They're also missing out on the transition costs, which can be extremely substantial.
There are programs written in the late 70's that are running on hardware built in the early 70's that have been touched only to make them Y2K compliant (and some not even then). These programs do everything from keep the lights on to issue Treasury bonds to determine whether a nuclear-tipped missile should launch or not. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not "upgrade" a nuclear-weapons computer when it's been working just fine for 30+ years. But, maybe I'm just paranoid. Maybe, you can keep track of every change made between version 3.4 and version 27.8 and calculate how each will affect every one of the million lines of code written in a language that was deprecated when I was still in diapers. And, maybe we just didn't need Detroit.
Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.
|
|
