On Fri, Nov 27, 1998 at 09:23:10PM -0500, Bob Munck wrote:
> Where, pray tell, does one get a freeware program to handle $10 billion
> worth of futures trading on SE Asia markets? [...]
You don't, obviously. You simply use freeware every place that you
can, as I said. That's one of the place you can't.
> How do you know what the old stuff does? It is tens of thousands of
> programs, scattered all over the company, with user and code documentation
> that is at best out of date, more likely completely missing. The UI is
> probably mostly 3270-based for that fraction of the programs that are
> interactive, and is printer output for the majority of it.
That would be about what I would expect. That's why it should be replaced,
not patched.
> I suspect that what you did involved replacing the network, DBMS, and
> OS portions of the system, leaving the applications code intact.
Uh, no.
> The applications code in a system like this is several orders of
> magnitude larger and more complex than the sum total of the OS, comms,
> network, and DBMS software.
Almost certainly. I'd be surprised if it wasn't.
> With 13 months left until 2000, and allowing no time at all to find
> out what the old stuff does, design the new system, integrate and
> test, you need only 900-some programmers. Piece of cake.
Uh, I didn't say that *now* would be the time to start. Obviously not:
at this point, they're hosed because they chose the safe career-preserving
MBA-specified traditional wisdom Information-Week-would-approve
thinking-inside-the-box way of solving the problem. So it probably
*will* cost them $800-$900 million, if not more.
Nope, the time to start would have been, say, 5 years ago. All the
bits and pieces of technology that will be available next year were
clearly visible back then to anyone who was truly paying attention.
(e.g. ultracheap hardware, 40-50G disks, gigabit ethernet, pervasive
use of web technology, decent enscryption/authentication s/w, etc.)
They could now be looking at deploying the most advanced network of
its kind (not that this is saying a lot: after all, all it does is
shuffle money) instead of running what amounts to an patched antique.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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