chudecek, on 2011-May-23, 08:30, said:
Have you ever filled out a "Pick-a-dot" product marketing survey? What kind of computer programming Einsteins (make that Yangs ) does it take to produce that?
If a couple of decent programmers couldn't come up with a suitable program for this in a week, they should change careers, and take up grease trap cleaning at Mickey D's.
If a couple of decent programmers couldn't come up with a suitable program for this in a week, they should change careers, and take up grease trap cleaning at Mickey D's.
As someone who works as a professional programmer, I agree with the poster who indicated that you do not understand the complexity of the task. The supporting software for thise surveys you describe was probably developed over months, not a week. Once developed, the survey itself is just data to the supporting software.
Something that a couple of decent programmers could come up with in a week would hardly fulfill what you envision.
And at what level do you expect these program to be used? I have gone to far too many tournaments where the boards are duplicated by hand (inlcuding many, if not all events in the NABC). Even if only used in such events as the team trials, you would presumably need a notebook or laptop computer for each active participant, plus a server. For 16 teams, we are talking about 65 computers that the sponsering organization would be expected to provide. And that is a relatively small event. For the Vanderbilt, I would expect that 257 would be required. And even a small notebook would take up space on the table. We might need bigger tables to play at. How is this going to work? Are the participants going to use this program instead of a bidding box? Or will we need an observer to enter the bids as they take place? With the former, I can see issues when someone misclicks, which I would expect to happen a lot, since this is only being used at major tournaments and the participants will not be used to this. And I cannot wait until there is a computer crash duting the middle of one of these major tournaments.