I'm involved with writing the code for this a project using this technology for a recycling subcontractor somewhere in rural England/Wales. The RFID simply allows us to tag a recycling box to a household then collect data on the weight of recyclate returned in each box. Housholds are issued with two boxes - paper/textiles/card and glass/cans so that's the finest level of detail being collected.
The use of the data is that it will allow the recycling organisation to work out which areas are recycling a lot of material and which are not, and the intention is to make that information available back to the public on a 'community' level. What a community is hasn't been precisely defined, but it's going to be larger, probably considerably larger, than postcode purposly so individuals can't be identified. The local authority will make use of the information by identifying areas where it needs to do more to encourage recycling, and possibly to reward communities that are actively recycling.
I honestly don't think there's any significant civil liberty issues here. In effect it's no different than a gas company monitoring the volume of gas each customer uses or a water company doing similar, it's just not been done before because up until now the technology to monitor garbage out (as opposed to the volume of a commodity going in) hasn't been available.
The Government's proposals for ID cards do cause me considerable concern so I'm not at all complacent about the matter, but presumably if we think that encouraging people to recycle is a good thing then collecting data to understand the patterns of people recycling is a helpful approach?
But the problem with map applications is not so much the code, but the data. THE advantage of google maps is that it comes complete with data down to a usable level of detail most of the planet.
Hmm, you can hardly pull logic when your argument is that we have three completely different proposals in completely different areas of knowledge put forward at around the same time, and because two of them are 'dead' the third one is too. The logic is dreadful.
Besides, it's arguable about these. True much of Freud has been superceeded, but his essential insight about there being an unconcious as well as concious mind remains, and while Marx hardly proved himself to have 100% forsight his analysis of economic history up until the 19thC still has some merit. Furthermore you are being very selective - Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism easily stands with Freud, Marx and Darwin as great 19thC theories and that's been spectacularly successful.
Personally I'd go for Hydrogen cyanide. Long time ago now, but the various biochem labs I worked in had potassium cyanide sitting around by the kilogram and reacting this with carboxylic acid or similar at reasonable strengh would do a lot of damage.
More interesting than cents, when I first started in a commercial DP department, back in the mid-80s, we had a couple of old guys (well, in their 50's) who could remember writing code that had to use the old UK pre-decimal money system (the UK went decimal in 1971). Under that there was 12 pence to the shilling, and 20 shillings to the pound. They similarly converted all values to pence before starting calculations, then converted back to £sd when complete. All on a computer (a Honeywell I think) with less power than my mobile phone.
Early access was indeed pretty crud. However Access 97 was a solid release that I still have clients running on even now. My milage varies because I never use Access as anything else put a front end to SQL Server or MSDE, and in these circumstances it's an excellent, reliable and solid system. Access should never be used as a database for all but the smallest of systems and personally I'd never trust it for anything else but single user, however to decry it because it doesn't work reliably in such circumstances is unfair - MSDE is free and works well for up to 5 simultaneous users, which should tell you something.
Your comment about starting counting from Access 2000 is actually quite perverse as this release was generally agreed to be considerably more buggy than 97 and best avoided - consequently many users didn't upgrade until Office XP. Access 2002, and particularly 2003 are good releases, although again myself I always use them as a front end to SQL Server.
But underline the point, using Access as a database and front end system, and using it as a front end system to MSDE or SQL Server are two completely different things and should be treated as such (indeed that there is the option of the adp file format in Access 2000+ specifically designed to work with SQL Server is a strong clue:-). Don't dismiss Access as a useful business system if you've only seen the former.
The problem with deploying Access for widespread use on a casual basis, even with the runtime, is that the various dependencies cause issues. Different versions of libraries etc can rapidly end you up in a support quagmire. True if you've limited yourself to vanilla Access and not made use of anything non-standard it may not be too bad, expecially in a standardised environment, but in my experience it's rare for a business application not to make use of other Office products and environments in all but the smallest companies are to some degree heterogenious. These problems may or may not surface to a greater or lesser extent, but it's always going to be more of an issue to support than a browser application. Hence IMHO there is a certain degree of functionality that is required by a user to make it cost effective to deploy Access.
On the other hand if your user does need complexity then the deployment overhead is often worth it. I'm sure you're a wizz with PHP, and indeed I can throw together a nice PHP bases web application myself with some speed - slapping up a simple Access data entry form and a simple PHP data entry form is indeed probably of similar order of development time. The problem is that in virtually all the reallife business applications I've come across a simple data entry form won't cut it.
We're talking here of such things as dynamic drop down lists (i.e. context sensitive to other data entered on forms), calculations on the fly (i.e. enter net price, then lookup database to determine a gross price depending upon item classification and commission), showing/hiding areas of a form based on data entered, dynamically checking data entered against a database, non-standard controls, integrating graphics and charts, creating or merging Word/Excel documents etc etc. All of which needs to happen responsively - i.e. you'll need extensive Javascript and Ajax coding as the form display/submit cycle is not acceptable.
I'm not saying that you can't do (most) of these with LAMP or find a work-around, just it's a lot more hassle than using Access as a front end, a tool that was designed specifically for business data processing. Cases need to be examined on merit with regard to circumstances and budget to decide what approach is appropriate. What does bug me though is the multiple ill-informed knee-jerk comments on most of this thread along the lines that Access is Microsoft, it's VBA, it's not Open Source and therefore you should throw up your hands in horror, refuse to touch it, and run for the hills. Oddly enough I'm just about to start a project for a major global charity recoding an Access/SQL Server application to WISP precisely because they need to be able to deply an application more widely than they currently have and don't want the Access overhead, so you'll see my comments are based on pragmatism, not ideology:-)
Finally I'm fascinated by the line that you disagree with most of my previous post. What's to disagree with? SQL Server isn't one of the best databases going (you can't honestly propose to run a back-office business system on MySQL?) MDB vs ADP issues? That Access isn't a good front-end application to a back-end database? Identifying groups of users and deplying appropriate tools for each? None of this is contentious, it's common sense.
Access has it's place. Ignore the OS zealots here, in the real world Access is a viable solution in many business contexts and there is no direct OS equivalent that comes anywhere close, besides if you try to convert it all to LAMP you'll most probably go out of business in the time it will take you:-).
OK, firstly you need to convert the data from Access to SQL Server. This is essential: Access is really an excellent front-end system, but it's data handling sucks big time in a mult-user situation. The upsizing wizards included with it do a pretty good job, although you'll undoutably want to tweak manually. Upsizing then reviewing the database and adding relational integrity and other database rules is an essential first step. If you can't afford SQL Server, which is probably on of MS's best products, the MSDE will do if you don't have too many users. It's also a little known fact that Access will run as a front end to Postgres - although I've never tried this myself if you Google for it there's quite a few resources out there.
Having upsized the database you then have two choices. Review and modify the upsized MDB front-end, or create a new ADP project and convert. ADP's have some advantages, but you have to convert manually and rewrite the data access code. This does take time (although a suprising amount can be cut and pasted from between MDB and ADP). The choice here is heavily influence by how the old database has been written - I've seen some Access applications which are practically VBA applications and need to be rewritten susbtantially to use SQL Server even if left as MDBs, whereas others hardly need any changes at all. If you are picking up the application to support yourself and can afford the time the ADP approach is probably prefable as you'll get to know the code and iron out any junk.
You should indeed consider what use you can make of LAMP (or more accuratly WISP). Access's strengths lie in it's ability to support detailed responsive Forms for data entry and most particularly it's Reports where complex output can be generated remarkably quickly - generally it's RAD abilities blow LAMP and similar away for anything but a simpler application (and Ruby on Rails, that includes you:-). Both of these are time-consuming to replace by a browser interface: the Forms will need extensive use of AJAX to reproduce the immediate responsive feel of an Access application, and Reports can take a lot of coding and even then reproducing pagenation and so forth can be problematic.
However in a business context it's quite usual for there to be a core group of users who are responsible for data entry and 'expert' use of the system, and a wider group of users who need just read-only access or some very simple data entry, generally for a limited number of screens. If this is the case it's a viable strategy to replace Access by a browser interface for these users. PHP runs happily on a windows server so all your LAMP skills can be applied quite readily. THE major advantage of replacing Access for the casual users is that you then no longer need to deploy Access, which will save you both licence money and support time.
If at a later date you have the time and motivation to convert more of the core user functionality from Access to browser then you can do that. A viable strategy is to convert the Forms but leave the complex reports in a Access as a 'reporting suite'. In many business setups it's quite common to find an 'expert user' who is capable of creating bespoke reports in Access. Handled correctly these people can be a valuable asset - generally I create an 'Adhoc' or 'Scratch' Access application for them (mdb is strongly preferred in this case so that objects are not created on the server) which they can use to generate bespoke reports. The core functionality is placed in a separate Access application which they do not modify.
Take-home message is to recognise that all these technologies have strengths and weaknesses and play
The Delphi 2006 win32 compiler is an improvement, and the IDE is considerably better than version 6. I upgraded myself and a few months ago for the first time since Delphi 6 and am quite happy with that side of the purchase.
However the.net support if for version 1.1, which sucks big time. I fail to see any reason to use Borland Studio on an old version of.net when Visual Studio is on 2.0. Indeed I feel more than a little cheated that I had to pay for all the.net stuff to get my hands on the win32 compiler.
I've used Delphi since version 1.0, and Turbo Pascal before that, so Borland have a long legasy of goodwill from me. However they are in last-chance saloon now. I'll probably upgrade to 2007 when it arrives to get.net 2.0 support, but beyond that, unless NewCo manages to up their game, I suspect I will go elsewhere.
I'd suggest Europa Universalis (http://www.europa-universalis.com) is probably a good stab at this. Especially as the game format is quite open and there's an active user community who have enhanced it to include a plethora of historical events (and what-if's) at a quite staggering level of detail.
It's not the kind of game that appeals to everyone (but it's highbrow right;-), but for anyone with an interest in history the ability to play what-if is really quite addictive. The game engine is rather impressive in that it moulds the game to follow generally historical lines without any overt manipulation or closing the door on the occasional wildly different outcome.
This has precisely zero chance of happening. Ignoring that it's undoutably a troll by the Government to check out reaction anyway (an oft-used tactic so they can 'listen to public opinion' and retreat to the position they wanted to implement in the first place) Government has a long, long history of failing to get complex, or even simple, IT projects to work.
By way of a small but succient example take the National Firearms Register. First proposed after the Dunblane Massacre, this relatively simple proposal for a single database of gun owners across the whole of the UK - instead of each local police force holding holding thei own records - still hasn't been implemented nearly 10 years after it was agreed. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4767068.stm
Remember gun ownership in the UK is rare - less than 50,000 people from a population of 55 million - and this is an widely supported measure that even the shooting organisations agree with.
Similar failed or massively cut-back initiatives abound for the national health service, vehicle licencing authority, child support agency, inland revenue/customs and excise, police authorities and much else.
I'd like to second that. I've been using a standard setup of php / tinybutstrong / xajax for several projects now and it drops in perfectly without any issues except one*. Very neat library with minimal bloat.
*one issue. Doesn't appear to work on any window open as a modal dialog. One time I needed that I coded the ajax calls directly myself.
True, but as I per below, there's literally mounds of baked clay tablets because they are so indestructable. Apparently they used to get shovelled into foundations and the like. The estimate I heard was that at current rates it will take scholars several hundred years to translate what we've found already. Compare that to parchment records where the discovery of even a few new scraps is a major event (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5235894.stm and particularly http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5216320.st m). Point is in the race for the most successful long term storage mechanism cuniform on baked clay is way ahead of the field, nothing else comes close.
Presumably the tablets stuff in museums are, but I was listening to an archeologist recently who was saying that the advantage of clay tablets is that they are virtually indestructable unless you purposly take a hammer to them. Compare that to papyrus and parchment which can get preserved a long time, but need special circumstances, such a being buried in a bog, to stop decay.
Apparantly because of this there is vast amounts of Sumerian and related texts awaiting translation (the language was only deciphered at the beginning of the 20thC and naturally there's not a great many people who can translate it) ranging from business accounts to high literature. Much of it is on tablets that were recycled as building material and the like - there's literally piles of it and at the current rate it will take several hundred years for scholars to get through.
Don't knock it, cuneiform on backed clay is the single most successful format for long-term storage ever invented - 3000 years and counting. Heck, most of our modern storage formats can't even manage 30 - tied to read a 8" floppy recently?
I have to push this as it usually gets missed from reviews as it's a hybrid P2P solution and not a straightforward filter, but Cloudmark's safetybar product (http://www.cloudmark.com/) is just about perfect for me. I get an average of about 20 spam emails a day and it has a false positive result of 0% and has had for months. In fact I've been using the product for several years now and I think the last time I saw a false positive was a couple of years back.
On the efficiency side it has a hit rate of nearly 100%. I would have said it was 100% a couple of months back, but just recently it's been having a bit of a problem with one stock-pushing spam.
Anyway, that aside it's the best spam filter I've ever seen by a very long way, and I'd highly recommend the service. It costs a few $ a month, but it's probably the best value subscription I have.
I have no connection with the company, just a very satisfied customer who's been using it since the beta some years ago. I have a publically available email address which I've had for years and must be on many spam lists, without Cloudmark it would be unusable, with it it's no problem at all. I recently installed it for my wife who was starting to get a lot of spam - on that I noticed it took about two weeks to get it trained not to junk a few mailing list emails she was on, but after that it's been just as highly reliable as my installation.
Cloudmark's safetybar product (http://www.cloudmark.com/ - lousy name, SpamNet which it was before was far better) is just about perfect for me. I get an average of about 20 spam emails a day and it has a false positive result of 0% and has had for months. In fact I've been using the product for several years now and I think the last time I saw a false positive was a couple of years back.
On the efficiency side it has a hit rate of nearly 100%. I would have said it was 100% a couple of months back, but just recently it's been having a bit of a problem with one stock-pushing spam.
Anyway, that aside it's the best spam filter I've ever seen by a very long way, and I'd highly recommend the service. It costs a few $ a month, but it's probably the best value subscription I have.
I have no connection with the company, just a very satisfied customer. The P2P nature of the product places it outside the usual spam filters so it's often missed from reviews.
Yeah love to know where the shoe thing comes from. Starts young though, when the whole family went on holiday this year - travelling around europe and carrying stuff in backpacks - my 12 year old daughter was told to she could only take two pairs of shoes in addition to the ones she was wearing. Also as the youngest she had a smaller pack and the rest of us would each carry some of her stuff.
It was only after a several days out we figured that she'd managed to pring 9 pairs, having individually talked the me, my wife and my son into carrying her 'extra two pairs'.
Interesting that it uses the line 'theoretical big bang' though. Am I being paranoid here or is USA Today covering itself against Creationists? Just seems rather odd to underline theoretical like that.
Honestly, there's justified MS bashing, and clueless knee-jerk wannabe cool MS bashing, and this is the later. Any production MS SQL installation will be running on Windows Server 2003, most likely as the only major application on the system, and under those circumstances it's really pretty solid.
Nobody pretends that Windows Server is as solid or efficient as Linux, but realistically it's not the pile of crap you posture, it simply doesn't score quite as highly. For practical purposes both are quite good enough to run a service on, and overall Windows Server 2003 + MS SQL is a pretty good choice.
But there is no agreed standard for procedural SQL as such, so you can't really complain about T-SQL not being compliant. All RDBMs have different implementations of procedural extensions so it's really rather unfair to pull Microsoft out for excessive criticism. Oracle's PL/SQL for example is equally as proprietary. The real point is over the ANSI SQL standards where MS SQL does offer very good support indeed.
In practise I don't think procedural SQL standards are too much of an issue as if you are designing a system that makes extensive use of such features you're probably pretty tied into a specific platform/database anyway.
We all like to knock Microsoft periodically for it's well know shortcomings, but SQL Server is not one of them. In fact it's one of the best products Microsoft produce. I've worked with Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres on various products over the past decade or two, often as DBA, and SQL Server is a gem.
It's a highly complient database and the SQL conforms to every standard going. In fact of all the databases I've worked on it's possibly my favourite as it can be installed on clients servers and left to it's own devices and it will continue to chug away with minimal human maintenance. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Oracle (or Postgres:-)
I'm not a MS fanboy by any means, but SQL Server is an excellent product and to declaim otherwise just shows up your lack of experience. My guess is you've probably confusing MySQL with a RDBMS and extrapolating from there:-)
Your CSS from IE and HTML from Word certainly raise a smile and is worth a mod point or two, but there is nothing wrong with the MS implementation of SQL, and SQL Server generally is a rock solid, highly complient, database.
MS may be fairly knocked for much, nae most, of their offerings, but SQL Server is a gem. I know it must have been tempting to do the standard MS knocking, but frankly in this case all you do is show yourself up as an utter eejit.
Insightful? Good god. Opera may well be closed source but it's a far better browser than Firefox which still suffers from memory issues and runs like a pig if you happen to hit the wrong website with the wrong combination of plugins installed.
Firefox has been getting better of late it's true, but it still suffers from the common Open Source Project issue that the sexy visible eye-candy stuff gets priority over unexiting but essential background code.
Which is not to say I don't like and use Open Source software, indeed given the choice between equal programs one Open Source and the other not then Open Source usually gets my vote. However to roll out closed source as if it's some fundemental problem with a truly excellent browser smacks of RMS zealotry.
Slashdot Mirror
You are of course refering to the Daily Mail?
I'm involved with writing the code for this a project using this technology for a recycling subcontractor somewhere in rural England/Wales. The RFID simply allows us to tag a recycling box to a household then collect data on the weight of recyclate returned in each box. Housholds are issued with two boxes - paper/textiles/card and glass/cans so that's the finest level of detail being collected.
The use of the data is that it will allow the recycling organisation to work out which areas are recycling a lot of material and which are not, and the intention is to make that information available back to the public on a 'community' level. What a community is hasn't been precisely defined, but it's going to be larger, probably considerably larger, than postcode purposly so individuals can't be identified. The local authority will make use of the information by identifying areas where it needs to do more to encourage recycling, and possibly to reward communities that are actively recycling.
I honestly don't think there's any significant civil liberty issues here. In effect it's no different than a gas company monitoring the volume of gas each customer uses or a water company doing similar, it's just not been done before because up until now the technology to monitor garbage out (as opposed to the volume of a commodity going in) hasn't been available.
The Government's proposals for ID cards do cause me considerable concern so I'm not at all complacent about the matter, but presumably if we think that encouraging people to recycle is a good thing then collecting data to understand the patterns of people recycling is a helpful approach?
But the problem with map applications is not so much the code, but the data. THE advantage of google maps is that it comes complete with data down to a usable level of detail most of the planet.
Hmm, you can hardly pull logic when your argument is that we have three completely different proposals in completely different areas of knowledge put forward at around the same time, and because two of them are 'dead' the third one is too. The logic is dreadful.
Besides, it's arguable about these. True much of Freud has been superceeded, but his essential insight about there being an unconcious as well as concious mind remains, and while Marx hardly proved himself to have 100% forsight his analysis of economic history up until the 19thC still has some merit. Furthermore you are being very selective - Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism easily stands with Freud, Marx and Darwin as great 19thC theories and that's been spectacularly successful.
Personally I'd go for Hydrogen cyanide. Long time ago now, but the various biochem labs I worked in had potassium cyanide sitting around by the kilogram and reacting this with carboxylic acid or similar at reasonable strengh would do a lot of damage.
More interesting than cents, when I first started in a commercial DP department, back in the mid-80s, we had a couple of old guys (well, in their 50's) who could remember writing code that had to use the old UK pre-decimal money system (the UK went decimal in 1971). Under that there was 12 pence to the shilling, and 20 shillings to the pound. They similarly converted all values to pence before starting calculations, then converted back to £sd when complete. All on a computer (a Honeywell I think) with less power than my mobile phone.
Early access was indeed pretty crud. However Access 97 was a solid release that I still have clients running on even now. My milage varies because I never use Access as anything else put a front end to SQL Server or MSDE, and in these circumstances it's an excellent, reliable and solid system. Access should never be used as a database for all but the smallest of systems and personally I'd never trust it for anything else but single user, however to decry it because it doesn't work reliably in such circumstances is unfair - MSDE is free and works well for up to 5 simultaneous users, which should tell you something.
:-). Don't dismiss Access as a useful business system if you've only seen the former.
Your comment about starting counting from Access 2000 is actually quite perverse as this release was generally agreed to be considerably more buggy than 97 and best avoided - consequently many users didn't upgrade until Office XP. Access 2002, and particularly 2003 are good releases, although again myself I always use them as a front end to SQL Server.
But underline the point, using Access as a database and front end system, and using it as a front end system to MSDE or SQL Server are two completely different things and should be treated as such (indeed that there is the option of the adp file format in Access 2000+ specifically designed to work with SQL Server is a strong clue
The problem with deploying Access for widespread use on a casual basis, even with the runtime, is that the various dependencies cause issues. Different versions of libraries etc can rapidly end you up in a support quagmire. True if you've limited yourself to vanilla Access and not made use of anything non-standard it may not be too bad, expecially in a standardised environment, but in my experience it's rare for a business application not to make use of other Office products and environments in all but the smallest companies are to some degree heterogenious. These problems may or may not surface to a greater or lesser extent, but it's always going to be more of an issue to support than a browser application. Hence IMHO there is a certain degree of functionality that is required by a user to make it cost effective to deploy Access.
:-)
On the other hand if your user does need complexity then the deployment overhead is often worth it. I'm sure you're a wizz with PHP, and indeed I can throw together a nice PHP bases web application myself with some speed - slapping up a simple Access data entry form and a simple PHP data entry form is indeed probably of similar order of development time. The problem is that in virtually all the reallife business applications I've come across a simple data entry form won't cut it.
We're talking here of such things as dynamic drop down lists (i.e. context sensitive to other data entered on forms), calculations on the fly (i.e. enter net price, then lookup database to determine a gross price depending upon item classification and commission), showing/hiding areas of a form based on data entered, dynamically checking data entered against a database, non-standard controls, integrating graphics and charts, creating or merging Word/Excel documents etc etc. All of which needs to happen responsively - i.e. you'll need extensive Javascript and Ajax coding as the form display/submit cycle is not acceptable.
I'm not saying that you can't do (most) of these with LAMP or find a work-around, just it's a lot more hassle than using Access as a front end, a tool that was designed specifically for business data processing. Cases need to be examined on merit with regard to circumstances and budget to decide what approach is appropriate. What does bug me though is the multiple ill-informed knee-jerk comments on most of this thread along the lines that Access is Microsoft, it's VBA, it's not Open Source and therefore you should throw up your hands in horror, refuse to touch it, and run for the hills. Oddly enough I'm just about to start a project for a major global charity recoding an Access/SQL Server application to WISP precisely because they need to be able to deply an application more widely than they currently have and don't want the Access overhead, so you'll see my comments are based on pragmatism, not ideology
Finally I'm fascinated by the line that you disagree with most of my previous post. What's to disagree with? SQL Server isn't one of the best databases going (you can't honestly propose to run a back-office business system on MySQL?) MDB vs ADP issues? That Access isn't a good front-end application to a back-end database? Identifying groups of users and deplying appropriate tools for each? None of this is contentious, it's common sense.
Access has it's place. Ignore the OS zealots here, in the real world Access is a viable solution in many business contexts and there is no direct OS equivalent that comes anywhere close, besides if you try to convert it all to LAMP you'll most probably go out of business in the time it will take you :-).
:-). Both of these are time-consuming to replace by a browser interface: the Forms will need extensive use of AJAX to reproduce the immediate responsive feel of an Access application, and Reports can take a lot of coding and even then reproducing pagenation and so forth can be problematic.
OK, firstly you need to convert the data from Access to SQL Server. This is essential: Access is really an excellent front-end system, but it's data handling sucks big time in a mult-user situation. The upsizing wizards included with it do a pretty good job, although you'll undoutably want to tweak manually. Upsizing then reviewing the database and adding relational integrity and other database rules is an essential first step. If you can't afford SQL Server, which is probably on of MS's best products, the MSDE will do if you don't have too many users. It's also a little known fact that Access will run as a front end to Postgres - although I've never tried this myself if you Google for it there's quite a few resources out there.
Having upsized the database you then have two choices. Review and modify the upsized MDB front-end, or create a new ADP project and convert. ADP's have some advantages, but you have to convert manually and rewrite the data access code. This does take time (although a suprising amount can be cut and pasted from between MDB and ADP). The choice here is heavily influence by how the old database has been written - I've seen some Access applications which are practically VBA applications and need to be rewritten susbtantially to use SQL Server even if left as MDBs, whereas others hardly need any changes at all. If you are picking up the application to support yourself and can afford the time the ADP approach is probably prefable as you'll get to know the code and iron out any junk.
You should indeed consider what use you can make of LAMP (or more accuratly WISP). Access's strengths lie in it's ability to support detailed responsive Forms for data entry and most particularly it's Reports where complex output can be generated remarkably quickly - generally it's RAD abilities blow LAMP and similar away for anything but a simpler application (and Ruby on Rails, that includes you
However in a business context it's quite usual for there to be a core group of users who are responsible for data entry and 'expert' use of the system, and a wider group of users who need just read-only access or some very simple data entry, generally for a limited number of screens. If this is the case it's a viable strategy to replace Access by a browser interface for these users. PHP runs happily on a windows server so all your LAMP skills can be applied quite readily. THE major advantage of replacing Access for the casual users is that you then no longer need to deploy Access, which will save you both licence money and support time.
If at a later date you have the time and motivation to convert more of the core user functionality from Access to browser then you can do that. A viable strategy is to convert the Forms but leave the complex reports in a Access as a 'reporting suite'. In many business setups it's quite common to find an 'expert user' who is capable of creating bespoke reports in Access. Handled correctly these people can be a valuable asset - generally I create an 'Adhoc' or 'Scratch' Access application for them (mdb is strongly preferred in this case so that objects are not created on the server) which they can use to generate bespoke reports. The core functionality is placed in a separate Access application which they do not modify.
Take-home message is to recognise that all these technologies have strengths and weaknesses and play
The Delphi 2006 win32 compiler is an improvement, and the IDE is considerably better than version 6. I upgraded myself and a few months ago for the first time since Delphi 6 and am quite happy with that side of the purchase.
.net support if for version 1.1, which sucks big time. I fail to see any reason to use Borland Studio on an old version of .net when Visual Studio is on 2.0. Indeed I feel more than a little cheated that I had to pay for all the .net stuff to get my hands on the win32 compiler.
.net 2.0 support, but beyond that, unless NewCo manages to up their game, I suspect I will go elsewhere.
However the
I've used Delphi since version 1.0, and Turbo Pascal before that, so Borland have a long legasy of goodwill from me. However they are in last-chance saloon now. I'll probably upgrade to 2007 when it arrives to get
I'd suggest Europa Universalis (http://www.europa-universalis.com) is probably a good stab at this. Especially as the game format is quite open and there's an active user community who have enhanced it to include a plethora of historical events (and what-if's) at a quite staggering level of detail.
;-), but for anyone with an interest in history the ability to play what-if is really quite addictive. The game engine is rather impressive in that it moulds the game to follow generally historical lines without any overt manipulation or closing the door on the occasional wildly different outcome.
It's not the kind of game that appeals to everyone (but it's highbrow right
This has precisely zero chance of happening. Ignoring that it's undoutably a troll by the Government to check out reaction anyway (an oft-used tactic so they can 'listen to public opinion' and retreat to the position they wanted to implement in the first place) Government has a long, long history of failing to get complex, or even simple, IT projects to work.
By way of a small but succient example take the National Firearms Register. First proposed after the Dunblane Massacre, this relatively simple proposal for a single database of gun owners across the whole of the UK - instead of each local police force holding holding thei own records - still hasn't been implemented nearly 10 years after it was agreed. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4767068.stm
Remember gun ownership in the UK is rare - less than 50,000 people from a population of 55 million - and this is an widely supported measure that even the shooting organisations agree with.
Similar failed or massively cut-back initiatives abound for the national health service, vehicle licencing authority, child support agency, inland revenue/customs and excise, police authorities and much else.
I'd like to second that. I've been using a standard setup of php / tinybutstrong / xajax for several projects now and it drops in perfectly without any issues except one*. Very neat library with minimal bloat.
*one issue. Doesn't appear to work on any window open as a modal dialog. One time I needed that I coded the ajax calls directly myself.
True, but as I per below, there's literally mounds of baked clay tablets because they are so indestructable. Apparently they used to get shovelled into foundations and the like. The estimate I heard was that at current rates it will take scholars several hundred years to translate what we've found already. Compare that to parchment records where the discovery of even a few new scraps is a major event (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5235894.stm and particularly http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5216320.st m). Point is in the race for the most successful long term storage mechanism cuniform on baked clay is way ahead of the field, nothing else comes close.
u rtime_20040603.shtml
Excellent 'In Our Time' programme on Babylon and it's Literature here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ino
Presumably the tablets stuff in museums are, but I was listening to an archeologist recently who was saying that the advantage of clay tablets is that they are virtually indestructable unless you purposly take a hammer to them. Compare that to papyrus and parchment which can get preserved a long time, but need special circumstances, such a being buried in a bog, to stop decay.
Apparantly because of this there is vast amounts of Sumerian and related texts awaiting translation (the language was only deciphered at the beginning of the 20thC and naturally there's not a great many people who can translate it) ranging from business accounts to high literature. Much of it is on tablets that were recycled as building material and the like - there's literally piles of it and at the current rate it will take several hundred years for scholars to get through.
Don't knock it, cuneiform on backed clay is the single most successful format for long-term storage ever invented - 3000 years and counting. Heck, most of our modern storage formats can't even manage 30 - tied to read a 8" floppy recently?
I have to push this as it usually gets missed from reviews as it's a hybrid P2P solution and not a straightforward filter, but Cloudmark's safetybar product (http://www.cloudmark.com/) is just about perfect for me. I get an average of about 20 spam emails a day and it has a false positive result of 0% and has had for months. In fact I've been using the product for several years now and I think the last time I saw a false positive was a couple of years back.
On the efficiency side it has a hit rate of nearly 100%. I would have said it was 100% a couple of months back, but just recently it's been having a bit of a problem with one stock-pushing spam.
Anyway, that aside it's the best spam filter I've ever seen by a very long way, and I'd highly recommend the service. It costs a few $ a month, but it's probably the best value subscription I have.
I have no connection with the company, just a very satisfied customer who's been using it since the beta some years ago. I have a publically available email address which I've had for years and must be on many spam lists, without Cloudmark it would be unusable, with it it's no problem at all. I recently installed it for my wife who was starting to get a lot of spam - on that I noticed it took about two weeks to get it trained not to junk a few mailing list emails she was on, but after that it's been just as highly reliable as my installation.
Cloudmark's safetybar product (http://www.cloudmark.com/ - lousy name, SpamNet which it was before was far better) is just about perfect for me. I get an average of about 20 spam emails a day and it has a false positive result of 0% and has had for months. In fact I've been using the product for several years now and I think the last time I saw a false positive was a couple of years back.
On the efficiency side it has a hit rate of nearly 100%. I would have said it was 100% a couple of months back, but just recently it's been having a bit of a problem with one stock-pushing spam.
Anyway, that aside it's the best spam filter I've ever seen by a very long way, and I'd highly recommend the service. It costs a few $ a month, but it's probably the best value subscription I have.
I have no connection with the company, just a very satisfied customer. The P2P nature of the product places it outside the usual spam filters so it's often missed from reviews.
Yeah love to know where the shoe thing comes from. Starts young though, when the whole family went on holiday this year - travelling around europe and carrying stuff in backpacks - my 12 year old daughter was told to she could only take two pairs of shoes in addition to the ones she was wearing. Also as the youngest she had a smaller pack and the rest of us would each carry some of her stuff.
It was only after a several days out we figured that she'd managed to pring 9 pairs, having individually talked the me, my wife and my son into carrying her 'extra two pairs'.
Interesting that it uses the line 'theoretical big bang' though. Am I being paranoid here or is USA Today covering itself against Creationists? Just seems rather odd to underline theoretical like that.
Honestly, there's justified MS bashing, and clueless knee-jerk wannabe cool MS bashing, and this is the later. Any production MS SQL installation will be running on Windows Server 2003, most likely as the only major application on the system, and under those circumstances it's really pretty solid.
Nobody pretends that Windows Server is as solid or efficient as Linux, but realistically it's not the pile of crap you posture, it simply doesn't score quite as highly. For practical purposes both are quite good enough to run a service on, and overall Windows Server 2003 + MS SQL is a pretty good choice.
But there is no agreed standard for procedural SQL as such, so you can't really complain about T-SQL not being compliant. All RDBMs have different implementations of procedural extensions so it's really rather unfair to pull Microsoft out for excessive criticism. Oracle's PL/SQL for example is equally as proprietary. The real point is over the ANSI SQL standards where MS SQL does offer very good support indeed.
In practise I don't think procedural SQL standards are too much of an issue as if you are designing a system that makes extensive use of such features you're probably pretty tied into a specific platform/database anyway.
Parent has been modded insightful? Why?
:-)
:-)
We all like to knock Microsoft periodically for it's well know shortcomings, but SQL Server is not one of them. In fact it's one of the best products Microsoft produce. I've worked with Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres on various products over the past decade or two, often as DBA, and SQL Server is a gem.
It's a highly complient database and the SQL conforms to every standard going. In fact of all the databases I've worked on it's possibly my favourite as it can be installed on clients servers and left to it's own devices and it will continue to chug away with minimal human maintenance. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Oracle (or Postgres
I'm not a MS fanboy by any means, but SQL Server is an excellent product and to declaim otherwise just shows up your lack of experience. My guess is you've probably confusing MySQL with a RDBMS and extrapolating from there
Your CSS from IE and HTML from Word certainly raise a smile and is worth a mod point or two, but there is nothing wrong with the MS implementation of SQL, and SQL Server generally is a rock solid, highly complient, database.
MS may be fairly knocked for much, nae most, of their offerings, but SQL Server is a gem. I know it must have been tempting to do the standard MS knocking, but frankly in this case all you do is show yourself up as an utter eejit.
Insightful? Good god. Opera may well be closed source but it's a far better browser than Firefox which still suffers from memory issues and runs like a pig if you happen to hit the wrong website with the wrong combination of plugins installed.
Firefox has been getting better of late it's true, but it still suffers from the common Open Source Project issue that the sexy visible eye-candy stuff gets priority over unexiting but essential background code.
Which is not to say I don't like and use Open Source software, indeed given the choice between equal programs one Open Source and the other not then Open Source usually gets my vote. However to roll out closed source as if it's some fundemental problem with a truly excellent browser smacks of RMS zealotry.