Latest Contributions by RobertStevens

I have been a strident critic of ESRI's software for some time, as examination of my posts will show.  In the past, I have used a MacBook Pro, running Windows10 under Parallels, and assigned 8G amd two cores to the VM. The performance was just awful, and the response of many was: "..need more resources...32G RAM minimum, prefer 64G:, "Parallels not supported"... etc. Ok. So our company has bought a dedicated PC. Graphics card is some high end NVIDIA jobbie as used by gamers; 64G RAM. 1T solid state drive; multicore AMD processor; $3000 later and .... fanfare....(no) Is performance better? Yes, it is better. But it is still slow enough to be irritating to the user. It is plain not good enough Could ESRI please explain this: I run a tool out of the standard toolbox. The same comment applies to many tools, but let's take Analysis Tools=> Overlay=>Spatial Join. There is a checkbox "Keep All Target Features (optional)". The default is on. I click it to turn if off. It takes 9+-1 seconds for the tick mark to disappear. So long, in fact, that one's first reaction is to click it again, whereupon it will be turned back on after another interminable wait. I am sorry. That is just pathetic. What can this behemoth of a software be doing that a simple graphical operation takes that long to echo??? And other fields are the same. There is always a pregnant pause after each field is entered or modified. The spinning blue circle and the "... is not responding from the OS" are my constant companions. So now, now that the stock response of "wrong computer, wrong this, wrong that.." are not applicable, tell me: Should i expect better?. That is a rhetorical question. This product reminds me of using computers in the seventies and eighties. I have not yet tried to use ArcPro on this revved up hardware. I am not optimistic. ... View more

I am running spatial join tool, joining points to points : I wish to determine for each point in the target dataset the nearest feature in the join dataset, and to record that distance. Both the join and the target dataset have the same (projected) coordinate system. They are both visible on the map. Attachment#1 shows my table of contents. The target dataset is nswdb_2019q2_project. The join dataset is Chic Grocery Stores 2015. The tool fails: see Attachment#2 Why does it fail? I have noticed this kind of failure before, intermittently, when the join  dataset is in a group layer (as it is here). When I move the Chic Grocery Stores 2015 layer outside the group layer, the join works. I have edited this posting to use the terminology used by the tool. )2019-06-18 15:57 EST). There was no change to the substance of the problem. ... View more

I have a point dataset, with many of the fields invisible. I create a selection on that point dataset, and use selection=>create layer from selected features. That works, but now all the fields which had been invisible now become visible. Why? That doesn't seem logical. I didn't want them to display in the old dataset, and it is unlikely that I want them to display in the new subset. Not a big deal, but more pointing and clicking. I seem to do much pointing and clicking with arcmap. Too much. ... View more

I have a layer created with the Multiple Ring Buffer tool in the Analysis Tools=>Overlay toolbox. The field, chosen by the tool, that has the radii of the distance rings is called, unsurprisingly, distance. Now I make a many-to-one spatial join of a point dataset (the target) to this buffer dataset (the join), the aim being to find how many points lie in each buffer and to extract other statistics from the point dataset as a function of distance. The result of this operation is a new layer, and it seems correct in all aspects bar one: the distance field has been set to zero. This would seem to be a bug.  Some spatial joins give one the option to record a distance, but there was no such option for this join. Th fact that the numbers are all zero anyway shows that nothing useful is being recorded. It is just wiping out data which I need for the next step in my analysis. Obviously, the fix is simple. Take the multiple buffer output and rename distance as something else. That works and no new field named distance is created, thus confirming the fact that no useful data  was being saved. ... View more