Martin's support & responsiveness to correcting issues with QM is
"legend" on this group, and certainly would represent the "Gold
Standard" by which others are judged.

Yesterday we uncovered an "interesting" issue with D3 on a site we had
just upgraded to use SSD drives and latest release of D3 (A100) -
specifically generating system aborts if you had a logon macro that
ran Flash Compiled code, AND the User was set to Auto-Restart on
errors ("R" in attribute 9 of users file) ... and of course if you
actually ran into an error

The issue apparently had been around for some time, but was obscure
enough not to have been noticed (I assume?? ). Anyway, yesterday
morning we reported to TData, along with a test program that
demonstrated the faulty behaviour - they passed onto Tiger Logic, who
recognised the patch, and TODAY patch A102 was released.

I know there is a LOT of history people have with TL/RD/PA/PS, but I
can tell you if this level of responsiveness is representative of the
"New TigerLogic", then things have certainly changed for the better!

Well done & thanks to the team @ TData and TigerLogic

Ross - I'm glad you posted that. I've noticed some major positive
changes at TL over the last couple years but if I talk about them
people think I'm just a surrogate. They're spending a lot of time in
the field with users all over the world, and incorporating feedback
into the product. All I can say there is: keep your eyes and ears
open folks.

Martin Phillips wrote:
I'm thinking out loud here. There are no absolutes and I won't debate
some specific point. I'm just trying to express concepts...

Martin - Major kudos to you for listening to your user/prospect base,
for responsiveness, and for high quality software.

But with all due respect, that DATA option is about 10 lines of simple
code which any MV developer can write in D3 or other platforms. Part
of your niche in the MV market is in being very fast to add those
ditties whenever someone expresses a need. And then you actually tell
people what you did, which is far beyond what we can expect from the
other vendors. But is it really a good thing to keep doing that?

It's a sad statement of our market that many people will prefer to
wait for the MV DBMS providers to add 10 line ditties like this, and
they may do without functionality for years as they pound their chests
about how "it should be included". I'm afraid many of your
enhancements are targeted at that audience, and I don't know if that's
generally a good thing.

Many other MV developers simply write the code and move on - it's not
a problem to be solved and doesn't require vendor intervention. This
is how the rest of the world works.

What happens when the vendor adds functionality like this is that the
DBMS product becomes bloated with conveniences, most of which people
forget. Your mantra later becomes "it's in there". D3 is littered
with conveniences like this too, that most people have forgotten, or
never knew about because they were never documented. PS/RD/TL adds
great functionality all the time that they simply don't document and
they don't have anyone in Marketing (anymore) to tell users how to do
things. QM and other platforms reap the rewards when the vendors
simply tell users what's in their software.

I would maintain that too many conveniences cause the developer/admin
to rely too much on the vendor and to forget about core functionality
which facilitates the creation of these ditties. At some point the
number of convenience functions outweighs the simple core
functionality which supports them. It should be easier to remember
the core functionality than to have to hit the docs to find where that
special little flag is that will do the special function that someone
may only need once per year. In some ways I think this is a
dis-service to the user base, and it just adds more code to the
platform for vendor maintenance.

We pride ourselves, in part, on our ability to easily do anything we
want with the Pick/MV platform, and then over time some people insist
on bloating the platform to the same level of complexity as the
competition. With an equal level of complexity we lose yet another
competitive edge. I'm not suggesting that the DBMS vendors don't add
new features. I'm recommending that they be more judicious, and firm,
about encouraging people to make better use the platform they already
have and appreciate.

Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com
Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products
worldwide, and provides related development services
remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/blog (Latest blogs on Web Services for MV)
Visit PickWiki.com! Contribute!
http://Twitter.com/TonyGravagno

On Jun 24, 4:31*am, Tony Gravagno <c... (AT) users (DOT) invalid> wrote:
Yeah, TL will be visiting us here in the antipodes in July .... a
brave move really - for a long time a "Visit to Oz" was the immediate
precursor to a departure from the company (the last group to visit was
Rick Laurer and Tim Holland)

I think it is a team of 3 this time, including John Bramley - a cut
down version of the conference held earlier this year, and if they are
coming here, I assume they will be visiting UK as well?

Ross Ferris wrote:
I believe there were already sessions in the UK, Spain, and Italy.

I'm only half surprised that there's no public discussion about it.

On 23 June, 23:19, Tony Gravagno <c... (AT) users (DOT) invalid> wrote:
why the fuck anyone would use it

thatswhy

yer all assholes