[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 @ 00:10 +1000, Robert Rose said:

> And don't even get me started on programmers that have no idea how
> networks work.  I've seen code that retrieves one row from a database
> on the other side of the country each time the user tabs from one
> field to another. "No, the database is fine, the server is fine, the
> peecee is fine, maybe you should look at your code?"

I've seen people write Perl code that fetched rows one at a time.  It's
relatively trivial to bind a database query in Perl so that large
fetches are done which greatly improve performance, and lower network
chatter too.

For that matter, much of the time you don't really need an SQL server.
Flat files, especially indexed, are almost always faster than using SQL.

My suggestion for one big shop was to covert *back* to batch processing
of data files, and use an SQL server that was updated every 24 hours for
ad-hoc stuff.

Most people cannot understand that you rarely need realtime access to
data, especially financial data.  In fact, most of the time not limiting
your queries to dated ranges is an error.

Years ago a suit came to me complaining that our reporting software
was broken.  He showed me two reports that had different answers in
the summary.  I had to explain to him that during the day transactions
occured every few seconds, so the answer would likely be different for
every report if run on the current day.

I also had to tell him that his queries were wrong, since he was only
supposed to look at data from the last and smallest fiscal period, which
for this company was bi-weekly.

He had an MBA.

> One of my university projects was a multi user operating system written 
> in 68000 assembler and running in 8k of RAM.  Damn that was fun, I wish 
> I still had that code on a disk somewhere.

I wish colleges still taught things like that.  I'd love to go back and
work on a project like that.

I think I learned more working on timesharing systems than I ever
learned working on a personal computer.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The object of war is not to die for your
country but to make the other bastard die for his." -- General George S.
Patton]