Another Midrange Forum Falls Over and Can't Get Up

MC Press Online (www.mcpressonline.com), which happens to be where I do most
of my writing, has been having a few bumps in the road in its attempt to
move from what I believe was a Notes-based web site to a Joomla-driven CMS.

It continues to beg the question of whether these "out of the box" systems,
especially the Open Source software, are really ready for prime time.

And while MC has had some trouble, at lease their site is up. System i
Network's forums have been down pretty much all day today, returning a page
that looks like an HTTP error, but instead saying "Database error
encountered".

I'm sorry, but software at that level of fragility would never have made it
out the door in the 80s and even the early 90s. Oh sure, there are a couple
of folks who will complain about some feature that took SSA forever to get
right, but that was a 100-million line system that for the most part ran
successfully day in and day out (and in many cases still does).

There were LOGIC errors in many cases - allocations not calculated quite
correctly, or things getting posted to the wrong date - but the code didn't
regularly just fall over dead. I remember spending a man-month tracking
down every MEMORY LEAK in our OS/2 thick client software. Imagine code
today without memory leaks - oh what a wonderful world it would be!

In my opinion, general code quality today absolutely stinks compared to 20
years ago.

Okay, that's my rant for the month. And I already had one in January, so
this will have to count for February. Dagnabit.

Joe