"I am the Dread Pirate CowboyNeal."

I had a Lisa! It was the successor to my Apple ][+. It had a 5 MB hard drive you had to turn on a few minutes before the main computer so that the drive would spin up and stabilize before the Lisa tried to access it. The drive was as big as a 24" monitor laying horizontally and sat on top of the computer. I used Modula-2 to program it.

A couple of years later I worked at a printing company and their prepress department had dozens of Lisa's all happily composing away. Great money saver for the company.

Clear winner on this issue.

Honestly, you don't keep up with current events. I don't care for Excel but it has supported a million rows since at least 2007 but hey, let's pretend make statements from outdated data. 40 Mb of hard drive space is huge!

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP010073849.aspx

Some more reading leads me to take back my second sentence as what I was looking at was unrelated to Oregon. Still, some states seemed to have managed the impossible spec.

Yeah, it's so impossible many other states have done it. Keep blaming Obamacare for what what Oracle admits was their IT fail.

I don't know why I took the bait in my previous reply (A bit of a rough morning I suppose). The point I wanted to make in the original post and did poorly at is this: The guy seems to feel dehumanized that he got a scanner which told him what to do and had an expected minimum rate at which to work. I don't know the specifics of Amazon, but in warehouses this is standard. You don't sit down and have a conversation over each item that needs to get shipped, you go get it and ship it out. While having an expected rate isn't always exciting, especially if you are feeling sick etc., typically the software telling you what to get is having you move around in some kind of efficient manner.

At the warehouse I was at, the system knew where I was (based off the last location I scanned) and would send me to my next location based on priority and proximity. What I'm suggesting is that nothing abnormal is going on. I'm sure hundreds of thousands of people around the globe work in similar positions. While it's not intellectually stimulating, I don't know if I would consider it dehumanizing.

Way to throw out some racist bullshit. Am I white and male, sure. Am I privileged? Not particularly anymore than others in Indiana. I worked that crap job for 9 years, and I would have kept working it as long as necessary to support my family. Sorry I wasn't able to pick where I was born and my race so I could have the privilege of being unprivileged.

I worked at a factory for 9 years. It sucked. A lot of people were "lifers" and would be there their entire life. In the warehouse we had a job almost exactly like that.

In a 12 hour shift you would walk around a giant stretch of belts and racks and throw things weighing between 2-40 pounds a piece on a moving belt. I would only throw things on the belt that had a LED indicator next to them with a number because *shock and fucking awe here* that was what was ordered. It was ridiculously hot in the summer (no air conditioning and the belt system was about 30 feet off the ground and heat rises), you walked several miles over the course of the shift in steel toes.

I didn't really like it because it tore up my feet but some people actually preferred to do that most nights. I didn't like working there at all so I put in a lot of effort outside of work and got a job in databases which I love. My point being: boo hoo. If you can't handle it, grow a pair or find a different job. I'm sure the special reporter snowflake felt very dehumanized because no one cares about you very much unless you show you are going to be around for a while and he obviously probably wasn't.

Until next year http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2013/07/17/what-s-new-for-columnstore-indexes-in-sql-server-2014.aspx

It's amazing what comes back as "new developments"

This is probably bundled in with other important stuff like MTV and Ice Road Truckers 35. Exactly the reason I decided to cut the cable (or the satellite etc.)

Yes, there is such a thing as a database developer.

There is such a thing as a database developer. You know why stored procedures are awesome? It's because letting a database engine use relational math properly can make thing wildly fast. The real problem is most application devs think they know all there is to know about databases but typically they barely even understand how an RDBMS work at a high level. With that though, don't let me stop you from running some query, copying a bunch of data across a network to load and process by an application, and then send some response back across the network to run another query to do something simple.

I hate it when I get too many where clauses on my tables. You know, the kind where tables have where clauses.