Re: The Great Year-2000 Hoax! .. but what about -our- reputation?

Followup-To: comp.databases.adabas,comp.databases.gupta,comp.databases.ibm-db2,comp.databases.informix,comp.databases.ingres,comp.databases.ms-access,comp.databases.s-sqlserver,comp.databases.object,comp.databases.olap,comp.databases.oracle,comp.databases . References: <325E9EC2.685A@eagle.cc.ukans.edu> <01bbb7bc$b9aa48e0$LocalHost@jason.ricochet.net> <325FAA1B.1D84@interserf.net> <info.4153.0025D841@sundialservices.com> Distribution: Organization: Bimbo Cabal Sundial Services (info@sundialservices.com) wrote: : Rather .. my concern is about our industry. What does it say : about US when highly credentialed tongue-waggers are saying with apparent : authority that "a disaster of magnificent proportion will occur!?" And when : people on the other side of this fence are silent? We are in the business of : constructing software systems worth billions of dollars upon which our : companies and our economy are utterly dependent. -Trust- is one of the : greatest assets that we have. What are we doing to, or by neglect allowing to : be done to, the public image and trust in our very competence? I perhaps erroneously read the implication in some of the text that I deleted that you had decades of experience in the industry. The paragraph I _didn't_ delete seems to demonstrate that you don't, for if you did, you would know that the decision to maintain legacy systems with architectural limitations based on hardware requirements from before 1980 is not being made by programmers and systems designers, but by shortsighted management. I know for a fact that one of the baby bells has 13 months of billing data on a platform that takes >24 hours to back up and would take 8-10 days to restore. That's like having no backup at all, since they can't afford to be out of business for more than a week. And the code for this billing system is in COBOL, and continues to be upgraded and ported to other platforms in COBOL, even though the shop has lots of people with much more expertise in C and other modern languages. Why? Because the manager thinks (erroneously) that they have too much of an investment in COBOL to switch. And because the answer to the question "Can we do it in COBOL?" is alwyas "Well, . . . yes, I guess we can. . ." I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is one of those systems with the Y2K problem. It's not the programmers who continue to perpetuate this problem. It's the penny-wise pound-foolish management that has refused (perhaps through complete ignorance) to address the problem in the last 15 years. Systems that will need to be patched in the next three years are systems that should have been replaced 10 years ago. And the programmers were probably calling for replacement years before that. David W. Fenton | New York University | The way of stylistic tolerance dfenton@bway.net | dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu | may lead to the final horror of http://www.bway.net/~dfenton | John Tesh. --Alex Ross, NYTimes