• Adam (unregistered) in reply to Random

    omg that's embarrassing, don't you know that "safty" if spelt "SAFETY"

  • Mischief (unregistered)

    A tip for any non-programmers. NEVER PAY for software that uses Access. Access is good for only one thing; Allowing people that don't know how to program to create simple data entry apps to integrate with other office products such as Word mail merges and stored values for Excel spreadsheets.

    If you need an application like this, hire some kid fresh out of school to build and maintain it. Having a semi-skilled developer on staff will pay off more than a overpriced crappy software "product".

    Personally I would rather go with MySQL or Postgre if I didn't have the money / need for MSSQL or Oracle.

  • Cheong (unregistered) in reply to anonymous_coder()
    anonymous_coder():
    Ow.

    I wish I had the moxie to charge that much money for utter crap...

    Agreed it's a WTF, but whether it's a crap... for sure it's utterly bad in security considerations, but since it's a "training program", as long as the "training materials" are good enough, it's hardly a piece of crap.

  • EEMac (unregistered) in reply to Ice^^Heat

    Actually, YES. There was a video from blackboxvoting.org showing how easy it was to change the votes. The GEMs tabulator used an Access database on a Windows machine. I don't believe it was password-protected. The lady just opened the database and changed the results. Presto! Democracy solved!

  • Sven (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Ben4jammin:
    Not being a programmer, I would like to know this: Is it THAT difficult to write software for Windows that can be run as just a user and not Power User or Admin?

    Not it isn't, but until XP, you could depend on the user being admin because everyone was anyway, and all your dev tools requried privs, so your dev machine was admin and didn't break when it made adminny assumptions.

    The end result is that the consequences of accidentally doing something stupid like installing keys under HKLM for a normal productivity app had no downside to you.

    Another issue here is the fact that a lot of developers run as Admin all the time. If there was a law that said developers had to be limited users when developing, we'd not have nearly as much trouble as we do now. Devs not being admin means that their apps break immediately if they try to do stupid things.

    Unfortunately, development tools don't always cooperate with this. I know some old versions of Borland C++Builder don't work as admin. Visual Studio works fine for most things, but there's a few things where you have to be an admin (unfortunately, MS seems to be suggesting that running VS as admin full time is a good way to get around those issues; I disagree).

    With Vista, Windows will use file and registry virtualization so that old apps think they can write to Program Files or HKLM but in fact they can't (it's basically the only way to have something like UAC without 95% of existing applications requiring elevation). MS is still strongly pushing developers not to rely on that, of course. As part of this the virtualization will be turned off if an app specifies its requested execution level with a manifest, and 64 bit applications don't support virtualization at all.

  • Garp (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Poltras:
    Still can't figure out why people design pro stuff with Access. Use more than 10 users on the same database and the performance are simply stunned (literally stunned).

    I work for a web hosting firm helping maintain the backend (amongst other products it sells), and this week I've been playing support ping-pong with a ticket bouncing between us and our front line support team regarding a dear customer of ours and database issues they're experiencing. Despite providing a platform with a fully functional, and free, MySQL database system for them to use, this company is using an access DB to drive the back end of a custom ASP based content management system. Fantastic. Get more than a half dozen users on the site or so and the whole thing locks up (due to another limit in Access). heaven forbid that they even try and make changes to the DB (which they do through a web interface, which always screws up. They just won't accept this from us though. I feel sorry for the frontline guys (ignoring the fact that their skill base is pretty poor and I shouldn't have even had to be involved in this) because the customer is giving them all kinds of grief. I suspect a cease and desist letter will be headed out soon!

    Franz Kafka:
    The end result is that the consequences of accidentally doing something stupid like installing keys under HKLM for a normal productivity app had no downside to you.

    Starting with XP, windows as a power user is a lot easier to deal with and MS made a real push to get things working as nonadmin. There are still a lot of custom apps that need that stuff, so we'll be enduring them for a while.

    /programmer

    Old HP scanners required you to be admin, even with their XP drivers and software. I wasn't prepared to have that for our users so we sold on all our old scanners. The version of Visual Studio we were using also had an odd glitch occurring I think relating to help. Thankfully in XP MS had the sense to include the option to give specific user groups specific rights to registry keys so we were able to deal with its issues by making the programming folks able to write to one area of the registry only.

  • csrster (unregistered) in reply to Ben4jammin

    My personal favourite is "Teletubbies Favourite Games", for ages 3 and up. Requires Administrator privilege to run.

  • Mr Steve (unregistered) in reply to protected static
    protected static:
    ha 6 figure access app... now thats funny
    I've personally worked on a 7-figure Access app. It was... special. It was (rightly) held up as a "don't do this" example at a national (US) IT conference.

    You the man :)

    Captcha: pirates !!! arrrgh

  • Mr Steve (unregistered) in reply to Mr Ascii
    Mr Ascii:
    Matt Foley:
    What's worse than safety training? Living in a van... down by the river...

    But seriously, I had a gig where the bozos in charge made us watch the "Fish" video - you know the one, about a fish shop in the pacific northwest, where all the crew are throwing fish at each other, and pretending to be all happy and stuff. It makes me gag just thinking about it. It was supposed to make us be a big happy team. The only thing it did was make us glad we didn't sell fish.

    captcha: stinky (I kid you not)

    A previous employer did the whole Fish nonsense. It was supposed to boost morale by letting the employees have "fun" at work. Except some key management wouldn't attend the training, they rarely budgeted money for it and it wasn't supposed to impact your work.

    We ended up with a "Fish Committee" that was supposed to come up with "fun stuff" to do with our own money. You can't force people to have fun. Some of the stuff employees were already doing on their own got rolled into the whole Fish thing and became boring.

    'We ended up with a "Fish Committee"'

    BAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAA!!!!

  • Merc (unregistered)

    Just for the record, the compatibility tab in XP sports a handy checkbox saying "Run in 640x480 screen resolution" It gets missed quite often, but it's there! Still a WTF that the application won't run on anything higher, however... even before the wide open database mess.

  • Dhericean (unregistered) in reply to It's a Feature
    It's a Feature:
    Dazed:
    Poltras:
    Still can't figure out why people design pro stuff with Access. Use more than 10 users on the same database and the performance are simply stunned (literally stunned).
    Well, it's the number of concurrent users that matters, not the total number of users. And if this database is just used for recording who has completed what, then it has probably rarely got more than a couple of concurrent users.

    I think that's the sum total I can come up with in the way of defence here ...

    I think it's a limit of 5 concurrent users. The number 6 user will simply not be allowed in. I got around this problem once by simply adding a 5 minute inactivity timeout logout process.

    But it really is an absolute idiotic WTF to have a $100,000 client/server multi-user application running with Access as the back-end when the full version of SQL Server is only a few thousand bucks (not to mention more secure).

    Let's get this clear. A solution using MS Access as the back end is NOT client/server (a WTF itself). The only server involved is the file server sharing the MDB files. There is no database server process. The JET engine (MS Access data engine) runs completely on the client machine and use file locks and lock records in a special file to provide isolation.

    This gives many interesting "features".

    1. Entire tables are read over the network to query information rather than just the results passing back - goodbye bandwidth.

    2. Multi-user access to the files can and will result in interesting corruption issues - Access can be an acceptable SINGLE user system.

    3. All security has to be client side as the process must be able to read the entire file.

    This is not to mention the idea of storing passwords in clear in ANY database. Mind you if they think JET is a good database engine they probably think ROT13 is a secure hashing method.

  • (cs) in reply to Matt Foley
    Matt Foley:
    What's worse than safety training? Living in a van... down by the river...

    But seriously, I had a gig where the bozos in charge made us watch the "Fish" video - you know the one, about a fish shop in the pacific northwest, where all the crew are throwing fish at each other, and pretending to be all happy and stuff. It makes me gag just thinking about it. It was supposed to make us be a big happy team. The only thing it did was make us glad we didn't sell fish.

    You too? I though I was the only that had to watch that drivel.

  • Gordon (unregistered) in reply to Ben4jammin

    In response to Ben4jammin: no, it's not THAT difficult to write software for Windows to be run as restricted users. The problem is the "works on my machine" mentality of many crappy code monkeys, where they don't take account of real-world deployment scenarios.

  • mroshaw (unregistered)

    The real WTF here is that the dude bought the thing without checking the system requirements.

  • Asd (unregistered)

    Oracle XE is also free and has a 4GB data limit.

  • TheRealFoo (unregistered)
    It was an Access database sitting on a file share. While that, in and of itself, is not terrible,
    It is not? *shudder*

    At the least, it is a sign of bad design, if any.

  • TheRealFoo (unregistered) in reply to Mischief
    Mischief:
    A tip for any non-programmers. NEVER PAY for software that uses Access.
    good advice.
  • Johnny5 (unregistered) in reply to Ice^^Heat

    Actually, yes. I just watched a great movie (Hacking Democracy - go watch it now, if you value your fundamental freedom to vote) about what a WTF our voting machines are. The data from all the voting machines are stored on a flash memory card. These are collected from several districts to a main tallying station. (I don't remember how many of these main tallying stations there are in each state.) This main tallying station is just a computer hooked up to a card reader. You open the Access program, put in your username and password and it reads the card, and spits out the results. Hmmm, but if you hold shift when you open the database you can change any votes all willy nilly and have your favorite candidate win the election. Oh and they conveniently have a program on the cards themselves that allows you to change the votes directly on the card. Buy a $50 card reader off eBay and Mickey Mouse could be our next president. Talk about all time WTFs. Oh, and our president is pushing for all of our voting machines to be replaced with these "more secure and reliable" electronic voting machines. Find out more at www.blackboxvoting.com

  • Johnny5 (unregistered)

    Sorry that last comment was in reply to Ice^^Heat

    Ice^^Heat:
    Do Diebold Voting machines have Access as an backend??
  • (cs)

    Just to offer a small defense of this software, I've seen a similar client/server configuration for training software before. They generally give you a bunch of interactive flash presentations, then only touch the database at the very end to record your score.

    Access is still inappropriate for an expensive piece of high traffic, commercial software. But it may not be blowing up constantly.

  • IHaveNoName:-( (unregistered)

    They pay a six figures fee for an application without tetsting it first?!

    That's the real WTF!

    Or was it custom made?

  • Rod (unregistered)

    Companies are paying 6 figures for the content, they could almost care less what the delivery mechanism is and the people selling this BS know it.

    Requirements for the client: Works in XP, Doesn't crash more than 60% of the time.

    Requirements for the server: Has a piece called "server" so sales jackasses can tout client/server model and come up with ridiculous Visio diagrams to wow their clients with the "architecture".

    Generally the education partners are not software development shops, are understaffed in the IT department, and the people working at these places in management have no idea what the difference is between a software developer and a network admin.

    During my tenure at one of these training institutions, I was the lead web developer for their website, the lead architect for three "enterprise solutions" (One of which was a six figure POS (piece of shit, not point of sale) CMS, technical support for the sales staff, technical support for the clients using these shitty products, and generally the only one in the company who had any clue how to turn on a computer.

    Hot tip for anyone looking to make a quick buck. Step 1) Start a training company, Step 2) Hire some good sales people Step 3) Hire some good course development people Step 4) Build some shitty software that pushes your training Step 5) Profit

  • Sgt. Preston (unregistered) in reply to GrandmasterB
    GrandmasterB:
    How do I get a gig like that? I can make a piece of crap access app for 100k as well as anyone!

    Though on a serious note, the company should consider a renegotiation on the price, as MS-Access apps are NOT client-server apps, as the progam is appearently advertised.

    Alex didn't say that it was an Access application; he said that it was a client-server application that used an Access database.
  • Sgt. Preston (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    The real WTF is that managers paid 6 figures for this bullcrap. There are some serious PHBs at JFL's workplace.
    Ice^^Heat:
    Do Diebold Voting machines have Access as an backend??

    Of course not!!! You don't want everyone to be able to manipulate the voting tallies.

    You only want Mr. Rove to be able to do that.

    Thanks for that link, AdT. It downloads spyware when you visit it.

  • NateB2 (unregistered)

    Speaking of poorly written training apps, I recall a certain Driver Safety app I installed a couple years ago. This thing was almost 100% Flash based, and yet it took forever to load every single time, complete with multiple progress bars. On a fast computer, it might take five minutes just to arrive at the main screen. That is completely unacceptable, especially with Flash.

  • Sgt. Preston (unregistered) in reply to Mr Ascii
    Mr Ascii:
    A previous employer did the whole Fish nonsense. It was supposed to boost morale by letting the employees have "fun" at work. Except some key management wouldn't attend the training, they rarely budgeted money for it and it wasn't supposed to impact your work.

    We ended up with a "Fish Committee" that was supposed to come up with "fun stuff" to do with our own money. You can't force people to have fun. Some of the stuff employees were already doing on their own got rolled into the whole Fish thing and became boring.

    The beatings will continue until morale improves.

  • (cs) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Ben4jammin:
    Not being a programmer, I would like to know this: Is it THAT difficult to write software for Windows that can be run as just a user and not Power User or Admin?

    Not it isn't, but until XP, you could depend on the user being admin because everyone was anyway, and all your dev tools requried privs, so your dev machine was admin and didn't break when it made adminny assumptions.

    The end result is that the consequences of accidentally doing something stupid like installing keys under HKLM for a normal productivity app had no downside to you.

    Starting with XP, windows as a power user is a lot easier to deal with and MS made a real push to get things working as nonadmin. There are still a lot of custom apps that need that stuff, so we'll be enduring them for a while.

    /programmer

    The problem doesn't stop there. During development you actually need to be an admin in many cases. Got to make changes to your local ISS for testing? Be an admin. Got to set up a new test user on your machine? Be an admin. Need to remove services and replace them? Be an admin.

    As developers we need admin rights far to often and it isn't because of our IDE either. It's all the other things we need to do.

    The problem is that most companies don't take true QA testing seriously. QA Testers should not be running as admin. The applications should be installed then given to the QA team and they should be running as normal users. If there is a separate branch of functionality then you can have SOME testers set up as admin, but make that the minority.

    The problem here isn't the developers, but testing and the attitude the company has towards it. Yes it is easy for a developer to make a mistake that might make the app need admin privileges, but testing should find that and it can be corrected.

  • J.F.L. (unregistered)

    I'm the story submitter here.

    There were a couple of facts wrong/missing from the story.

    It didn't cost 6-figures. It was 4-figures -- but yes, most of that goes to the copyrighted media content and not for the programming.

    The software was ultimately chosen because frankly there are not a lot of options out there. We needed something that would be a complete package that could test and score hundreds of employees. The Health and Safety Specialist and I chose it because he had used it before at a different site.

    We also chose it because the sales rep told us it could run on a server, among other things. Running on a server turned out to mean hosting the access database on our file server. I did mention I have to install the actual program on every single person's computer?

    We desperately needed something/anything in order to stay within OSHA compliance. I don't know anything about the requirements, so that's why I let the Health and Safety guy to decide.

    Despite everything, it's actually quite an upgrade from our old system which had suddenly died. The old system was running on a 486 installed under NT which no one had admin passwords for anymore. It wasn't even networked. Our HR used to take a floppy disk, and copy the CSV file it generated so she can open it in excel.

  • (cs) in reply to J.F.L.
    J.F.L.:
    Our HR used to take a floppy disk, and copy the CSV file it generated so she can open it in excel.

    This is a story I wouldn't mind hearing about. Since she was part of the processing was she properly debugged? Did she get approved during User Acceptance Testing? Were all of her interface points properly checked for overflow problems?

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to Matt Foley
    Matt Foley:
    What's worse than safety training? Living in a van... down by the river...

    But seriously, I had a gig where the bozos in charge made us watch the "Fish" video - you know the one, about a fish shop in the pacific northwest, where all the crew are throwing fish at each other, and pretending to be all happy and stuff. It makes me gag just thinking about it. It was supposed to make us be a big happy team. The only thing it did was make us glad we didn't sell fish.

    Oh yes, I remember that fscking video. We were forced to watch it at a previous job. By the end we were all in so much of a foul mood, that we heckled the consultant doing the presentation. Eventually we demanded management tell us how much money had been wasted on this "team building" exercise, especially as we'd received no bonus that year.

  • phishtrader (unregistered)

    If this is the software I'm thinking it is, I currently support it (along with about forty other apps) via the third party that produces training material for the software and resells both the developers courses as well as our own. Part of the deal is that we also provide technical support for the software.

    The software was previously known as Iprax, but is now known as CourseWorks and is produced by a company called Marcom. Many of the courses were initially developed in the heyday of the CD-ROM craze in the 90s. That's why the resolution is so poor; the courses were intended to run on Windows 3.1 machines and now there is considerable inertia against re-authoring the courses to update them for newer computers. It would cost a fair amount of money to re-shoot the video footage or re-encode if the archived footage is still usable as much of it was shot in the 1990s. Any of the new courses then would be incompatible with existing installations.

    I've supported versions 3.2, 4.0.5, and now 5. Versions 3 and 4 both used an Access database as the backend. The database is password protected by the developer, we do not have access to it. Certainly crackable, but secure enough to keep your forklift drivers from messing around with Access in the database.

    Version 5 uses the SQL Server Desktop Engine and supposedly can be used in conjunction with SQL Server 2005, but I have not seen instructions on how this is set up nor tried it on my own. Versions 3 through 5 have worked on Windows XP SP2 for as long as I know. Early versions of 3 may not have, but that would have been in 2003 or earlier.

    End users do need to have read and modify access to the directory that contains either the mdb file (v3 and 4) or mdf file (v5) or else the application will not work. The database is used to do a minimal amount of recordkeeping, basically tracking students' answers to questions and their progress. The program doesn't generate a significant amount of traffic for database accesses when run across a network, especially when compared to the hundreds of megabytes of video files that make up the course material itself.

    That the OP's company spent so much is a bit incredulous. The courses themselves are $350 to $495; you get a volume discount for purchasing more courses. The CourseWorks software is usually thrown in for free with the purchase of a course. There are additional license files to purchase if you wish to have multiple students accessing the system at one time and each course is only licensed for access by one student at a time unless additional course licenses are purchased and installed. I'm not familiar with the pricing for these additional licenses, but cost less than the courses themselves do.

    Basically, $100,000 purchases A LOT, at least from the reseller that I work for. The software and courses are actually pretty cheap. When you get into this market, you aren't paying for software, you're paying for content. The CourseWorks software is a better deal for a small company that can't afford anything else. Especially, if they need to do some legally mandated safety training and simply have no other options. Comparable Internet-based options without full motion video run $500 per student. With CourseWorks, $500 lets you train as many students as you wish, one at a time.

  • Garp (unregistered) in reply to J.F.L.
    J.F.L.:
    It didn't cost 6-figures. It was 4-figures -- but yes, most of that goes to the copyrighted media content and not for the programming.

    Bah.. 6 figures sounds so much more dramatic! You ruined all his hard work in altering the story to seem more unbelievable.

  • (cs)

    Ah, the good old purchase-without-evaluation practice. Always wins.

  • phishtrader (unregistered) in reply to J.F.L.
    J.F.L.:
    We also chose it because the sales rep told us it could run on a server, among other things. Running on a server turned out to mean hosting the access database on our file server. I did mention I have to install the actual program on every single person's computer?

    If you bought it from JJ Keller (Friday's my last day), I can understand that. Our sales reps are mostly clueless when it comes to software. Most of them sell not only software, but about 6000 other products, most of them are not software. As a result, they don't know what they're talking about. Nobody in our tech support dept would have referred to the software as a client/server application. Older version are "network aware" and the most recently available version does require a machine to be designated as the server in a multi-user installation.

    Every version that I've supported does require that the application be installed on every PC in a multi-user installation. However, the most minimal installation consists of creating shortcuts and writing three lines to the win.ini file, the executables are left on the "server".

  • S|i(3_x (unregistered) in reply to discordia
    discordia:
    we've got an app based on access that's probably cost us a seven figure amount over the years. it is seriously bad, dependent on outdated dlls, values apparently defined in config files but just for fun hard-coded once or twice. it's known to corrupt its databases regularly. i once caught a glimpse of a part of the source-code, and scrolled through hundreds of lines without a single comment.

    everybody knows and agrees that it's bad, from top management through the it-department all the way to the lowly data-entry monkeys. but there's no replacement on the market, and we've done the research, including industrial espionage at our competitors (they've attempted the same with us). and nobody is willing to invest the funds necessary to build a replacement, and running the risk that it /might/ not work... so the situation is just getting worse. (and the salary of those of us who know how to maintain the beast keeps rising :P )

    What does this software do? I'm sure there're a number of devs trolling this site that could produce a much better product using modern tools.

  • (cs) in reply to S|i(3_x
    S|i(3_x:
    discordia:
    we've got an app based on access that's probably cost us a seven figure amount over the years. it is seriously bad, dependent on outdated dlls, values apparently defined in config files but just for fun hard-coded once or twice. it's known to corrupt its databases regularly. i once caught a glimpse of a part of the source-code, and scrolled through hundreds of lines without a single comment.

    everybody knows and agrees that it's bad, from top management through the it-department all the way to the lowly data-entry monkeys. but there's no replacement on the market, and we've done the research, including industrial espionage at our competitors (they've attempted the same with us). and nobody is willing to invest the funds necessary to build a replacement, and running the risk that it /might/ not work... so the situation is just getting worse. (and the salary of those of us who know how to maintain the beast keeps rising :P )

    What does this software do? I'm sure there're a number of devs trolling this site that could produce a much better product using modern tools.

    I know I could, but I wouldn't based off of one statement... "nobody is willing to invest the funds necessary to build a replacement" I don't work for free. Let's let the support team go up to 7 figures a year first.

  • Ben (unregistered) in reply to Mr Ascii

    I worked for a company that did the fish market thing as well. A few days later, one of the other guys I worked with brought in a 3-4 foot long plush fish. You never knew when a giant stuffed fish was about to come flying over your cubicle wall and hit you in the face.

    That actually was kind of fun.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Sgt. Preston
    Sgt. Preston:
    Thanks for that link, AdT. It downloads spyware when you visit it.

    When I visit it, it doesn't, otherwise I wouldn't have posted the URL. But I'm using Firefox with NoScript. Would you care to explain what kind of spyware you are experiencing?

  • Jim Bob (unregistered) in reply to KattMan

    I debugged her, right in her butt, she's a ho

    captcha: stinky, just like my junk when i got done with her

  • Ross Presser (unregistered)

    Truth is, you DON'T need access installed for this to be a problem. A DA (determined asshole) can use nothing more then NOTEPAD.EXE, CSCRIPT.EXE, and some easily written ADO code to access your Access database.

    And XP SP2 started coming with .NET, with builtin OLEDB and SQLClient classes, making it even friendlier.

  • J.F.L. (unregistered) in reply to phishtrader

    We used to use IPRAX, that was the old training system that we replaced.

    When our old computer died, I couldn't find any information on the company. Everything led me to believe the company went under. That's why we looked for another program.

  • (cs) in reply to Matt Foley
    Matt Foley:
    What's worse than safety training? Living in a van... down by the river...

    But seriously, I had a gig where the bozos in charge made us watch the "Fish" video - you know the one, about a fish shop in the pacific northwest, where all the crew are throwing fish at each other, and pretending to be all happy and stuff. It makes me gag just thinking about it. It was supposed to make us be a big happy team. The only thing it did was make us glad we didn't sell fish.

    captcha: stinky (I kid you not)

    I watched that one as well. Within a couple of months my team got told off for making too much noise, despite the fact that we also had a very high productivity record. Sometime later, PHB made the mistake of showing us Who Moved All the Cheese (or whatever it's called). This time the team (all three of us) just left the company. There are limits.

  • (cs) in reply to Random

    The real WTF is that people who work on a computer all day can't spell words they saw right in the text they're replying to.

  • Crusoe (unregistered)

    The "Fish Video" was filmed here in Seattle, it's based on the fish seller in the market that puts on a little show by throwing a fish out, and then on the 4th throw, pretending to lose it. Also, when a customer orders, they toss the fish over the counter to the packer.

    Mainly, it just blocks up the aisle because all the tourists stop and gawk.

  • Matt (unregistered)

    TimeRec, a time recording app, does the same - all data is stored in a central Access database to which every user must have full r/w privs. Do I need to mention that the database contains all kinds of personal information?

  • (cs) in reply to Rod
    Rod:
    Companies are paying 6 figures for the content, they could almost care less what the delivery mechanism is and the people selling this BS know it.

    Requirements for the client: Works in XP, Doesn't crash more than 60% of the time.

    Requirements for the server: Has a piece called "server" so sales jackasses can tout client/server model and come up with ridiculous Visio diagrams to wow their clients with the "architecture".

    Generally the education partners are not software development shops, are understaffed in the IT department, and the people working at these places in management have no idea what the difference is between a software developer and a network admin.

    During my tenure at one of these training institutions, I was the lead web developer for their website, the lead architect for three "enterprise solutions" (One of which was a six figure POS (piece of shit, not point of sale) CMS, technical support for the sales staff, technical support for the clients using these shitty products, and generally the only one in the company who had any clue how to turn on a computer.

    Hot tip for anyone looking to make a quick buck. Step 1) Start a training company, Step 2) Hire some good sales people Step 3) Hire some good course development people Step 4) Build some shitty software that pushes your training Step 5) Profit

    No, that can't possibly be right. Where are the underpants?
  • Bad Programmer (unregistered)

    I just want to cry... why can't I ever find a sucker like this to sell my awful stuff to??

  • Jasmine (unregistered)

    And that's why all software should be $49.95. There is no excuse for making people think their software is worth anything more than that. Get it right, sell it cheap, and get a 6 figure number of users. Every software I have used in this price range has the same problem... the developers expect that since people are paying a million bucks for it, they won't mind a million hours of labor to figure it out.

  • Maz (unregistered) in reply to Ice^^Heat

    Yep. They use an MDB file... and the MDB holds "count" values too. Guess someone was too lazy to use the SQL Count function. It allows a great hack of "resetting" a machine, then changing the counts at the beginning to create an offset. STOOOOPID!!!

  • (cs) in reply to Dhericean
    Dhericean:
    This is not to mention the idea of storing passwords in clear in ANY database. Mind you if they think JET is a good database engine they probably think ROT13 is a secure hashing method.
    Don't be silly, it's much more secure to use quadruple ROT13. That's like FOUR times the security, man!

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