Saturday Comic

A bit of a Chinese theme now that the Olympics have started and everybody's feeling warm and cuddly.... here we salute the brave boys in the Chinese security forces





(With acknowledgments to WC Fields)

Worst software of all time

I just had to dive back into Crystal Reports after a ten year absence as part of a major system rollout where we came up short a few reports.

It was a case of "we kept your room just as you left it"

I could see virtually no difference between the CR in VS 2005 and CR 6 which was what I last used.

Software productivity has improved by orders of magnitude over the past 10 years. With C# I now spend time building functionality which 10 years ago I would have spent in C++ tracking memory leaks and converting between the seven different types of string! Yet CR remains in the dark ages. Working with it is like going back to a pre-Google era.

How can a product be this old and you still can't reliably copy and paste more than one element? How can there be no 'align' and 'make same size' feature? How can you have to type in coordinates and sizes manually to make things line up? I remember 10 years ago how CR would crash whenever you attempted to do virtually anything. They seem to have fixed all these bugs, but that has left no time to add any new functionality, or even make the existing functionality work decently.

They have added the facility to read a .NET DataSet as opposed to forcing you to access stored procs and tables directly. Great. But it turns out this is unreliable.

The whole thing is an archaic, bodged up creaky mess. The dialogs are confused, confusing and badly thought out. You can't nest a subreport in a subreport for God's sake!

CR might be free with VS 2005 but it's not worth it. It is a massive time-sink, like SharePoint.

Somebody please do the decent thing and take this piece of pimply shit out and blow what passes for its brains all over the sidewalk.

Great moneymaking idea from Blago

It had to happen. Blagojevich, or should I call him "Public Official A" has cottoned on to the huge amount of cash he could "earn" by putting speed cameras on interstates.

At least unlike in the UK he is open about the fact it's all about making money, but his lie is it's to fund combatting crime in Chicago. Of course the money will just go on hiring more flunkies and cronies to bloat the public payroll here in Illinois.

Blagojevich, who has not been charged with any crime, insists that only the most egregious speeders will be caught - over 80 or 85. I'm willing to bet that after a year or so, that would come down to 55. Why not? It's like having a money tap. The number goes down and the cash flow goes up.

Almost without exception, politicians are truly the most disgusting breed of human.

Hate insurance companies? Want government to run healthcare?

Expect the government to take a big interest in your health. For starters, if your couch-potato kids are starting to resemble the couch, expect a letter from the school warning you of that fact. Because the government is so politically correct, of course words like "fat" or "obese" will not be used. Neither will "lardy", "gut-bucket", or "wobble-bottom".

Also, expect civil servants to decide who gets what life-saving drugs, based on how much they cost, and where you live (the Scots get drugs the English do not, because the power base of the ruling Labour party is in Scotland).

I loathe insurance companies, but given that government workers fall into two camps - morons and crooks - and are unresponsive to public pressure (unlike private insurance companies) - I think I'll be sticking with them.

Good riddance

An illegal immigrant gang-banger rapist murderer just got his comeuppance

Generally I don't agree with the death penalty. I don't think governments should have the right to kill their own citizens. Death Row contains a lot of people whose only crime was being poor and unable to afford a decent lawyer.

However, people like this guy richly deserve it. If nothing else, the execution was a finger in the eye of the International Court of "Justice". Who the hell gave them the right to order the US to do anything? Certainly not the American people.

The only change I would make to the death penalty, would be to mandate that sentence be carried out by firing squad within 30 days. That would have several beneficial effects.

- You would get far fewer wrongful guilty verdicts because the prospect of a swift execution would concentrate the jury's mind wonderfully. They would not be able to think, "well, he might not be guilty, but I really want to get home, and he's not really ever going to be executed, after all". Either they find him innocent or guilty. If guilty, they know he's in the ground within 30 days.

- No time wasted in court proceedings where inmates complain they are Too fat to execute. What shooter, after all, would want a smaller target?

- No money wasted warehousing people on death row

- No photo opportunities for grandstanding anti death row campaigners

- Rapid satisfaction for relatives of the victim who can then move on with their lives

Rare instance of common sense from the security/industrial complex

Lots of people are making big money out of the security industry from raising peoples' fears about "terrorists". Parents, governments and religious groups use all use fear to control their children, subjects and followers (bogeyman, terrorists, the devil respectively), as it has historically proven to be a very effective tool.

One person who didn't go along with this stupid nonsense is the pilot of this plane who ignored a written "bomb threat" and continued to his destination.

Well done sir!

Interesting mitigation

So you've come over the UK and taken full advantage of their dunderheaded social engineering programmes to claim about 925,000 GBP (nearly 2 million dollars) in fraudulent tax credits.

Finally the authorities catch up with you and you're facing a severe prison sentence - possibly as much as 2 whole months in the slammer.

What do you do. What do you do?