounting system because it relies on an obscure system of joined excel tables spread across the network? That is job security. I have seen it happen plenty in financial institutions. Usually those programmers are worshiped as the only ones capable of understanding the systems (of course, they only understand it because they wrote it and have maintained it for 25 years).

I'm one of those guys. There is no "the" wacky AS400 Accounting system (there is apparently your company's accounting system). There is no obscure system of joined Excel tables (yes, users download data to spreadsheets like everyone else). And we can understand anything with source code, not just the people who wrote it.

Yes, I expect I encountered an unusual glitch to hang responses to links (X lit and no response on any link after clicking Stop and trying some additional links). Hopefully I or no one else will encounter it again.

Like I said though, it's good, responsive, the way a technical forum should be, but doesn't carry a crapload of images that typical users burden forums with (from multiple sites) and the typical ad links which paralyze web pages. I'm all for high quality programming like these guys use though.

I had to try it with a response like that. It started out very responsive but hung after I clicked on Discussion Index and tried the link for Google Summer of Code link. Tried backing out to a couple of pages but links hang.

It's the way a good technical discussion forum should be but if used by typical users with all the image overhead they bring with them and the hangups of typical links to ad sites it would be slowed down like the rest of them.

t's too bad that Delphi didn't win out. It was a much better language/environment that VB6.

Microsoft, as is their history, determined that by destroying Borland in making the Delphi team an offer they couldn't refuse. C# was created by them.

Thanks for the insight from your posts. I thought the description of your requirements and thinking were very reasonable. Good luck on filling out your team and on a successful project.

cancer is not evolution....it is caused, for most cancers, by a local mutation of somatic cells that produces cancer cells in a specific tissue. The mutation is due to environmental conditions (poor nutrition, poor habits, etc).

I'm reading some fascinating stuff (Biology of Cancer - Weinberg) that says there are huge amounts of point mutations taking place throughout the body all the time from oxidants. Also with LOH and inherited loss of genetic viability, indications were that while there are certain effective carcinogens, probably most cancers are not caused by poor nutrition and poor habits as you say.

I think a point to be made is that the opposite of accellerated aging due to lack of AUF1 (and its effect on causing repairing ends of DNA) is not delaying aging and prolonging life, it's normal aging.

And while delaying aging based on perpetually repairing ends of DNA, as an interested layman reading Weinberg's Biology of Cancer, cell immortalization "is a step that appears to govern the development of all human cancers."

In other words, that's one of the universal mutations that enable human cancer, as I understand it. Otherwise the cells with critical mutations enabling cancer would die off.

How does Slashdot accept such a crappy post?!

I believe they welcome this stuff with open arms, and add an obscure summary with sensational headline to boot.

And slashdotters tear it aprt even while complaining. Win-win for everyone.

I actually read once that a lot of the old gear is kept due to its resilience to the radiation out there. The larger circuit traces from that gear was supposedly less susceptible.

I think you're referring to the electronics that was certified for spacecraft. None of that is applicable to mainframes. IBM constantly refreshes the electronics, now on ever newer Power CPU's.

I'm curious as to what makes COBOL the right tool for data processing tasks.

I was under the impression that much of the reason it was still around is generally because there are existing large projects already written in it, and it is generally deemed to expensive to try to convert to some more modern language. You make it sound like there is more to it than just that (although surely it plays a part).

What makes it a better language than say Java or Python for data processing tasks? If one chooses to use those languages in a more purely procedural style (rather than an object oriented style) would they not produce similarly straightforward code, but with the advantage of having a much larger pool of developers?

That's a fair question. I'll try to give a quick answer without starting a language flame war. :)

First, to be fair, good programmers can do just about anything with any language. We've done remarkable things though the decades with very little. Now that computers are relatively infinite in capability, even bad programmers have a shot at doing anything with any language. So it doesn't matter as much anymore.

But as an IBM RPG programmer, which has similar attributes as COBOL, the reasons are high speed transaction processing with language and even hardware support for binary decimal data type and direct disk IO, not limited to SQL for database IO. Programs are written with typed variables and compiled. Efficiency used to be paramount to accomplish what needed to be done, and it still is highly efficient.

The IBM mainframes and midranges these programs run on can be smaller but scale to very, very large environments that are very secure. Java also runs on these systems and we write systems with it and is used extensively, but generally not for the hardcore data processing jobs.

When something is processed, be it a screen, something from a web page, a record from an input file, etc., we usually hit several files in validating and updating info, on a transaction by transaction basis. It can be emulated with extremely complex SQL statements, I've seen some of them, but it takes quite a bit of engineering to attempt to do all the IO we routinely do for transactions.

The IBM midrange (i OS) and mainframe operating systems are also a big part of the success of RPG and COBOL, respectively.

I've always said that if i OS were written today by an OSS team you guys would think it was the second coming of operating systems.