March 1998

Use the Web to cast your ballot for IMAGE enhancements.

The IMAGE Special Interest Group (SIGIMAGE) is putting the database’s enhancement ballot on the Web for the first time this year. The ballot is the most prominent means to influence the CSY database lab’s choice of which projects get immediate development attention. One outstanding issue for IMAGE users is a proposed date/time datatype, something the database has been without since it first went online in 1974. This enhancement was ranked number 4 in the 1997 voting, but only 74 ballots were tabulated, perhaps one reason why HP still hasn’t committed to providing something that could help in Year 2000 work. The Web access for voting may improve the turnout, and you don’t have to belong to Interex to cast a ballot. You can cast votes for date/time, and any of the other 59 proposed enhancements, until March 31. The Web site above also has a link to this spring’s edition of the SIGIMAGE newsletter, tenderly edited by Adager’s Alfredo Rego with versions in Acrobat, Postcript and HTML. That newsletter includes detailed explanations of the proposed enhancements. We recommend downloading the Acrobat file (only a minute at 28.8 speeds), looking it over in printed format and then browsing back to the Web site to vote. Your ballots are being tabulated on an HP 3000, running an IMAGE/SQL database, of course.
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