Loading a million random records out of a set of one hundred million records is an enormously difficult task for an RDBMS on commodity hardware (e.g. magnetic rotating disks). This is a more common task than you would think. ORM systems backed by an RDBMS, such as Ruby on Rails, Django, Hibernate, have exactly this requirement and will only demand more as these models become more mainstream. Think about what search engines have to do: find millions among billions, all to show a user a dozen.
These problems are solvable now, but there's a lot of duplication of effort going on that a smart database vendor could solve for us.
When Michael Crichton writes a novel on global warming, he's an ignorant sensationalist.
When Michael Crichton writes an op-ed piece on gene patents, he's insightful and informed.
As insightful and informed as his previous essay ``Why Rape is Wrong''.
Linux's adoption is not hindered by technical problems.
There's no marketing. While the marketing department is where you'll find some of the greatest bullshit artists in the known world (even moreso than in sales), it's also the department that identifies the market for the product and determines how to meet its needs.
It takes a large corporation to design a desktop experience for a mass market. You cannot grow this organically. Tough decisions need to be made, people need to get fired, lawyers need to put down troublemakers, kneecaps need to get broken. This is business.
Examples of how Linux desktop adoption fails because there's no marketing department
A marketing department would have put an end to the KDE vs. Gnome issue in its infancy. Two competing desktop technologies fragments the installed base and leads to duplicated efforts. They would've told product development ot knife one, adopt the other.
Support for binary-only drivers is essential. Not every vendor finds it feasible to embrace open source in every instance. You can either draw a hard line and live with limited support, or find a way to lower their costs if they have to stick with binary only drivers. Can't compromise the principles? Fine, but don't expect to win over a billion desktops with this attitude.
Seamless 100% integration with market leading desktop products is essential, otherwise the barrier to entry is unreasonably high and the cost of Linux adoption is infeasible. This means working perfectly with Word, Access, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, SQL Server, MS Project, Photoshop, Illustrator, WordPerfect, Quickbooks, ACT!, etc. Yes, it also means supporting these products better than the vendors do, being able to open file formats from 1995 even though vendor's current product does not. It also means being line-item feature equivalent. It also means should someone switch to The GIMP, they can still use all of their Photoshop plugins bought and paid for. It means that Fax driver someone bought for ACT! still works when they use [open source ACT! alternative].
Shovelware/crapware that people impulse buy at their supermarket checkout lines has to work out of the box flawlessly when they pop the CD in. If it doesn't you fail.
Copy & paste hasn't perfectly interoperated on the Linux desktop in 10+ years (e.g. copy & paste xterm URL into a Mozilla URL). My guess is if I tried it right now it still wouldn't work, but even if it does, it shouldn't have taken TEN YEARS.
Linux is my server platform of choice, and my embedded desktop platform of choice, but I'm not retarded enough to demand it be imposed on Joe Sixpack home user in its current state. I doubt I ever can be.
Slifter.com, which is on the list, is pretty specialized. It's a mobile local product search. Its data comes from retailer inventory (not on the web) and it's meant to be run from a mobile device.
All of the new TLDs introduced have been disasters or fiascos.
New TLDs have...
Failed to eliminate the namespace scarcity problem
It's still all about.com and.net. You can't help but to laugh a bit when you see a business operating a.biz.
Failed to provide a usable content filtering solution
If authoritarian China can't purify the internet by blocking everything but.cn your ridiculous filtering proposal is dead in the water
Aided phishers
Is someone inside of TWO DIGIT COUNTRY CODE being stupid by expecting paypal.[TWO DIGIT COUNTRY CODE] to be legit?
Failed to restrict registrations to only a select group
Non-european residents have successfully registered.eu domains.
Non-universities have gotten their hands on.edu domains.
".NET Developer's Journal is reporting that Don Ferguson, the 'Father of WebSphere,' has left IBM to join Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie's office. Ozzie, whose efforts to rebuild Microsoft have been discussed previously on Slashdot, is gaining a man who while at Blue championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development -- a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being."
Should Microsoft be allowed to hire expert talent in order to stay competitive?
Data recovery is only a viable business (and a useful life-saving service) because of the peculiarities of how data loss occurs. Serious data loss is hard. It involves wiping the entire disk, block by block. It can take hours.
In the grand majority of data loss cases, 99% of the data is still intact. The operating software has simply lost the ability to manage it. A human being with the proper tools can eyeball the raw data and come up with a plan to reconstruct it. This is a pretty costly procedure, but feasible enough for the average business that REALLY needs data back (almost always because they discover their backup procedure was broken).
The costs involved in recovering data when you're dealing with encrypted volumes are orders of magnitude higher, well into the range where only intelligence agencies would bother trying.
Unless there are corresponding improvements in backup policies (doubtful) this is going to make a really bad situation.
Microsoft announced it had big things in development, didn't quite release all of the things they announced. This is fraud. Microsoft bad. They did it on purpose, by design. We're onto you guys, you won't fool us with Vista!
He references The Mythical Man-Month as if this would give him some kind of software development street cred. I don't buy it, mainly because he doesn't seem to have ever been involved with any software development project.
Many software projects start with ambitious and optimistic sets of features. And by many, I mean all. The bigger the project, the more ambitious the scope. "Yeah! Our next generation Operating System is going to have an OBJECT FILE SYSTEM and DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS and JUST IN TIME COMPILATION and ADAPTIVE HEALING and ADVANCED AI COMMAND INTERFACE and VOICE RECOGNITION. The future is NOW! We're awesome!" Developers believe the hype and do a lot to generate it. And if they believe it, and they're implementing the fucking thing, what chance do marketers have of looking at it critically? None. So they tow the line.
Result? The ambitious wildly impractical story is impossible to keep quiet. Sure, you can certainly fault companies for announcing features well before they're release candidate quality, but ambitious features getting cut because project deadlines are slipping happens all the time. Aside from the bad press that's generated from missing your release date, and the investment you blew developing features which don't get commercialized, there aren't many other downsides. If you can afford it, who cares?
I can totally imagine cutting these features if I were the project manager and we missed our release date; the decision process would go something like this: what is the most expensive feature we're developing right now that has the lowest return on investment that if we cut, would allow us to release much earlier? "Object filesystem" probably makes the top of everyone's list. It gets cut it in a heartbeat. What, was marketing hyping the shit out of it this whole time? I hadn't noticed, because I haven't left my cubicle in 36 months. Tough it out, marketing clowns.
The problem with Microsoft-defined "de facto standards" (and their products in general) is that they usually lag far behind the state of the art even more. WinAPI is one of the most messier system APIs out there, for example, and WinForms still sucks compared to Qt or even Swing.
It's totally ugly. I've been complaining about it for a decade now.
But put that aside for a second.
Pretend you were bankrolling an ISV and you had to pick an API. Your goals are to reach the widest possible audience at the lowest possible cost.
The Win API has going for it:
A half a billion desktops that natively speak it
MS Visual Studio, which is a really damn good IDE
Numerous alternative IDEs that also let you target Windows
An entire marketplace of tools that understand it, and understand your binaries
Volumes of books, online documentation and example code available
More developers who understand it than any other API
If you can make the business case for choosing Qt to hit 99% of the marketplace instead of hitting 90% with Win API, kudos to you. It's a rare company that sells so many units that their development/supports costs are negligible compared to the additional revenue targeting the remaining 9% of the market would bring. Especially when they have the option of developing in Win API now and if the market picks up, porting later, or choosing from a wide selection of automated-conversion tools to go Win -> Mac|Linux|Java.
Even if the Win API is missing some state of the art feature, I can't imagine the trade-off being worth it for most ISVs.
This probably isn't such a big deal for open source.
With Windows, whole swaths of the user community are running nearly identical binaries so malware authors have a large attractive market for their worms.
With Linux, you have virtually thousands of possible binary configurations due to the high prevalence of custom compiled from source and the sheer number of competing distributions with frequent releases. Reduces the attraction.
DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know, there are players who target niches, this rationale isn't bullet proof.
DISCLAIMER2: Yes, address space virtualization can't stop all buffer overflow exploits either.
They created a platform that commoditized the underlying computer and jump-started a PC revolution. An independent developer can reach a market of half a billion desktops with a single binary. How neat is that?
Now, in theory Java, OpenGL, POSIX, J2ME, XHTML/CSS, etc. are supposed to allow you to do portable development and treat the underlying platform as a commodity, but the problem with de jure standards is that you'll either be stuck with a standard that lags far behind the state of the art or a standard that is loosely adhered to, and is rife with incompatibilities, despite passing all of the compatiblity tests people can think up. Maybe you've seen standards that work, but every single one that I've dealt with has cost me or my company a lot more than simply targetting a Microsoft platform with 90% installed base does.
It seems like the best way to get commodity behavior is for one company to win and push a homogenous platform. Of course, it sucks when you have 10 vendors trying to do that and none of them have any majority marketshare. Microsoft's neat because they won, and won so well.
What Microsoft did with PC hardware is similiar to what open source does with essential digital infrastructure: it commoditizes them by becoming the one standard reference implementation. Where a mature open source product exists, the only market for proprietary software in that segment seems to be niches.
Yeah, they pulled a fast one on many of us with that episode. I mean, here we are, watching one of the funniest TV shows ever, and they spring that tear-jerker, heart-warming ending on us. Gads! See...just thinking about it and I'm about to start bawling again.:'(
When I watch Futurama, it's usually on late at night and sometimes I pass out near the end. Every time I've watched the episode with Fry's dog, I've passed out right at the ending and woken up to a everyone else in the room crying. Happened three times now.
If these drives become standard they'll have a huge impact on my day-to-day.
The most common point of failure in a desktop PC is the drive head smacking into the disk platter in a rotational-magnetic drive. The worst part of these failures is that your drive head runs a real good chance of being over your important data when it hits (because you access it often, because it's important), so you're much more likely to toast your critical ACT! database instead of the rarely used Typing Tutor Turbo III you don't care about. Switching to solid state drives would increase reliability and reduce data recovery costs. You would see the impact on national GDP.
Many new algorithms, even today, have to be designed to minimize disk seeking and re-order disk accesses into sequential reads. Pulling a million 100 byte records from a database that are scattered across a 100GB table is enough to make an SQL database unusable since even if you're using an index and have it entirely resident in cache. Solid state storage would free up capital being sunk into this kind of development, which translates into increased investment in more application features or lower costs.
Once the streaming performance is addressed (matter of time), solid state drives are going to be the standard and we'll wonder why we ever put up with rotational-magnetic storage.
I am completely unimpressed by Blackberries or cellphones with cameras and MP3 players in them. Costs me extra to buy, more complex to use, and I never wanted that function!
I used to say that until I got one of those dojiggers for free once (to develop an application for it). Now I can't imagine going through life without being able to pop open Wikipedia whenever I'm stuck on a boring car trip/tiresomely long subway ride. Mobile SSH is pretty awesome, too.
Equivalent framework for Python
on
Rails Recipes
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Since I'm already familiar with Python and use it on a daily basis, my experience with Ruby has been pretty limited. This puts Ruby on Rails just out of my reach for a new project.
Thankfully, there's I guess what you'd call a rough equivalent, Django which is the first framework I've ever used that hasn't frustrated the hell out of me.
Agreed. This has nothing to do with nerds. What is it doing here? Not to mention half of us are bitter toward Indians anyway as a result of outsourcing..
Oh maybe thats why.....
Mod points here for insightful.
I'll never understand why Americans are so bitter about this. I don't have a single colleague who can say they lost their job to offshore outsourcing, or even has any trouble getting a new job for great pay.
If anything, I have only positive things to say about offshore-outsourcing. Farming out the easy stuff frees me up to pursue the more lucrative stuff, like working more with customers or developing partnerships.
We could already be watching all of our TV shows over the internet on-demand.
The average person isn't watching the bulk of their TV this way because the networks don't want to give up that kind of control. To say nothing about the people who don't even want to control their TV experience. Some people are just happy to flop onto the couch and let a gigantic media corporation design their entire evening's entertainment experience.
This is real inconvenient for left-wing environmentalist nuts (all of them live in cities, obviously, which are the least environmental of surroundings imaginable, but hey, let's just disregard that).
I guess by "least environmental of surroundings" you could mean that there aren't any lush forests, but while they are soul crushing, living in New York City is a more energy efficient way to live according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_New _York_City:
New York's uniquely high rate of public transit use and its pedestrian-friendly character make it one of the most energy-efficient cities in the country. Gasoline consumption in New York City is at the rate where the national average was in the 1920s.
Science just doesn't have anything to offer to the average Joe Sixpack.
Getting a definitive answer to anything takes effort, time, and worst of all, intelligence. And not just any intelligence, good intelligence, one that could explain something complex in simple terms that the average Joe Sixpack can understand. And even with all that, important science doesn't always have profit motive.
Without profit motive, the scientific community doesn't stand a chance of competing against all of the other noise makers that can make billions by getting their junk-science-but-profitable messages out there. Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack's going to hear a lot more about the snap crackle and pop of Rice Krispies than he will about the impending snap crackle and popping of his skin as it blisters and sloughs off as the temperature of the earth approaches 1,000 degrees. (Or however this global warming thing is supposed to work; I'm no scienceologist)
...a web to paper mail gateway so that I could type and sign letters (with a previously uploaded signature file) without actually having to touch a piece of paper... oh man.
Bonus points if it embosses the signature.
Triple word score if it sends the letter certified / registered mail for you.
Wet dream alert if they offer a service where they'll act as an unbiased third party that will let you prove that you sent someone a letter stating X on date Y confirmed received on date XXXX.
Oh fucking shit if someone breaks into your account though. Suddenly you're designating power of attorney to a 14 year old in eastern europe.
The only problem with such a complete database is that the street value of the data is through the roof, so any righteous criminal that set out to free it would have to resist great temptation to sell it to hardened criminal enterprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Loading a million random records out of a set of one hundred million records is an enormously difficult task for an RDBMS on commodity hardware (e.g. magnetic rotating disks). This is a more common task than you would think. ORM systems backed by an RDBMS, such as Ruby on Rails, Django, Hibernate, have exactly this requirement and will only demand more as these models become more mainstream. Think about what search engines have to do: find millions among billions, all to show a user a dozen.
These problems are solvable now, but there's a lot of duplication of effort going on that a smart database vendor could solve for us.
As insightful and informed as his previous essay ``Why Rape is Wrong''.
(In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.)
Linux's adoption is not hindered by technical problems.
There's no marketing. While the marketing department is where you'll find some of the greatest bullshit artists in the known world (even moreso than in sales), it's also the department that identifies the market for the product and determines how to meet its needs.
It takes a large corporation to design a desktop experience for a mass market. You cannot grow this organically. Tough decisions need to be made, people need to get fired, lawyers need to put down troublemakers, kneecaps need to get broken. This is business.
Examples of how Linux desktop adoption fails because there's no marketing department
Linux is my server platform of choice, and my embedded desktop platform of choice, but I'm not retarded enough to demand it be imposed on Joe Sixpack home user in its current state. I doubt I ever can be.
Slifter.com, which is on the list, is pretty specialized. It's a mobile local product search. Its data comes from retailer inventory (not on the web) and it's meant to be run from a mobile device.
(Yes, I work for them.)
All of the new TLDs introduced have been disasters or fiascos.
New TLDs have...
It's still all about
If authoritarian China can't purify the internet by blocking everything but
Is someone inside of TWO DIGIT COUNTRY CODE being stupid by expecting paypal.[TWO DIGIT COUNTRY CODE] to be legit?
Non-european residents have successfully registered
Non-universities have gotten their hands on
New TLDs: Just say no.
The correct moral is that bloggers are a vocal minority and not trend-setting taste makers as previously thought.
Data recovery is only a viable business (and a useful life-saving service) because of the peculiarities of how data loss occurs. Serious data loss is hard. It involves wiping the entire disk, block by block. It can take hours. In the grand majority of data loss cases, 99% of the data is still intact. The operating software has simply lost the ability to manage it. A human being with the proper tools can eyeball the raw data and come up with a plan to reconstruct it. This is a pretty costly procedure, but feasible enough for the average business that REALLY needs data back (almost always because they discover their backup procedure was broken).
The costs involved in recovering data when you're dealing with encrypted volumes are orders of magnitude higher, well into the range where only intelligence agencies would bother trying.
Unless there are corresponding improvements in backup policies (doubtful) this is going to make a really bad situation.
Factual errors aside, I think he's trying to say:
Microsoft announced it had big things in development, didn't quite release all of the things they announced. This is fraud. Microsoft bad. They did it on purpose, by design. We're onto you guys, you won't fool us with Vista!
He references The Mythical Man-Month as if this would give him some kind of software development street cred. I don't buy it, mainly because he doesn't seem to have ever been involved with any software development project.
Many software projects start with ambitious and optimistic sets of features. And by many, I mean all. The bigger the project, the more ambitious the scope. "Yeah! Our next generation Operating System is going to have an OBJECT FILE SYSTEM and DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS and JUST IN TIME COMPILATION and ADAPTIVE HEALING and ADVANCED AI COMMAND INTERFACE and VOICE RECOGNITION. The future is NOW! We're awesome!" Developers believe the hype and do a lot to generate it. And if they believe it, and they're implementing the fucking thing, what chance do marketers have of looking at it critically? None. So they tow the line.
Result? The ambitious wildly impractical story is impossible to keep quiet. Sure, you can certainly fault companies for announcing features well before they're release candidate quality, but ambitious features getting cut because project deadlines are slipping happens all the time. Aside from the bad press that's generated from missing your release date, and the investment you blew developing features which don't get commercialized, there aren't many other downsides. If you can afford it, who cares?
I can totally imagine cutting these features if I were the project manager and we missed our release date; the decision process would go something like this: what is the most expensive feature we're developing right now that has the lowest return on investment that if we cut, would allow us to release much earlier? "Object filesystem" probably makes the top of everyone's list. It gets cut it in a heartbeat. What, was marketing hyping the shit out of it this whole time? I hadn't noticed, because I haven't left my cubicle in 36 months. Tough it out, marketing clowns.
It's totally ugly. I've been complaining about it for a decade now.
But put that aside for a second.
Pretend you were bankrolling an ISV and you had to pick an API. Your goals are to reach the widest possible audience at the lowest possible cost.
The Win API has going for it:
If you can make the business case for choosing Qt to hit 99% of the marketplace instead of hitting 90% with Win API, kudos to you. It's a rare company that sells so many units that their development/supports costs are negligible compared to the additional revenue targeting the remaining 9% of the market would bring. Especially when they have the option of developing in Win API now and if the market picks up, porting later, or choosing from a wide selection of automated-conversion tools to go Win -> Mac|Linux|Java.
Even if the Win API is missing some state of the art feature, I can't imagine the trade-off being worth it for most ISVs.
This probably isn't such a big deal for open source.
With Windows, whole swaths of the user community are running nearly identical binaries so malware authors have a large attractive market for their worms.
With Linux, you have virtually thousands of possible binary configurations due to the high prevalence of custom compiled from source and the sheer number of competing distributions with frequent releases. Reduces the attraction.
DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know, there are players who target niches, this rationale isn't bullet proof.
DISCLAIMER2: Yes, address space virtualization can't stop all buffer overflow exploits either.
They created a platform that commoditized the underlying computer and jump-started a PC revolution. An independent developer can reach a market of half a billion desktops with a single binary. How neat is that?
Now, in theory Java, OpenGL, POSIX, J2ME, XHTML/CSS, etc. are supposed to allow you to do portable development and treat the underlying platform as a commodity, but the problem with de jure standards is that you'll either be stuck with a standard that lags far behind the state of the art or a standard that is loosely adhered to, and is rife with incompatibilities, despite passing all of the compatiblity tests people can think up. Maybe you've seen standards that work, but every single one that I've dealt with has cost me or my company a lot more than simply targetting a Microsoft platform with 90% installed base does.
It seems like the best way to get commodity behavior is for one company to win and push a homogenous platform. Of course, it sucks when you have 10 vendors trying to do that and none of them have any majority marketshare. Microsoft's neat because they won, and won so well.
What Microsoft did with PC hardware is similiar to what open source does with essential digital infrastructure: it commoditizes them by becoming the one standard reference implementation. Where a mature open source product exists, the only market for proprietary software in that segment seems to be niches.
When I watch Futurama, it's usually on late at night and sometimes I pass out near the end. Every time I've watched the episode with Fry's dog, I've passed out right at the ending and woken up to a everyone else in the room crying. Happened three times now.
I don't think I ever want to see the ending.
Wow, you weren't kidding.
If these drives become standard they'll have a huge impact on my day-to-day.
The most common point of failure in a desktop PC is the drive head smacking into the disk platter in a rotational-magnetic drive. The worst part of these failures is that your drive head runs a real good chance of being over your important data when it hits (because you access it often, because it's important), so you're much more likely to toast your critical ACT! database instead of the rarely used Typing Tutor Turbo III you don't care about. Switching to solid state drives would increase reliability and reduce data recovery costs. You would see the impact on national GDP.
Many new algorithms, even today, have to be designed to minimize disk seeking and re-order disk accesses into sequential reads. Pulling a million 100 byte records from a database that are scattered across a 100GB table is enough to make an SQL database unusable since even if you're using an index and have it entirely resident in cache. Solid state storage would free up capital being sunk into this kind of development, which translates into increased investment in more application features or lower costs.
Once the streaming performance is addressed (matter of time), solid state drives are going to be the standard and we'll wonder why we ever put up with rotational-magnetic storage.
I am completely unimpressed by Blackberries or cellphones with cameras and MP3 players in them. Costs me extra to buy, more complex to use, and I never wanted that function!
I used to say that until I got one of those dojiggers for free once (to develop an application for it). Now I can't imagine going through life without being able to pop open Wikipedia whenever I'm stuck on a boring car trip/tiresomely long subway ride. Mobile SSH is pretty awesome, too.
Since I'm already familiar with Python and use it on a daily basis, my experience with Ruby has been pretty limited. This puts Ruby on Rails just out of my reach for a new project.
Thankfully, there's I guess what you'd call a rough equivalent, Django which is the first framework I've ever used that hasn't frustrated the hell out of me.
You've got no excuses left, check it out.
Mod points here for insightful.
I'll never understand why Americans are so bitter about this. I don't have a single colleague who can say they lost their job to offshore outsourcing, or even has any trouble getting a new job for great pay.
If anything, I have only positive things to say about offshore-outsourcing. Farming out the easy stuff frees me up to pursue the more lucrative stuff, like working more with customers or developing partnerships.
We could already be watching all of our TV shows over the internet on-demand.
The average person isn't watching the bulk of their TV this way because the networks don't want to give up that kind of control. To say nothing about the people who don't even want to control their TV experience. Some people are just happy to flop onto the couch and let a gigantic media corporation design their entire evening's entertainment experience.
This is real inconvenient for left-wing environmentalist nuts (all of them live in cities, obviously, which are the least environmental of surroundings imaginable, but hey, let's just disregard that).
I guess by "least environmental of surroundings" you could mean that there aren't any lush forests, but while they are soul crushing, living in New York City is a more energy efficient way to live according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_New _York_City:
Science just doesn't have anything to offer to the average Joe Sixpack.
Getting a definitive answer to anything takes effort, time, and worst of all, intelligence. And not just any intelligence, good intelligence, one that could explain something complex in simple terms that the average Joe Sixpack can understand. And even with all that, important science doesn't always have profit motive.
Without profit motive, the scientific community doesn't stand a chance of competing against all of the other noise makers that can make billions by getting their junk-science-but-profitable messages out there. Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack's going to hear a lot more about the snap crackle and pop of Rice Krispies than he will about the impending snap crackle and popping of his skin as it blisters and sloughs off as the temperature of the earth approaches 1,000 degrees. (Or however this global warming thing is supposed to work; I'm no scienceologist)
...a web to paper mail gateway so that I could type and sign letters (with a previously uploaded signature file) without actually having to touch a piece of paper... oh man.
Bonus points if it embosses the signature.
Triple word score if it sends the letter certified / registered mail for you.
Wet dream alert if they offer a service where they'll act as an unbiased third party that will let you prove that you sent someone a letter stating X on date Y confirmed received on date XXXX.
Oh fucking shit if someone breaks into your account though. Suddenly you're designating power of attorney to a 14 year old in eastern europe.
I see XML as a glorified CSV file. Instead of being a two-dimensional representation of a data structure, you can use an N-dimensional representation.
If that's all it was, I wouldn't mind. But it gets so much hype. Why?
3. You will relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen", but only after fully carrying out Task #1 (see above).
I *love* the Sex Pistols. Maybe this annexation by England thing isn't so bad after all...
The only problem with such a complete database is that the street value of the data is through the roof, so any righteous criminal that set out to free it would have to resist great temptation to sell it to hardened criminal enterprise.