The Legacy Lunch: Fill & Download for Free

Legacy Systems.Many companies deal with these curses. Hallmark has legacy systems built when the company was at its most profitable, the 1970s.The original programmers can't answer questions about them. They're all retired, and many are dead.The source code was lost decades ago. All that remains is compiled code that no longer runs native on any machine. Hallmark has to use emulators on modern hardware to simulate the warm, wet swamp these dinosaurs evolved in. In some cases emulators need emulators.(somewhere in here there’s a loop that’s crashing out…)Because nobody knows for sure what the code does, it can't be rewritten without affecting some of the deepest algorithms that must execute every day. There are single character fields that nobody knows what they do. All that is known is that if a user plugs in an 'N' instead of a 'Y' into one of these fields, some customer will no longer receive billings, or an entire warehouse may cease to ship product. So, fifty years later, employees faithfully enter the mysterious Y's to make sure nothing breaks.Serious limitations to business pop up with increasing frequency. The legacy just isn’t capable of learning new tricks. In my time, I remember we picked up new business: the United States Postal Service, which had 60,000 accounts. The legacy required that only one user could add a new account at a time, and that process would take up to fifteen minutes per account. That’s almost two years of solid data entry, working around the clock without a single snag. There was simply no way to speed it up. Multiple users would cause AbEnds - Abnormal Termination errors. My job was to find a faster way. My solution was to simply get another system to pretend to be a super-fast user that could enter an account in about a second. It was a hack that surrendered completely to the will of the legacy.A popular analogy is that replacing one of these legacy systems is like “changing the tire on your car while it’s in motion.” But, that analogy really doesn’t describe the complexity of the problem at all. Imagine having to replace your car’s frame while it’s in motion. The corporation can’t take a year off to do this, it needs to continue down the highway without sputtering while you replace the framework that not only holds the wheels in place, but restrains the powertrain, protects the driver, holds the wires in place, and keeps the road from rattling everything apart.I witnessed several attempts to replace these systems. Each team was given a large budget and told to make it happen. Spirits of young programmers were dashed against the rocks again and again by these projects. They eagerly dove in, and documented all of the functions that are performed by the legacy. Then they began to build replacement systems that must run in parallel to the legacy. Until the project is completed, these replacements must pipe information into and out of the legacy while establishing an entirely new framework.Usually a couple years into the project, when the budgets have run into the millions, the team starts to disband. The original group moves on to new projects. Team replacements need to re-learn what the lost members knew. They make some progress in the replacement system. New unrelated projects begin to pull data from the replacement instead of the legacy. Then, suddenly, the plug is pulled. The team is asked for an estimate of what it will take to complete the project. The answer has so many digits that management says, “No way. We simply can’t afford that.”That means that the original legacy is still in place. New systems have been written around and on top of it, burying its fossilized remains ever deeper, making the complexity ever more substantial. Because new systems were built to depend upon the replacement, we can’t abandon this partially completed system. Now we have to maintain the original legacy system and the new “legacy” that we’ve abandoned part way in. To go back to the original analogy, we now have a car with one and a half, or two frames. One of the wheels may now be mounted on the new frame, but the rest of the wheels and the doors, and the damn tail pipe remain stubbornly welded to the old frame. Future attempts will require that this entire unwieldy mess be replaced.These legacy systems can be so deeply entrenched that it’s easy to imagine they will never go away, but simply be buried like the remnants of medieval settlements. Users of the future may use modern interfaces to enter their data, but those interfaces may translate the information to older systems that in turn communicate with the legacy through multiple emulators.To get rid of the legacy, you need to send everyone in the entire company, at every single facility, office building, warehouse, and manufacturing plant, out to a long lunch one day. Then bomb all of it back to rubble and start from scratch.Some companies continue to be profitable long enough to afford to replace their ancient systems. But for corporations where sales begin to lag, the legacy of the company’s zenith will dog them until the very last SKU is shipped, the doors are locked, and the land is bulldozed flat.

Mrs Merkel is a highly intelligent woman, interested in the well-being of her country. Therefore she recognises that relationships with other countries are very important, especially big countries like China.It's much better to have friendly relations with everyone as long as they do not conflict with German (and EU) interests. She also does not need to employ rabid populism to fool her own people into following rancid right-wing agendas.Also, she knows there's no need to throw out Huawei and spend billions to reconfigure her country's communications networks just to please the idiot in the American White House.That's because she's capable of developing and maintaining an independent view of global events.Here is an example outcome of not having a proper independent outlook:https://www.quora.com/What-are-your-thoughts-on-the-U-K-stopping-using-Huawei-for-5G-networks-by-2027/answer/Rupert-BainesAs for her legacy, it will probably be very much kinder to her than the legacies of Trump and the brown-nosers who need him. These people don't know that they will be discarded like used toilet paper into the scrapheap of history. For certain, Mrs Merkel will never suffer this fate.To be honest, I'm not a great follower of politics so this is just my opinion after a liquid-ish lunch.

If the gloves were to come off, the F-35s would steal the Rhinos' lunch money and date their sisters.I like the Super Hornet and have many good friends flying them. They laud its superiority over the legacy Hornet, its fluid characteristics, and greater destructive prowess (and seldom grouse about having to be a tanker guy from time to time). I've also worked as a consultant on the F-35 and knowing just some of its strengths, along with the data that's widely available, it's hard not to put down a large stack of chips on black. Note: if the aircraft get to the merge, all bets are off. At that point many of the F-35's advantages have been neutralized and it's the drivers that are going to finish the story.However, given the sticker price of almost double the Super Hornet, I'm on the fence as to which is the better platform, dollar for dollar. The F-35 has some capability that will seldom—maybe never—be used, but if we need that extra push over the cliff, it's going to go to 11. The Hornets only go to ten.