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Admin
A whole coupon! lucky bastard!
Admin
They were including the entire WorldCat database with each update, and it fit on a DVD?
Admin
Free pizza? Where's the WTF?
Admin
I've worked for (the daughter company of a daughter company of) a company that owns quite a handful of players in that market, including the academic library market, and I'm not surprised. The CEO and the CTO had very little knowledge of software making, but nonetheless had fancy plans based on tools not suited to the job (i.c., Lucene). The company was held afloat by one or two cash cows, old tech which had to be kept alive, while the Cs were starting and killing off new development at random. The procedure from the article is almost sane in comparison to their practices.
Admin
A free pizza for "two days of hard work" as part of his job was actually very nice.
Admin
I don't understand this. Erik was an employee, he was assigned a task, and he accomplished the task. Isn't the real "reward for his hard work", y'know, his paycheque?
Admin
If the fix was adding WHERE InsertDT > @LastDT, it roughly translates to 1 letter per hour and 3 letters per slice of horrific free pizza.
Admin
I imagine a database like that compresses fairly well.
Admin
A candidate for Governor of a major state in the U.S. paid some of his staff in gift cards.
"A free pizza for "two days of hard work" as part of his job was actually very nice." Pretty good pay for a musician.
Admin
Hey, I fixed a major performance bug just last week, and I never got any free pizza. :sulk:
Though, to be fair, the company is pretty generous with Christmas gifts.
Admin
No, don't be silly. Originally it was floppy disks (I assume more than one), and then a CD.
Admin
Mind that floppies were originally invented for distributing system updates. It's the right tool for the purpose! :-)
Admin
Floppies originally were the system. That is where the 'non-system disk or disk error' error comes from.
Admin
Eh... why would a library need a local copy of everything listed on the internet in the first place? Who thought that was a good idea in the first place?
Admin
The one who set up the original floppy-delivery system way back before the internet.
Admin
Actually, there might have been no system at all. (Floppies were originally used to ship microcode updates for some IBM processors.)
Admin
They're fortunate in not dealing with academic libraries. Those have always had a great deal more books, many of which are extremely obscure (even ignoring things like PhD theses).
They'd have needed a whole load of CDs for that.
Admin
Speed. Early versions of the internet were very slow.
Admin
And in the early days - cost : I can remember one dialup service (BT Telecom Gold) generally offered was charged at £0.03 per kilobyte of traffic at 300 baud....
Admin
He didn't quit afterwards.
Admin
At least that was by data. Telecom in Czech Republic charged by the minute.
Admin
I don't think so. If I do some work for a company, the pay isn't the reward, it's the remuneration. It's the agreed cost of doing the job. If I go to a restaurant and order a meal, I don't reward the company by paying them, I pay them as part of the agreed "give me food" contract.
I'd consider a reward as anything over the expected pay. Christmas bonuses (unless specified in a contract) would be a reward. Crappy as it may be, a free pizza voucher would be a reward.
Admin
You got a REWARD?
The last time I came up with such a speedup, it was a like 40 times speedup. All I got for my work was a rebuke, along the lines of "the customer was perfectly happy with a very very very slow web site, why did you waste 3 days on that". No pizza coupon. Eventually was consigned to a basement office in a faraway field office. That's my prize, mate.