The most common error I've seen in this area is that most GIS systems use (Lat, Lng) but most systems written by non-GIS people use (Lng, Lat), which they think of as (x, y).
I think you have that backwards? In my very limited experience most GIS systems use ENU ordering (east, north up), and easting corresponds to longitude.
In my first job I used Ingres/Quel. Probably because of that, I still find SQL hideous. Quel was a lot more orthogonal and clean, but by now SQL has so many more features that they're not really comparable. The first version of Ingres ran on a PDP-11/70, and the different components (parser, query optimizer, query executor, etc.) ran in separate processes connected via pipes (this was pre-socket Berkeley Unix) because each process could only be 64K 16-bit words. It was hideously slow--ran a lot faster once it was ported to the VAX and everything could run in one process. INGRES originally stood for something like Interactive Graphics Retrieval System, IIRC because the original funding agency wanted a graphics database. Stonebraker wanted to build a relational DBMS so he just went ahead and did it, but gave it a grant-compliant name and wrote some bullshit about graphics to make the funding agency happy.
That used to be his house. The construction technique was interesting: make a pile of dirt, pour/spread concrete over it. When the concrete cures dig out the dirt.
An instructor told me around 1977 that there was not going to be much need for programmers in the future, because every piece of software that was needed had already been written.
I like to rephrase statements like that in the form of: "Every possible problem and need already has an automated solution that has been mechanized and made aware by everyone on the planet."
Right, so you get an effective rate of 1.2% of FMV for class 1, 5.8% of FMV for class 2. So the rate is just a bit higher than California for class 1, which might explain why brownstones are so expensive in NYC relative to larger buildings.
