My third job, a contract with a, well, sort of a utility company. I was originally hired to work on the implementation of a new accounting system, which did so poorly that the Major Accounting Consultant Firm was fired one afternoon. But I was personally doing well, and so got a new assignment, to be project lead to convert a system written in COBOL that called multiple FORTRAN subroutines (doing scientific computations) using VSAM files to use DB2 databases instead of flat files.
Lots of screens to update the files/databases. But it was relatively cut and dried. I worked out how long each revised program would take, counted the programs, did my homework, gave the estimates and background data to my manager, who said "That's too long... make it shorter!"
So I make it take the length of time he wanted. Then one of the contractors finished his first big task, it was horrible. Barely functional. We let him go, I gave that task to another guy. Most of my guys were in another state, which shouldn't have mattered. But of course it did!
Anyway, when we reached the time I "estimated" as instructed, we weren't done, and I was moved back to that horrible accounting project that had died a year ago. The people who took up my "failed" project finished right on time - that first estimate that was "too long"... using my specs and designs.
TL:DR Even if you do a good estimate and hit it right on, it still won't be right.
Before PL/I I used to key in octal commands to enable a Digital computer to bootstrap the OS, which was on punch tape. This was in the mid-1970s.
In publishing punch tape was a common data transmission source inside a shop, so using it for the OS and code was a no brainer. Plus 6 level and 8 level tape gave you two common byte sizes.
I enrolled in a BS/CS program in 1980 which used PL/I as the main instructional language. I never used it professionally, but it was common in Grad School too.
I told him that they had executed their organization's credibility, and that no one with academic credentials would work for them once the meaning of this management decision soaks into everyone's mind.
Also that they were dead to me forever.
It was longer than what I have quoted, but I went to physical therapy after sending it and now all I remember is the stretching of my shoulder.
I can't believe that the place where I learned what anthropology and wildlife biology and archaeology and photography were all about is now a political propaganda arm of a political party that expressly does not believe in science and the scientific method. That was also in my letter.
I put in that if he was lucky he would have to report to Megan Kelly, but I took that out, she isn't management track with Rupert.
Especially in rural areas. It is the only service that is available for reception at our winter camp in Arizona, and is more widely available in West Virginia than other cell companies. Their hot spot only costs $25 for the hardware, and it works in rural areas where geography doesn't interfere with connections to the cell network.
They offer 12 GB monthly if I recall their advertising correctly, but you are correct, it isn't cheap.
Good luck. We are so screwed compared to Europe, Japan, S Korea, etc. Terrible availability, tiny bandwidth for data, terrific prices for the companies, all of them.
I think someone has to do something about that. Should do something about that. Because it is wrong, and because governments need to be held to the letter of the law if we're to be safe from them.
I managed a software development shop for a state agency until I retired, and we had contractors in the shop for large development projects, as there was a huge resistance to actually hiring people. So we would spend $140,000/year for really good developers, instead of hiring someone as a FTE for $50,000.
One governor had the HR agency implement a requirement that we ask interviewees what their minimum salary would be to join our shop, and then would approve a max offer several thousand dollars lower than that minimum. That made it kind of impossible to hire anyone with good skills and an understanding of their market worth.
I think you should hang these law breakers out to dry. But you need to understand that whistle-blowers often are hung out to dry themselves, and frequently have career ending events as that process winds up.
because when I built a small winter time camp in SE Arizona the local power co-op was charging nearly $30,000 / mile to run new power line. A solar panel / battery system was spec'ed out at $28,000. The co-op offered a "rebate" to customers who decided not to connect to their grid, I got $6,000 in a one-time check. This rewarded us for not causing the Co-op to need to build out new capacity for an additional housing unit over the foreseeable future.
At the time there was also an income tax credit against the cost of installing solar systems. A credit is better than a deduction, as it applies to the actual tax amount, rather than to your income, like deductibles. So for 2 or 3 years our federal income tax was much lower than it would have been. To the point where the installation didn't really cost much at all.
I have a 2Kwatt Honda quiet running generator in case of overcast/stormy weather, a wood stove for winter heat, along with a ton of standing dead wood that everyone is glad to see cut as it lowers fire hazard. The house is stuccoed with Portland cement based stucco, which makes the walls fireproof, and the roof is metal, also nominally fireproof.
So for the time we spend in Arizona avoiding winter storms, we're off the grid, completely. January, February and March. Sunshine every day nearly. Cold at night, so we build a small fire in the wood-stove at bedtime.
If you take a job as software director, you won't be developing software any more, you'll be managing software developers. I took that promotion myself, and enjoyed the new and different work. But it meant lots of meetings where I talked to other managers who didn't know anything about software development, trying to explain why systems take so long, cost so much, and can't be developed correctly without participation by the senior members of the "customer" work group.
I also met with funding providers for the software unit often, to justify progress, schedule changes mostly doe to discovering new complexity in the data requirements or interfaces.
I worked in management for about 10 years before retiring, and I became a wizard at grant applications, spreadsheets, project scheduling, interviewing potential developers, but I didn't really ever code, or even do system analysis at the specification level, ever again.
If you're good with that, then maybe a 10% raise is a good thing. But dealing with personnel problems, people's health problems, needs, and family problems, HR requirements, etc is not the same as coding at all.
We live in rural W Va, and have no hi speed option but sat dish service. Now I commonly see sat dishes for RVs that will even work while moving for TV... not sure about for data connection.
Of course no gaming works well with orbital distances, the time lag get you shot/fallen/lost/abandoned almost immediately. But for systems work, or other types of telecommuting for software related careers it seems to be fine.
I went to college (for the 3rd time) at the age of 30. I had a hard time with Calc etc. and hated the first two semesters of Comp Sci, but got over that. I literally had to ask the Prof in 101 where the switch was on the machine.
My first job was with a government tax department. One of their biggest problems was that small businesses kept changing their names trying to escape from last quarters' tax bill. I got assigned to write a routine to track business names - really to invent a way to track businesses changing their names. This led to designing an artificial key for a business, and assembling a list of all their names and date the changes.
Then after some work I found that some of the businesses randomly changing their names would reuse a name eventually. Not smart if you're fleeing debt associated with that name, but what can I say? That created a closed loop that would circulate endlessly, or until a main frame operator got suspicious and stopped the job; or until I wrote code to escape a closed data loop.
Making a really long story a little shorter, you will need math, and the skills learned working on math, no matter what kind of work you do, unless you are just a code monkey coding things with all the complexity designed by a systems analyst with 2 degrees in math.
If that's all you want, to be a code monkey on a system you don't understand large parts of, then you don't need a degree in Computer Science. If you want to be any kind of scientist, or systems designer, like those who build gaming engines or rastor graphics programs, or tracking genetic variability in organisms being studied in labs in Research Triangle Park, NC; or at C-M University, in Pittsburgh; or Cal Tech where they just landed a curious robot on F'Ing MARS, then don't get a degree, don't study math, stay ignorant.
That kind of work is actually going on everywhere now, not just these examples I pulled from my a**, I never left my home state to have a good career doing important work. I didn't use Calc every day, but I knew that I could if I needed to.
"You can cure ignorance, but there is no cure for stupid."
I'm a proud Hillbilly, lived my whole life in the WVa hills, even managed to have a career as a software developer, only moved out while I was in the service/drafted.
Not that we don't like NYC, Caribbean Islands, the different hills and mountains in Colorado, WY, AZ, NM, etc.
But you can call me Hillbilly and be accurate. I think it's illegal to discriminate against Hillbillies in Cincinnati, where lots of us have gone looking for good jobs.
Had a wide-open throttle condition, that happened with my wife driving from Charleston WV to Beckley, WV on the Turnpike. A limited access toll highway, where towing is really expensive.
She drove all the way to the Ford dealer in town, slowing at toll-booths with the brakes and throwing money at the staff. It was a 4-cyl Ranger and mostly uphill, which helped too. She shut the engine off to stop, and when she started it, full throttle. We were 12,000 miles and a year out of warranty and the Ford dealer replaced the ECM no questions asked. It wasn't even the shop where we bought the truck!
This was before cars had black boxes, but as others have commented, when a computer screws up, often the.log file is as screwed up as the rest of the output. But don't tell me that complex code can't have unintended results. Maybe Toyota outsourced the code to Elbownia?
Books on MySQL and MS SQL and DB2 and Oracle aren't what he needs. He needs modeling theory to get the table design right first. Then the implementation becomes relevant.
the 3rd member of the staff, hired by a friend who was the second member of the staff. Eventually we wound up with nearly 2 dozen people, many better than me or my friend.
But even when I was Application Development manager, I designed table structures and wrote custom queries to reply to FOIA requests for data.
I took some graduate school classes after getting my BSCS, so as to have access to a computer while looking for my first job, which tells you something about when this was. The best class was Relational Data Base using "An Introduction to Database Systems" by C. J. Date. ISBN 0-201-14471-9.
Mr. Date, along with Mr. Codd, invented relational calculus, including normal forms. In later classes at work we were strongly advised to use 3rd normal form, as even mainframes of the day couldn't really support 4th or 5th. That instructor had participated in a project to rebuild a 5th normal form system into 3rd for Westinghouse, whose mainframe choked on the small (low column count) tables and huge keys required by 5th normal form.
The book covers other styles of databases, network and hierarchical, but both are antique now. So I'd skip or at most skim those chapters. They show how Relational DB design grew out of experience with shortcomings of Multics and IMS, early network and hierarchical DBs, respectively.
Other commentors are correct, which DB software you use isn't terribly important for good table structure design. Learning how to select keys for uniqueness and design tables to be non-redundant are not database-specific solutions.
Do good backups, and practise restoring from them regularly, it doesn't matter how well-deswigned a DB is if the hardware fails and you can't recover the data.
It only takes a geologist or a google to show this has been publicly known for decades. Google "Afgan mineral specimens" and add -ebay for better results. The gem minerals being sold from Afgan locales are primarily those found in lithium-rich pegmatite deposits. The gems are worth from $100-100,000 for something that fits in a ziplock baggy. Raw lithium is valuable, but in rail-car amounts. I'm just an amateur geologist and if you had asked me I could have listed 3rd world countries with rich undeveloped minerals.
The same is true of Pakistan. Neither country has heavy rail. Bolivia has rich mineral deposits and mines, and the natives are dirt-poor and poisoned by mining related pollution, so don't hold your breath for the Afgans/Pakis to become developed countries.
people with depression, even deep depression, can smile, laugh, and be outgoing right up until the moment they commit suicide.
It's part of the syndrome that they want to act like a natural, happy person, even if they're on a brink - no matter what. Many won't admit they're ill until fatal results happen.
Insurance companies shouldn't have anything to do with diagnosis, they aren't qualified (not being doctors), and they have a conflict of interest, making money by denying illness. Frankly I think making money by denying health care to people is nearly as unethical as just shooting them up front.
I attended a high-end and selective liberal arts school my first time around. Believe me, the CS majors will be challenging as they will have passed the selection process that the Math / English / PoliSci / Art / Theatre/preMed / preLaw students passed.
You will wind up a better educated person with the Liberal Arts CS degree, even if they call it a Maths degree. You have to communicate with other people to do high-end work.
I talk to engineeers, biologists, geologists and other kinds of scientists every day. If I can't understand them, our systems and projects suffer.
I talk to accountants and managers every day. If I can't make sense to them, my budget/systems suffer. I'm not saying that MIT grads can't do what I do, but they'll have to learn a lot on their own before they could do what I do as well as I do it.
I'll go for a well educated and rounded person every time, if I can get one. They're harder to come by than you think!
There have been wars upon wars in the Mid-East, with the Ottomans and the British just one recent phase in a series of vast wars. That one involved T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) who helped the local tribes learn to be more efficient guerilla fighters. Good idea!
So we've known the Mid-East is a violent and volatile area for about 4000 years...like in the Bible, for cryin out loud!
My first computer justified text into full-width columns using 6-level paper punch tape for input and output - it had a plexiglass front and blinking neon lamps on the cards for problem diagnosis. It was the size of a home refrigerator! The generated tapes were used to control Mergenthaler Linotypes casting type using molten lead.
I was able to operate all the machinery used in hot-type newspaper publishing by the end of that job, as well as most used in offset printing. This was true industrial-revolution age machinery, lots of cast iron and steel, vats of molten lead, huge presses spinning cylindrical lead plates with paper running by so fast the words and pictures were a gray blur.
I also learned most of how to operate a photo-engraving shop using line screened negatives to etch photos into zinc plates using nitric acid baths for printing photos in hot-type publishing. How to spool film onto reels for processing in the dark! By feel!
Later on I learned to milk cows, producing milk with nothing but my hands and a bucket! I still have a strong grip, 25 years later, and forearms like Popeye! Not quite, but sill...
I know how to butcher meats in the back yard, and how to can food in the harvest season so as to be able to eat in the winter.
I also know how to debug a hex dump, the worst bug I ever found was an unprintable character that occurred right where a decimal point belonged....whooo!
I know Calculus, is that obsolete now?
I have several slide-rules, but haven't used them in a long time, so I would have to review that technology to be proficient.
There are others...using non-synchronized transmissions, some skills I won't fess up to...
Our shop has a large scale client/server system with about 525 RDBMS tables in the backend. The data is by nature complex, and the table structures are as simple as the data allows. We were asked by senior mgt to provide portability for the system, on laptops used by field staff. Since the RDBMS vendor touted their DB synchronization product and their portable DB server capabilities, we thought it would be, well, not simple, but not really difficult in concept.
Wrong!
The OS on the laptop changed, rendering the ability to run version X of the DB Lite impossible, which impacted other cross-dependencies... A total nightmare!
Then, once all those dependencies were resolved, the number of tables needed for field staff (between 125 and 150) proved totally beyond the ability of the DB Sync tools provided by the DB vendor. After many many help tickets showed us that the vendor (think large yacht) had no real intention or ability to fix their sync tool set, we decided to take another tack.;-)
We assigned a young coder with a degree but not too much experience, and made him a full time sync tool coder with the senior DBA (also a crack coder) and they've been working on writing a tool to sync laptop data with server data. Now about 98% complete, they tell me.
We're using flags to control which data set is current, and the logs will allow us to use a utility to work out conflicts that the custom sync tool has problems updating.
Wish us luck, as I wish everyone confronted by this problem the best of luck! I don't think commercial or open source tools are flexible enough to deal with anything more complex than the most simple set of information and a very static environment. Build your own tool, no one else understands you requirements well enough to help you, really.
Just my $.02 worth of hard experience on synchronizing complex data for field operations.
One day, outside the bookstore at a new strip mall near here, I saw a young woman shouting into her cell phone, saying "You don't understand, I don't want to talk to you any more!" and I thought, "Hang up." "Don't answer."
If Comcast doesn't treat you nice, tell them to come and get their nasty little box, or you can mail it to them, but you're done with them.
End of story. Don't whine around about it, vote with your money by withholding it from them. Once enough people stop paying them, they'll understand the clue.
If I were you, I'd worry about OCD TV watching! Read a book or two, take a walk, quit that TV addiction and get a real life!
So you don't approve of AJAX. You don't like thin client web-based tools for end users. You have strong opinions about the direction of development that conflict with common wisdom.
I'm preparing to spend several million dollars developing custom complex AJAX based systems to track regulatory and scientific information, with one major system going into production tomorrow.
What's your real-world suggestion for how I should architect future systems, now expected to be built with AJAX?
I suspect you meant General U. S. Grant, or perhaps Sherman. It was Sherman's March to the Sea through Georgia that actually broke the south's back. The burning of Atlanta in the movie Gone with the Wind was done by Sherman's troops, who cut a burnt swathe 90 miles wide completely through the CSA.
By contrast, General Robert E Lee was the leader of the CSA troops, in charge of defending the south and attacking the Union.
Slashdot Mirror
My third job, a contract with a, well, sort of a utility company. I was originally hired to work on the implementation of a new accounting system, which did so poorly that the Major Accounting Consultant Firm was fired one afternoon. But I was personally doing well, and so got a new assignment, to be project lead to convert a system written in COBOL that called multiple FORTRAN subroutines (doing scientific computations) using VSAM files to use DB2 databases instead of flat files.
Lots of screens to update the files/databases. But it was relatively cut and dried. I worked out how long each revised program would take, counted the programs, did my homework, gave the estimates and background data to my manager, who said "That's too long... make it shorter!"
So I make it take the length of time he wanted. Then one of the contractors finished his first big task, it was horrible. Barely functional. We let him go, I gave that task to another guy. Most of my guys were in another state, which shouldn't have mattered. But of course it did!
Anyway, when we reached the time I "estimated" as instructed, we weren't done, and I was moved back to that horrible accounting project that had died a year ago. The people who took up my "failed" project finished right on time - that first estimate that was "too long"... using my specs and designs.
TL:DR Even if you do a good estimate and hit it right on, it still won't be right.
Before PL/I I used to key in octal commands to enable a Digital computer to bootstrap the OS, which was on punch tape. This was in the mid-1970s.
In publishing punch tape was a common data transmission source inside a shop, so using it for the OS and code was a no brainer. Plus 6 level and 8 level tape gave you two common byte sizes.
I enrolled in a BS/CS program in 1980 which used PL/I as the main instructional language. I never used it professionally, but it was common in Grad School too.
I told him that they had executed their organization's credibility, and that no one with academic credentials would work for them once the meaning of this management decision soaks into everyone's mind.
Also that they were dead to me forever.
It was longer than what I have quoted, but I went to physical therapy after sending it and now all I remember is the stretching of my shoulder.
I can't believe that the place where I learned what anthropology and wildlife biology and archaeology and photography were all about is now a political propaganda arm of a political party that expressly does not believe in science and the scientific method. That was also in my letter.
I put in that if he was lucky he would have to report to Megan Kelly, but I took that out, she isn't management track with Rupert.
Especially in rural areas. It is the only service that is available for reception at our winter camp in Arizona, and is more widely available in West Virginia than other cell companies. Their hot spot only costs $25 for the hardware, and it works in rural areas where geography doesn't interfere with connections to the cell network.
They offer 12 GB monthly if I recall their advertising correctly, but you are correct, it isn't cheap.
Good luck. We are so screwed compared to Europe, Japan, S Korea, etc. Terrible availability, tiny bandwidth for data, terrific prices for the companies, all of them.
I think someone has to do something about that. Should do something about that. Because it is wrong, and because governments need to be held to the letter of the law if we're to be safe from them.
I managed a software development shop for a state agency until I retired, and we had contractors in the shop for large development projects, as there was a huge resistance to actually hiring people. So we would spend $140,000/year for really good developers, instead of hiring someone as a FTE for $50,000.
One governor had the HR agency implement a requirement that we ask interviewees what their minimum salary would be to join our shop, and then would approve a max offer several thousand dollars lower than that minimum. That made it kind of impossible to hire anyone with good skills and an understanding of their market worth.
I think you should hang these law breakers out to dry. But you need to understand that whistle-blowers often are hung out to dry themselves, and frequently have career ending events as that process winds up.
because when I built a small winter time camp in SE Arizona the local power co-op was charging nearly $30,000 / mile to run new power line. A solar panel / battery system was spec'ed out at $28,000. The co-op offered a "rebate" to customers who decided not to connect to their grid, I got $6,000 in a one-time check. This rewarded us for not causing the Co-op to need to build out new capacity for an additional housing unit over the foreseeable future.
At the time there was also an income tax credit against the cost of installing solar systems. A credit is better than a deduction, as it applies to the actual tax amount, rather than to your income, like deductibles. So for 2 or 3 years our federal income tax was much lower than it would have been. To the point where the installation didn't really cost much at all.
I have a 2Kwatt Honda quiet running generator in case of overcast/stormy weather, a wood stove for winter heat, along with a ton of standing dead wood that everyone is glad to see cut as it lowers fire hazard. The house is stuccoed with Portland cement based stucco, which makes the walls fireproof, and the roof is metal, also nominally fireproof.
So for the time we spend in Arizona avoiding winter storms, we're off the grid, completely. January, February and March. Sunshine every day nearly. Cold at night, so we build a small fire in the wood-stove at bedtime.
If the headline summary is accurate, this is the dumbest court decision evah!!!
They have an address of record, where legal service can take place. Also, the ADA is in effect everywhere in the USA. Where Netflix exists.
Dumb. D. U. M B.!!!
If you take a job as software director, you won't be developing software any more, you'll be managing software developers. I took that promotion myself, and enjoyed the new and different work. But it meant lots of meetings where I talked to other managers who didn't know anything about software development, trying to explain why systems take so long, cost so much, and can't be developed correctly without participation by the senior members of the "customer" work group.
I also met with funding providers for the software unit often, to justify progress, schedule changes mostly doe to discovering new complexity in the data requirements or interfaces.
I worked in management for about 10 years before retiring, and I became a wizard at grant applications, spreadsheets, project scheduling, interviewing potential developers, but I didn't really ever code, or even do system analysis at the specification level, ever again.
If you're good with that, then maybe a 10% raise is a good thing. But dealing with personnel problems, people's health problems, needs, and family problems, HR requirements, etc is not the same as coding at all.
Just sayin' ...
We live in rural W Va, and have no hi speed option but sat dish service. Now I commonly see sat dishes for RVs that will even work while moving for TV... not sure about for data connection.
Of course no gaming works well with orbital distances, the time lag get you shot/fallen/lost/abandoned almost immediately. But for systems work, or other types of telecommuting for software related careers it seems to be fine.
As you see, it gets me on /. just fine...
I went to college (for the 3rd time) at the age of 30. I had a hard time with Calc etc. and hated the first two semesters of Comp Sci, but got over that. I literally had to ask the Prof in 101 where the switch was on the machine.
My first job was with a government tax department. One of their biggest problems was that small businesses kept changing their names trying to escape from last quarters' tax bill. I got assigned to write a routine to track business names - really to invent a way to track businesses changing their names. This led to designing an artificial key for a business, and assembling a list of all their names and date the changes.
Then after some work I found that some of the businesses randomly changing their names would reuse a name eventually. Not smart if you're fleeing debt associated with that name, but what can I say? That created a closed loop that would circulate endlessly, or until a main frame operator got suspicious and stopped the job; or until I wrote code to escape a closed data loop.
Making a really long story a little shorter, you will need math, and the skills learned working on math, no matter what kind of work you do, unless you are just a code monkey coding things with all the complexity designed by a systems analyst with 2 degrees in math.
If that's all you want, to be a code monkey on a system you don't understand large parts of, then you don't need a degree in Computer Science. If you want to be any kind of scientist, or systems designer, like those who build gaming engines or rastor graphics programs, or tracking genetic variability in organisms being studied in labs in Research Triangle Park, NC; or at C-M University, in Pittsburgh; or Cal Tech where they just landed a curious robot on F'Ing MARS, then don't get a degree, don't study math, stay ignorant.
That kind of work is actually going on everywhere now, not just these examples I pulled from my a**, I never left my home state to have a good career doing important work. I didn't use Calc every day, but I knew that I could if I needed to.
"You can cure ignorance, but there is no cure for stupid."
I'm a proud Hillbilly, lived my whole life in the WVa hills, even managed to have a career as a software developer, only moved out while I was in the service/drafted.
Not that we don't like NYC, Caribbean Islands, the different hills and mountains in Colorado, WY, AZ, NM, etc.
But you can call me Hillbilly and be accurate. I think it's illegal to discriminate against Hillbillies in Cincinnati, where lots of us have gone looking for good jobs.
Had a wide-open throttle condition, that happened with my wife driving from Charleston WV to Beckley, WV on the Turnpike. A limited access toll highway, where towing is really expensive.
She drove all the way to the Ford dealer in town, slowing at toll-booths with the brakes and throwing money at the staff. It was a 4-cyl Ranger and mostly uphill, which helped too. She shut the engine off to stop, and when she started it, full throttle. We were 12,000 miles and a year out of warranty and the Ford dealer replaced the ECM no questions asked. It wasn't even the shop where we bought the truck!
This was before cars had black boxes, but as others have commented, when a computer screws up, often the .log file is as screwed up as the rest of the output. But don't tell me that complex code can't have unintended results. Maybe Toyota outsourced the code to Elbownia?
Books on MySQL and MS SQL and DB2 and Oracle aren't what he needs. He needs modeling theory to get the table design right first. Then the implementation becomes relevant.
the 3rd member of the staff, hired by a friend who was the second member of the staff. Eventually we wound up with nearly 2 dozen people, many better than me or my friend.
But even when I was Application Development manager, I designed table structures and wrote custom queries to reply to FOIA requests for data.
I took some graduate school classes after getting my BSCS, so as to have access to a computer while looking for my first job, which tells you something about when this was. The best class was Relational Data Base using "An Introduction to Database Systems" by C. J. Date. ISBN 0-201-14471-9.
Mr. Date, along with Mr. Codd, invented relational calculus, including normal forms. In later classes at work we were strongly advised to use 3rd normal form, as even mainframes of the day couldn't really support 4th or 5th. That instructor had participated in a project to rebuild a 5th normal form system into 3rd for Westinghouse, whose mainframe choked on the small (low column count) tables
and huge keys required by 5th normal form.
The book covers other styles of databases, network and hierarchical, but both are antique now. So I'd skip or at most skim those chapters. They show how Relational DB design grew out of experience with shortcomings of Multics and IMS, early network and hierarchical DBs, respectively.
Other commentors are correct, which DB software you use isn't terribly important for good table structure design. Learning how to select keys for uniqueness and design tables to be non-redundant are not database-specific solutions.
Do good backups, and practise restoring from them regularly, it doesn't matter how well-deswigned a DB is if the hardware fails and you can't recover the data.
It only takes a geologist or a google to show this has been publicly known for decades. Google "Afgan mineral specimens" and add -ebay for better results. The gem minerals being sold from Afgan locales are primarily those found in lithium-rich pegmatite deposits. The gems are worth from $100-100,000 for something that fits in a ziplock baggy. Raw lithium is valuable, but in rail-car amounts. I'm just an amateur geologist and if you had asked me I could have listed 3rd world countries with rich undeveloped minerals.
The same is true of Pakistan. Neither country has heavy rail. Bolivia has rich mineral deposits and mines, and the natives are dirt-poor and poisoned by mining related pollution, so don't hold your breath for the Afgans/Pakis to become developed countries.
people with depression, even deep depression, can smile, laugh, and be outgoing right up until the moment they commit suicide.
It's part of the syndrome that they want to act like a natural, happy person, even if they're on a brink - no matter what. Many won't admit they're ill until fatal results happen.
Insurance companies shouldn't have anything to do with diagnosis, they aren't qualified (not being doctors), and they have a conflict of interest, making money by denying illness. Frankly I think making money by denying health care to people is nearly as unethical as just shooting them up front.
Hi:
/preMed / preLaw students passed.
I attended a high-end and selective liberal arts school my first time around. Believe me, the CS majors will be challenging as they will have passed the selection process that the Math / English / PoliSci / Art / Theatre
You will wind up a better educated person with the Liberal Arts CS degree, even if they call it a Maths degree. You have to communicate with other people to do high-end work.
I talk to engineeers, biologists, geologists and other kinds of scientists every day. If I can't understand them, our systems and projects suffer.
I talk to accountants and managers every day. If I can't make sense to them, my budget/systems suffer. I'm not saying that MIT grads can't do what I do, but they'll have to learn a lot on their own before they could do what I do as well as I do it.
I'll go for a well educated and rounded person every time, if I can get one. They're harder to come by than you think!
JR
Dude,
There have been wars upon wars in the Mid-East, with the Ottomans and the British just one recent phase in a series of vast wars. That one involved T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) who helped the local tribes learn to be more efficient guerilla fighters. Good idea!
So we've known the Mid-East is a violent and volatile area for about 4000 years...like in the Bible, for cryin out loud!
My first computer justified text into full-width columns using 6-level paper punch tape for input and output - it had a plexiglass front and blinking neon lamps on the cards for problem diagnosis. It was the size of a home refrigerator! The generated tapes were used to control Mergenthaler Linotypes casting type using molten lead.
I was able to operate all the machinery used in hot-type newspaper publishing by the end of that job, as well as most used in offset printing. This was true industrial-revolution age machinery, lots of cast iron and steel, vats of molten lead, huge presses spinning cylindrical lead plates with paper running by so fast the words and pictures were a gray blur.
I also learned most of how to operate a photo-engraving shop using line screened negatives to etch photos into zinc plates using nitric acid baths for printing photos in hot-type publishing. How to spool film onto reels for processing in the dark! By feel!
Later on I learned to milk cows, producing milk with nothing but my hands and a bucket! I still have a strong grip, 25 years later, and forearms like Popeye! Not quite, but sill...
I know how to butcher meats in the back yard, and how to can food in the harvest season so as to be able to eat in the winter.
I also know how to debug a hex dump, the worst bug I ever found was an unprintable character that occurred right where a decimal point belonged....whooo!
I know Calculus, is that obsolete now?
I have several slide-rules, but haven't used them in a long time, so I would have to review that technology to be proficient.
There are others...using non-synchronized transmissions, some skills I won't fess up to...
the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, which (I think still) allows news coverage of civil actions to be unhindered.
But I'm just guessing here.
Hi:
;-)
Our shop has a large scale client/server system with about 525 RDBMS tables in the backend. The data is by nature complex, and the table structures are as simple as the data allows. We were asked by senior mgt to provide portability for the system, on laptops used by field staff. Since the RDBMS vendor touted their DB synchronization product and their portable DB server capabilities, we thought it would be, well, not simple, but not really difficult in concept.
Wrong!
The OS on the laptop changed, rendering the ability to run version X of the DB Lite impossible, which impacted other cross-dependencies... A total nightmare!
Then, once all those dependencies were resolved, the number of tables needed for field staff (between 125 and 150) proved totally beyond the ability of the DB Sync tools provided by the DB vendor. After many many help tickets showed us that the vendor (think large yacht) had no real intention or ability to fix their sync tool set, we decided to take another tack.
We assigned a young coder with a degree but not too much experience, and made him a full time sync tool coder with the senior DBA (also a crack coder) and they've been working on writing a tool to sync laptop data with server data. Now about 98% complete, they tell me.
We're using flags to control which data set is current, and the logs will allow us to use a utility to work out conflicts that the custom sync tool has problems updating.
Wish us luck, as I wish everyone confronted by this problem the best of luck! I don't think commercial or open source tools are flexible enough to deal with anything more complex than the most simple set of information and a very static environment. Build your own tool, no one else understands you requirements well enough to help you, really.
Just my $.02 worth of hard experience on synchronizing complex data for field operations.
JR
In Firefox, click on Options > Content and uncheck the Java Enabled checkbox. Then click on OK, and you're safe...
One day, outside the bookstore at a new strip mall near here, I saw a young woman shouting into her cell phone, saying "You don't understand, I don't want to talk to you any more!" and I thought, "Hang up." "Don't answer."
If Comcast doesn't treat you nice, tell them to come and get their nasty little box, or you can mail it to them, but you're done with them.
End of story. Don't whine around about it, vote with your money by withholding it from them. Once enough people stop paying them, they'll understand the clue.
If I were you, I'd worry about OCD TV watching! Read a book or two, take a walk, quit that TV addiction and get a real life!
Hi:
So you don't approve of AJAX. You don't like thin client web-based tools for end users. You have strong opinions about the direction of development that conflict with common wisdom.
I'm preparing to spend several million dollars developing custom complex AJAX based systems to track regulatory and scientific information, with one major system going into production tomorrow.
What's your real-world suggestion for how I should architect future systems, now expected to be built with AJAX?
Thanks,
JR
I suspect you meant General U. S. Grant, or perhaps Sherman. It was Sherman's March to the Sea through Georgia that actually broke the south's back. The burning of Atlanta in the movie Gone with the Wind was done by Sherman's troops, who cut a burnt swathe 90 miles wide completely through the CSA.
By contrast, General Robert E Lee was the leader of the CSA troops, in charge of defending the south and attacking the Union.