eggestad's comments

Nonsense.

All A2A kills since 1999 have been with missiles. The F-16 have very preciously few A2A kills using guns.

Check wikipedia again

an AIM120C is 300-400k

an AIM120D is 1.7M (I think it was listed as 1.2M last I checked this page)

According to this http://www.f-16.net/f-16_armament_article1.html a sidewinder in 1999 had a unit cost of 55k-85k which would be 9L,M, or P most likely. 9X did enter service until 2003

These toys, much like the planes carrying them get progressively more expensive in newer version.

But the cost ratio stay much the same. You get 4-6 AIM-9 for the cost of one AIM 120

try writing a rust implementation of linux...

most moves from mainframe to *nix, windows or others are a port of existing code to a new OS. NOT a complete rewrite.

If you read the article carefully you'll notice that most banks DO NOT maintain their own software! They licence the software, and usually the job of running the system, from a software house. The article is based on an intervjue of the CEO of Auka. Auka is a software house for a peripheral piece of banking software. (read, he's selling software licenses). Try to look at this from the banks point of view.

My first job was in one of these software houses for banking and finance(B&F) who made both core system and peripheral software.

A bunch of us programmers tried to make the same sell to one of the bankers we had on staff. (You need bankers to do the job of products manager in this business). He looked at us like we're morons, and asked a rather pointed question: "OK, say we rewrite the whole software stack in C++ (this was 1998). What NEW banking products can we make in C++ we CAN'T make in cobol?" Answers is of course; None, zip, nada. Last time you changed bank, did you ask who's banking system is being used and in what language it was written in ? I'm guessing not.

So banks go to the software houses to license a core banking system, and they care pretty much about only two things: 1) Is it solid (i.e bug free. Few things evaporate trust in a bank faster than there being questions about the banks ability to do basic math right). 2) price

There have been a few cases when a new core banking system have been written from scratch, and most have been failures due to being too buggy when launched. Word get out among the banks and the system is dead. All will wait until it's proven, no one will be the first one out of the gate. The bug free requirement is a show stopper from the getgo.

On to price. The development cost of such a system is in the neighborhood of 250 - 500 million USD. The only way to get that down is to strip down the features to a much simple system. The other software houses are just going to sell an existing cobol system, with disabled features to match yours, and underbid you.

Bankers, unlike most CS majors, actually understand how to calculate cost of investments! Say 500M USD development cost, a future value calculation will yield that you'll need a return-on-investment (ROI) of 20-50M US EVERY YEAR FROM HERE TO INFINITY to make the investment pay off. (That's PROFITS, not revenue)

Core banking systems are so feature stable, and have been so thoroughly debugged over DECADES, that there is very little maintenance to be done. I'd expect that each of these systems have a staff of 10-20 programmers maintaining them (and they spend a lot of time doing other things). How big a staff of maintainer will you new banking system need after launch? Even if it was zero and you assume you pay each maintenance programmer 250k USD, a staff of 20 still only cost 5M USD.

The article have a section "what can the banks do" left out a fourth option. Instead of using CS majors to code cobol, you use B&F majors, and give them a 1-2 year education on doing cobol programming. The CS majors need 1-2 years of on the job experience to reach a B&F Bachelor level understanding of what a core banking system need to do anyway. Cost is the same.

One last point, say you do write a new system today your choice of language will be either Java or C#. As database there is no viable alternative to SQL. In 30 years no fresh CS major will touch Java or C# with a ten foot pole, and you'll have to do another rewrite to the tune of 100-200M USD (assuming that programming will require less hands).

Much cheaper to keep on educating non CS majors to do cobol.

This guy got one. (Man take me back, used to have the HP drive on my first job in the 90's. (Sigh) The bad old days...)

Maybe he'll take pity on you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEL8wnW5uvs

First revel in the fact that you actually get to choose :-) most programmers just get to play with a choice someone else made.

First of all, are you going to be the product owner, or is this a consulting gig you're gonna walk away from? If the latter, chose what allow you do get the job done for the least amount of hours. As your reputation grows for getting the job done in few hours (cheap) you can increase your hourly rates. You don't need to read on. Also, if you're sure that no bottle neck is going happen. Meaning that the user will always get a response in less then 0.3 second, some thing. use whatever will get the job done fastest. In which case you should be looking at what components (like Databases, search engines, etc) are out there that allow you to get the job done fastest. Then choose you poison according to those sub systems. There is an argument for easy maintainability, in which case it comes down to how you tend to debug. I tend to use debuggers a lot, and that leaves be with Java from the languages I know from your list.

You need to identify the bottle neck your application is going to have. You're rarely going to be wrong. I tend to operate with 5 bottle necks: CPU Memory Disk Network IPC

CPU: Easy, won't happen. It requires that you've avoided a memory bottleneck, meaning that you've figured out how to feed the CPU with data. There are only three languages where this is really possible, C, C++, and Fortran.

Memory: Unusual for a backend project, but possible. Solving it requires that you lay out your data the right way in memory, and you're again basically back to C, C++, and (to a lesser degree) Fortran. Anything with a new operator and garbage collector tend to be bad. If possible try finding an existing piece of software to do the job for you, but it's rare.

For disk and network bottle necks, programming languages don't matter.

If disk bound you need to try picking a sub system that do proper caching for you, like a SQL, NoSQL, or other system. Your design choice here will be on what you base your language decision.

Since you say backend, I'm assuming that you're on a web or mobile app frontend. In all likely hood, this is the bottle neck you're going to face. You should be concerning yourself with the frontend to backend interactions, not programing languages. Web frameworks and proper use of AJAX are more important. Worrying about languages is like worrying about getting a Ford model T, a Pinto, or a F-150 for a indy 500 or formula 1 race. You've asked the wrong question.

IPC! Strictly not a bottle neck, but a problem that occur a lot. Remember that a IPC call take about 1 000 000 times longer than a method or function call within a program. You have to assume 40ms latency from the frontend to backend. Calling web services, database requests within you backend if you spread it over multiple servers have a 1-10ms latency. You can assume 5-10ms in practice. Trying to keep a response time for a user interaction below 0.3s, i.e 300ms you should realize that you have a tight budget for IPC calls. A backend operation that involves 1000 DB requests is just not going to get done in 300ms. If you know that your DB operations will be the bottle neck, avoid ORM's like hibernate. You're going to be spending your time making DB procedure and optimizing SQL. If you're going to have a lot of business logic, chosing a language that don't lend itself to writing large programs may run you into trouble. It's tend you to keep programs short and use IPC to call the business logic. As a result I tend to stick to Java. Well, have been doing a lot of C and C++ stuff earlier in my career, so I tend to be a little biased. On the otherhand, have been wringing a lot of frontend logic in Javascript as well, and detest the language.

Hope this helps.

He did the right thing in getting in getting this guy out of jail.

On quite frankly thats more than enough to feel proud.

His question is "what now?" from the point of view that the guy he helped is out on the street.

I get it, I'm just saying that at some point you need to start looking at the bigger picture.

And yes, I do always look at the bigger picture when I choose to contribute.

I'm a little pissy since looking beyond the inch in front of your nose seem to be a lost arts.

And changing the law was what I was hinting at

Well if someone try to shout you down, I'll shout you up! :-)

First of all you should take pride in what you have done already. You've gone way beyond what most of your fellow country men will ever do.

While I understand, you're doing the wrong thing by focusing on this single individual. Since this guy is someone you have gotten to know, you have an emotional tie that is making you blind to the cold hard truth.

This happens to someone everyday.

- Parents have a falling out with their adolescent children and kick them out - Runaway kids run out of money, and by running out I mean: zero zilch nada - Addicts just run out of money as well as in zero zilch nada - Explosive break up of couple where one gets locked out - Eviction by landlords or as a result of bankruptcy etc etc etc

Most have friend or family to help out, and you'll never heard about them. Those who don't are the one you see sleeping on the streets. Thats assuming that you're not one of those that just stay between our office, the mall, and the safe gated community in the suburbs where the hobos are nicly or of sight out of mind. This is what most people do...

You can do one of two things. a) Take the position that's you've helped one guy out of jail. If every body helped one person, everybody in need would be out of homelessness in a forth night. Quite frankly, your guy is just so much better of just living on the street than in jail, so if you take this position you've done your part for king and country. I will not fault you for taking this position.

b) Start working on something, anything, that goes towards a solution that take care of everybody.

I'm a bit astonished that you can't go to the court and argue that as there is no way he is not going to get some kind of compensation, the state can just as well right now front up something like $1000 - $10000 to help him get reestablished. If there is some crap about there is case law not too, then this is call to start working on abolishing the whole concept of common law and switch to a civil law system. (I know this means getting the legislative to replace the current body of case law with some more sensible civil code. A task for which the word "hard" falls short.)

I just take the position we need to work on the whole problem , and that doing this by individual you're effectively just doing a band aid. Remember the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions?" You make actually be making it worse by doing it by individuals as it may hide the true scope and scale of the problem.

We actually don't send people to prison (impost sanction) to make them stop. 0.1% of any population will break laws no matter what.

The real reason for imposing sanctions is that 80% of law abiding people would break any and all laws if there was not a threat of sanction.

Stop using gold as reserve currency and the price of gold plummets >99%