Posts by alansingfield

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

Re: OK...

(Shudder)

Brings back nightmares of being in the basement of a customer site, standing at the server rack debugging on a locked-down WinNT DEC Alpha through a crappy 640x480 KVM with a crusty trackball.

Some of VB6's greatest hits:

Method '~' of object '~' failed

Binary Compatibility DLLs

REGSVR32

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, CLSID and InprocServer32

You've never lived :-)

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

Re: No no no no no

"pre-define little bits of logic" - congratulations, you've just invented the CREATE VIEW statement...

Once you realise a VIEW is just a macro, a lot of things suddenly make sense about SQL. Devs can boil all the complex logic and joins into views, then business users get flat "tables" of exactly what they need.

When you start digging deeper into SQL, it is a testament to how right Messrs Boyce and Codd were when they designed the relational model back in the early 70s. IIRC however, Boyce and Codd thought SQL was an abomination and were proposing a query language more like this Logica (but with ALGOL-style unkeyboardable operators). I'm glad they lost that argument!

Hate data fees but love your HD slab? Here's a better way to pay for bytes

Marketing 101

It's a market segmentation thing. Customers will sign up for the biggest data plan that they think they can afford, because the consequence of being "fined" for going over the cap is dire. Even when they often use nowhere near the allowance.

There's almost no downside for the telco billing this way:

1. Customers are paying as much as they are willing to pay, every single month.

2. If they use more data than agreed, they can rake in big bucks. (think international roaming)

3. Customers are "scared" to use all their allowance, in case they go over the limit: the telco doesn't need to actually provide all the bandwidth they have sold.

No telco would ever produce a plan where if you use less than the agreed amount of data, you get money back.

If customers had an accurate record of how much they used they would drop down onto a lower GB allowance once they realised how little they were using.