Date   : Tue, 04 Apr 2006 16:36:31 +0100
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Basic & BBC Basic

Annihilannic wrote:
> Jules Richardson wrote:
> 
>> Maybe the whole industry will just implode in a few years time due to 
>> lack of talent?
> 
> What scares me is how many people in the IT industry now are unaware of
 
> the size of a byte.  To me a megabyte is still a hell of a lot of 
> information.  And here I am looking after systems housing databases of 
> plain old customer and order data that take up 4.5TB, and that's just 5
 
> years worth... it scares me to think how blas=E9 programmers have becom
e 
> about the amount of data they casually throw into a database with no 
> thought as to the expected lifetime of that data, and no automatic 
> processes to clean it up when it's no longer required.

Absolutely. The primary storage is cheap, but little thought is given to
how 
that data can be organised so that people can come back to it in years to
 
come, or how it's maintained, or how it's properly backed up. (look at th
e 
amount of people with several hundred GB hard disks in their desktop mach
ines 
on a single disk and no backups whatsoever!)

> I think that's one good reason why programmers (or potential 
> programmers) should be made to go back to basics (heheh) so that they 
> can learn the value of a byte... and why they shouldn't attach a 4MB 
> .BMP to an email... etc.

At the end of the day though, people are lazy and so if the technology's
there 
which allows them to be wasteful then they're going to use it. How to fix
 that 
problem I have no idea.


>