Reply #70: Mostly irrelevant

[Philosophy]

The applications you describe are not comparable to the Diebold systems. The Diebold voting machines do not contain millions of records. They do not have to handle multiple concurrent users. Record locking is not necessary. They are not distributed. Every ballot is not transmitted to a central database in the GEMS system, only vote totals. Rollback logs and backups are unnecessary - the chance of any individual machine hosing its database is vanishingly miniscule, and not worth the expense. There is no record merging going on. As designed they are not comparable to lottery systems and ATMs, not should they have to be.

Unlike you I'm not a Microsoft-hating computer geek who sits in a dark room all day doing nothing but babysitting one huge database that I am religiously devoted to so I think everyone who doesn't use a multi-million dollar computer system for their grocery list is a loser script kiddie. I design and program many very different typesand sizes of programs with different hardware, software, and cost requirements for many different companies. Every solution takes into consideration a cost-benefit analysis. A giant, expensive database system is not required for every project. Access databases are a perfectly valid tool for some of these projects. In fact my company consistently gets contracts because we bid far under what other companies do who have the same illogical attitude that you have.