Well, my assumptions are dropping like flies!
Terry Brownell wrote:
>
> When Linux or any other OS forges ahead of MS, then I'm there
> baby, with bells on.
>
Quoting from an article on ITworld.com:
Most of the world's business data, approximately 75 to 85
percent, is written in COBOL," adds Bill Payson, president
and CEO of Senior Techs, an Internet-based job bank for
experienced IT professionals in Campbell, Calif. "That
translates to some hundreds of billions of lines of code."
COBOL is used in some manner by almost all Fortune 500
companies. Many of these companies have a large pool of
COBOL-based applications that are primary business systems.
E-business requires these systems to be integrated and
connected to the outside world.
"With the future of all commerce linked to the Internet,
companies with massive databases know that success depends
on the ability to move data in and out of the Internet,"
Payson explains.
Paul Halpern, director of traditional development solutions
at Merant, a Web-enabling training company in Mountain View,
Calif., maintains that, "If all the COBOL programs stopped
working, the US economy would collapse." And he points out:
"Nine out of ten of the top Internet brokers use COBOL with
CICS [Customer Information Control Systems]. Chances are
that when you use an ATM card you are starting a COBOL/CICS
process. An IBM report published last year indicates 30 billion
COBOL/CICS transactions are executed worldwide each day, more
than the total number of Web pages hit each day."
An obvious conclusion would be that it's not worth bothering with
an unknown upstart language with a non-existent job market and
a total transactions-per-day count that isn't even in the range
of round-off error compared to the volumes mentioned above.
At least not until it "forges ahead" of COBOL...
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
...
> >
> > I guess I'm with Tim Berners-Lee when he says "The power of
> > the Web is in its universality" -- why dilute that power
> > by restricting access?
> >
Greed. Pure and simple.
Companies that cannot compete in technical excellence usually
resort to the "4 L's" -- lies, license, lock-ins, and lawyers.
Judge for yourself where this applies.
-jn-
--
; sub REBOL {}; sub head ($) {@_[0]}
REBOL []
# despam: func [e] [replace replace/all e ":" "." "#" "@"]
; sub despam {my ($e) = @_; $e =~ tr/:#/.@/; return "\n$e"}
print head reverse despam "moc:xedef#yleen:leoj" ;
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