Posts by Mark Studden

Data modelling layers: do you wanna get logical or physical

Data Modelling is not an "old discipline", it's an essential professional skill.

Sigh.

After many years of Data Modelling consultancy, experience has taught me that the problem for a lot of businesses is that they really cannot afford NOT to take a professional approach to database design.

In the long run, a well designed database system will repay its design costs many times over. Poorly designed databases (especially "hacked physical models" lashed up by developers at the last moment) cost more than they should do to code against, to maintain, to extend, to report against and eventually to replace.

Far too many businesses still ignore these facts, paying the price in countless little increments of unnecessary expenditure.

The licence (it's a noun) costs for DB/Artisan or ER/Studio or any other top quality ER tool are piffling in comparison. Even my daily rate pales into insignificance.

Endemol in 'win a kidney' TV show rumpus

AJ's off on one again.

Strewth AJ, don't be a sanctimonious twerp!

Every day, people are starving to death or dying of curable diseases because rich westerners who could have saved their lives are not giving up enough of their wealth to help out.

Every single person who dies and does not donate enough of their wealth is, in some tiny measure, complicit in the death of a person starving to death or dying of curable diseases.

It's a classic talking bollocks situation.

And, yes, dead people do have rights. They are enshrined in a thing called a Will.

Phew AJ, glad you're not running my country.

What's really encouraging is that, in the the 21st Century, we haven't regressed to the point where the state exercises complete control over the fate of our bodies after death.

As for asking "why should we allow" people to justify things you find unacceptable on religious grounds, what do you propose we actually DO about it when other sovereign states chop off criminal's extremities, oblige their women to behave like serfs to their menfolk, and carry out public beheadings? Nuke 'em? Invade?

As for the TV programme, with any luck it'll be the death knell for the careers of its producers and broadcasters. Sheer, unadulterated, lower than lowest common denominator tat.

Glastonbury hippies force-fed spam

DPA? Far out.

Rob,

the REAL real question is:

Does the Information Commissioner's Office have any proper sticks with which to beat those who have breached the DPA?

And the answer is not in the affirmative.

Which means the REAL REAL real question is: Why not?

It's all gone, like, commercial, man.

I remember years ago ringing up Worthy Farm to ask when the tickets would be on sale. Mrs. Eavis was pleasantness itself on the blower, and we chatted for a minute or so as if we were neighbours.

I know darn well she didn't bash 1471 into the phone the minute I rang off, in order to make a note of my number for "Marketing" purposes.

Sigh. It's all gone to pot now. The bread-heads have won.

Bring back Dumpy's Rusty Nuts, Hawkwind, home made food stalls selling lentil soup of questionable providence and hygiene, and loos made of tin and plywood.

Software is never done… Or is it?

agile as in ducking and diving

Kurt, I couldn't agree more. It seems that 'agility' can end up as a convenient smoke screen for not taking responsibility for delivering something to specification and on time. It's a shame that while the business making the IT investment (i.e. paying for all the code) has to exist in a real, competitive environment, and will go to the wall if it can't cut the mustard, the droves of artfully pierced and scruffily attired kiddie winkies cutting code can just shuffle off to their next contract without facing the consequences of any failure to deliver, once the project is er, 'done'. Or not. Like, whatever.