• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • Right now there are three “biggest powers” on the world stage. US, China and Russia. China has belligerent rhetoric towards a lot of their neighbors, particularly Taiwan. They want the areas they control, but largely stop short of action. It’s why they claim the South China sea, and other nations need to pointedly ignore their claims to delegitimize them.
    Russia has been openly annexing, or trying to anyway, their neighbors, and using historical precedent as their excuse.
    As the largest power, the US very notably not annexing land nearby shifts the tone way into the realm of it being the norm not to do that.

    Annexing, or at least threatening to, nearby land makes it more that all major powers do so, or at least are looking for opportunities to do so.
    If cold war schemes give the US historical claim to Greenland, then Russias claims on Ukraine start being less unhinged and more generally expansionist.


  • It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
    They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

    My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.




  • It reads to me like he’s saying that if you expect 5+ years without maintenance if it’s more than $100, you should look at a different product.
    The top comments are someone saying that after five years they needed to repair it due to battery failure, and the founder saying the repair process is the same.

    Five years is longer than the average lifespan of a liIon battery. Expecting to be able to skip repairs that long is unreasonable for a $150 product.

    It reads like the founder actually giving realistic expectations. A $150 product will likely need repairs to last longer than five years, and you’ll be disappointed if you expect otherwise.

    Can you point to a similar product that costs about as much that fits your criteria?