* Posts by Tim99

2003 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Bill Gates again world's richest, tops in US for 20th straight year

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: If it makes you feel any better

@Martin Budden

{What if you just hide it under the bed?}

Somebody would get paid a quite a lot of money to construct the extensions on the bed legs, the ladder to climb up into bed, and the safety rail around the mattress to stop you falling out.

A billion dollars is 10,000,000 $100 notes, so assuming that you have a kingsize bed (You are, after all, a billionaire), a very rough calculation suggests that the pile would be about 10 feet high...

Google cooks web dev teaching tool for Raspberry Pi

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Evil?

"Coder is a second signal that the Pi may be a little more confronting than its makers intended. ®"

Or more worryingly, for Google, something that does not immediately leak privacy.

Can't have a generation growing up without using Google for everything, can we?

Using this icon, but would like to use AC instead although not anonymous >>===>

Turnbull floats e-vote, compulsory ID

Tim99 Silver badge

So it begins

Oh dear! So it begins

Reports: NSA has compromised most internet encryption

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Big Brother

Re: Really?

@psychonaut

Link for Eric Blair - George Orwell

"Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism and commitment to democratic socialism".

Tim99 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Really?

@Frumious Bandersnatch

[OK, it was Communists then, Terrorists now, but plus ça change ...]

Yes, but since then, the Communists were declared to have been beaten, so we need a new bogeyman. The good news for the "intelligence" and military businesses is that the "War on Terror" has no well defined enemy and no way of measuring victory - Now the war can last indefinitely.

-

"The purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities, hence the economy of a super-state cannot support economic equality (a high standard of life) for every citizen".

Ref: the fictional book "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein" in Eric Blair's "Nineteen Eighty-Four".

Samsung stakes claim to smartwatch market with Galaxy Gear

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Wrist watches - I've heard of them

@AC 09:26

<blockquote>

So?? That has no more relevance than it mentions the word watch.

</blockquote>

The relevance is that Samsung are hoping to charge a lot of money for a device that has a likely useful life of <2 years, is only marginally useful, and like an old watch will only run for a day without being repowered.

I would be very surprised if many of them are in working order in 5 years. Smartphones work because they are a useful stand-alone compromise hybrid of a phone, calendar, address book, map, camera, diary, note book and computer. The Samsung only appears to do one thing well (tell the time) with most of its other functions a fairly poor compromise.

I have seen previous "world changing" hybrid electronic watch/technology hybrids fail because they really are far more trouble than they are worth to the average user - You also risk looking like the sort of person who thought that a Casio Calculator Watch was really cool :-)

On the other hand (wrist?) a single function analogue watch tells you immediately that it is nearly time to go to the pub...

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Wrist watches - I've heard of them

The watch that I am currently wearing is a Longines "Professional" purchased in 1942 by my father for £5 in Cairo (admittedly quite a lot of money back then). He bought it as being better than the standard RAF aircrew Observer's (Navigator/Bomb-Aimer) watch.

So far in 71 years it has been cleaned 5 times, has had a new crystal and a number of new straps. The radium luminescence is now very weak so it only glows very faintly.. Usually I remember to wind it up, and so, generally, it is wrong by less than a minute/month. Apparently it is now worth ~£1,000.00.

Google goes back to the future with SQL F1 database

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

@JMiles

[I like the NoSQL approach for many use-cases but I have grown tired of inexperienced developers trying to use it for everything and proclaiming how great their achievements are when their problem never warranted a 'BigData' solution or a 'NoSQL' solution]

I have seen an internal contact/ job & customer management system proposal for a not for profit that the external developers were proposing a 'BigData' solution - SQLite would have been entirely adequate...

Bradley Manning* sentenced to 35 years in prison

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Stop

Re: Good

You're a busy little shill, posting the same comment on /. too a few minutes ago...

Leaked photos of iPhone 5C parts portend ugly Google legal battle

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

Rik - You have surpassed yourself...

Just when I think that you couldn't be a bigger click-whore, you surprise me with more bait.

Can't agree on a coding style? Maybe the NEW YORK TIMES can help

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Personally

There's a rat in separate...

I used this icon - No spelling Nazi icon >>>>=============>>

Boffins: We have FOOLED APPLE with malware app

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: @Success Case (was: Apple's variation of BSD ...)

@jake

[Give me access to your Apple hardware, and I can get root. That is, by no stretch of the imagination, "security" in a mobile device that may get lost, stolen, or strayed.]

I think you meant "Give me, sufficient time with access to your phone/laptop/netbook/Android/Microsoft/Apple hardware and I can get root". Wel even I probably can some of the time, but it is generally not worth the candle...

MS brandishes 'Katana' HTTP/2.0 server

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

They want fast?

How about FastCGI? You can even run it with IIS - Link to www.iis.net

Oh, sorry no, that won't happen - You would need people who know how to code...

And you try and tell the young people of today that... they won't believe you. (Four Yorkshiremen).

Google who? Samsung announces its first developer conference

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Why San Fran?

To annoy Apple?

Microsoft biz heads slash makes Ballmer look like dead STEVE JOBS

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Risky Stretegy

[Re: Risky Stretegy

So is doing the opposite. How is the English Electric Valve company EEV doing these days?]

Apparently, fairly well - Wikipedia

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: I'm flying, Steve...

[I'm flying, Steve...

Is this the beginning of a rearranging-the-deckchairs-on-the-Titanic strategy?]

Perhaps more of a discussion on the best way of revarnishing the deckchairs...

Microsoft waves goodbye to Small Business Server

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

I think the big integrators killed it too

You can blame Microsoft who need to get everyone to follow their new business model of renting stuff (Although I think that their business model always relied on renting software, we just called it "Upgrading").

I think we also should also blame the larger VARs who always saw SBS as a threat to their bottom line - They really didn't want something that supports almost all of the IT requirement of 5-75 users for <$10,000.00 and only costs a few thousand a year in upkeep. There is little scope to gouge the SMB punter with multiple servers and CALS of the normal Windows Server lines.

I used to supply and configure SBS to 50 user or less organizations - We wrote and supplied custom software that could use MS SQL Server, and found that it was cheaper and less hassle than supplying Windows and SQL Server separately. Exchange was a "free bonus".

I am retired now, but have been on the Board of a not-for-profit who had a grant to use public money to replace their ageing 12 computer Windows XP professional peer-to-peer network. The hardware was very unreliable, and the users would occasionally get the Windows licence exceeded message when more than 10 users tried to access the same resource. The business relied on a Microsoft Access database, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and several users running Outlook who would export their e-mail messages to relevant staff to read. It was dreadful, but worked surprisingly well.

With the lure of public money, a very large local VAR gave a quote. They came back with a design that used a bespoke SQL Server/Sharepoint/Exchange; a SNA; networked high quality printers and 7 Windows servers to hold it all together for an organization of 14 staff and a CEO. The quote was $440,000.00. I told the Board that there must have been a mistake and suggested that they got a revised quotation.

I went on a 12 week trip abroad, and when I came back they had installed a cut-down system using only 4 new servers. They also used repurposed one of the old XP machines that had held the Access database as a Backup Domain Controller. The revised cost was only $218,000.00. This might have been acceptable IF IT HAD WORKED. The Exchange Server was under specced so that it was impossible to reclaim unused space as there was not enough disk space to consolidate the databases, so Exchange would fall over taking the SNA and back up server with it. The down-time was in the order of 3 days a week, and the organization was without e-mail for 16 consecutive days. When the CEO asked why they were having problems, the VAR said that the system was too small and that they should have spent more... After an emergency Board meeting (where I showed that if they had used SBS it would have been very difficult to have spent more that $65,000.00 including software), we managed to get the VAR to upgrade some of the hardware such that the down time was only about 1 day a week. The VAR still wanted about $18,000.00 a year to maintain everything.

I had some health issues and retired from the Board. I found out that they then shared the hardware with a larger government/not-for profit organization, and that the down-time was now OK; but the system still did not do what they wanted.

The last I heard, was that that they were looking at getting rid of it all and replacing it with an OS X Mac Mini Server, 3 MacBook Airs/ MacBook Pros for the CEO and clerical staff and the other users would be given iPads and/or iPhones, so that would be a total spend of less than $25,000.00.

Elon Musk's Grasshopper tops 300m, lands safely

Tim99 Silver badge
Alien

Re: Merlin engine?

@Allan George Dyer

" ...the RR Merlin's space-flight capabilities are well known..."

Yes, how about four of them: Picture Link

How City IT is under attack from politicians, diesel bugs, HR

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Diesel Bug

The problem of fungi and oleophilic bacteria in fuels has been known for decades. Even clean dry fuel will become contaminated from bugs in the air. Changes in temperature, humidity and pressure cause contaminated water vapour to condense in the tank where it slowly settles to the bottom. The bugs gennerally grow on the fuel/water interface near the bottom of the tank.

The problem can be ameliorated by using a suitable fuel biocide and a desiccant cartridge on the fuel filler vent. Well designed systems generally have the fuel outlet above the bottom of the tank so that any crud stays below the outlet. Some systems also have a drain-cock at the bottom of the tank so that any water/crud can be drained off periodically.

El Reg rocket squad poised to select Ultimate Cuppa teabag

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Sorry Lester - No Teabags

Lester,

Your basic design is flawed. The Royal Society of Chemistry posted the correct way to make a perfect cup of tea 10 years ago Link to PDF - This was done at the time of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eric Blair (George Orwell), who wrote a set of rules for making a nice cup of tea in 1946.

If neither of the above suits, try ISO 1303, which specifies a standardized method for making tea.

Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

If God had meant us to use C++

He wouldn't have given us C.

As I started with FORTRAN, you may ignore my comment - It permanently distorted my reasoning.

Tim99 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: The usual non-USA cost bias.

@quod50

You might be surprised to find that the US government spends more per capita on health at $4437 compared to $2919 for the UK. The USA in total spends 17.9% of GDP compared to 9.6% for the UK. This is, perhaps, the price that you pay for having one of the least efficient health systems in the world. You do however spend even more on military spending.

DHS warns of vulns in hospital medical equipment

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Updates and FDA regs

I have personal experience of medical/scientific equipment controlled by networked PCs being broken by their controlling PCs after auto updates have been installed. The equipment was originally isolated from the Internet as it was "mission critical" - Then the IT support contractor persuaded the powers that be that it should be connected, so that it could be automatically updated because "it could get a virus unless it was updated".

Report: Foreign owners blocked T-Mobile, Verizon from NSA snoops

Tim99 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Americans are NOT being terrorized !

@0_Flybart_0

If you are an American, you are perhaps four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist or eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer.

I posted this a few days ago: Ssshhh! Don't let the cat out of the bag.

******The purpose of the "Wars on... whatever" is that there is no clearly defined enemy, and therefore no realistic prospect of ending them by "winning".

The main problem that the US had was when they "won" the Cold War - How could they continue to take over a quarter of their total tax revenue and pass it through the defence system (Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex") to concentrate vast profits into the hands of the very few, without upsetting their tax payers? Their defence spend is about 60% of the total raised by individual income taxes.

US defence spending (>$680 billion ) is about 40% of the world's total. The US spends >4x as much as China, 8x that of Russia and >11x that of Britain.******

So maybe you should spend less on the War on Terror; and more on earthed tinfoil hats and continual monitoring of your law enforcement officers?

Apple said to be 'exploring' 5.7-inch iPhone

Tim99 Silver badge
Pirate

Re: There's nothing wrong with copying

Yes, I agree. The shape, size and colour thing should not be a patent - USAians refer to "Design Patents". Don't call them patents - Much of the rest of the world refers to registered designs, or infringing trade dress, which means that it is less likely that these two concepts are conflated.

I really don't want some cheap company using trade dress to put a cheap knock off in the market - Like say an Asian company using similar designs of packaging and product shape to dress their product as high quality European chocolate; or a supermarket's own label that looks similar to a a market leading brand name.

What would also be nice is to get back to not allowing any patent in an agreed international industry standard - Like the LWZ submarine Unisys GIF debacle which caught a product that I developed.

Apple at WWDC: Sleek new iOS, death of the big cats, pint-sized Mac Pro

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Just one more thing...

@An0n C0w4rd

If you really can't afford $7/week to keep the Thunderbolt display in your depreciation schedule, you aren't the demographic that it is aimed at. Alternatively join the race to the bottom of the market, or enjoy your new career in the fast food industry.

Apache devs: 'We'll ship no OpenOffice before its time'

Tim99 Silver badge

And the winner is?

Please, can the forks just get together and complete the most import fix - Remove the Java RTE.

Apple unveils hints of Monday's new-product announcements

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Re: Perhaps I did Not Sleep Well Last Night?

But, you still went to the trouble of posting...

Leaked Obama brief reveals US cyber defense, offense policy

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Act of war

Yes, probably, if it was port 80...

Prosecutor on Private Manning's Wiki-leaks: 'Arrogance meets access'

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Ssshhh! Don't let the cat out of the bag.

The purpose of the "Wars on... whatever" is that there is no clearly defined enemy, and therefore no realistic prospect of ending them by "winning".

The main problem that the US had was when they "won" the Cold War - How could they continue to take over a quarter of their total tax revenue and pass it through the defence system (Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex") to concentrate vast profits into the hands of the very few, without upsetting their tax payers? Their defence spend is about 60% of the total raised by individual income taxes.

US defence spending (>$680 billion ) is about 40% of the world's total. The US spends >4x as much as China, 8x that of Russia and >11x that of Britain.

The BOFH is BACK: And it's cloudy with a 90% chance of beatings

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

An Outlook User

I had a contact who found that it was easier/quicker to phone me and get me to read out the emails that she had sent me, and that I had replied to, rather than her finding it on their Exchange/Outlook system.

She was the admin support person of an IT based organization...

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: yes

@Nick Gibbons

Civil Defence, as such, continued after 1968; it was still going in the 1970s.

After an extensive training course, my father was given access to a pistol and the key to the local bunker. His qualifications were that he had been an RAF aircrew Observer/Bombing Leader in WWII; and was at the time, the highest ranked (Commissioned volunteer reserve) Senior Local Government Officer in the area.

Massive EXPLOSION visible to naked eye SEEN ON MOON

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Lancaster

@Darryl

We don't need to get a Lancaster on the moon - As any fule kno - Picture Link

Although getting the bomb there might be a problem...

Tim99 Silver badge

Non-American history Lewis?

[According to NASA, the mighty blast briefly "glowed like a 4th magnitude star ... the explosion packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT". For comparison that's twice as much explosive as one would find in a US Air Force nuclear-bunker-busting MOP superbomb]

Or, alternatively, a bit less explosive power than a 1945 British "Grand Slam" bomb (6.5 tons TNT equivalent).

Cf: The 1944 "Tallboy" bomb - 3.5 tons TNT equivalent; and the 1943 "Upkeep" bouncing bomb - 4.4 tons TNT equivalent. All of which were carried by modified Avro Lancaster bombers. A Grand Slam weighed 10 tons - Normal Lancasters could carry 6-7 tons of bombs. This compares to the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress which could only carry about 2 tons of bombs over a similar range. The later Boeing B-29 Superfortress with a crew of 10 could carry ~9 tons.

An interesting paper exercise after WWII compared the performance of these heavy bombers with the 2 crew, smaller, wood/composite construction de Havilland Mosquito which could carry nearly 2 tons of bombs at a speed about 1.5 times faster than a Lancaster (The Lancaster had a normal crew of 7).

Climate scientists agree: Humans cause global warming

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

Re: statistics, statistics ...

So, would you stand on a busy road if statistics said that you had a 1 sigma chance (1.0SD - 68.3%) of getting run over? Perhaps you would continue to stand there until more research (3 sigma) suggested that you had a 99.3% chance of being run over? At what point would you agree that it is dangerous - 0.67SD 50%; 1.64SD 90% or 2SD 95.4?

As an aside - I have been involved in using science where the legislation was constructed such that to avoid prosecuting someone who could have been innocent, the data had to be defined to 6.47SD (>99.99999999%).

MI5 spymasters axe intel database upgrade, pour '£90m' down drain

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: K : £90m.. its not going cost us anything..

@Matt Bryant

You have summed up one of the definitions of the "sunk cost fallacy" (sometimes called the sunk capital fallacy). Wilipedia link

I came across it when I was running a scientific enterprise for a banker. He had bought a laboratory that lost (a lot of) money. I had just got it to the point where it was breaking even and stood a reasonable chance of making a small profit. He killed it - When I asked why he told me about sunk capital. The point was that even though we had spent the money, it was unlikely that any future effort we put in was unlikely to make a reasonable return. It was better to write it off and spend time and money on something else, rather than to continue just because he had spent a lot of money (and we had spent a lot of time and effort) on it.

<-- I raise a beer glass to one of the best bits of business advice that I was given...

EC: Motorola abused its patents in Apple iPhone spat

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: They'll just not be a part of the standards body

"They'll just not be a part of the standards body and sue everyone later."

Er, No. You have to publish the patent. This is better than the Unisys LZW submarine patent when everyone was asked to pay for GIF technology years after the "GIF standard" was agreed. Link everything2.com

Hence the development of PNG.

Climate-cooling effect 'stronger than volcanoes' is looking solid

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Don't open the bubbly yet Lewis

A slight problem, mentioned obliquely in the paper is that CH3HCOO reacts strongly with oxides of nitrogen to produce PAN (peroxyacitylnitrate).

This is not good. It is one of the more unpleasant compounds in smog, a strong lachrymator (severe eye irritation), that also damages vegetation, and is suspected of being a major cause of respiratory complaints.  Wikipedia Link.

Lots of work was done Investigating these materials in the 70s and 80s as they were  a major factor in the notorious LA smogs.

Behold Ubuntu Server 13.04: Focus on hypervisors and OpenStack

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Ubuntu Server?

For goodness sake people - Just read the Debian documentation and do it properly...

Half of US smartphone owners have no idea which mobe to buy next

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Whatever.

@AC - 19:56

" Apple users will buy the product with the biggest advertising budget. "<br>

So that would be Samsung then: The cost of selling Galaxies.

Gov report: Actually, evil City traders DIDN'T cause the banking crash

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

@Alan Brown

"If you're finger pointing at the welfare state it'd be far more "correct" to point the finger at pensions and pension perks (free busses + cheap trains, power, etc all cost, but they don't show as coming from the welfare budget)"

No. Power costs, bus and train travel doesn't - There is a Public Service Obligation to run trains and busses during the day. If you were running a transport system to make money, you would only run it on popular routes during peak times. There is a huge capital cost to owning fleets and infrastructure that is only used during a small amount of the day which is why the subsidy is paid.

There is almost no additional cost in allowing pensioners to travel for free, as the staff and vehicle costs are almost the same whether the bus is nearly empty or half full of pensioners. This is why "Eligible older people are entitled to free off-peak travel on local buses anywhere in England." Link gov.uk, and "The Railcard discount isn’t available on tickets for travel during the morning rush hour (peak time), Monday to Friday (excluding Public Holidays) for journeys made wholly within the London and South East area." Link senior rail card.

It be argued that these "perks" can save money as they can help towards the physical and mental health of older people - Unless of course you really want to reallocate more wealth back to the wealthy, destroy the welfare state, and encourage the "unproductive" to die...

Apple handed victory in Samsung text-selection patent case

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Bullet proof, but not B.S. proof.

"...logic looses."

I believe that the word that you want is "loses", unless you meant that logic is set free.

"ORIGIN Old English losian ‘perish, destroy’, also ‘become unable to find’, from los ‘loss’.

Usage: The verb lose is sometimes mistakenly written as loose, as in this would cause them to loose 20 to 50 per cent (correct form is … to lose 20 to 50 per cent). There is a word loose, but it is very different—normally an adjective, meaning ‘untethered; not held in place; detached’, as in loose cobbles; the handle was loose ; set loose." (OED).

MongoDB developers 10Gen tool-up NoSQL database

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Mongo is web scale

Obligatory link: Transcript and Flash

Frankly, some of the stuff that is being set up for this could be done with SQLite sqlite.org link...

1 in 7 WinXP-using biz bods DON'T KNOW Microsoft is pulling the plug

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Really?

I am an OAP, and a volunteer helping teach other OAPs computing - So far all of them hate Windows 8 - Except, maybe, those few who only seem to want internet access (so we might as well get them using iOS)...

Era of the Pharaohs: Climate was hotter than now, without CO2

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

OK, This is just click-whoring

OK Lewis, we know that it is all a conspiracy, and that the nasty science people are in league with the UN, the Illuminati and the lizard people; to get us all to pay more taxes to implement a dastardly plan of world domination by conspiring to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

May I respectfully submit to El Reg that we have a new icon called the TW*T where the * can be either an "A" or and "I", or even better we call it the TWAT-TWIT (or maybe the TWIT-TWAT) that we can use it to identify similar articles - The troll or extraterrestrial explanation icons really will not do for such drivel.

For this post I'm using the beer icon, because I really need one after reading it.

Mozilla to Apple: we don't care about iOS

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: I got this one.

@Destroy All Monsters

"I hope we can fall back to "Foxconn rebadger"."

Yes, but ( according to Wikipedia), that could be:-

Acer Inc. (Taiwan); Amazon.com (United States); **Apple Inc. (United States)**; Cisco (United States); Dell (United States); Google (United States); Hewlett-Packard (United States); Microsoft (United States); Motorola Mobility (United States); Nintendo (Japan); Nokia (Finland); Sony (Japan); Toshiba (Japan); or Vizio (United States)

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: That's ok, we don't want your browser.

@Andy Prough

Perhaps most fanbois don't really need Microsoft. I run Debian and several Windows instances in Parallels on a couple of Macs. On these machines, I use Windows about once a fortnight for a few minutes to help maintain shrink wrapped (Windows) versions of software that I wrote. I find that OS X and Debian cover all of my needs, and that I don't use Windows for any other purpose.

Admittedly I have retired and am now spared the festering frustration that is SharePoint, Exchanges, Windows Server and Office - Although I do volunteer to maintain some Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 and 8 machines at a Council run over-50s centre (1200+ members), and am profoundly grateful that I no longer have to do this sort of thing for a crust...

Agile development may be taught in Australian High Schools

Tim99 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Access SQL

@km123

Access can/does use a SQL: Link - Access SQL

It works surprisingly well and can be ported (sometimes needs dialect modifications) to SQL Server, Postgres etc.

I would however recommend SQLite for students - It runs on almost everything...

Nokia wants to build the Google of human behaviour - and share it

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Hari Seldon

Is this sort of stuff the start of psychohistory?

Big Data versus small data: Unpicking the paradox

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Database de-normalization Tradeoff

You wrote:

"In the end a competent database developer knows what tradeoffs to make to ensure scalability whilst maintaining code manageability."

It seems to me that we have let the children play with our important data. Here is a reply I wrote on another thread several years ago:

"I spend the first 10 years of doing DB stuff normalizing everything. When I become pretty good at it, I spend more time denormalizing some of the stuff I had carefully normalized. This may not be good advice to the 'separate data, logic and presentation' people - It works well for us old farts who were taught how to use constraints and triggers and 'use the database to do the heavy lifting'. It may still be a useful idea to manage the PHP, Javascript and RoR types who put logic in their presentation layer stuff and break things."

I'll need my coat while I wait for the bus to go to the retirement day-centre...