Re: Tired of Waiting: Please Help!

In message <d79a7f43.0201290301.5cca4b36_at_posting.google.com>, Johan Groenewald <jpgreen_at_uwc.ac.za> writes
>Bernard Peek <bap_at_shrdlu.com> wrote in message
>news:<aMoHYHGMscV8Ewi8_at_shrdlu.com
>
>>What you want is the perfect database . . . No, nobody has built one
>yet.
>
>Thanks for the reply Bernard.
>
>Yes I guess what I'm describing is near perfect from my own
>perspective. And that will be to enter data once and keep it in a kind
>of album for future use. Does "perfect" and "nobody has built one yet"
>refer to unatainability in terms of R&D, program complexities and
>market potential?

None of those is individually enough to make it impossible. What you are looking for is a system that merges the processing power of the human brain with the storage systems of a computer. The nearest approach is a human with a computer. Hire a good librarian.

>
>Thanks for the link to Idealist. I've checked it before when it was
>marketed by a UK company (Black_____?)

Blackwells, the publishing company and bookseller.

>and I even think Oxford
>University Press. I'm glad to see that the program is being upgraded
>for integration with the web. I'm downloading the demo and will
>evaluate it.
>
>I've also checked askSam and I use the free Windows version i giveaway
>for small little tasks. I'm not confident that even the latest version
>(4.1) can do things that I would like it to do. Seems the program
>keeps going because of the favourable comments that the DOS version
>received many years ago.

That may be true of Idealist too. I remembered it from many years back. We are getting better at transforming information into formats that can be stored in a relational electronic database and so the need for something like Idealist is less than it was.

Many of the functions of idealist have been subsumed into web search engines. You might also consider the document search functions that are built into the latest MS programs and operating-systems. Essentially the disk files are stored in a database and can be searched. Under Windows 2000 I can click on a word-processed document and display its properties. This includes the author, word-count and any custom properties I included when I created the document.

-- 
Bernard Peek
bap_at_shrdlu.com

In search of cognoscenti