XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics
-hh wrote:
On 3/31/25 02:36, Governor Swill wrote:
On Sun, 30 Mar 2025 23:49:42 -0400, -hh
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 3/30/25 21:06, Siri Cruz wrote:
On 30/3/25 6:46, NoBody wrote:
Did it occur to you
that it could and should be replaced by something other than Cobol? >>>>
Thus you show you know nothing about software.
Its more that they're profoundly ignorant about Project Management and
scoping ...
... in the context of legacy software that's had decades worth(s) of
updates, revisions, patches, etc ... not all of which received perfect
documentation.
The net sum makes it not impossible to replace, but highly
time-intensive to fully document every last millimeter and thus,
extremely expensive: the pragmatic business solution has been that it
is cheaper to just keep the status quo running and keep on updating it.
What would it cost to upgrade the govt systems to modern standards?
That's an interesting question.
Answer: a lot ;)
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/setting-the-record-straight-on-social-security
Only 0.1 percent of Social Security benefits are paid to people over 100
years old. DOGE head Elon Musk has been circulating a table he claims
shows Social Security beneficiaries at very old ages, but he is grossly mischaracterizing its contents. These numbers appear to be drawn from
SSA’s Numident database, a record of every Social Security number
application since the program started. The Numident typically does not
contain death dates for people born before 1920 — before Social Security
was established and long before electronic records were kept. A 2023 OIG
report explains that “almost none” of the people born before 1920 in
this dataset are being paid benefits. As a result, SSA explained that
adding death dates to these very old records would be “costly to
implement [and] would be of little benefit.”
First part is the inference that COBOL isn't a "modern standard" because
it is still being very widely used in Fortune 500 Enterprises.
COBOL (and Fortran) is still under development.
Second part is the term "upgrade": question that needs answering here is
to be able to articulate ... and quantify ... just what tangible
business benefit is from the change. That includes is cost & ROI times.
Welllll... Cobol Cowboys are in high demand. More would be
needed so more would be needed not only for maintenance
but for adding new code
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/minecraft-server-made-to-run-on-pre-x86-cobol-coding-language
This legacy programming language can still be seen in modern mainframes
and is so popular in the private and government sectors alike that COBOL
coders remained in high demand at the peak of 2020's unemployment wave.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-jersey-cobol-coders-mainframes-coronavirus
New Jersey Pleas for COBOL Coders for 40-Year-Old Mainframes Amid
Coronavirus Crunch
last updated April 6, 2020
https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2025/03/21/what-is-cobol-and-why-should-it-matter-to-louisiana-residents/82598521007/
What is COBOL, and why should it matter to Louisiana residents in wake
of OMV outages?
March 21, 2025
Following the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles' outage on March 20,
Gov. Jeff Landry declared a State of Emergency Friday morning.
In the executive order, Landry extended the expiration date and
delinquent fees of Class E driver’s licenses for up to 30 days after the license's expiration date.
OMV announced on its website on March 20 that the Louisiana Office of Technology Services was investigating a frequent intermittent outage
affecting the COBOL mainframe.
According to the governor’s order, the COBOL mainframe has resulted in prolonged wait times for the public, service outages and security vulnerabilities, impacting operations across the state.
According to IBM, many government and private organizations use COBOL to
run financial, administrative, and business applications. As of April
2024, COBOL was the foundation forfor more than 40 percent of all online banking systems, 80 percent of of in-person credit card transactions,
and 95 percent of ATM transactions, and power systems that generated up
to $3 billion in commerce per day.
The Louisiana OMV's computer system is also COBOL based.
Reportedly, the SSA had a five year modernization effort in the late
2010's ... one should go read what happened. It probably failed for the same reasons why Fortune 100 attempts to replace COBOL have failed.
Cost. See above. And as more time goes by people with
the skills become fewer.
Is it easier or harder to hack legacy systems?
Depends. One can probably argue that a constantly maintained legacy
system has had more debugging. Likewise, being written in an "old"
language can have some security-by-obscurity elements to it too.
Hmmm. How many hackers and such know COBOL? ;)
Can you imagine our leaders being responsible enough to realize the
inefficiency of having such a patchwork? I can't. Not since Clinton.
Because this isn't above being inefficient: they've realized that they
can't easily mine the SSA database in its current form, so they're
trying to get paid to change it to make it easier for them to steal.
GASP! Their motives aren't... aren't... pure?
Then again, a fragmented network using thousands of languages and
millions of protocols might be easier to hide in.
Yup.
Or get into... "Hey Fred, what the hell is this piece
written in?" "Uh, PL/I?"
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)