Ooh, someone is about to make BANK!
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
844 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
69393 readers
2763 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
We're maintaining and developing OpenVMS OS, and both we and our customers need Cobol, Fortran, and other half-dead languages coders.
Many large companies maintain their old systems and use them for production or data processing purposes. Sometimes it's too expensive to migrate off, but im many cases "it just works"
Isn't pretty much all airport scheduling based off software from the 80s or something?
Edit: Found a video about it.
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(15 replies)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Oh, everyone who ever travels by train in Europe will tell you that the German infrastructure is very much broken. You're lucky if your delay is less than a day travelling through Germany.
That's another part of the infrastructure, though: We just don't have enough rail as well as backup rolling stock.
And as the federation finally decided to spend some money it's going to get worse in the next decade or so due to outages due to new constructions being linked up to the old stuff.
As to the age of the infrastructure -- I mean it's the railway. If a rarely-used branch line still uses mechanical interlocks and there's no need to upgrade the capacity then the line is going to continue using infrastructure build in the times of the Kaiser. It's not like those systems are unsafe, it just might be the case that unlike in the days of ole those posts with a gazillion levers aren't manned all the time so you'll see an operator drive to it with a car while the train is on its way. Which really isn't that much of a deal when the branch line goes to a, what, quarry maybe sending out a train every two months or so. Certainly better than to demolish the line and use trucks instead.
German re-unification cost trillions. It's entirely unsurprising.
Afaik Deutsche Bahn loses 5 mil a day: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/14/its-the-same-daily-misery-germanys-terrible-trains-are-no-joke-for-a-nation-built-on-efficiency
Germany doesn't really seem like a very efficient country, they still use fax for things and every person has to manage like 10,000 different insurances for everything. Seems like an old (and inaccurate) ww2 trope.
It's mostly a misunderstanding of what is valued in German society. The common trope is that German society covets precision. This is not the case. German society covets unwavering precision in the adherence to norms. To the point where innovation is akin to revolution in the negative sense, and pigheadedness in procedure is considered a workplace virtue. In the mean time nothing gets done. Source: expat in Germany.
Source: expat in Germany.
Is this the same as a migrant?
I believe the difference is that an expat moved there non-permanently, while an immigrant moved there permanently
Though if I ever somehow became an expat, I wouldn't use the word because of how people associate it.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Yes, as long as they're also white and middle/upper class!
No, the way it's often used is closer to "posh guest worker".
I have no doubt their bureaucrats perform world-class efficiency in their handing out, filling in, faxing and archiving a sophisticated system of paper forms.
I guess it's the trap of getting complacent and stopping modernizing as soon as you've convinced yourself you have the best system in the world.
It's more that the bureaucracy is so complex and fragmented that it's incredibly hard to digitalize. Lots of small fiefdoms that are entitled to make IT purchasing decisions themselves means paper is the only universal interchange format. In addition there is an unwillingness to change how things have always been done, or to simplify procedures. So there you have it: The German bureaucracy is too fat to move.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Until it becomes obsolete, unsupportable, the crux of your operation, and/or the basis for all of your decisions 😬
(Yes, I read the article, it’s just the signs, but yes, the above still applies!)
Not to mention when you want to change the entire system it becomes a huge operation and problem.
load more comments
(1 replies)
COBOL has entered the chat
e: good for legacy employment though. A relative of mine is a Z80 programmer by trade, and he can effectively walk into a job because the talent pool is so small now. Granted - the wages are never great but never poor, and the role is maintenance and troubleshooting rather than being on the leading edge of development - but it's a job for life.
🥲
load more comments
(11 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(8 replies)
Better hope those systems are not network enabled
They’re probably still running on their own Netware network. Is there still Win16 compatible malware going around?
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Time for a rewrite
As long as it's not à la Musk where the new versions will be inferior to the previous one because "no modern trains should rely on antiquated technology so we're scrapping everything from before to start from scratch".
load more comments
(5 replies)
Misleading title: SIEMENS Mobility is looking for said Windows 3.11 admin. NOT the German Railway
load more comments
(1 replies)