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You live on an island.
You have a rabbit problem.
You are a farmer.
You have a boat that holds one item.
Your task is to take a fox, a hen, and seed to the island.
If you leave the fox with the hen it will eat the hen.
If you leave the hen with the seed it will eat the seed.
How do you get all three across to the island, when remember you can only carry one item at a time on your boat.
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My dad told me this one. lets see if I can remember.
You take the hen across and leave it at the island.
Go back and get the fox, take him to the island and pick up the hen.
Take the hen to where the seed is but leave the hen and take the seed to the island, leaving it with the fox. Then go get the hen and take it to the island where the fox and the seed be.
Y'all live happily ever after.
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Ah, logistics!
The real life equivalent would be to get the new application, the new database and the customer into the server room one at a time without leaving the customer alone with anything he would try to 'improve'. 
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
I hold an A-7 computer expert classification, Commodore. I'm well acquainted with Dr. Daystrom's theories and discoveries. The basic design of all our ship's computers are JavaScript.
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First, shoot the customer, then...
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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CDP1802 wrote: without leaving the customer alone with anything he would try to 'improve'.
Years ago I worked in a business where the server room was a cupboard - we would leave it open at times when we had to perform maintenance.
One of these 'times' we had a power cut and fortunately the UPS kept the computer(yes we only had one) going while at the same time beeping, telling us that we had limited time to shut down.
One of the accounts ladies was passing by and decided to switch off the UPS - her reason when asked - 'The box was letting out a loud beeping noise as though it was in distress so I turned it off to ease its distress'...
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Yes, put the poor thing out of its misery.
And tomorrow I will again work on a project where the customer requested a change that would require to completely replace the primary keys of most tables in order to be able to arrange all major objects (and future expansions) in a tree structure as he sees fit. But please without changing anything in the table definitions, so that the stored procedures he has written to manipulate the database (!!!) still work.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
I hold an A-7 computer expert classification, Commodore. I'm well acquainted with Dr. Daystrom's theories and discoveries. The basic design of all our ship's computers are JavaScript.
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Move away from SQL, just stop using databases.
Move into class libraries with properties that serialize the data.
Much faster
Then you can have the properties bring in data from the old database seamlessly without having to rewrite the primary key system.
You can also inject the value backwards into the database for the clients scripts, and as well get them to upgrade to the new system by using windows 8 xaml apps.
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That's exactly what we are doing, but unfortunately the customer has never heard of something like application logic and insists on messing around in the database with his stored procedures. The old composite primary keys are not adequate to represent the new tree structure, so we have little choice than to make those changes in the database and keep the changes to his SPs as small as possible.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
I hold an A-7 computer expert classification, Commodore. I'm well acquainted with Dr. Daystrom's theories and discoveries. The basic design of all our ship's computers are JavaScript.
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CDP1802 wrote: that would require to completely replace the primary keys of most tables
Sorry, I could not resist 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Take the fox over to the island to take care of the rabbit problem,
then go back and have a nice fat roast hen for dinner...
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The seed killed the chicken because it ate to much in the short 40 minutes it takes to go there and back.
Also the seed was for the fields now your whole family will starve.
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Ah, an exercise in requirement gathering and talking to users... [oh! didn't I mention that]
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If you have to ask the user what they want you're in the wrong business.
You should have been able to gather the parameters of life from the fact he was a farmer and had to live more then one day.
This isn't a program, even if it was, you failed.
You don't need to ask the user that life goes on after one day.
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When it comes to users it is better not to assume anything...
... anyway what's wrong with living for the day!?
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I don't think you see it.
If you fulfill the users needs - great you fulfilled the purpose for which they wanted.
What did that have anything to do with their jobs?
Are you sure they know exactly what they want?
Are they even saying the right keywords in the meaning you understand them?
If you program for today - today is as long as it will last.
ALM - Application lifecycle management; this concept should extend beyond the memory management and into the user cases - the GUI itself.
The PC is so great yet it's simplicity does not handle any one use case.
So when you handle the needs of the user you are defining your own limitations.
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Club the fox to death and rip its head off. Wring the chicken's neck and cook the bird and serve with a delicious peri-peri sauce. As for the seed, throw it away and see what grows in its place the following year. In the meantime, go to the island. Rabbit pie anyone?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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If you can only do 2 things:
Add 25 to a number
or
subtract 6 from that number;
is it possible to obtain any number?
And how could you get the number 20 starting from 0?
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x = 0;
while (x != n)
{
x += 25;
x -= 6;
x -= 6;
x -= 6;
x -= 6;
}
Wow. That was hard. I just fell out of bed and still am sleeping to 90%. And, of course, you can also unroll the loop 20 times if it must be the primitive solution.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
I hold an A-7 computer expert classification, Commodore. I'm well acquainted with Dr. Daystrom's theories and discoveries. The basic design of all our ship's computers are JavaScript.
modified 9-Feb-14 1:37am.
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Try to reach this answer in the least number of steps.
Try the human asnwer
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The loop contains 5 operation and iterates 20 times, so we would have 100 operations. Fine.
0 + 25 - 6 + 25 - 6 - 6 - 6 - 6 = 20.
Or you could try to find the solutions for a x 25 + b x -6 = n for any given n. For n = 20 a would be 2 and b would be 5.
Colborne_Greg wrote: Try the human asnwer
That's hard, even if I have to wait another 100 years before they finally send a ship to pick me up.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
I hold an A-7 computer expert classification, Commodore. I'm well acquainted with Dr. Daystrom's theories and discoveries. The basic design of all our ship's computers are JavaScript.
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Two quarters and five half dozens.
The solution 50 cents for case of eggs.
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Simples:
int x = 0;
int n = 21;
while (x != n)
{
while (x < n)
{
x+=25;
}
while (x > n)
{
x-=6;
}
}
speramus in juniperus
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