Deft Flux » Uncategorized

Web Site Completion

Adam — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 22:41:00 +0000

We at Deft Flux are proud of our latest web site, created for Quality Paint and Coatings. We think it reflects their values and persona.

Reaction to Watson

Adam — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:36:46 +0000

We recently had the chance to see Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing super-computer, mercilessly pummel Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Jeopardy champions. While we believe that Ken and Brad knew just as many or more questions than Watson and Jeopardy is as much about the buzzer as the questions, Watson providing so many correct questions is nevertheless a feat. We also got to see the Nova episode that went into more detail about the development of Watson. IBM tried to use a rules based answer engine first, and then went to a pattern matching engine. We immediately recalled the fellow who trained his pattern matching spam filter to play chess. Anyway, based on what we have seen of rules based spam filters and pattern matching (Bayesian) spam filters, we are not surprised that Watson’s pattern matching question engine performed much better than the rules based engine. You may say we are surprised that IBM did not try that first.

To conclude:

Let us remember that although the question algorithms give the computer the appearance of intelligence, this computer is no more intelligent than any past computer. That is, it is just pretty good and really fast at matching patterns of a certain type.
Maybe we need more information, but based on what we know, we would not say Watson is a major breakthrough. IBM just was able to put together a sufficiently powerful computing system to store and retrieve all of the necessary information. We give credit to the smart guys at IBM.
In the end, it was a buzzer pressing contest and no one can beat a computer at that.

EPICOR shines

Adam — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:16:12 +0000

During a recent ERP selection, we have had the pleasure of looking at several different systems for a local client. But today, I want to share a few of our high-level observations of Epicor. Epicor is consistently coming in at almost double the price point of the other ERP systems that are normally considered for a business of this size. The “problem” is that Epicor is consistenly twice as good. First, each of the other ERP systems lacks one or two key modules — e.g. payroll, maintenance, or purchasing. When you subtract the price of those modules from Epicor or add the price of a third-party add-on to the other ERP, the price is closer to competitive. Then, you consider how much work the folks at Epicor have put into making the software usable (the other vendors have not kept pace) and you have to add a “time saved” factor to the price of the software. We have seen that the Epicor designers have not rested. They are constantly releasing improvements and we can say that — mostly in usability, but sometimes even in function — their software compares well even with players like JDEdwards and SAP. For lack of time, we shan’t go into more details, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Epicor stay in this game despite their high price. If they can bring it down just a touch, they may win the game. The point — for your future selection efforts, it may pay to consider Epicor.

Date to JDE Date

Adam — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:38:09 +0000

I know since we posted the JDE date to real date function, everyone has been wondering where the real date to JDE date function is. Well, “ask and you shall receive.”

drop function myuser.DateToJ!

CREATE function myuser.DateToJ (RealDate date)
    returns decimal(8,0)
    language sql
    deterministic
    no external action
begin atomic
   if RealDate is null then
      return 0;
   else
      return ((Year(RealDate) - 1900) * 1000) + DayOfYear(RealDate);
   end if;
end!

select myuser.DateToJ(date('2008-11-18'))
from myuser.dual!