There is also the cost of labor associated with upgrading. A lot of corporate IT departments don't want to spend the hours upgrading their whole infrastructure when they have other things to do - from my experience IT is expected to run with as little cost as possible - if everything needed for people to complete their work is possible with ie6, there is no incentive to upgrade.
For #1 - I've always been pretty disappointed with the shipping companies tracking systems. Maybe I just don't understand what problems they are having, but if you have to scan items each step of the way, regardless of scale, shouldn't it be fairly straightforward to get the newest data for each package to the website pretty quickly?
Agreed, isn't this what capitalism is supposed to get us? Competition for lower prices and better products? Saying "Sorry, your products are too good and you're offering them for too low of a price" kind of kills innovation, doesn't it?
Ah so it isn't like theres all these American companies that are going to be paying top dollar to maintain their legacy, mission critical COBOL systems. They're outsourcing it for minimum wage.
I've heard about a lot as well, especially in the banking industry, yet not actually met anyone. Does anyone have any data or any numbers on how much someone can get paid doing cobol legacy maintenance? Just for educational purposes of course.
Cool, I have one from a while ago that I got about that far as well. I was thinking about working through the Mud Game Programming book to get a working foundation going, but send me an email (in profile) once you start working on it again.
Have the ruby thing on github by any chance? Id love to check it out. I've been toying with the idea of writing a mud in ruby, and giving it a graphical web frontend to make it more accessible to new players.
You shouldn't look at this as a negative. For worthwhile spaces there's always room for more competitors. Finding other people doing similar things should validate your idea.
I still use javascript, but I am intrigued by CoffeeScript enough that I can see in myself starting to use it in the near future, once I get time to work through the PragProg CoffeeScript book.
I'll be adding the link to the site once I get home from work today, but I've set up a mailing list for anyone who might be interested in getting an email when new features are pushed out: http://eepurl.com/emtQU
Do you mean as like a dashboard for a bunch of different social news sites? What would be some killer features that you think would make it in to something people would pay for?
Wow, I slept through this whole thing. I'll be around now though. If anyone has any requests for different ways to interact with the data, let me know and I'll work on getting it added to the site.
I was really busy leading up to the contest, so I had to cut back on a lot of the features I wanted in order to hit the deadline. I will be working on adding a more visualisations and detail as quickly as I can.
I would also agree that I don't see Facebook being supplanted by Twitter or iCloud. What I would like to know, though, is which social network are these people moving to? I haven't really heard of anything new and upcoming that might be pulling in people of those numbers, and I'm sure we would see some article about it on here.
I don't think we can expect all the different service providers to agree on a standardized API, but that doesn't mean it wouldnt make sense for someone or group of someones to take up the cause of creating a standardized API for a category of services and maintaining the connections to all of the different providers.
You would be surprised. I met someone this weekend at a wedding who works at a law firm that specialises in software patent suits, and he really didn't understand or even care. Outside of this and similar communities, no one has any idea that software shouldn't be patentable, or even that there are issues with it in the first place.
Yeah, I've read that before, and other articles like it. Does the feeling of 'this code sucks, needs rewritten' ever go away after inheriting an old, smelly, but working codebase?
I used to frequently scan through gizmodo and lifehacker quickly every day or two and open any article that looked even a little interesting in a new tab. I remember being really disappointed when the redesign happened at first and the way I interacted with and used the site was no longer as painless.
Out of curiosity, what would you say are some legitimate reasons for doing major rewrites? I'm currently going back and forth on whether or not a rewrite is a good idea, and would like to hear what some people would consider good reasons.