• (cs) in reply to .
    .:
    Call these incompetents out as you see them. This is LEAP legal software http://www.leap.com.au/
    hehe Russell Cocks...

    http://www.leap.com.au/about/testimonials.htm

  • Boogie (unregistered)

    You called it....

    When push came to shove....

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to He who is not to be named (aka zunesis)
    He who is not to be named (aka zunesis):
    Rawr:
    It's pretty sad that I'm 23 and I'm The One that gets the references. Fools.
    A young fella, huh? So, uh.... what's up?
    Call that young? In IT you might as well have grown up on Algol if you're that old....
  • Walt (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus

    Clipper in turn was the compiled clone of dBase III.

    I wrote one thing in Clipper in 1991. It worked pretty well for the little in-house database app but I would never have considered using it for something we were actually selling.

    If I remember correctly FoxPro was a "better" dBase III clone, ultimately purchased by Microsoft and turned into a "Visual" product.

    They probably wrote this thing in FoxPro years ago and have been updating it and porting it to incrementally later versions. Or maybe they're still using an old FoxPro version.

    I wonder if it works in 64-bit Windows.... 16-bit apps don't.

    None of the dBase programs/languages supported transactions so far as I know. Relational yes, transactional no.

  • (cs)

    I work for this company, but not on this product. I knew it was only a matter of time before they showed up here.

  • Ormond (unregistered)

    "Special" is a lame tab title. They should have called it the "JUMP to conclusions" tab.

  • (cs)

    Oh btw, it's written in 4D, not FoxPro. The sales rep response is no surprise to me.

  • Slicerwizard (unregistered) in reply to Ed
    Ed:
    Remy, you disappoint!
    Au contraire. Remy served up "secretaries and parallegals (sic)" along with "This lead (sic) to a series of meetings". Top notch, as always.
  • b0b g0ats3 (unregistered) in reply to Walt
    Walt:
    Clipper in turn was the compiled clone of dBase III.

    I wrote one thing in Clipper in 1991. It worked pretty well for the little in-house database app but I would never have considered using it for something we were actually selling.

    If I remember correctly FoxPro was a "better" dBase III clone, ultimately purchased by Microsoft and turned into a "Visual" product.

    They probably wrote this thing in FoxPro years ago and have been updating it and porting it to incrementally later versions. Or maybe they're still using an old FoxPro version.

    I wonder if it works in 64-bit Windows.... 16-bit apps don't.

    None of the dBase programs/languages supported transactions so far as I know. Relational yes, transactional no.

    Yes, Visual FoxPro 9.0 runs in Windows 7 x64. Very slowly.

    Yes, VFP supports transactions, if you use database containers (DBCs).

    The only productive way to use VFP was to write the frontend and use a real DBMS on the backend which was very easy to do using SQL passthrough.

    I worked on property & casualty insurance company software back in the 90s that was written in VFP. On the first attempt we tried to use FoxPro's integrated data engine and it was epic fail once the system was under load. Convinced management to spring for MSSQL and rewrote the data layer, everything was beautiful. Except for the part where you had to convert decimal to string back to decimal and perform math on them during the conversion back to decimal, otherwise you'd get weird rounding errors.

  • Happy (unregistered)

    Personally I believe any piece of software that makes the life of lawyers less pleasant must be good.

    It's probably deliberately bad.

  • (cs) in reply to Jim
    Jim:
    He who is not to be named (aka zunesis):
    Rawr:
    It's pretty sad that I'm 23 and I'm The One that gets the references. Fools.
    A young fella, huh? So, uh.... what's up?
    Call that young? In IT you might as well have grown up on Algol if you're that old....

    Algol 60 or 68?

    No, get real, the serious old-timers are Coral-66 fiends.

  • (cs)

    What's a parallegal? Is that, like, the opposite of an orthogonegal?

  • Mayhem (unregistered) in reply to Anonymouse

    It is the practice of throwing multiple lawyers at the same problem, in the hope of generating more money and/or hot air.

  • Anonymous Cow-Herd (unregistered) in reply to b0b g0ats3
    b0b g0ats3:
    I worked on property & casualty insurance company software back in the 90s that was written in VFP. On the first attempt we tried to use FoxPro's integrated data engine and it was epic fail once the system was under load. Convinced management to spring for MSSQL and rewrote the data layer, everything was beautiful. Except for the part where you had to convert decimal to string back to decimal and perform math on them during the conversion back to decimal, otherwise you'd get weird rounding errors.
    I feel your pain, bro. I was tasked with maintaining a VFP system for a financial client. An interesting "feature" was that most of the code was stuffed into form controls - anywhere that automatic printing was called for (e.g. a batched report), the code would load the print dialog, make it invisible, fill text boxes with the appropriate data, then press the "Print" button. This system also had a Web gateway, for some reason I never really figured out (it allowed their clients to view their collection instructions along with their current status, and nothing more). I was given the job of rebuilding said gateway. One of the feature requests was to show the information in pages - except the ODBC driver didn't seem to have any way of returning a limited number of results without first getting the entire result set. Thankfully, shortly after that my three-month probation came up, so I took the opportunity to make a clean break.
  • Someone who can't be bothered to login from work (unregistered) in reply to method1
    method1:
    Is VisualFoxPro like Access? I've never used it, but their implementation sounds like the sort of dodgy ISAM db that gets corrupted & you have to manually re-key it periodically & it takes ages.

    Wikipedia says it's "a data-centric object-oriented and procedural programming language". Its lineage is from dBase and that's what format its data files are - we still get a dBase file spat at us from one of our data sources, because they're still using something written in VFP.

    Microsoft no longer actively develop it - it hasn't seen an update since 2007, it seems. They've also pretty much said they're never releasing a new version, because it would entail moving to 64-bit capable code, which would require an entire ground-up re-write, which isn't worth their time.

    Basically it's one of many left overs from before SQL based RDBMSs were more commonly used outside of large corp back end data stores.

    I mean dBase still has a place as a solution to store application data which doesn't need to be read or written by more than one thing at a time, but most people have gone over to using things like SQLite for things like that, because it uses a query language they're more used to now.

  • Sock Puppet #5 (unregistered) in reply to Jim
    Jim:
    In IT you might as well have grown up on Algol if you're [23 years old]
    Algol? Isn't he the superhero who invented the Internet?
  • Ben F (unregistered)

    As a VFP (Visual FoxPro) coder earlier in my career I can tell you the problem with the system was not VFP. Just like any other tool, it doesn't prevent morons from making a bad design. Please refrain from blaming bad design on the tool. How many times have we seen terrible Microsoft Access applications? That doesn't mean that Microsoft Access is terrible, just that the designers of the application were terrible.

  • Someone who can't be bothered to login from work (unregistered) in reply to Sock Puppet #5
    Sock Puppet #5:
    TFC:
    Remy's Law of Software: If the product is, in any way, described as an "enterprise" product, it is a giant piece of garbage.
    What about the ones without a bloody A B C D or E?

    /obscure?

    That's hardly obscure. Still one of my favourite scenes in TNG though, it's quite tear jerking, in its way.

  • Troll food (unregistered) in reply to Ben F
    Ben F:
    As a VFP (Visual FoxPro) coder earlier in my career I can tell you the problem with the system was not VFP. Just like any other tool, it doesn't prevent morons from making a bad design. Please refrain from blaming bad design on the tool. How many times have we seen terrible Microsoft Access applications? That doesn't mean that Microsoft Access is terrible, just that the designers of the application were terrible.

    It's the other way around, Access has so many limits (at least the old versions, I don't know about new ones) that intentions of good software design will eventually bump into these limits as the application grows, thus forcing the devs into ugly workarounds or bad practices that will end up here, where people say "WTF? Ha, I get it, it's Access!".

    So Access has flaws that no designer/developer will be able to correct. If anyone, the managers are to blame for choosing Access as a software development tool.

    As for VFP, I have no idea, I don't know it at all.

    Captcha: abigo, a friend with a cold.

  • Anonymous Cow-Herd (unregistered) in reply to Ben F
    Ben F:
    As a VFP (Visual FoxPro) coder earlier in my career I can tell you the problem with the system was not VFP. Just like any other tool, it doesn't prevent morons from making a bad design. Please refrain from blaming bad design on the tool. How many times have we seen terrible Microsoft Access applications? That doesn't mean that Microsoft Access is terrible, just that the designers of the application were terrible.
    While it's true that morons can come up with bad designs and poor code in VFP, there's very little there to encourage good designs. Some of its OO is a bit crazy - for instance, you can specify that given properties and methods are public and others are private, but you can't really change this for pre-existing PEM, and for the ones you can set it doesn't bother enforcing it because fuck encapsulation. Then instead of properly subclassing your UI you end up making all your custom controls a subclass of "Control" because it's the only way to properly hide them. Then let's not forget that every form is actually a dBase table, and can be opened and modified as a table, as are your custom control libraries.

    Invariably, most applications you end up supporting are sprawling tentacled monstrosities that have grown over the course of several years. On one system I supported, someone at the client said "Oh, we do that on the DOS system" - they weren't kidding, it was a FoxPro 2.0 app written in-house with a copyright notice that read "(c) Initrode Ltd 1992".

  • (cs) in reply to Sock Puppet #5
    Sock Puppet #5:
    Jim:
    In IT you might as well have grown up on Algol if you're [23 years old]
    Algol? Isn't he the superhero who invented the Internet?
    No, you're thinking of All Gaul, the superhero beaten by the Romans. Thus setting a precedent for future millenia.

    (Note Snopes http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp.)

  • Labias and Gentialia, it's ZUNESIS!!! (unregistered) in reply to Jim
    Jim:
    He who is not to be named (aka zunesis):
    Rawr:
    It's pretty sad that I'm 23 and I'm The One that gets the references. Fools.
    A young fella, huh? So, uh.... what's up?
    Call that young? In IT you might as well have grown up on Algol if you're that old....
    I'm more concerned with stamina and naivete than that nerd shit. Now stop ruining the mood!
  • (cs)

    JUMP software doesn't exist. But the question is why? If they can't even build a proper software product, how are they going to be able to sue the hell out of thedailtwtf.com?

  • Rich D (unregistered)

    I use Foxpro everyday. Foxpro is actually quite excellent when you have a good programmer. We've built an entire in house CRM and ERP system with it. If the system crashes, it due to a bad programmer or code, not Foxpro.

  • Tangurena (unregistered) in reply to Machtyn
    Machtyn:
    3 state boolean!

    I see two possibilities here: True, False, Maybe.
    True, False, Disappoint.

  • Lucent (unregistered) in reply to Rich D
    Rich D:
    I use Foxpro everyday. Foxpro is actually quite excellent when you have a good programmer. We've built an entire house of cards with it. If the system crashes, it due to a bad programmer or code, not Foxpro.
    Fixed.

    Although, seriously, I don't know anything about foxpro, just jumping on the bandwagon as is required by standards conformance.

  • (cs) in reply to PedanticCurmudgeon
    PedanticCurmudgeon:
    Who is Eddie and why should we care whether or not he likes unicorns?
    You (Really) Got Me.
  • (cs)

    There's this awesome piece of software we have to use at work, called Wartman. UI looks ever worse than your average Foxpro app, the translation is definitely Englisch, not English, and it features such a sweet features as a huge button on the front page that'll cause it to dump the whole queue of maintenance checklists (for many, many years forward) onto the printer without confirmation. And then clear the queue.

    http://www.maintenance-live.com/web/de/wm-wikipedia.htm

    At the end of this link there's some screenshots; the English link at top will have others. The site is a WTF with frames, blocked rightclick, and other best design practices from '95... the app is even worse.

    Oh yeah, and the client-server version works by installing the "server copy" and license on a network share, that all the clients use. Whenever you install updates, you need to edit each client's config file to point to the local database that was created during install; if you'll run updater on a client connected to the server, you better have backups. I love how the manual says "It should be safe, but don't ever try it."

  • (cs) in reply to cconroy

    An unregistered poster up-thread named Ed who complained.

  • BillClintonsThirdTerm (unregistered) in reply to Machtyn
    Machtyn:
    a. geek:
    I get up, UP! and nothing gets me down! (except of course, the lack of error handling, weird data types and general pointlessness of the program!)

    You just gotta rooollll with the exceptions, to get to what's real (or was that supposed to be int? boolean? anyone?)

    3 state boolean!

    VB to the rescue!

    Dim _bln as Boolean?

  • (cs)

    "...I'll wait for you to guess which happened more often...."

    You say that, but you didn't wait at all... just kept right on going.

  • (cs)

    "the developers had actually gone so far as to add a "Force Exit" option to the main menu. "

    They got the idea from Zapnotes.

  • (cs) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    My boss says FoxPro is like something called Clipper...and I'm not old enough to know what Clipper is.

    Clipper was the best DOS-based DB-oriented app development language ever... right before GUIs conquered the world. Sort of like being the best blacksmith in the land at the advent of the automobile. They tried to adapt, bless 'em, but once CA bought them all hope was lost.

  • Schol-R-LEA (unregistered) in reply to Walt
    Walt:
    I wrote one thing in Clipper in 1991. It worked pretty well for the little in-house database app but I would never have considered using it for something we were actually selling.
    On my first quasi-professional programming project (e.g., I was being paid for it, but it was part of another job I already had), I was asked to write a Point Of Sale system in FoxPro. The MS-DOS version. This was in 1996.

    That was the least of the problems in this project. The whole sorry mess can be seen here for those with a morbid curiosity for small-scale software project failures.

    In the end, the program was indeed a POS. Which has nothing to do with point-of-sale processing.

  • Ted (unregistered)

    C'mon Dave Gimme a Break

  • Ted (unregistered) in reply to SQLDave

    Cmon Dave, Gimme a Break

  • (cs)

    I once worked for a tiny publishing company that was still in the prehistoric times as far as software. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 or Windows ME (yes, you read that right. All the customer service PCs were WinME, thank god they weren't connected to the internet!). The entire company was run on FOXPRO 2.6 (that would be the Win 3.1 version), including some programs that were DOS-based and ran on Windows 95. I think I had one of the few Windows XP computers, with a princely 512MB of RAM. This was in 2006 BTW. And, of course, any suggestion to upgrade was met with laughs because, as we all know, software and modern PCs cost a lot while using stuff that has worked for years is 100% free.

    This article reminds me of that nightmare. Going to worke very day there was terrible, the "IT Department" was like a retirement home.

  • *sigh* (unregistered)

    [quote user="Some Idiot]As fairly as possible," the sales rep said with a lawyerly smile- full of teeth and bits of his victims. "We won't let one big customer like yourself drive all of the new features, so we're going to take all the ideas we get from customers, put them on slips of paper, and draw them out of a hat. It's the fairest way to decide.[/quote]

    ... and that's when I shot him, Your Honor.

  • *sigh* (unregistered) in reply to *sigh*

    Well, I feel stupid.

    Some Idiot:
    As fairly as possible," the sales rep said with a lawyerly smile- full of teeth and bits of his victims. "We won't let one big customer like yourself drive all of the new features, so we're going to take all the ideas we get from customers, put them on slips of paper, and draw them out of a hat. It's the fairest way to decide.

    ... and that's when I shot him, Your Honor.

  • (cs) in reply to Someone who can't be bothered to login from work
    Someone who can't be bothered to login from work:
    Sock Puppet #5:
    TFC:
    Remy's Law of Software: If the product is, in any way, described as an "enterprise" product, it is a giant piece of garbage.
    What about the ones without a bloody A B C D or E?

    /obscure?

    That's hardly obscure. Still one of my favourite scenes in TNG though, it's quite tear jerking, in its way.

    Of course, he blew the line. At the time, E didn't exist.

    "There have been five ships with the name Enterprise. Please specify by registry number."

    "NCC 1701. No bloody A, B, C, OR D."

    Of course, the new pre-ST:TOS/ST:TNG history even makes that inaccurate due to the first Enterprise with Captain Archer.

    The truly pedantic dickweed will point out that there is a space shuttle Enterprise. However, since it wasn't part of the Federation, one could argue that it doesn't count.

  • (cs)

    ...we'll hold a lottery.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    omg, the despair is making me use gotos! goto cliff

    cliff: jmp 0xFFFFFFFF

  • Coyote (unregistered) in reply to PedanticCurmudgeon

    I guess you guys aren't ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.

  • Ghost of Nagesh (unregistered) in reply to Walt
    Walt:
    Clipper in turn was the compiled clone of dBase III.

    I wrote one thing in Clipper in 1991. It worked pretty well for the little in-house database app but I would never have considered using it for something we were actually selling.

    If I remember correctly FoxPro was a "better" dBase III clone, ultimately purchased by Microsoft and turned into a "Visual" product.

    They probably wrote this thing in FoxPro years ago and have been updating it and porting it to incrementally later versions. Or maybe they're still using an old FoxPro version.

    I wonder if it works in 64-bit Windows.... 16-bit apps don't.

    None of the dBase programs/languages supported transactions so far as I know. Relational yes, transactional no.

    I wonder who's feeding you that crap. All my 16 bits are working in 64 bit OS.

  • (cs)

    Used to code on FoxPro 2.5, back in the days before they stuck the "Visual" name in it. Back when PCs had 8MB RAM and "Database" meant "DBase III", FoxBase+, which turned into FoxPro was a pretty good cost-efficient solution. It could actually build real executables (prog.exe) and 2.5 built nice-looking Windows apps.

    And it is infinitely much better than that atrocity called Visual Basic!

    That said, I stopped using FoxPro sometime during college. SQL Databases were much better, and I could actually get to use 'em for free by then...

    Addendum (2011-08-30 20:32): Oh, someone mentioned it already:

    Basically it's one of many left overs from before SQL based RDBMSs were more commonly used outside of large corp back end data stores.
    Oh so very right.
    I mean dBase still has a place as a solution to store application data which doesn't need to be read or written by more than one thing at a time
    That was dBase. FoxPro actually had a clever locking system; you could open a table in EXCLUSIVE or SHARED mode. The second one would actually LOCK and UNLOCK data rows when you edited/saved them, so it could actually cope with a multiuser environment. Something that Access can't cope with. Maybe MS hated Fox Technologies, FoxPro never really improved after 2.5, and that one was mostly developed before MS bought Fox.
  • (cs)

    I would have gutted these mother fuckers.

  • (cs) in reply to danixdefcon5

    Microfuck buying FP was yet another travesty perpetuated by this insult to the universe. It would have been fucking awesome to see what FP would have evolved into. SQL Server is just now growing up for god's sake.

  • (cs) in reply to SQLDave

    My grandfather was enthralled with FoxPro. As a kid I used to play with FoxPro converting data and what not. Supporting Word Perfect 5.1, running FoxPro, those were the days. Missed by many, never to be known by even more. I used to take text files from an old program called TIM (Total Information Management) and pull them into FoxPro. My grandpa and I spent soooo much money buying programs and playing, my grandma threw numerous fits (she ran the business). As a 14 year old I refused to use Windows to write programs because I had to use their APIs which did everything for me, absurd. I always wanted to build everything from scratch (stubborn teenagers). I'm sorry to say it was a time and a way many will never know--I feel sorry for them.

  • Axel (unregistered)

    Remy, I'm fine with the corny song titles. I don't even mind the unicorns. But fer God's sake, learn how to spell "led"! It's only 3 letters, fer fuck's sake! Yeah, yeah, I know the drill: it's free entertainment, don't visit if you care about spelling and grammar, yada-yada. I get it. But you're taking actual dollars from sponsors, and they're paying for eyeballs. Show your sponsors that you give enough of a crap to at least get the easy words right. I'm looking at you, too, Alex. And Mark.

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