The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@tsaukpaetra It is! It is you!
returns to a standing position and approaches @Yamikuronue, nudging her knees
Yays!
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scratches @tsaukpaetra behind the ears
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@yamikuronue How is it possible people are pretending to be dogs, and neither Accalia or RaceProUK is involved.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@yamikuronue How is it possible people are pretending to be dogs, and neither Accalia or RaceProUK is involved.
Because @accalia is a fox and @RaceProUK is a hedgehog?
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@blakeyrat !!!=
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@tsaukpaetra said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Because
Also, thread derailment for the purposes of comedic relief.
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@tsaukpaetra said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, thread derailment for the purposes of comedic relief.
Huh. I figured it was comedic relief for the purposes of thread derailment.
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@createdtodislikethis said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@tsaukpaetra said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, thread derailment for the purposes of comedic relief.
Huh. I figured it was comedic relief for the purposes of thread derailment.
Tomato potato. ;)
Though...
Status: My bitch just came and wants me to play with her more...
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@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
In modern software, people require at least some of the following:
- data accessible on multiple devices, by multiple users (members of the organization, customers)
- web interface, working on mobile devices, over unreliable connections
- permission control
- security against hacking
- backups
- guarantee of reliability (that the shop does not charge you 100x the price of product because of a software error)
- polished UI (you should know about that :) )
It would be great to have an environment making these easy to do, but that is a massive project.
Corporations have no motivation to make it, because they get more profit from subscriptions to cloud services. Private developers don't have the power to build something that big.The one place where such tools are being created is game development, for example Unreal Engine with its visual scripting, GUI manager for all your assets, a repository of assets you can import. But the specialization for games makes these not viable for the general case.
That's all quite similar to something I want to make actually, as a more expansive version of what I was looking for here. I'm not sure how
@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
An easily accessible programming environment
would fit in as part of the program, though. Seems more like something that would go with it rather than in it.
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@gurth said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Unfortunately, they seem to have won that battle fairly quickly. Before Outlook and its ilk became popular, I never saw top-replies at all, despite being on several popular mailing lists at the time (100+ messages a day through one was not out of the ordinary, this back in the mid-’90s).
I top post because every damn client is so bad at detecting changes correctly. I hate having to expand the message and guess which reply belongs to whom. This might also be because outlook mangles it for everyone.
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@apapadimoulis said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
The point is, I never could get used to the electronic tools and their inability to bend to my will. I guess there's stuff that is just easier to use with simple combination of pen and paper instead of a fucking computer.
We recently switched all of our company planning to index cards and whiteboards; then we take a picture of it. It's amazing how much easier and functional it is.
Now, of course, I can't email the picture to the team, because some stupid OFfice 2016/365 setting wants us to share the photo with either Delve or OneNote, neither of which seem to work on our Win 10 (Creators Edition??) laptops. So we print the pictures and give to team members. Actually, that's better.
Then, someone else, can write up the notes in a word document, and send it to the team. for now. But printing and handing out is much easier.
Our system works well, but the main issue we have right now is penmanship. I only know how to write legibly in ALL CAPS any more, and some members of the team can't write at all. But I think that's going to be easier to fix than software.
This doesn't really surprise me. The cost of doing the equivalent digitally is relatively expensive because of material cost (big whiteboard screen + artrage or something similarly easy to use), and doing something more than that would necessarily involve more formality and structure, and thus more complicated tooling.
Although...
I wonder how hard it would be to make a program that could convert drawings (as you make them) into formal boxes and lines and lists, with handwriting recognition to convert writing to text, and so on. I think I recall seeing something like this in some Microsoft or Adobe demo video or another, and also in some old video from the 70s or 80s about a pen interface.
Okay, here's the Shaper tool in Adobe Illustrator: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/building-new-shapes-using-shape.html
I can't quickly find the old pen interface video, but I'm pretty sure it used a light pen.And maybe you don't really need a whiteboard. Just everyone has a laptop/tablet with a pen (or touch, maybe) interface, and a way for everyone to view and work on the same drawing. Also put it in front of everyone via projector/front-of-room screen if everyone's in the same room. Concurrency could be handled by some digital equivalent of handing a marker around to people currently viewing/editing the shared document.
I think I'm proving your point rather than countering it. The biggest technological and fiscal holdup - wide access to touch/pen input devices - is now nearly ubiquitous. One would think this is already being worked on, if not already available.
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@adynathos Genexus tries to do all that with relative success. You guys just don't know Genexus.
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Alright. Let me drag some of my lounge topic out in the open because, this is important, dammit.
I am the architect and product lead for WtfFramework, a proprietary development environment and runtime used by WtfCorp to rapidly develop WTFs (actually, event driven workflows).
Once my team has built the applicable reusable "building blocks", a developer strings them together in a proprietary XML dialect that amounts to a scripting language and writes custom SQL for the actual one off parts.
This is a "more usable" iteration on calling a library of building blocks. It was supposed to be a short term stopgap until someone wrote a GUI to assemble these scripts, but the programmers in charge, and their managers all thought that was dumb. Software is for wizards
Until I took over. Against managerial permission, my team has been building a full scale IDE around this fucking thing for a couple years now. It's HARD. But we're getting closer. And I have buy in from my boss. Once we reach feature parity with the written language, there is no reason a BA couldn't do 90% of the stringing-together-building-blocks (their specs already spell it out in exact sequence) and the developers can be reserved for doing the actual one off stuff, thereby making the whole pipeline vastly more efficient.
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@weng and that's what we need. A GUI for stringing together building blocks. Not GUI for making the building blocks - this is pointless because the only people able to use it efficiently would be those who could just as well write it in programming language.
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
A GUI for stringing together building blocks. Not GUI for making the building blocks
LabView?
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@gąska Yes sir.
We have blocks like:
"Copy those files from over there to over there!"
"Run this SQL and make it into an Excel file!"*
"Send this data to an external vendor for change-of-address processing!"
"Hey, run this through that million dollar impenetrable document composition tool!"*
"Hey, run this through that million dollar impenetrable document composition tool and then do the needful integrations to make it go into a print production queue in a factory!"*
"OK, I'm done here, do whatever it is you need to do to wrap things up and pass control to the IBM Mainframe Shitstorm!"
"Put that into the inexplicably expensive document retention and presentment product!"
"Put this CSV into a database table!"
"Run this SQL to do something to that data"*
"The customer is stupid and sends invalid XML, fix it up plz!"
"Validate this XML!"I put a * next to the ones that require specialists to help any random BA. A specialist SQL developer and a specialist document composition person. Very narrow focuses, so if those people don't have to do anything else, they can be VERY effective at that one thing. And a BA with 'enough' SQL knowledge would be very dangerous indeed. BECAUSE...
We've built things on top of SQL Server that help idiotproof SQL development (because even our allegedly professional SQL developers can't be arsed to do it right half the time). A building block runs some user-provided SQL, or generates some based on user inputs. After it's done, it checks out the query plan. It finds an index that should have been there to make it run faster? Because it's being run in an automated context, we know damn well adding an index is going to help performance later. So it fucking adds it right then and there. It checks out your tables. WTF yo, you didn't put a clustered key on that! If it can infer from it's knowledge of our business rules and patterns what the primary key should have been (it's generally called one of like 2 things), it'll do it. It sees you're using looping or a cursor, it looks you up in peoplesoft and sends an email to your boss requesting you be terminated (this is currently disabled in config, but I've been threatening).
Full scale RDBMS's are incredibly heavily optimized products with complexity only really rivaled by operating systems. They have features to tell you exactly what the fuck you're doing wrong. Why the hell isn't there a "I'm not landing space rockets vertically on a robot barge in the Atlantic, take care of that shit for me, bro" feature that we can turn on to make them actually performant without magical indexing incantations for the 80% LOB-CRUD-garbage use case?
Because they are only used by developers, who are often natural complicators who inexplicably love fiddly, obscure trivia and overseen by the sadistic evil cousin of the developer, the DBA.
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@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
That doesn't solve the original problem: getting the user to understand the difference and know which choice to make. Software development is hard because it's about making decisions that require research and forethought. Of course, it doesn't help that the existing tooling is difficult to use, but making the tooling easier to use doesn't make it any easier to make decisions or have foresight.
It also doesn't help that with a lot of people, once they've taken a decision, they won't reverse that decision no matter how wrong their decision is shown to be. They dig themselves into horrible situations and never consider that what they are doing is doomed by a mistake early on, and that they should go back and fix that. Being a good programmer requires mental flexibility and a willingness to throw a piece of the code away for the good of the whole.
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@dkf I usually find the mistake doesn't reveal itself until there isn't time to do anything but work around it's consequences :(
I had an incident of this a bit back when my only choices were spend another month pulling it apart or write a clusterfudge to fix it involving PHP classes being defined dynamically at runtime with eval. Would love to fix, but the current implementation works so no business need to fix.
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
A GUI for stringing together building blocks.
There's lots of those about. For some reason, none seem very good at breaking out of their niche.
Also, scaling up the GUIs involved is quite hard. Small problems can be described easily enough, but large problems end up with so many boxes on the screen that figuring out what the heck is going on is at least as hard as with a standard textual programming language. Which in turn means you need ways of managing the complexity, but the only people who I've ever seen use such complexity management tooling effectively — even in a GUI — have been people who are also quite capable of writing programs the standard way. I'm guessing one of the key skills for being a programmer is being able to easily manage complexity through stuff like hierarchical thinking…
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@arantor said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@dkf I usually find the mistake doesn't reveal itself until there isn't time to do anything but work around it's consequences :(
That's where experience really helps. You get better at avoiding making subtle megabloopers (usually because you've BTDT).
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@apapadimoulis said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
You're supposed to
blockquotescreenshoot to JPEG the entire thing now, come up with a more click-baity title, put alink at the way bottomwatermark logo, and share it on your MEDIUM.FTFY
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@dkf even with the best will in the world, it still happens. Fortunately not so often to me any more, but when it does, ugh.
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@gurth said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
With bottom-replying, the idea is that you delete the bits of the message that you’re not specifically replying to. Together, that makes conversations easy to follow even if you don’t have all the messages to read back (because who had the disk space to keep hundreds of messages a day back then anyway?).
Your post helps prove your point.
And now this post too, as well as the vast majority of posts in this forum and others.It's the style of quote->comment used in blog posts, even.
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@magus said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@e4tmyl33t Still up for it any time, if anyone else wants in there. Tabletop Sim exists, and we could always all buy Action Mahjong off steam :D
So... Where do I sign up for some mahjong action? And/or tabletop action? Was ages since I did either so may be a bit rusty, though...
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@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
For example, my friend tried making avisual representation for C# code:
Beautiful. So much easier to read than
void Main() { for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++){ Console.WriteLine(i); } string str0 = Console.ReadLine(); if( str0 == "Cat" ){ Console.WriteLine("Meow"); } else { Console.WriteLine("No Meow"); } }
or
for i in range(0, 10): print(i) if input() == "Cat": print("Meow") else: print("No Meow")
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@swayde said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I top post because every damn client is so bad at detecting changes correctly. I hate having to expand the message and guess which reply belongs to whom. This might also be because outlook mangles it for everyone.
Yes, it does. Just about every mailer of 20+ years ago would simply indent all of the original message by one level of >’s, and it’d be clear enough who said what. Outlook then suddenly couldn’t be arsed to do that unless you specifically made it, and a lot of mailers have followed that really bad idea.
Even worse is Windows Live Mail, which can’t auto-indent quoted text. There just isn’t even an option to make it do that, I discovered when looking into this (because someone I know sometimes sends me messages with inline replies in all-caps or other ways to show what’s the reply).
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@weng and that's what we need. A GUI for stringing together building blocks. Not GUI for making the building blocks
Something like this, you mean?
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@weng said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
This is a "more usable" iteration on calling a library of building blocks. It was supposed to be a short term stopgap until someone wrote a GUI to assemble these scripts, but the programmers in charge, and their managers all thought that was dumb. Software is for wizards
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@weng and that's what we need. A GUI for stringing together building blocks. Not GUI for making the building blocks - this is pointless because the only people able to use it efficiently would be those who could just as well write it in programming language.
Yep...another instance of taking a particular problem and tackling it, but it requires the difficult work of the non-casual user to make it so.
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@weng and that's what we need. A GUI for stringing together building blocks
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@atazhaia I'll add you on Discord, then, at some point, once I know your userID. We haven't played yet, and I don't know the rules for any variant except the Japanese, and I can't even score that well. The others in the group haven't played, I don't think.
This single-player version on the windows store has the proper rule set, but the UI is in Japanese. Still pretty playable, if you want to refresh your memory.
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@dkf said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
A GUI for stringing together building blocks.
There's lots of those about. For some reason, none seem very good at breaking out of their niche.
Which is not surprising at all, considering how closely tied to the domain these tools have to be in order to make them usable.
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@arantor said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I usually find the mistake doesn't reveal itself until there isn't time to do anything but work around it's consequences
That's my experience too. "Ok this type has 3 variants, but they're all basically the same thing so let's just add one parent type and three children."
(2 months later after 60,000 lines of code)
"Holy hell this would have been much easier if we had just made that three different types from the get-go. Oh well, we're invested now."
(Although in our case it was because the data model in the DB was already settled, and that's harder to change than just PHP classes.)
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@magus said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@atazhaia I'll add you on Discord, then, at some point, once I know your userID. We haven't played yet, and I don't know the rules for any variant except the Japanese, and I can't even score that well. The others in the group haven't played, I don't think.
This single-player version on the windows store has the proper rule set, but the UI is in Japanese. Still pretty playable, if you want to refresh your memory.
Most I played is with that non-translated Touhou one with the superpowers, and one online version where I started to learn how things went but then it fell off my radar months ago and I've probably forgotten most of it by now :/
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
(Although in our case it was because the data model in the DB was already settled, and that's harder to change than just PHP classes.)
Never understand why changing the DB is so hard, but than again. I don't Oracle, so maybe that is why.
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@dragoon said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Never understand why changing the DB is so hard, but than again. I don't Oracle, so maybe that is why.
Because it was populated with HIPAA-covered data and coming up with a move query that was fault-free enough that we could:
- Ensure it could roll-out the same time as the new build of the code within a reasonable (< 1 hour) downtime
- Ensure nobody would have to look at the HIPAA data to debug stuff
Was a very expensive and risky operation for a 45-employee company which relied on only a couple huge clients.
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@dreikin said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
And maybe you don't really need a whiteboard. Just everyone has a laptop/tablet with a pen (or touch, maybe) interface, and a way for everyone to view and work on the same drawing. Also put it in front of everyone via projector/front-of-room screen if everyone's in the same room. Concurrency could be handled by some digital equivalent of handing a marker around to people currently viewing/editing the shared document.
And this is exactly what some clever developer told some idiot product manager --- hey guys we can totally make this. Except, they can't. They will never will be able to. As an industry, we have lost the ability to make basic, usable instant messaging software... what makes you think we'll ever be able to make such a complicated piece of collaboration software?
I guarantee that no one is using those "digital" whiteboards or shared drawing, for anything other than demo purposes. Even the people who write software to run the whiteboard to aren't using it. I'm sure they will work, for the most part, in a demo. But that's enough for TIM COOK, SANTA NUTELLA, SUNDAY PICACHU, etc. to approve for shipping it --- and, from there, it will only get worse in quality as they try to update the software.
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@e4tmyl33t The touhou one is really good!
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@apapadimoulis said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@dreikin said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
And maybe you don't really need a whiteboard. Just everyone has a laptop/tablet with a pen (or touch, maybe) interface, and a way for everyone to view and work on the same drawing. Also put it in front of everyone via projector/front-of-room screen if everyone's in the same room. Concurrency could be handled by some digital equivalent of handing a marker around to people currently viewing/editing the shared document.
And this is exactly what some clever developer told some idiot product manager --- hey guys we can totally make this. Except, they can't. They will never will be able to.
Sure they can. Having not tried any of the stuff I linked, it's possible they already have.
As an industry, we have lost the ability to make basic, usable instant messaging software... what makes you think we'll ever be able to make such a complicated piece of collaboration software?
I suspect it's not so much that the industry has lost the ability as it is that the industry has lost the will. Being open opens up your customers to your competitors. Vendor lock-in gives you a more captive customer base.
I guarantee that no one is using those "digital" whiteboards or shared drawing, for anything other than demo purposes. Even the people who write software to run the whiteboard to aren't using it. I'm sure they will work, for the most part, in a demo.
Maybe, maybe not. That post was rather stream-of-consciousness, and even with having found those I'm not sure it's enough to overcome the advantages of physical media in all cases. It probably does in at least some (collaboration when you're not all in the same room, for example). But part of it is probably also inertia and not catching on to tools that already exist. Lots of good stuff was invented, demoed, and implemented decades ago but only recently has come into fashion, while more good stuff still languishes. And that's not a new phenomenon in our industry.
I'm pretty sure all the technical ability needed to make techtopia is there. It's the will and collaboration that's missing.
But that's enough for TIM COOK, SANTA NUTELLA, SUNDAY PICACHU, etc. to approve for shipping it --- and, from there, it will only get worse in quality as they try to update the software.
The religion threads are
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@dragoon said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
(Although in our case it was because the data model in the DB was already settled, and that's harder to change than just PHP classes.)
Never understand why changing the DB is so hard, but than again. I don't Oracle, so maybe that is why.
It depends on how much you have to change because of the DB change you just made. Surely you can understand that?
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Guess I have been working in Multi-Value to long. There would be few if any, and it could easily be done with a script.
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@weng said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
WtfFramework, a proprietary development environment and runtime used by WtfCorp to rapidly develop WTFs (actually, event driven workflows).
Workflow Transformation Framework?
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@dragoon said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Multi-Value
MultiValue is a type of NoSQL and multidimensional database
:shudders:
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@dragoon said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
(Although in our case it was because the data model in the DB was already settled, and that's harder to change than just PHP classes.)
Never understand why changing the DB is so hard, but than again. I don't Oracle, so maybe that is why.
It depends on how much you have to change because of the DB change you just made. Surely you can understand that?
I'd thought the danger to the data was more significant. If you mess up code, you just fix it and recompile.
If you mess up your data...well, you're screwed if you don't have backups. Depending on your availability requirements, you might be screwed even if you do.
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@boomzilla
You forgot the most fun part, PICK.
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@dragoon said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@boomzilla
You forgot the most fun part, PICK.Dick Pick, a developer at TRW
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@dragoon said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
There would be few if any, and it could easily be done with a script.
You can't make any schema change "easily" while remaining HIPAA compliant. Even if you're using a NoSQL database.
The question becomes, "is the cost of the change worth it?" and it means it has to be pretty goddamned costly until it is.
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@blakeyrat
Yeah, I didn't even think of HIPAA. Hold on, let me grab my 39 & 1/2 foot pole.
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
That's never my issue; mine is always the dreaded "[Message clipped] View entire message". Because that's what I need.
One time I actually bothered to view the email source to find out why it was clipping it so unnaturally early... I mean, really...
This was the contents of the email's "head" tag:
Well whaddaya know, it's too long to post. Fine, I'll upload it...
0_1499796559893_new.txt
(I really hope there's no PII in there...)
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@anotherusername Microsoft. :nodsnods: