Posts by fatalXception

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

A nice little story but hardly a damning indictment of Access, since clearly it was the Ops Manager who was the "Tool" in this case, albeit the wrong one. I'm pretty sure the guys would have had the same problem no matter what he used to create his app.

SAP S/4HANA rollout at Queensland Health went so well that hospitals bent over backwards to avoid using it

Re: Lack of training on the new ERP system seems to have been at the heart of the problems.

The thing is with SAP, you are not buying software, you are buying Business Processes, and this almost always turns out to be the stumbling block, because no matter how big - or how good - your army of Highly Paid Consultants is, the core of the system is opinionated and in most cases what you hoped would be your 100% custom implementation ends up ceding ground to those unmovable core constraints.

Thus your staff, who have years and years of practice with your current processes, have to now learn a new process. And what's worse - it's often not entirely a brand new set of processes, it's more like Franken-Processes where it *looks* like the old one but has just enough subtle differences to trip up the unwary.

When SAP started selling it's Business One suite in the UK and Ireland, our #1 ask from our customers was the ability to register a partial payment for an invoice. At the start, SAP literally couldn't understand how this was even a thing, as far as they were concerned one paid an invoice or one didn't. Good luck customising around that particular limitation of the system! In fairness - they did put it in a couple of releases later i.e. 2 years, which is light speed as far as SAP is concerned!

€13bn wings its way back to Apple after Euro court rules Irish tax deal wasn't 'state aid'

My tongue is very firmly in my cheek here, but I do think we are missing point 4:

4. Take on 200BN+ euros of debt in 2008 by bailing out banks, bondholders, investors, gamblers and general financial vultures (most of whom are not Irish, many of whom are in fact these other EU citizens from whose children's mouths we are now apparently stealing bread) and placing the burden of the loss directly on its citizens and their children + grandchildren. I reckon that's more than balanced any EU subsidies we have received over the years :)

We took (or depending on who you ask, were forced to take) a major one for the team in the last crash, personally I am delighted that we've won this case (assuming we also win the next appeal from the EU). If we lose, and Apple has to finally fork over the cash to the Revenue, we won't see a red cent of it. The rest of the EU countries will be lining up to take their "cut", many of whom have their own ways of spectacularly ruining their own economies, but it's easier to blame the Irish tax system, I'm sure they will find some way to blame us for Wirecard next :)

I love being part of the EU but part of that willing to stand against the bad actors in it, and this is not the first time the EU's Commission - which let's be honest, generally over-represents the interests of those in Europe who see themselves as more equal than others - has taken what is essentially unilateral action and it's not the first - nor the last - time they've had their noses bloodied as a result.

Almost gives me a new and somewhat sympathetic perspective on Brexit :)

Again before this is downvoted into oblivion, I am only half serious in all this, my opinion is probably completely misinformed, etc, etc.

Is this an ASP.NET Core I see before me? Where to next for Microsoft's confusing web framework...

Re: I think "EF driven hellish wasteland of something little better than...

Very much this.

On many projects I've been brought into to help improve performance related to data access, where I'm told "It's because of stupid EF". And then I've discovered that 90% of the problems are caused by missing indexes on tables, or by developers assuming that EF is somehow able to magically translate their terrible N+1 loops into fast queries, and fixing that solves most of the problems. i.e. even if they had used direct SQL the problem would have been the same because they were doing the classic mistake of reading header records and then looping through and reading related tables for each header, classc RBAR cock-up.

With the exception of edge cases where performance really does need to be hand-tweaked (and frankly I could count on one hand the number of times I have come across one of these, even really fast bulk insert is possible these days with EF), I've found EF (both core and non-core) to be an excellent solution for data access, it saves a ton of manual and error-prone data mapping, and in the handful of cases where it really isn't suitable to have your SQL generated for you, you can just point it at a View in your database and forget about it, or use Dapper, etc, if you really need to squeeze a little more performance.

It is kind of annoying how this "EF sucks, NHibernate sucks, ORMs are stupid" myth keeps doing the rounds, seeing ridiculous amounts of time wasted on what amounts to artisan, hand-coded data access layers ridden with defects. I can't remember who said it but I do believe that "Writing your own Data access code is stealing from your customers" to be quite apt here. One suspects that in the vase majority of cases including my own (admittedly anecdotal) experiences that the real problem is that the developer's ability to understand and implement a performant database system is what actually sucks :)

Rockstar dev debate reopens: Hero programmers do exist, do all the work, do chat a lot – and do need love and attention from project leaders

Re: There's a big difference...

+1, this is what I immediately thought as well. And I would bet that if you look at *any* successful endeavour you see a similar trend....the conflation between "rockstar" and "hero" is unfortunate!

Atlassian hikes prices for most cloudy JIRA and Confluence users

It's all pretty subjective I think. I personally find TFS's online stuff far more pleasing to the eye, far easier to work with and far *less* confusing than Jira's. Granted, that's only the most recent iteration (TFS 2017 / VSTS) but nevertheless, I'd drop Jira in a heartbeat if I could. But that's the thing, use whatever works best for you :)

Dishwasher has directory traversal bug

I dunno, I can think of one time this would have been really handy - about 6 weeks ago my washer stopped working, it would work away for about 20 minutes and then just stop, with a single blinking red light. There's no LED display on most low-end dishwashers so no way to know what's wrong

Thought it was knackered and was pretty sure I'd need to replace it - I figured the element was gone or something - when I discovered (whilst doing something unrelated under the sink, which required me to unplug a bunch of pipes) that there was a big horrible ball of gunk stuck in the water outlet pipe of the washer and this was why the washer was failing. Once that was sorted, it's been fine since.

Would have been nice to have gotten a text or be able to log into some kind of "what is wrong with you" type webpage in the washer to see that the cycle was shutting down as it was unable to empty the water, I would have known right away what the problem was.

Now that's a Blue Screen of Death: Windows 10 told me to jump off a cliff

Re: Methinks MSFT (and some here) are taking this too seriously.

I personally don't have a problem with it, being a native of North Clare I'm biased towards pictures of my cliffs.

BUT one thing I will say. Every year people do actually commit suicide by jumping off these cliffs. We have had 2 or 3 every year for as long as I can remember. (I know someone whose sister used the cliffs to exit this mortal coil. He's quite a happy fellow but I can imagine that seeing something like this might bring back painful memories.)

So I could appreciate that it might not just be that the person looking at it might possibly be feeling suicidal, it's that this is a poor tag in general, to put on a place where people are known to have killed themselves.

That's all.

'Please label things so I can tell the difference between a mouse and a microphone'

Re: Easily fixed...

But surely - and I say this with tongue firmly planted in my cheek - you only need to learn *one* of them?

Microsoft's certification exams: So easy, a child of six could pass them. Literally

Re: Nice

"Any teacher that just wants compliance is out of date unionised scum unfit to be dealing with the future of kids." - bit harsh maybe? Perhaps the teachers are well aware of how pointless the subject matter is but have not yet won the battle to have it removed from the curriculum, and therefore want to at least ensure that their wards can pass the (silly) exams. Although most teachers I know are indeed just fascists, there are some "good" ones out there :)

If I were that teacher, my first response would have been: "OK, you may have a point. Come on in here and sit last year's final exam for this boring Office class, today."

If he passed - well, great, he can sit at the back of the class and hack away at something that interests him for the rest of the term, reasonably certain that he'll pass this year's test.

But if he didn't...well then that's too bad but he's going to have to participate in this class, end of.

And if I were the parent and the teacher didn't offer then I'd ask for this to happen.

Teaching kids to conform "because that's the way it is" is bad, but imho it's no worse than teaching kids to rebel "because conformity is wrong". Far better to teach kids to conform to what's right, and rebel against what's wrong, *but only after they can prove they know the difference*

Video games make you NASTY AND VIOLENT

Re: Sounds a lot like those...no, not really

@ Shaha Alam: "you can't change other people's stupidity. but you can reduce the impact it has on you."

That...is probably the wisest thing I've heard all year. Nicely put!

Alicia Keys throws in towel on BlackBerry's creative director job

Take my money

"Kenny Rogers gangsta rap album". Please, take my money! That would be awesome...