Posts by herbgold

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

"Excel is a shit database." No, it's not. Excel is not a database.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

Bring back PROFS!

Yes, I know PROFS (aka "NOSS" in its IBM manifestation) was horrible, but it was working when I left IBM at the end of 1994...

Fancy trying to explain Microsoft Teams to your parents? They may ask about the new Personal version

Skype???

But Skype and Skype for Business are also M*soft products - this announcement just seems to add to the confusion. Can we have some positioning from someone who knows?

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

May I copy a comment I made in Quora a little while ago.

The question was, "What are some of the uses of Microsoft Access?"

The only real-life development using Microsoft Access I’ve seen was a complex booking system for patient therapy appointments at a small charity I used to volunteer at. It was “cleverly” written by a non-professional developer, and it used common shared variables instead of explicit parameters, which made it a nightmare to debug.

Because Access is designed for a single user and has no built-in locking, the development had to go through hoops to stop multiple concurrent users trying to update the same data (effectively inventing his own locking system). Because Access lumps everything (data tables and code) in a single module, it was very fragile and often fell over.

Access should be OK for a single user system (this is what it’s designed for) but for the type of system I’ve described I would run a mile from it.

We Kana believe it! Raspberry Pi Foundation launches Japanese keyboard

Sorry to out-pedant you, but neither hiragana nor katakana are 'alphabets' - they are two different but related scripts, where each symbol represents a syllable (like 'ta', 'ka', 'sa', etc).

Y2K? It was all just a big bun-fight, according to one Reg reader

Re: Saved our bacon Y2K did.

Thanks so much for reminding me of the "offog" story - one of my favourites back in the day.

In the bag: Serco 'delighted' to grab £450m ferry and freight deal between Scotland and Northern Isles

Genuine quest for information here: the article talks about Aberdeen-Kirkwall-Lerwick, but what about Scrabster-Stromness? Will Northlink continue running that?

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

Coen brothers - are you reading this?

A sequel to "Fargo" - "Cedar Rapids", perhaps?

Foldables herald the beginning of the end of the smartphone fetish

"phones can now resemble a pre-digital household object: a paperback book," - well, we have that - sort of - in the form of e-readers. I use my Kindle a lot but don't get the same pleasure out of handling it that I do from a "proper" book. But, hey, I'm old.

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

Re: Alternative to seasickness pills

We took the Scrabster-Stromness ferry last June (and Hatston-Aberdeen on the way back). Disappointed in a sort of perverse way that the sea for both crossings was like glass.

Orkney was glorious in the sunshine we had all week, but I'd love to go back and see it in more typical conditions.

By the way, is there any more evocative name for a railway than the Far North Line?:

Skip-wrecked! Boat full o' rubbish scuppered in Brit residential street

Is it called Sh*tty MacSh*tface?

Your mouse can't reach that Excel cell? Buy a 'desk extender' said help desk bluffer

What is wrong with this picture?

"Wendell wasn't an IT pro at the time, but he had built his own computer in the early 1980s, "before the IBM PC". "

Danger! High voltage: German customs bods burn half-tonne of weed in power station

"Devil's Lettuce" LOL

IBM opens emergency escape hatch to TSS volunteers

"Open Voluntary Separation Program(me)" - don't you love it. It was CTP (Career Transition Programme) back in the day, or "Career Termination Programme" as we renamed it.

Four techies flummoxed for hours by flickering 'E' on monitor

"the company 3270 mainframe.”

No, no, no, failure of concept here.