“There is no IGLU Cabal” Quotes [possible satire]

There is no IGLU Cabal. Shlomi Fish has obtained a patent on certain key technologies essential for the existence of IGLU Cabals. He is available for license negotiations only on February 29th of odd-numbered years, between the hours 14:15:09-18:28:18.

People, who practice IGLU Cabalism without the appropriate patent licenses, risk teleportation into the interior of exploding supernovae.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 1968
(Re: A TINIC Sequel)

There is no IGLU Cabal!

Writing this sentence followed by an explanation has been patented by Omer Zak in US patent No. 10943307*2^66452-1. Commenting on Omer's comment has been patented by Shlomi Fish in US patent No. e^(i*pi). The sentence itself is a trademark of Moshe Zadka.

The existence of these patents is the only explanation one needs for this sentence.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 1515

There is no IGLU Cabal. Some Politically-Correct ISPs block E-mail which comes from Hell. Unfortunately, some of the brightest minds needed for the IGLU Cabal languish in Hell.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 2203
("Do you want to send E-mail from hell?")

There is no IGLU Cabal! Its members spent a better time of their lives writing an RDBM server in a purely functional programming language. After having to deal with designing many FP-friendly algorithms, and dealing with ugly code that was made uglier due to FP, they found the task of maintaining the IGLU site too mundane and unchallenging.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 1964

There is no IGLU Cabal. The former Cabalists have been swallowed by the black hole of MPPL (Most Powerful Programming Language) and find the mundane programming problems posed by Linux kernel and applications to be incredibly elementary, trivial and boring.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 1302
("Most mind-expanding computer language?")

There is no IGLU Cabal! Its members can be arranged in N! orders to form N! different Cabals. The algorithm to find which order formulates the correct IGLU Cabal is NP-Complete.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2071

There is no IGLU Cabal. The problem of founding an IGLU Cabal has been proven, in a surprise move, to be equivalent to the question of existence of God, fully-tolerant religions and NP-complete oracles.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 2060

There is no IGLU Cabal! Home-made Cabals eventually superseded the power and influence of the original IGLU Cabal, which was considered a cutting edge development at its time.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2001
("Pentium 100 == Cray 1 (?)")

There is an IGLU Cabal, but its only purpose is to deny the existence of an IGLU Cabal

Martha Greenberg in Hackers-IL message No. 2057

There is no IGLU cabal! The former cabalists are trying to prove the correctness of a program that proves the correctness of proofs of other programs.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2607
("Proving the Correctness of a Proof")

There is no IGLU Cabal! They had to write a web application in an API (which chose to remain nameless) in which one has to call CreateFile with 6 or 7 arguments just to open a file. By the time they were done, someone wrote a 30-line perl script that did exactly the same thing.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 1871
("Perl vs. JavaScript ASP with IIS")

The information transmitted is intended to be ignored by the person or entity in front of whom it appeared and may contain useless and/or misleading material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other abuse of, or taking of any action of any kind because of this misinformation by persons, animals, aliens, or cosmic entities other than the unintended recipient is bad karma. If you received this error, please send your paycheck to the sender and delete everything on the hard drive of your computer.

Geoffrey S. Mendelson in Linux-IL message /02/09/msg00066.html

This sender of this e-mail is privileged and has protexia with people in high places. Don't ask, they are in high places. You could not have received it in error, we know what we are doing. If it has any scandal or gossip value please notify the newspapers, television and radio by e-mail and then delete everything from your system. Please copy it and use it for any purposes, and especially disclose its contents to the press: to do so would be exactly what we really wanted. This disclaimer is to cover our you-know-what if it ever got out that we sent it to you. Thank you for your co-operation. Please dial 911 if you need assistance.

Geoffrey S. Mendelson in Linux-IL message 02/09/msg00090.html

Ally McBeal as a Software House:

Richard Fish - the methodology guru, usually does not actually write code. But he does stress doing things the right way (not in the PHB sense, but in the hacker sense).

Ally McBeal - the brilliant female hacker. Her code is mixture of brilliancy - both in getting the job done, and in the quality of bugs which go into it.

"Biscuit" - would be the type who does not think twice of embedding a string representing a Scheme script into an assembly language device driver, and invoking Guile from it.

Other participants - left as homework.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003, Shaul Karl wrote about "Re: Various performance problems":

Nadav Har’El wrote:

I'm guessing that TLS (thread local storage, NOT transport layer security)

Is there any work to remove this name clash?

Yes, the Thread-Local-Storage people were annoyed by this clash, and decided to change their name. The new name they came up was “Storing Stuff Locally”, or SSL for short.

NOTE: the question of existence of the IGLU Cabal is not on-topic any more, as it was already discussed from all possible angles in Signature lines of a few regular Hackers-IL participants. This is besides the fact that the IGLU Cabal Does Not Exist, and Hamakor officially denies any relationship with the IGLU Cabal.

[Hackers-IL discusses what is on-topic and off-topic there]

Hey Omer,

Pretty thorough list, but you forgot:

More typical subjects for Hackers-IL:

• Shlomi Fish
• Meta-discussions about Shlomi Fish
• Discussions about what is off-topic or not
• Meta-discussions about whether discussion about what is off-topic or not, is off-topic or not
• List of typical subjects for Hackers-IL
• Literal ways to make any discussion infinitely recursive

You can easily install the binary distribution of Mozilla (from mozilla.org) on a different prefix, possibly under your home directory. Please install it and use it instead of Mozilla 1.1, at least when verifying if problems indeed exist. I do not wish to tolerate any more reports of problems when using Mozilla 1.1, because I can't tell if it's a bug that was fixed by then, or if it's an actual issue with Mozilla.

On a slightly different note: my machine crashed the other day when using it with kernel 2.6.0. Can anyone help?

Shlomi Fish on discussions@hamakor.org.il

On a slightly different note: my machine crashed the other day when using it with kernel 2.6.0. Can anyone help?

I do not wish to tolerate any reports of problems when using kernel 2.6.0, because I can’t tell if it’s a bug that was fixed by then, or if it’s an actual issue with the kernel.

My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory; and its display device is grievously short of pixels. Can anyone help?

— Shlomi Fish, Muli Ben Yehuda and Omer Zak on discussions@hamakor.org.il.

My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory; and its display device is grievously short of pixels. Can anyone help?

I can give you 64K of memory to make it a Commodore 128, it will be just like brand new. I’ll throw in a disk drive so you can dump the cassettes, they are obsolete these days.

Leave your Commodore alone, this platform does not allow good scaling, even doubling RAM amount… I think it’s good time to upgrade to XT. You can even install another 8088 instead of 8087 co-processor. Dual-CPU system would allow greater throughput in multiuser environment. Yes, I know it demands bigger initial investment, but the ROI is guaranteed in no more than 2 years.

Omer Zak, Baruch Even and Alexey Maslennikov on discussions@hamakor.org.il

Dear Mz. Agmon,

What a horrid and nasty post you made. You absolutely lack ANY sense of humour, human and human feelings as well as even an inkling of the rediculous.

Can you not get it in your head that Shlomi, is promoting the cause of free-range chickens, defending their poor brethren rights, protesting their distreatment with the heANDS OF NASTI AND HORRIBLE PEOPL WHO RAIZE CHIKINS IN REAL SMALL CAGES WHERE MY FATHER WHO WAS THE MINISTER OF OIL PRODUCTION IN OUR GLORIOUS CUNTRY WAS MURDERED BY THE DEPRAVED MERCERNAIES IMPORETED FROM IZREAL BY THE FASCUITIC PRES. SESESCLUCK. HOW EVER MY FATHER HAS SEKVESTRED $16,750,962.23 (SIXTEEN MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRT, NEIN HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO US DOLARS AND TWENTY-THREE CENTS) IN AN UNNUMBERED ACCOUNT IN THE BANK OF OUR CUNTRY.

I LIKE TO SHARE THA STASH WITH YOU IF YOU ONLY SEND ME A BIG BOX MADE OF EGG CONTAINERS AND A SMALL TICKET TO BORA-BORA, BUISNES CLASS, PLEZ.

Hello, mein kinder.

While both Gilad and yours truly are indubitably and inalienably right, it is often that clients in their infinite (the hands - they have a life of their own and will not type "wisdom") perversity will ask for such wonderful contraptions as RTAI kernel running in Red Hat 7.2 distribution with Mozilla 1.5 backported into it, the whole thing shouldered a-la the Tokyo Underground at 7am into a 16MB NAND flash running with a proprietary driver (Gilad - we know the culprits, do we not?)…

What should the indie, the consultant, the Gitche Manitou of the right solution, do in such a case? Shove the right thing down the client's gullet (I did that, it is very trying to shove a 48-node cluster down ANYONE's gullet and, truth be told, not very hygienic)? Let the client blithfully trundle towards his/her/its doom? Lie outright, say you do this, do the other? What?

Jonathan? Gilad? Gil? Shahar? Oron? Danny? Lior?

> I am looking for a Python trainer so we can start offering
> Python training to our customers.

Must… Resist… Oh what the heck.

(read with a heavy southern India accent)

Hello, my name is Ashish Khare, I've been a python trainer for fourteen years under the great Ranjan of Pushkar, I would love to train any python that you have, I also do cobra and rattle snakes. I am highly experienced and my pythons have only bitten 3 people so far, one of them tried to actually grab it by the teeth, imagine that. No fatalities so far. I have my own basket and flute and willing to relocate.

Please call Ashish +91 (98) 1137-7803 for more details.

Let the next version be good and full of eye-candy.
Let the FUD spreaders begone and vanish.
Let us be CAR and not CDR.
Let our features outweigh our bugs.
Let our patches be approved and committed.
Let our code spread in torrents.

Hacky New Year :-)

Since you are running a proprietary closed source system like WebLogic and Solaris, I suggest you call their customer support.

Sun and WebLogic both told me that their customer support is their key differentiator and competitive advantage over Open Source in the telecom service provider market in order to ensure high availability of mission critical systems.

God - I love the way those buzz-words just roll off my keyboard…

Best regards and good luck - this is a Linux/FOSS forum…sorry if you think I'm a snob but I had a similar problem with the Sun Java application server a few years ago and it took Sun 3 months to admit they didn't know the answer…

I installed Linux (first Red Hat, then Mandrake) for my mom a few years ago. The reason: her TV card refused to work properly in Windows no matter what we tried. So she was extremely happy with Linux and hardly bugged me at all. And believe me, she's rather clueless on the computer (she does stuff like opening a doc file in word and choosing "save as.." in order to rename a file :).

Anyway, she was using linux happily, w/ a dual boot to Windows which she hardly used, and then my brother convinced her to let him install Windows instead.

Now, she keeps calling everyone every week or two with problems in her Windows and she really misses her Linux… (she misses the uptime, the multiple desktops, the fact that things didn't suddenly break and stop working for no reason, her games - Aisleriot, PySol, LBreakOut 2, and other things I can't think of right now.)

Oh, and about the command line, back then when she tried to shut down her linux, sometimes some process needed manual killing, so I gave her the set of commands she needed to type in the command line and she had no problem doing that. In fact, she preferred doing that than, say, dragging some file in Windows, because for her it's easier to give the computer some commands she doesn't really understand than to start trying to figure out "intuitive" GUI…

Quoting Nir Simionovich, from the post of Mon, 02 Apr:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm trying to arrange an Asterisk weekend of code, with the purpose of

I see this as a direct attack on datiyim, people with children, people who work during the week and want to rest on the weekend but don't have children, people who like to go diving on weekends in Eilat, soldiers on weekend duty (without children), people who don't know Hebrew, and worst of all: the vast majority of people who don't want Hebrew in the Asterisk tools and DO have children but are not datiyim!

When will the bigotry end?

Well, no. Russians do not use everything for drinks. It has been empirically proved that some substances - e.g. slag - cannot be used to make drinks.

Worse, some substances - e.g. slag - cannot be even used for the after-drink zakuska.

Yet even worse than that, some substances - e.g. slag - are not even useful for bottling drinks.

The silver lining on the rain cloud, however, is that there are precious few such substances. Namely, one - slag.

Slainte!

> My personal advice and preferences:
> Don't bother with advice about understanding 50-line code blocks.
> Advise how to make 10,000,000 line code base easier to understand.

Your advice is similar to going to a guy explaining home-improvement on TV and showing how to build a shelf (or whatever) well, and telling him: "don't bother with advice about building a shelf - advise how to build a 150 story sky-scraper!". True, if a someone is about to build a sky-scraper, they should not bother with the details on how to make a shelf (they'll hire someone to do that), but most people will never need to build a sky-scraper in their lives, while building shelves is a useful skill.

Similarly, most hobbyist (or even most professional) programmers will benefit more from advice on writing 10,000 line programs than from advice on how to write 10,000,000 lines.

I have much more books than I can put on my night-stand. Books that are on my night-stand are quickly accessible (when I'm in bed, that is), and books on the shelf are not (I hate getting up from the cozy, warm, bed). So, when I suddenly feel like reading a book that is not on the night- stand, I have no choice but to go to sleep. In the morning, I wake up and always find the book I wanted next to the bed! As it turns out, when I was asleep, another process, known as "sleepwalk" got me the book I wanted. Also, when my nightstand already has too many books on it, The sleepwalk process moves one of the books - the one I'm least likely to want to read next - back to the shelf.

Last month, four Europeans with weird names decided to mess around with my book-reading system. One called Alan decided that in some cases I should move *all* my books to the shelf, go to bed without any books the same night, and instead fill the nightstand with crap. And if somehow all my shelves are full I should just burn one at random (if it burns the whole shelf, or the wrong shelf, who cares).
Another one, called Andrea, decided that I should redesign my whole sleepwalking routine according to his master-plan. However, this made my sleepwalking become so strange, that people were hesitant to call me "stable" any more. Alan thought my new sleepwalking was a sure sign of be not being stable.
But then a third European, Linus, finally made a judgment-call, and decided that I was stable, even with Andrea's new sleepwalking routine. He then told yet another European, Marcello, that from now he's responsible for keeping me stable. I thought it was my shrink's responsibility, but Marcello said no, that now that he finally has some responsibility he's not going to just give it up.

2. Journaling filesystems:

Imagine writing stuff on a lot of different notes and pieces of papers, etc., and then suddenly getting hit in the head and forgetting everything (call this rebooting). You suddenly don't know which was the note you were in the middle of writing, and you may end up finding a note saying "kill <name>" not knowing you really meant to write "kill <name>'s jobs on the department's workstation, because they are hogging all resources" before you got hit on the head. That's why you should have a journal. Write everything that you do in there, one entry after another, and only when you complete a whole note, cut it out of the journal and keep it.

Also, when you go to the bathroom, don't forget to write down in the journal about whether you're already done with #1, #2, or #3 (don't ask what #3 is…). That way, if you suddenly get hit on the head (say, the nice fake plant over the toilet falls on you) you won't get embarrassed, asking yourself questions like "Oops, I don't remember if I did #2 or not, so should I reach for some toilet paper or not?" If you had a journal, everything would have been much simpler. Just look in there, and see what you've been up to.

3. Blue Screen of Death:

Some people, after a bit of strenuous activity, or simply a couple of days of normal life, suddenly go blue and freeze up. Some people call it the blues, others just call it death, but in OS lingo it's simply the Blue Screen of Death. When that happens to a you, somebody passing by then needs to hit you on the head (this is called a "reboot", after the footwear usually worn while kicking someone's head). After a minute, you wake up, forgetting everything you didn't write down before the event, but functioning much better than you did before (at least for the first hour).

4. User Friendliness and Graphical User Interface:

Most people are not very user-friendly. Try talking to a person (especially of the opposite sex) and trying to guess what you're supposed to do now, what the other person wants from you, what would happen if you did this, and what would happen if you did that, and how the heck to you get the other person to do what you really want. No more of that! People should get a graphical user interface. Why talk to the other person in that complex command line language we call "Hebrew", when you can just look at the menu, see the options "Leave me alone" and "Let's have sex" and just chose the one you want! Better yet, why not have a toolbar, with nice little icons?

5. Authentication:

In the simple old days, to recognize someone you'd just look at his face and try to remember who it is (if you didn't forget it in one of the Blue Screen of Death episodes). But there's a much better way, which is more mathematically-sound: RSA! Why try to remember a (many times ugly) face, when instead you can remember a person's 1024 bit RSA key? (remembering 1024 ones and zeros is a lot of fun! try it!) Then, when you meet the other person, and you want to be sure it is *really* that guy, not some Hannibal Lektor who pealed his face off and wore it, all you need to do is to make up a random number (try not to choose 7, because that is too easily guessable!), do some fun arithmetic with 1024 digit numbers, and then tell the other person the result (hoping that the other guy doesn't get bored by you reading out aloud the digits "one" and "zero" a thousand times) and ask him to try to guess the random number from it. If he succeeds, he's not Hannibal Lektor - but he's probably mad anyway.

4. One of my friends works in a software development house who has an NT server farm that needs to have close to 100% uptime and operationality. Needless to say, they have top-of-the-class admins, and also make use of scripting, the command line, command automation, etc. a lot. Most NT sys admins don't know anything about the NT command line, much less about scripting and automation.

Welcome to the real world with *real* MS sysadmins. Those who script, automate, write code, know a thing or two about security and the underlying technology. You know… professionals.

Please, please, do not tag those other "MCSE wannabes" with "Systems Administrator" title. People that hardly know how to administer couple servers and dozen workstations in my world are hardly called "operators" (and the same stands in Linux world)

"operators". It's been a long time since I saw this word used anywhere. In fact, I think the first and only time I saw it so far was in the story "The Bastard Operator from Hell". (which is a highly recommended read).

But we need a common word for both sys-admins and "operators".

There is no IGLU Cabal! They set out to write the "IGLU Cabal Paradigm", which aimed to be the ultimate programming paradigm ever created or ever to be created. Then they became frustrated that some programming newbies who fully read "The IGLU Cabal Paradigm Bible" still produced very bad code.

Question: if a website crashes in the middle of the night and there are no support people to roll in the crash cart, will anyone hear it play C:\WINNT\Media\Windows 2003 Critical Stop.wav to call the nurse, or does it wait till morning for the doctors' rounds?

Why Eclipse doesn't belong to the "right" tools ? My naïve understanding is that Eclipse is Emacs of the 21-st century – it is open source, customizable etc., similar to Emacs; in addition to being graphical.

Thank you! I was wondering why I hated Eclipse so much, and you have put your finger on it. It's exactly like a 21-st century Emacs.

There is no IGLU Cabal. The main organizer got 99% in the course about starting and managing Linux Cabals, which he took in the Industrial Engineering Faculty. However this grade did not reflect his organizational abilities in the real world, and this was the understatement of the century.

I agree with your assessment about hand-editing, but I wanted to be sure before I get in too deep. Send to me the code, I will try to get something useful out of it. Unless it's Perl. Don't send me Perl!

I have some 16-bit Turbo C++ C source code to convert the Gregorian Calendar to the Jewish calendar here:

https://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/nostalgia/

It's MIT/X11, but will take some effort to adapt and I've found much more elegant code in C in the past on the Net (which during my work for Cortext Web Design, I translated into Perl 5, back in 1996ish. It was since lost.). I think it was GPLed.

I also have versions of this code in COBOL.NET, Intercal, PDP-10 Assembly, J, APL, Windows NT 4.0 Batch script and Autocad Lisp - I'm sure you can handle all of them because none of them is Perl. ;-).

Perlfully and Painfully yours,

-- Shlomi Fish

Shlomi Fish wrote:

First of all, I should note that "April 21" is an Americanism which makes little sense and one should use "21 April" or "21st of April" in Commonwealth English or Israeli English.

Erez Schatz replied:

"April" and the entire Gregorian calendar are not-Hebrew and make little sense. One should use "Zain in I'yar".

To which Sawyer X replied:

Actually, if we're gonna nitpick… "Zain" and "I'yar" are hebrew words, but "in" is not. It's an Englishification of the sentence. You should write "Zain be'I'yar". :)

To which Shlomi Fish replied:

Romanisation is an imperialistic practice and we must not succumb to it. We should write the date as "ז' באייר" using the Hebrew alphabet exclusively. ;-)

To which Sawyer X replied:

You win best reply!

To which Shlomi Fish replied:

Yes, but I haven't finished yet. The contemporary names for the Hebrew months are Pagan, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyar is:

«(Hebrew: אִייָר‎ or אִיָּר, Standard Iyyar Tiberian ʾIyyār ; from Akkadian ayyaru, meaning "Rosette; blossom"…The name is Babylonian in origin.»

(And Tamuz is the name of a Phoenician god who is akin to the Egyptian Ossiris.)

As a result, we should use the old Biblical numerical names of the months and call "Iyar" "The Eighth month" if we start from Tishrey or "The Second Month" if we start from Nissan and say that "Zayin in Iyar" is "Hayom hashvi3i bahodesh hasheni" or "Hayom hashvi3i bahodesh hashmini.". ;-) (I'm using the evil transliteration to Latin out of laziness but I'm consistently inconsistent.)

And we should also revert to the old Phoenician / Kna'anite alphabet which was originally used for writing Hebrew instead of the contemporary Hebrew alphabet that is derived from the Aramaic transformation of it… (There are actually characters for it in Unicode).

Shlomi Fish Wrote:

Well, I've also built some kernels on various occasions. The vanilla 2.6.37 kernel I built seemed snappier than the shipped-in Mandriva kernel, and Freecell Solver executed there at 72.7685720920563s instead of 73.6936609745026s (the fractions are what was reported by my script and copy pasted here - they are not very accurate.).

I hope that you agree with me that 99.9218485921% of the users wouldn't bother themselves with recompilation (or any other manual step for that matter) to make their games run 1.27127529900685765% faster ;-)

But what did not succeed was to make the customers request free [as-in-speech] and open source software ( FOSS ) when they (and not the creator of the operating system or the device) choose a program themselves. For instance, only a small part of the Android applications today are FOSS, and the customers are “content” with a gratis and non-FOSS, software program.

I think the reason for this is prosaic — the belief that one can make money easily from non-FOSS software on Android. That if you will only write an application and turn on the bit of “show ads”, then suddenly you will make millions (or at least thousands…) from advertising. What happens eventually is that there are 17 “headlight” (for example) applications in the app store, all showing ads, and each one is used by 17 people and the developer earns a few cents in the good case. This is instead of one headlight application, as FOSS, which is better than all of them (see http://code.google.com/p/search-light/ for instance). But everyone except the users — Google and the authors of the software — have an interest to push the non-free program to the user.

In the early 1990s there was a similar phenomenon in the PC world - the “shareware”. Then it involved a program that you could get (without the source code!) free-of-charge, but if you wanted to use it beyond a given time (for example a week), or enable features that were limited in the gratis version, you were supposed to pay for it. As far as I know, the whole system was a complete failure — most of the developers did not earn substantial amounts of money, and most of the users ignored the limited features, or cracked them. Nevertheless, during almost two decades, thousands of programmers wasted their time to write such non-FOSS software. Most of the gratis software for the PC back then was shareware - not open source. Today, nothing has remained from all this work. However, a large part of the FOSS that has been written back then, is still in use today.

If only there was a way to explain to the authors of the mobile applications that no, most of them will not get rich from the applications, like most of the authors of shareware did not, and it’s just better to write FOSS…

On the other hand, let's not forget what I believe to be the reason for FORTH's demise. FORTH is a very elegant language, with unorthodox ideas. It was invented by Chuck Moore, who is having his own eccentric (and fresh) ideas about how one should program.

The reason FORTH didn't take hold (at least in my own projects) was that it lacked standard libraries for the things which I needed. It expected people to reinvent the wheel (and optimize it to their project's needs) all the time. It didn't take to heart Pareto's Law (80% of the computer time/programmer time/memory requirements/bug expenses of software are in 20% of the code). People should optimize and design their own implementations of data structures only when and where they are critical to the software's performance. For non-critical parts of the software, standard libraries are good enough and should be used.

The morale of the story to hash functions in STL: STL should have provided a standard hash implementation (like Perl does). But the standard implementation should (like implementations of all other STL data structures) have provisions for people to substitute their optimized algorithms when those algorithms are really needed for a specific application

A couple of years ago I worked for a medical software development company. I was working on the database development side. (We had our own proprietary object oriented database)

Our database was pretty cool; it could handle an hospital level load on a dual Pentium Pro machine. (Which was a far cry from most big iron machines that were used back then.)

Our medical software side used PowerBuilder (and later Visual Basic) to develop the medical applications. To put it mildly, the medical application itself, was by far, slower and heavier then the medical database that it was built upon. While 50 clients could run easily on a Pentium I 90 MHz with 32 MB of RAM , the medical application ran like shit on a Pentium I 166 MHz with 64 MB of RAM machine!

And every-time we pointed this anomaly to the med team, they claimed that "new machines are bound, new CPUs; by the time we are out, CPU power won't be an issue."

You know what, that med software now runs slower than a dead dog on a top-level Pentium 3 / Pentium 4 / Athlon machine… nothing has changed.