>There were six of us FoxPro Programmers working together with as many VC++ developers near by. We got blamed for ?everything? by the VC++ guys as ?FoxPro is an inferior product?. Two examples were:
>
>1. Memory leak. The application was a 24/7 and would fail in less than 24 hours due to a memory leak. The VC++ guys had their heads in the air and blamed us. We proved it was their problem and even found the code causing it. That was one for us!
>
>2. A new version of FoxPro was installed on the Network running NT and Novell. When ever anyone would attempt to access it the entire network would shut down. Since there were about 250 people in the office this managed to get everyone?s attention. We became famous and jokes over the company P.A. system let everyone know ?we were guilty?! ?See how terrible FoxPro is? It shut down the network! Get rid of it?!
>
>The network problem shut down the company for over 24 hours and turned out to be a bad segment on the hard disk. Whenever anyone went to access it, it would kill the entire system. We were spared once again.
>
>That incident convinced me to not become a Novell CNE, as I had planned. I saw the network tech pull a 32 hour shift with no rest. Enough!
>
>There is something about computers I love and then again?

A local company hired me for a one day stint to investigate a Novell network problem and to remove games and pirated software from all company workstations. The SysAdmin, who was my 'boss' on this project, had swapped hardware, shifted workstations, reloaded software and apps, but servers and workstations continued to randomly hang or had garbage appear in their data stream. This could have easily been located by a logical swapout technique, which I wanted to redo, but the sysadmin claimed he had already done that and persuaded the higher ups that since swapping hadn't found the problem and I was a 'professional' I must use other methods. I suspected the heartbeat pulse and put a fast, triggered oscilloscope on the cable. Sure enough... there was random excessive ringing in the square wave, which I traced to a NIC in a server. I replaced that and their network was back to Novell's usual rock steadiness. I explained to a higher up who happened to be standing by, in stepwise detail, how a logical swap technique would have quickly and easily found the problem. That sysadmin was fired shortly after I left. A couple of months later they phoned and asked if I would accept the job. I had been to every workstation on their network, seen what was on each HD and listened to what the workers were saying. I gave the company about a year. They didn't quite make a year.
JLK