• blah (unregistered) in reply to DOA

    Erm, scarily I imagine he'd have gone for that :(

  • Paolo G (unregistered)

    "Now granted, this system was a 98 machine running on a beige box 500mhz and 128mb of ram"

    Wow, 0.5 hertz. That's SLOW... I'm not sure you'd be able to do much with 128 millibits, though. ;)

    CAPTCHA: odio - "I hate"

  • Hamstray (unregistered) in reply to Alan
    Alan:
    Yup, using a length of 255 for a middle initials field is stupid.

    Regards

    Alan Q. T. Z. D. I. B. I. W. K. L. S. D. W. Z. Q. R. R. G. O. A. P. Ú. Q. C. Y. S. L. Q. C. F. C. D. R. E. M. W. L. H. X. Í. C. L. Q. C. F. I. W. A. L. S. S. S. S. S. S. É. L. E. E. A. O. D. P. Ú. Q. C. Y. S. L. R. V. M. W. L. D. T. N. Ú. U. R. D. D. A. L. W. C. Brown

    create table middleinitials(
    initial char, 
    pos integer,
    dude whatever references persons,
    primary key(dude, pos) 
);
  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Alan

    I have seen an IP address field that was declared as a 1024 char string in a table were the primary key was declared as a 2 byte short to save space (of course this was all only noticed when the primary key field became full and the entire system stopped working).

  • Jonathan (unregistered)

    There may be a better way to approach someone about a new idea.. Never come to a person and say; hey, what you got sucks. It puts him on the defensive and will battle any idea you have. This is advice to anyone reading this. Talk about what the new system has. If you can keep all your statements positive, things should proceed smoothly.

    (against my own advice i used never in this comment)

  • Wayne (unregistered)
    The problem isn't the names, names don't matter in most insurance applications. Everyone is referred to by number, and in some cases this number is generated by policy number + birthmonth + birthyear. Take a close look at that and you will see why twins are a problem.

    One other thing to note is that this problem also raises it's head if the two adults are nearly the same exact age, born on the same month in the same year.

    Like those twins in Britain that didn't find out that they were twins until after they got married?

    If they had one baby with two heads, the problem would only get worse...

  • Alain (unregistered)

    I actually read about this British guy that changed his name to James (Dr No, the titles of all the rest of the james bond movies enumarated, Casino Royale) Bond. I guess the developer that created this database must have read the same news article..

    ahttp://www.mi6.co.uk/news/index.php?itemid=4416

  • Rich T (unregistered) in reply to DeLos

    I probably won't be popular for saying this. I've done some volunteer work in the past for small non-profits; you can't count on the quality or training or sanity of who might be helping out or trying to fix things after you. In a situation like that, or perhaps in a seldom changing Radio station database, it is best to keep things as simple and idiot proof as possible; make it so that the guy who had a fortran programming class in 1988 (and nothing since) might be able to take a shot at it. In the situation as described, I think it might just make more sense to use a flat file.

  • Me. (unregistered) in reply to Alan

    I suspect that someone who's seen users trying to put multi-byte ( Japanese, Korean, Chinese ) chars in as their middle-initial would have done that. . .

    I'm continually sabotaged by systems that assume all postal-codes are numeric-zip-codes, so why not?

    ( PS: if someone out there knows for sure that multibyte chars aren't ever required for middle-initials, then say so, or if there's a guaranteed-minimum number of bytes that'll work. . . 255 is one single byte of array-index, so I suspect it was done by an oldtimer who learned on assembler or something )

  • Dugeen (unregistered) in reply to Alan

    Initials of Scots names beginning Mc have three characters. You'd abbreviate 'James McDonald Dacre' as J.McD.D.

  • Nick (unregistered) in reply to Alan
    Alan:
    Yup, using a length of 255 for a middle initials field is stupid.

    Regards

    Alan Q. T. Z. D. I. B. I. W. K. L. S. D. W. Z. Q. R. R. G. O. A. P. Ú. Q. C. Y. S. L. Q. C. F. C. D. R. E. M. W. L. H. X. Í. C. L. Q. C. F. I. W. A. L. S. S. S. S. S. S. É. L. E. E. A. O. D. P. Ú. Q. C. Y. S. L. R. V. M. W. L. D. T. N. Ú. U. R. D. D. A. L. W. C. Brown

    I lolled really hard, still am

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to dave
    dave:
    You have to be able to support multi-digit initials; you never know what could happen to the initial standard in the future.3

    captcha: damnum

    By the time Starfleet Academy uses it to record Data's entrance, they'll need three characters: He is, I understand, NFM NMI Data

  • itsmo (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    KattMan:
    akatherder:
    Someone You Know:
    Occasionally one does need more than one character for a middle initial. At my last job, there were two employees who had the same exact first, middle, and last names. Supposing that their names were John Andrew Smith and John Andrew Smith, it was common for official reports to refer to them as John A1 Smith and John A2 Smith. (Fortunately the headaches stopped when John A2 Smith got married and got a hyphenated name.)

    Are you posing that as a WTF or are you seriously posing that as an acceptable way to solve the problem of two people having the same name?

    Well it is so much better than the way a lot of health insurance companies deal with twins. Either one claim is always denied because they feel you are double claiming, or one child is "born" a month later.

    This may seem strange, but that actually happens. Two twins will be born at once and the insurance company will give them different birthdays for the exact reason stated. It's a workaround for the many old legacy mainframe systems that serve as the underpinning of their financial systems.

    WTF - don't the twins have different names? Or does the insurance company only have one person with each DOB? (max of 366 customers)

  • itsmo (unregistered) in reply to itsmo
    itsmo:
    Joe:
    KattMan:
    akatherder:
    Someone You Know:
    Occasionally one does need more than one character for a middle initial. At my last job, there were two employees who had the same exact first, middle, and last names. Supposing that their names were John Andrew Smith and John Andrew Smith, it was common for official reports to refer to them as John A1 Smith and John A2 Smith. (Fortunately the headaches stopped when John A2 Smith got married and got a hyphenated name.)

    Are you posing that as a WTF or are you seriously posing that as an acceptable way to solve the problem of two people having the same name?

    Well it is so much better than the way a lot of health insurance companies deal with twins. Either one claim is always denied because they feel you are double claiming, or one child is "born" a month later.

    This may seem strange, but that actually happens. Two twins will be born at once and the insurance company will give them different birthdays for the exact reason stated. It's a workaround for the many old legacy mainframe systems that serve as the underpinning of their financial systems.

    WTF - don't the twins have different names? Or does the insurance company only have one person with each DOB? (max of 366 customers)

    EDIT: - doh per year I mean

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