I've met more than one very good developer who didn't grok database design.

One subcontracted me to teach his girlfriend who needed it for a course she was doing. Basically, it involved us all going to the pub and talking about movies and music while she scribbled furiously. It's a good teaching example because it involves natural/surrogate keys (how do you deal with movies/bands/artists with the same name, or movies with more than one title?), multiple relationships (an actor might also direct, a musician can also be a producer) etc.

Another had gone through the induction training in half the normal time, so he'd caught up with my cohort and we were on a DB concepts course together. The DB instructor just couldn't make him understand the difference between "Gone With The Wind" in the abstract and a particular tape of it. In the end I think I convinced him that in the first case it always stars Clark Gable, but in the second we might have two in the shop (of which one is reserved) and the third is out and overdue. At least he shut up and let us get on with the class...

As consumerization of IT and self-service trends becomes part and parcel of everyone's work in the enterprise

This is stated as if it's an axiom. I'm not going to opine on whether it's true or not, since I'm not sure what the blinking heck it's supposed to mean.

But the whole article falls flat on its arse if its major premise turns out to be a load of old bollocks, don't you think?

Such mustaches were quite popular in the 1930s. My grandfather had one, and kept it all the way through WW2. Woe betide anyone who asked him why he had a Hitler mustache; he claimed he had it first, and therefore it was Hitler who had a my-grandad mustache, and without so much as a by-your-leave. Strong words would be in order when the British army got to Berlin...

One thing's sure, he certainly had it last.

In Soviet Russia, new mechatronic overlords welcome YOU!

Even today, there are plenty of crimes that you can be convicted of for only KNOWING it was happening. Sure you may not have killed that guy, but you were there, you saw it, and you did nothing to stop it. That's accessory to murder, conspiracy to murder and a whole bunch of other crimes.

[citation most definitely needed]

200x200 pixels is really only useful for animated GIFs of cats

Make it pink and you'll sell millions.

with my hands full or occupied, underwater, or covered in jam/cement dust/grease/crap.

I don't know what your job is, but I don't want it.

Some licensing schemes with oracle can wind up costing companies almost a million dollars per year.

I think they can cost almost that much to administer. I once got involved in trying to work out how much the hell we owed them and it was huge PITA to just extract the stuff out of our sales system. This was partly our fault (we hadn't captured some of the relevant info before) but mainly theirs because we hadn't needed to under the simpler old method.

In fact it was mainly our management's fault. One, for agreeing to the change (though perhaps they didn't have much choice) and two, because they only informed IT 6 months later when they expected a spreadsheet full of the magic lovely numbers to miraculously fall from heaven.

Because, as they say, if females were in leadership positions, there would be only peace in the world.

It'd last about three weeks.

Patents artificially sque the economies of scale.

[Spanish accent]Kew? [/]