Re: This is why...
That’s a (wire-)wrap.
2001 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
Hi Addie, see my self-aggrandising comment above. I liked and upvoted your post, but I suspect that I am more cynical than most, and I believe that my cynicism has been earned - Including being the senior chemist who did the analysis when ST was prosecuted by the relevant authority when THEY had polluted a major system (Admittedly that was before privatisation in 1989, I suspect that things have not necessarily improved).
And so has everybody who has worked in IT for a few decades, particularly when one of the customer's senior manglement lusers insists on "doing it now".
But my personal favourite was when I was asked to delete customer order data from the previous year in a live SQL database - I knew that a cascade delete would also run on the orderdetails table because I had designed the database. Obviously I checked that they had a backup (from the night before) and what was going to be deleted with a: SELECT COUNT(*) AS NumOrders FROM Orders WHERE OrderDate < "01/01/1999" - Then the phone rang as I was copying part of the line, just before I was about to paste it into a new command that I had started with DELETE FROM Orders - About fifteen minutes later I pasted what I thought I had stored in the paste buffer, just as the manglement luser came in and pestered. The paste added only the semicolon, but I still pressed [Enter] - The statement was therefore "DELETE FROM Orders;". Fortunately I was able to roll it back from the transaction log in spite of their system admin's new policy of saving storage space by truncating logs before they "got too big"...
Sorry, this is probably because I’m a grouchy old fart - My Apple Mail is configured to always reply in plain text. That way, I know roughly what it will look like at "their" end. I did this (to keep what little mental capacity I have left) after seeing what my emails looked like when they came back via a long chain of additional comments and replies where each author had used "whatever" platform. Many people now use their phones for almost all of this - I put in a feedback request to Apple to give me a similar option on iOS, but no luck there - My workaround is to copy/paste everything in/out of txt4ios or QuickText before sending it.
Or Arthur C Clarke’s "Superiority"? Although it should be stated that the main purpose of complex and expensive weapons systems is actually to channel large amounts of taxpayer’s money to a very few of the "right sort" of rich people...
The British came fairly close by using just aircraft and a very limited ground force when "policing" Somaliland, and later Mesopotamia Wikipedia link. It is possible that the relatively cheap use of effective air power, rather than troops on the ground, was also behind Churchill’s Statement in a War Office meeting (Wikipedia) where he considering the use of dropping tear-gas from aircraft.
Whilst you may not be able to easily split a database across multiple files, you can ATTACH multiple files and manipulate them. Example at: SQLitetutorial.net
A very long time ago, I went for an interview with the Civil Service. I had a straggly beard, hair down to my shoulders, tended to wear Slopp shirts or pullovers, but had a decent blazer. Shaved of the beard, cut the hair so it went just below my ears, and put on the blazer with a tie. The panel was led by a middle aged man with a short frock coat and broad striped trousers, who ushered me in to meet the rest of the interviewers - They were scientists who had straggly beards, hair down to their shoulders, and were wearing pullovers... I got the job, so perhaps my attire and appearance met the average of the panel?
When I did FileMaker stuff, Apple seemed OK, but Windows was borked.
Haven't used it since Version 12 though (multiuser was starting to look too expensive for my customers). I don't use it at all now - The last job with it (in 2015) was to export some historical data to SQL Server from FileMaker 6!
Works for me, and does seem faster. Time to a "working" Windows 10 2004 desktop ~10 seconds from a cold start (2019 iMac Retina 4K, 16GB RAM, SSD).
Not that I use it much, but it's handy when I want to run old shrink-wrap that I have written on DOS, Windows 2000, XP etc. Devuan is OK (install it as Debian) although these days when I'm doing UNIXy stuff I tend to use the Mac Terminal. I learnt *NIX in the 70s, and as the mind is going a bit, I can remember it - Linux and Windows 10 "not so much".
Treats the year 1900 as a leap year because Microsoft’s main aim when they introduced it, was to kill Lotus 123. Lotus (on the PC) replaced VisiCalc on the Apple II who’s epoch was 1 Jan 1904, so VisiCalc didn’t go back that far. Microsoft’s original spreadsheet Multiplan didn’t cut it, so Excel (originally introduced for the Macintosh) was rapidly promoted to run on Windows... and spreadsheet-jockeys attempt to run major business with it...
A customer used the default short-INT auto-incrementing key on a Microsoft Access table they had created to import a CSV back-up file that our software generated at month end. Obviously it was our fault when it stopped importing after 4 months when we had generated 32k rows. So a quick un-billed site visit fixed that. Were they grateful? Of course not - It was obviously our fault for not making sure that their database, that we did not know about, was "incompatible".
I use SQLite to "tidy" recalcitrant data: Command Line Shell For SQLite
Apparently the maximum database size is 140,000 gigabytes - I wouldn't know, I've only tried it with a few million rows with a hundred or so fields :-)
Sod’s law: A previous post...
This is true. However at the end of 2019 they had ~290,000 Apple devices of which ~200,000 use macOS. At the same time they had 383,800 employees, obviously some employees will use more than one device. I have a relative who is a very senior IBM techie who told me that in his (large) part of IBM far more techies use Linux than Windows - He was also of the opinion that a number of IBMers elected to go to Apple rather than move from Windows 7 to 10.
According to IBM, Mac users cost less to support with about 1/3 of the support personnel and are generally happier and more productive.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cio-mac-users-perform-better-more-engaged-than-windows-users/
https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-research-showing-mac-enables-greater-productivity-and-employee-satisfaction-at-ibm/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/number-of-employees