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A comment on The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology (2021). Parent comment

Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by jiggawatts on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:07PM (#37972233)
It’s basically a JOIN, the most fundamental data manipulation operator. If you can’t automate this, then you don’t “get” computers at all.

I once had two guys arguing next to me about how it was impossible to produce a simple report about VM storage utilisation in under a month. I produced the report, printed it out, and shoved it in their hands just to shut them up while they were still busy arguing. A “month” of work required five joins.

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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by johnmaguire on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:14PM (#37972256)
> It's basically a JOIN

The comment you're replying just explained why this is not "basically a JOIN." There are two unrelated systems (not SQL databases) which don't expose any APIs to the analyst.

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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by tuatoru on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:40PM (#37972366)
It's still basically a join. If it's on a computer, it can be converted to text files, and then it can be JOINed, one way or another.
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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by ethbr1 on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:49PM (#37972409)
My sibling from another mother. That's exactly what we did.
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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by csomar on Saturday October 21, 2023 @11:57PM (#37972703)
In these cases, the work is usually about connecting the systems together than the data modification itself.
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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by TeMPOraL on Sunday October 22, 2023 @05:37AM (#37974029)
No, that's just made up work that's not required to solve a problem. Systems are already connected enough by virtue of being accessible by the same person on the same computer at the same time. Turning this into software project and building Proper Integration is only creating a tight coupling between the systems, which will only keep creating bugs and requires ongoing maintenance.
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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by c0pium on Sunday October 22, 2023 @04:27AM (#37973754)
No they didn’t. They made up out of whole cloth a bunch of nonsense and then acted smug about how other people don’t get it. Then OP posted that it was in fact just a join.

Stop being so helpless.

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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by nicbou on Sunday October 22, 2023 @05:46AM (#37974058)
This is a pointlessly mean and unpleasant comment. It was polite discussion up until that point.
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