Are the posted questions getting worse?

  • Grant Fritchey (2/24/2011)


    Ian Scarlett (2/24/2011)


    Does this sort of irritating Spam really work? http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1068979-392-1.aspx

    If I was in the market for one of those, I wouldn't buy from a company that does that sort of thing (spam a SQL forum) on principle.:angry:

    I'd say no, there's no way it works... except that companies keep doing it. Over time, most actions become rational. They must actually get a return on it, however small, or they'd stop after a while.

    Well, I can't click the link to see what sort of spam it was, so someone must have reported it and it was removed. But if it wasn't you that reported it, Ian, feel free to do so in the future when you come across that stuff.

    Brandie Tarvin, MCITP Database AdministratorLiveJournal Blog: http://brandietarvin.livejournal.com/[/url]On LinkedIn!, Google+, and Twitter.Freelance Writer: ShadowrunLatchkeys: Nevermore, Latchkeys: The Bootleg War, and Latchkeys: Roscoes in the Night are now available on Nook and Kindle.

  • Stefan Krzywicki (2/24/2011)


    SQLkiwi (2/24/2011)


    David Benoit (2/24/2011)


    I remember when I took my first programming class, Pascal (Turbo actually)...

    I did a term using Turbo Pascal at University too.

    I remember taking Pascal in college and deciding then and there that I'd never work in IT. : -)

    Wow. Am I really the only person on The Thread that not only took the course, but enjoyed it? Turbo Pascal and Assembly were, IMHO, the two easiest programming courses (aside from Basic) I ever took.

    Brandie Tarvin, MCITP Database AdministratorLiveJournal Blog: http://brandietarvin.livejournal.com/[/url]On LinkedIn!, Google+, and Twitter.Freelance Writer: ShadowrunLatchkeys: Nevermore, Latchkeys: The Bootleg War, and Latchkeys: Roscoes in the Night are now available on Nook and Kindle.

  • OMG, that makes me feel REALLY old. Turbo Pascal hadn't even been invented when I wrote my first commercial program (COBOL) :blink:

    I made a very good living from COBOL for a lot of years. Then I took a course in SmallTalk. Now that was a shock to the system!

  • Brandie Tarvin (2/24/2011)


    Stefan Krzywicki (2/24/2011)


    SQLkiwi (2/24/2011)


    David Benoit (2/24/2011)


    I remember when I took my first programming class, Pascal (Turbo actually)...

    I did a term using Turbo Pascal at University too.

    I remember taking Pascal in college and deciding then and there that I'd never work in IT. : -)

    Wow. Am I really the only person on The Thread that not only took the course, but enjoyed it? Turbo Pascal and Assembly were, IMHO, the two easiest programming courses (aside from Basic) I ever took.

    Well, to be fair, it was a horrible class. The instructor looked like Ed McMahon and sounded like Ed Sullivan. It was taught in a lecture hall with no computers and he wouldn't stop talking about robots in a maze. The lab TA didn't engage the students beyond "I'm here for questions" and there weren't enough terminals in the lab for everyone at the same time. Finding terminal time was a PITA. By the end of the course, you knew how to do little beyond moving a "robot" through a maze and the prof never bothered to explain how any of the things we were learning could be used for anything else.

    I took C++ a few years later and had a much better experience.

    --------------------------------------
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    You ask a glass of water. -- Douglas Adams

  • Ian Scarlett (2/24/2011)


    SQLkiwi (2/24/2011)


    David Benoit (2/24/2011)


    I remember when I took my first programming class, Pascal (Turbo actually)...

    I did a term using Turbo Pascal at University too.

    OMG, that makes me feel REALLY old. Turbo Pascal hadn't even been invented when I wrote my first commercial program (COBOL) :blink:

    Try ALGOL on an Elliott 803 then πŸ˜›

    Although not commercial πŸ™‚

    Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.
    Anon.

  • Ian Scarlett (2/24/2011)


    SQLkiwi (2/24/2011)


    David Benoit (2/24/2011)


    I remember when I took my first programming class, Pascal (Turbo actually)...

    I did a term using Turbo Pascal at University too.

    OMG, that makes me feel REALLY old. Turbo Pascal hadn't even been invented when I wrote my first commercial program (COBOL) :blink:

    I hadn't realized until just now that 'Ten Centuries' was your age, not points rank :w00t:

  • Brandie Tarvin (2/24/2011)


    Wow. Am I really the only person on The Thread that not only took the course, but enjoyed it? Turbo Pascal and Assembly were, IMHO, the two easiest programming courses (aside from Basic) I ever took.

    No, I thoroughly enjoyed it. As I recall, it was a traffic management application. Fun.

  • GSquared (2/24/2011)


    Most won't go that far, but business competition is ... well ... competitive. Sun Tzu's Art of War applies.

    As I get older, I think this isn't true. There is so much business out there, so many companies. No one needs to dominate completely to succeed. Most companies can be wildly successful alongside their competitors.

  • Brandie Tarvin (2/24/2011)


    Tom.Thomson (2/23/2011)


    I don't see much point in attempting obfuscation if the enemy can see inside the database.

    That's a good point, Tom. But is "enemy" a good word choice here? Do businesses really see this as a war?

    I would have said "Eve" or (more likely) "Mallory" instead of "the enemy" if this were a cryptography forum; but in fact it isn't a cryptography forum and too many wouldn't understand what that meant, and anyway "enemy" is perhaps a good word, as the goings on can get pretty nasty (very large sums of money change hands in the form of bribes in industrial espionage; judges pass pretty long sentences; getting hold of code is just another manifestation of teh same thing; and someone else getting hold of your design and undercutting you on price in a jurisdiction where the judiciary is either their friend or for sale can put you out of business - they don't have to service the debt you ran up in the R&D phase of building your business, so they can get to a price at which you can't compete).

    Tom

  • Ian Scarlett (2/24/2011)


    SQLkiwi (2/24/2011)


    David Benoit (2/24/2011)


    I remember when I took my first programming class, Pascal (Turbo actually)...

    I did a term using Turbo Pascal at University too.

    OMG, that makes me feel REALLY old. Turbo Pascal hadn't even been invented when I wrote my first commercial program (COBOL) :blink:

    You should feel old πŸ™‚ My first programming language was Java. Quite easy. The year after I had C and C++. What a difference...

    Need an answer? No, you need a question
    My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
    MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

  • I took Pascal in high school and enjoyed it. It was much better than BASIC, and it prevented some of the mistakes that came about in C and assembly. I think it's a fine language.

    We didn't have turbo pascal until near the end of the year of that class. I still remember being amazed that we didn't have to "watch" the lines being compiled on the screen.

  • What are people's thoughts on whether an update operation on a 10 million row table (a selective update, but probably around 1-2 million rows affected) holding 400,000+ Page locks? Shouldn't it just escalate to a table lock?

    Having some weird behaviour migrating a data warehouse ETL to a 2008 server, it's thowing up some "cannot obtain a lock resource" message every now and again...

    Seems to have very different behaviour in 2005.

    Will try to set up repeatable sample code and make a new thread, just wanted to check it's not a common issue/perfectly normal before doing so... Trying to avoid having to plaster the code with TABLOCK hints...

  • HowardW (2/24/2011)


    Trying to deploy database code to a company and make it unreadable to their DBA's is a recipe for disaster. In the thread in question, the thought the OP had (and he completely ignored everyone who didn't agree with him) was to deploy all the DB code in obfuscated CLR's (as in with Dotfuscator or something), even going as far to say that they'd do the actual work in .Net code and then feed back to the database in order to avoid profiler seeing the logic.

    I guess this would at least achieve the goal of not getting the code stolen as it would be abysmal. I'm with the "trying to hide bad code" camp....

    I think the only real needs to hide it would be like Gail mentioned, if there was some groundbreaking analytical/statistical formulae in there that could be lifted without lifting the code itself, in which case SaaS is the only proper answer.

    In any case, I'd see the risk of tangible theft of intellectual property to be negligible. Businesses don't win significant market share in a sector purely from technical achievement, they also need legitimacy and a client base, which you'll lose getting dragged through the courts for easily provable violations.

    Does putting the servers on the customer's site and giving them limited access constityte SaaS? If so that's what we did at Neos - the customer's DBAs had no access to our databases, and the customer's sysadmins had only limited access to the servers.

    You are wrong about losing legitimacy too; the chances of getting dragged through the courts are fairly low if you are financially less powerful than the other side; it's quite clear that the technical capabilities of courts in (for example) the US are close to NIL, otherwise all those patents with absolutely no inventive step in them would be easily overturned - but it is in fact extremely rare for a US court to instruct the patent office to renew something, because they tend to rely on the (invalid) factoid that the US patent office is technically competent and always conducts a proper search for prior art. Same sort of problems on software copyright - SCO's absolutely ridiculous case took the courts years to bring to a conclusion (at least they got to the right conclusion in the end - but would that have happened if the other side had not been able to afford to wait - while probably suffering severe adverse publicity on account of the other side's counter-allegations - that long for the issue to be settled?). The same applies in Europe to a lesser extent, and in the "developing" world to a greater extent (and often there is also the problem of a corrupt or highly prejudiced judiciary too).

    Tom

  • Brandie Tarvin (2/24/2011)


    Stefan Krzywicki (2/24/2011)


    SQLkiwi (2/24/2011)


    David Benoit (2/24/2011)


    I remember when I took my first programming class, Pascal (Turbo actually)...

    I did a term using Turbo Pascal at University too.

    I remember taking Pascal in college and deciding then and there that I'd never work in IT. : -)

    Wow. Am I really the only person on The Thread that not only took the course, but enjoyed it? Turbo Pascal and Assembly were, IMHO, the two easiest programming courses (aside from Basic) I ever took.

    My trouble when I ran into Pascal was that with a sound knowledge of language design (with particular reference to usability and expressivity) that awful thing made me feel I needed to vomit. If it had been the first computer language I saw my reaction wouldn't have been that strong, because I'd not have spotted most of the things that were wrong with it, but it would probably still have ensured that I never went into computing.

    Tom

  • SQLkiwi (2/24/2011)


    I hadn't realized until just now that 'Ten Centuries' was your age, not points rank :w00t:

    I'm indestructable.

    Hold on, you're probably too young to have seen Captain Scarlet, so you won't have a clue what I'm on about. πŸ˜€

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