It's entirely true under the ne provisions of the Data Protection. They are entitled to charge up to £10 for the cost of retrieving the data. Mark Thomas did a program on C4 about this some months ago, where he retrieved all sort of footage of himself.
It also applies to filming that takes place on private premisses where the public have ready access.
In may of this year after a particulary heavy night out, me and my friends got chucked out of the local McDonalds (OK, we probably shouldn't had been dancing on the tables on 8am on a Sundaym morning, but there was a real tune on the radio!!).
I wrote to McDonalds, stated the relevant portions of the act, the time and location of the desired footagge, and enclosed a cheque for ten pounds. I recieved a video tape of us being kicked out of McDonalds. How quality is that?:)
I'm afriad I really can't be bothered to search out any links for you, but try searching for The Data Protection Act 2000.
Well it depends on what you want your music to be! I think the majority of people just use music as a bit of a mild distraction - something to listen to when driving to work, something to dance to while getting drunk with friends,or some noise to go with their drugs:)
And then you have people who are seriously into their music. And those who live and breathe music.
I'll try a rubbishy comparsion to food and use the good, old standby MacDonald's:) How many of you eat MacDonald's? How many of you think it's gorment food? McDonald's sell millions of burgers, but do you think someone who lived and breathed food - a world class chef - would praise McDonalds?
When a good chef creates a dish he'd pay attention now to every last detail, because food probably matters a lot more to him than it does to us. But most people don't care that much about food. McDonalds is readily available and most people don't mind eating it.
People who begin to get heavily into music seek out the styles that interest them - and that isn't the mass marketed stuff. For everyone else, pop is good enough.
Do you really think there's people out there who listen to Britany Spear's wondering what exciting keychain or rhymic device she's going to be using in her new song. I very much doubt it. The true reason pop is popular is most people really don't care that much about music! The lowest common demonintor is good enough for them.
(and you could replace McDonald's with Baked Beans, or cheese on toast if you like:p )
How long ago was "back in the day?". I've been to The Fridge numerous times in the last year (and other clubs in Brixon), and I've never once felt threatened.
Which volcano in the Phillipines poured out CFCs? I'd be very interested in hearing about a volcano that poured out chemicals that do not naturally occur! CFCs are manmade - they are no naturally occuring CFCs.
The hazards we now associate with CFCs were discovered in the 1960s when a British chemist (Lovelock) was interested in tracing the motions of air masses. He was using CFC's to do so, as they were ideal for tracing air motions, being chemically stable and not naturally-occurring (they are only man-made) so their presence in an air mass could not be confused with CFC's coming from natural sources.
Perhaps you are thinking of the theory that volcanic chlorine caused ozone depletion? There are a number of problems with this:
(1) There was significant O3 loss in the 1980's, but no major volcanic activity then.
(2) There has been major volcanic activity since O3 monitoring began in the 1950's, but it was not necessarily associated with declines in O3. That is, O3 losses and volcanic activity appear to be uncoupled in time (lack temporal consistency)
(3) Measures of hydrogen chloride in the stratosphere after the relatively recent eruptions of Mt. Pinatubo and El Chicon showed less than a 10% increase in stratospheric HCl following those eruptions, while stratospheric HCl has increased steadily across recent years. Furthermore, it is estimated that 1% of the Cl released by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo Cl made it to the stratosphere, judged by the increase in HCl in the stratosphere following the eruption and the estimated release of Cl by the volcano.
(4) Stratospheric hydrogen fluoride has also increased steadily in parallel with HCl, as would be consistent with CFC sources.
(5) Much of the HCl produced by volcanoes (or Cl from sea salt) is injected into the troposphere and very little of that makes it to the stratosphere, as it is washed out first. Volcanic emissions include abundant water vapor, and HCl and NaCl are quite soluble in water, while CFC's are not.
(6) Most of the HCl that does make it to the stratosphere is rapidly washed out -- that is the major removal mechanism for Cl from the stratosphere.
(7) After volcanic eruptions, scientists find enriched sulfate in ice caps, suggesting that the eruptions inject sulfate into the stratosphere, where it gets widely distributed before being washed out. However, ice caps are not enriched with Cl following volcanic eruptions, suggesting that most Cl doesn't make it to the stratosphere where it could get dispersed as sulfate does.
That's right folks. It hasn't worked Welcome to the world of government cons.
I'm not aware of any studies that have proven a link between a greater number of CCTV camera and lower, or slowing crime rates. I am aware of a number of studies that have shown CCTV camera to have no appreciable effect on crime rates, and some where there appears to be links between CCTV cameras and higher crime rates! *
Yes, I know it sounds hard to believe. How can CCTV cameras lead to higher crime rates? Simple. CCTV cameras are treated as surrogate policemen. Everyone in Britain knows we've been having a hard time recruiting enough police-officers - well now we don't need to!
It's quite easy.. Stick a load of CCTV camera everywhere and what's the point in having all those policemen wandering about to keep an eye on things (and act as a deterant).
Umm.. no.. CCTV cameras are crap. CCTV footage is inadmissable in court as identification. In many cases the footage in the cameras isn't kept long enough to be used anyway. Better hope the police get around to retrieving the footage before it gets taped over in the next 24 hour cycle. And they make rubbish deterents. What would stop you - seeing a policemen or some half-arsed camera ontop a pole that may or may not actually have some film in, that may or may not be kept, that can't be used to identify you in a court of law, all with a good chance that the police who's supposed to monitoring it is has nipped out for more donuts/a piss/a cigarette? Bear in mind, that if you'll about to commit a voilent crime you'll probably to drunk to care about the cameras anyway...
It is quite simply all a con. The government seems completely incapable of scrapping together enough policemen to stop the rising crime rates so they stick a load of CCTV cameras everywhere and try and get kudos for it. What a load of bollocks....
If you want to get the crime rates down you need better policing with more policemen. No some poor grainy footage of crime that's already taken place. That's not exactly prevention.
(*Unfortunately, I don't have links to hand - try searching the GreenParty's website, they should have a few)
(Amusing aside: A town in Devon had a spaite of robberies that all coincided with the shift change at the CCTV monitoring centre. They never did catch them...)
You're obviously quite young. Otherwise you'd remember the 'Home Computers' of the 1980's. Typically an 8k or 16k ROM would hold an entire OS and programming language.
Of course that was when an OS was an OS and not an OS, a GUI, various applications, sandwich toaster, cuddly toy...
Damn straight 300k is a lot. The Amiga 2000 fitted it's whole multi-tasking OS into it's 512 ROM. And that includes the graphics and GUI subsystems. The earlier Amiga 1000's had only a 256K ROM - I've never used one, but IIRC they had to have more OS code loaded off disk.
Well, as many have already pointed out MySql has ODBC drivers which can be used to hook Access to MySql via Access's linked tables.
The question is "Do you really want to do this?". I only deploy MySql on web-backends where read speed is important. A carefully setup MySql/Apache/PHP combo rocks if you need a database driven website,
However, MySql is only used for the web-side of things. In the office we use MS Sql Server and a VB front-end. I'd recommend Oracle over SQL Server if you have a lot of data (millions of rows), a lot of users, or a lot of heavy duty querys, but all of these are fairly moderate where I work. We then regulary push the data from MS-SQL to MySql as a one-way op.
Access is great for RAD development & situations where long-term support isn't an issue. The Access forms lib make this stuff a breeze - VB and ADO takes longer.
I don't have much experience using Access with MySql, but I can offer some tips from my experience with Access/SQL Server which hopefully will give some kind of an idea what you can expect.
Firstly for god's sake don't use Access 2000 with linked tables! To get Access 2000 on Windows 2000 with SQL Server 7 requires that you have every available service pack for all three pieces of software client and server end, otherwise you'll have all sorts of problems with the linked tables (sometimes they will refuse to link, sometimes it will link but all your rows show up as #deleted, bit columns in MS-SQL that can be NULL give Access headaches, GUID's sometimes get treated as guid{x} in code instead of {x}, etc. etc). All of these problems can be fixed with the latest service packs but in my experience Access97 and Sql Server 7 make for a more reliable combination.
Don't attempt to use Access if you have a large amount of data. Access barfs once the tables get to large. Access's psuedo SQL implementation (Jet I believe?) is stoopid enough to try and do a lot of the processing client-side (like joins and the like - eek!). Remember Access was originally designed to work a local database.
Working with Access also gets nasty if you need to fill forms with data from more than one table (updatable joins? Have fun...). VB & ADO is much nicer for this sort of stuff.
Access2000 with SQL server can utilitize Access Data Projects. A custom mode designed to link the two together properly - you get access to all the SQL Server properties like views and stored proceedures, and decent query optimising (Jet is rubbish). In return you lose some of Access's features (you have no ability to create local Access tables etc.) I haven't played with this that much so I can't offer that much advice here.
Unless this RAD stuff, if you are using Windows clients I'd really recommend VB and ADO - it will connect nicely to MySql via MyODBC, and you have none of the Access headaches. VB and ADO are more widely used for real application than Access so you'll find more books and examples, and it seems to be more stable and better tested.
You really need to consider the choice of MySQL. SQLServer is great for middle-sized deployments and is very easy to maintain. Alternatively if you are on an OpenSource bender take a look at PostgreSQL. It seems to have a good rep but I haven't played with it that much.
If you choose SQLServer some advice:
*it needs a fair bit of diskspace - particulary for it's transaction logs, which due to the way they are allocaed and used can ballon waaay waay up (allocated space at the beginning and end and NOTHING used in the middle!). There's example stored proceedures on the web on how to get it shrink. Do your research!
*SQLServer backups are huge! We've ditched them now, and do a nightly backup to an new Access database everytime (SQLServer generates the Access db, Access the application is not involved), but ours is only a small operation.
Remember you pick the tools to suit the application - not the other way around. I could be wrong here but it sounds like you want to use MySql simply because it looks like the 133t OpenSource database of the hour. RESEARCH!
Anyway, enough rambling, hope this is of some use. It's very late here at the moment, and I'm tired so it could all be bollocks.
From a war perspective (and not neccessary a quasi-global polic force one), non-lethal but permamently disabilitating weapons will be favoured by a miltary. If you kill a man the enemy have a dead person on their hands - end of story. Severely injure them and they have a wounded soilder that needs to be transported from the front-lines back to a hospital and then cared for. Not just a man out of action, but a *whole* lot of resources tied up caring for him as well. That equates to an advantage they want to exploit.
(And if you have the kind of enemies that might just abandon or shoot their wounded, you still haven't lost out).
Like the glue guns I heard about a while ago that caused *permament* blindness. Hell, imagine if you could create a weapon that didn't kill someone but blew their legs away. Putting aside the moral objections, it would be a very powerful weapon... Oh wait, it's called a landmine.
The RIAA aren't that bothered (at the moment) about the priacy taking place on Napster - honestly that doesn't eat into their profits that much. Ever wondering about those "studies" that show napster users buy more CD's - doesn't matter. What about the fact the RIAA aren't terribly interested in a subscription based Napster (ie. royalty payments).
The fact is that even if Napster demonstratedly improved CD sales, even by a sizable amount, it doesn't matter! More CD's sold != more profit as some would think. A lot of people use Naspter to make informed choices about the music they buy. You can source a wide-range of material, find what you like and just buy that. This means less profit!
The record companies use ecomonies of scale to keep their profits so high. Hypothetical record company "A" might have 1 million artists signed to it - but 995,000 are consigned to the "only make 50,000" copies basket. The record companies promote who they want to big, they get big and you print 5 million CD's of just them. There's very little waste, and you don't have to change the presses that often.
Now imagine that people start making highly informed choices about the music they buy - and are less swayed by the marketing pushes. You could no longer predict who's going to big. Obscure bands could become popular over-night, and "insert famous band X"'s latest album flops because everyone hears it first and decides it sucks.
Eventually you might have to print an even quanity of CD's across your whole range simply because you no longer have control over who makes it. A whole lot of a whole lot of different stuff to burn makes you a lot less cash!
They don't just want to be the content-providers they want to govern what people think the content is - they're had this hold for years and their shareholders will demand that they don't give it up now.
Hmmm.. Are you sure your machine is *actually* doing stuff faster, do does it just *feel* faster?
I suspect that a lot of applications you are running are only single-threaded so they can only use one CPU. The difference is that the other CPU is free for all the event and interrupt handling.
So when you are doing something that 100% maximises out one CPU, the other is still free for all the GUI and house-keeping stuff, so your machine doesn't feel as sluggish.
This puts me in mind of the old Amiga machines where all the GUI handling was handled in a seperate high-priority thread (I think it was priority 10, not sure). No matter how heavy a load your machine was under the GUI was always garenteed a certain timeslice if it had stuff to do. No matter how loaded your machine was it always remained responsive so people precieved it as faster than the 7.14Mhz most of them were (A500's etc.).
I think you could be experiencing something similar.
Course, I could be wrong - perhaps you run lots of multi-threaded apps?
It doesnt take care of your relation to other players (the LPB advantage) but IMO there is no fair way to solve that, you can use server side prediction like Half-Life but IMO it causes as much problems as it solves. Sure its fun for the HPB's but its extremely frustrating for LPB's which keep getting shot in places where they know they should be safe because some lagger can see a spot he was ages ago.
Yeah, it's always a problem. I do PlayerObject collision on the client, and PlayerPlayer and ObjectObject on the server. As far as I can work out this gives the least visual disparity between what you are seeing and what the server (and everyone else) thinks is happening.
IIRC, Quake's biggest problem was that the server sent back more information than the client needed in an effort to speed up the connection. Clients could then do prediction and such, but once that got found out bots were created that predicted when people would come around the corner and blast them immediately.
Trust me, Quake would had had a far bigger problem if the client's couldn't that prediction. It's a neccessary part of simulating an environment with mulitple client - otherwise lag and bandwidth problems just bite you in the arse.
This form of extrapolation (dead-reckoning) has been used in most of the military sims developed and is still in use the US's latest creation - the HLA (High Level Architecture). And it's been used in just about every realtime multiplayer game written.
If you can't extrapolate positions you can kiss bandwidth goodbye. Here's an example. You have 30 players, each player update take 20bytes, and you want 30 frames a second, so:
20 x 30 x 30 = 18000 = 140KB/sec
That's a lot of bandwidth. Now factor in weapon firing and you'll way up there.
Not to mention the effect variation in lag will have on the smoothness of your opponents movement.
Opensourcing the clients creates a really really difficult security problem. "Security through obscurity is no security at all" is a cryptography term, and the one thing crytographers don't have to worry too much about is efficiently. "Can't trust the client? Then don't" works get for them, but for MMP games it would kill them.
than it is to actually do it. You have two major problems - bandwidth and latency. And while bandwidth gets better all the time latency doesn't improve nearly as quicker.
For example, you might say a Law of Nature is "Thou shall not walk through walks". For this to be done on the server everytime the client moves it has to check to see if it can move! Imagine you are playing with 200ms ping times - having the screen update a 1/5 of a second after you move the mouse/joystick is very noticable. Or a 1/5 of a second delay between pressing fire and having your gun fire? That's very annoying (it's what happens in my multiplayer space-sim at the moment, and it's very noticable).
Not to mention the fact that your server loads goes up a whole bunch. I've written a few very basic multiplayer games and, although I'm proabably a sloppy coder, server load is a real issue - particulary in MMP games.
Really the best you can do is to have the client obey the "Laws of Nature" and then have the server check up on it once in a while (and the checks would still be fuzzy - in a lot of cases you have to extrapolate position based on lag and that can give false positive collisions).
Bandwidth gets better everyday, and with boardband connections becoming more and more common it's almost ceases to be an issue. Latency is here for a long while though, and that's a far harder problem.
(Btw, some of the GPL'ed Quakes have tried to get around the open client problems by releasing "blessed binaries" that have an encyption key hidden in the data, surrounded by a random amount of data each side. It's a nice idea, but it's obviously breakable).
It's not a particulary great amount of money, but AFAIK the library does pay the publishers based on the number of books they lend - that's on top of the cost of buying the book in the first place.
Remember that WINE stands for: Wine Is Not an Emulator. Running windows apps only Wine should (theorically) be far more stable than running windows apps under Windows. And faster. And more efficient.
So you say Wine could be bad for Linux, but what you really mean is Wine could be bad for non-microsoft APIs.
If Wine gave a perfect implementation of the Win32 APIs under *Linux* then there'd be no reason to use Windows AT ALL. Ever. You could use apps coded to the Direct3D API (and others) under Linux.
If you don't like Microsoft APIs don't code to them - use OpenGL instead of DirectX etc. But the one thing Wine is doing is opening up the Microsoft APIs to a multiplatform audience and I don't really see how that can be that bad.
If Wine succeeds then the Win32 API and all the others, will become a cross-platform API, and you'll have a choice of implementations. Microsoft's one under W9x/NT (yuk!), or Wine's one under Linux. Which would you choose?
This really makes it a fair more level playing field. You choose your OS and you choose your API to code to - the two become less tied together. (Obviously there are still link between the OS API. Registry API's etc.). Now if the Win32 API is available on Windows and Linux thats a win for the Win32 API and the apps that use it. If you prefer a different API (Posix etc.) and that one is available under Linux and not Windoze them that's a loss for that API - it needs to get better to compete.
Sam
(Oh and those of you who are thinking M$ will just change the API... It's been pointed out before - they can't. Doing so would break all the existing apps on Win32 - all they can do is try and extend the API and not tell anyone about the extra bits).
Prove that there we are in a warming trend: easy.
Prove the cause of this warming trend: don't make me laugh.
It doesn't matter what the whether human activity is the sole cause of global warming or not. It only matters that it has some signifigant effect on it. It's looking more and more likely that our activities are worsening a natural occurance. Just because it might occur anyway is no excuse to not try and stop it.
It's like saying: "Well there was going to be a tidal wave anyway. That nuclear bomb we let off only made it 20% bigger, I don't know what all the complaining is about."
Last time I checked, the base element chlorine is what destroys ozone. The mix with CO2 doesn't help. Mt. Pinatubo spewed tons of chlorine miles into the stratosphere. CFC's take time to drift up to the upper atmosphere, they must get broken down into their base elements like bromine and chlorine*. It's like shooting a syringe of ink into a pan of water. Mankind produces far less chlorine through CFCs to what volcons produce.
Yes you are correct - chlorine does destroy Ozone. But chlorine on it's *own* isn't a problem - it would never get high enough in the atmosphere to react with the ozone layer. It would get rained out as hydrochloric acid.
CFC's on the other hand were orinigally designed (in the 1930's) to be as non-reactive as possible. When they were first presented to the world there was a famous demonstration were one researchers inhaled a lungful of CFCs and used it to blow out a candle. At the time they were hailed as a major breakthrough - a gas that was completely non-toxic, nonflamable and they hardly react with anything.
The last point is the problem. Those florine bonds are incredibly strong. So strong that it takes an awful lot of energy to break them. In fact energy of the sort of strength that the only place you'd find it naturally occuring is in the in UV light just around the ozone layer. Uh oh! Once the CFC's break down in this region that chlorine can get to work destoying ozone.
In fact it a little worse than that. The chlorine is just an initator in a chain reaction. It goes a little like this:
Photolysis of some CFC's releases chlorine radicals (the initiation step).
then the propegation steps:
Cl + O3 -> ClO + O2
ClO + O -> Cl + O2
Notice the chlorine radical is released again in the propegation stage (hence propegation). One chlorine radical can go on to destroy a lot of Ozone. And at these attitudes it has a high atmospheric halflife (50 years or so).
So CFC's can destroy the ozone whereas ordinary chlorine released in the atmosphere can't. Think of the CFC as protective armour around a chlorine radical to help it get high enough to do some real harm.
My memory is a little shaky here, but I suspect this is in reaction to a recent court case where a man was found to be guilty of a particulary gruesome rape - but had to be let go. The DNA evidence they had taken from the scene was matched against DNA of his taken during an earlier investigation into another crime - one he had been found innocent of. That's how they caught him. But under current UK law after an investigation is concluded all DNA evidence collected has to be destroyed (not sure about the DNA evidence of the accused but I think that has to go to).
So the police shouldn't had had the earlier DNA on file - it should had been destroyed years ago. The only evidence that could had convicted him was inadmissable in court and he was found to be innocent.
Oh, as regards CCTV camera's they are everywhere here! Mark Thomas said recently that we have the highest camera/person ratio in the world! (I'm told by an American friend of mine that schemes like this would never fly in the states.) And lots of studies have concluded that they do nothing to reduce crime - and in many case crime goes up. It's seen as an alternative to putting real officers on the beat and CCTV footage can't be used as proof of identification in court.
In Bridgewater, Devon there was a spate of robberies in the town centre timed to conincide perfectly with the shift change at the CCTV centre. Most CCTV footage is very low resolution - incredibly blurry. I believe they typically multiplex about seven feeds onto one tape. Unless the police eating doughnuts in front of the TV screens notices something happening and flicks it to a higher quality output they can be next to useless.
Oh this is amusing. Under the Data Protection Act 2000 any organisation, company or government body has to provide you with any information they have about you. It cost a tenner. And as Mark Thomas pointed out recently it include.. dah dah dah dah daaah... CCTV cameras!
That's right - you too can act like a loon in front of CCTV cameras, then write to your local council with a tenner inclosed and they have to send you a copy of the tape!
Been taped by the police at a local football match/protect/err...riot recently? They get a copy off the police to prove you were there..
However, I woudln't mind if Spanish was removed from the face of the earth. In fact, I woudln't mind of Danish was removed from the earth (my own native tongue). The reason for this is that it's simply stupid and unproductive for everyone not to speak the same langauge.
Some would say that this would destroy culture, but if a culture is so weak it cannot survive the "loss" of its language, I'd say that people weren't really serious about it anyway.
Language has far more of an effect on culture than you think. You *think* in language - if you cannot express an idea in your language you are going to find it extremely hard to express it.
Now, you don't notice this much in the Western world because all Western Languages (basically wesstern European languages) are capable of expressing the same ideas. Being Danish you don't have any trouble expressing yourself in English.
There are languages where the word for 'land', 'people' and 'culture' is the same. In these peoples mind there exists an inescapable link between all these concepts. If they were raised speaking a different langauge they wouldn't grow with this understanding, and the culture would end up changing.
The replacement of any European language with another (ie. Spanish or Danish for English) is unlikely to have much of an effect. But when the langauges are radically different and fundamentally incapable of expressing the same ideas then the changes are more subtle and far reaching.
Many cultures are capable of surviving of the loss of a language (and many have). But if you want to destroy a culture then you could do a lot worse than start with the language.
Blatant falsehood!! Studies have shown that smoking 15 thousand joints or more in an hour will result in recieving a FATAL dose! So please, everyone limit your Marijuanna consumption to LESS THAN 15 thousand joints per hour!!!
Eeek? Only 15 thousand joints? I sure came close to OD'ing yesterday - thank god I was just too stoned to reach for that fifteen-thousant joint, or I'd be in trouble:)
On a more serious note, I seen many techies affected by drugs, but that's probably more university life than computer scientists.
For what it's worth: I've lost family members to drug abuse (too many cigerettes - they couldn't quit); seen close friends lose family members to drug abuse (too much achohol, couldn't quit); had a friend nearly due to drug abuse (got addicted to ProPlus (caffine tablets), and ended up taking sleeping tablets at night just to sleep and nearly OD'ed); a kid in my school (years ago) got sent to a juvinile detention centre after he got caught stealing one to many times to support his glue-sniffing habbits.
Strangely I've known anyone who died of an illegal drug, dispite the fact I take the occasional drug (so obviously all my friends are crazy drug addicts). Strange how the world turns.
Slashdot Mirror
It's entirely true under the ne provisions of the Data Protection. They are entitled to charge up to £10 for the cost of retrieving the data. Mark Thomas did a program on C4 about this some months ago, where he retrieved all sort of footage of himself.
:)
It also applies to filming that takes place on private premisses where the public have ready access.
In may of this year after a particulary heavy night out, me and my friends got chucked out of the local McDonalds (OK, we probably shouldn't had been dancing on the tables on 8am on a Sundaym morning, but there was a real tune on the radio!!).
I wrote to McDonalds, stated the relevant portions of the act, the time and location of the desired footagge, and enclosed a cheque for ten pounds. I recieved a video tape of us being kicked out of McDonalds. How quality is that?
I'm afriad I really can't be bothered to search out any links for you, but try searching for The Data Protection Act 2000.
Oh, and you were such a good troll until you gave the game away with that! :(
We have a similar thing where I work on Friday evenings (we normally go our seperate ways for Friday night).
:)
Thing is, all our Friday evening beer gets to go on expenses! Our boss considers the social bonding important enough! Wahey!
Well it depends on what you want your music to be! I think the majority of people just use music as a bit of a mild distraction - something to listen to when driving to work, something to dance to while getting drunk with friends,or some noise to go with their drugs :)
And then you have people who are seriously into their music. And those who live and breathe music.
I'll try a rubbishy comparsion to food and use the good, old standby MacDonald's :) How many of you eat MacDonald's? How many of you think it's gorment food? McDonald's sell millions of burgers, but do you think someone who lived and breathed food - a world class chef - would praise McDonalds?
When a good chef creates a dish he'd pay attention now to every last detail, because food probably matters a lot more to him than it does to us. But most people don't care that much about food. McDonalds is readily available and most people don't mind eating it.
People who begin to get heavily into music seek out the styles that interest them - and that isn't the mass marketed stuff. For everyone else, pop is good enough.
Do you really think there's people out there who listen to Britany Spear's wondering what exciting keychain or rhymic device she's going to be using in her new song. I very much doubt it. The true reason pop is popular is most people really don't care that much about music! The lowest common demonintor is good enough for them.
(and you could replace McDonald's with Baked Beans, or cheese on toast if you like :p )
How long ago was "back in the day?". I've been to The Fridge numerous times in the last year (and other clubs in Brixon), and I've never once felt threatened.
Which volcano in the Phillipines poured out CFCs? I'd be very interested in hearing about a volcano that poured out chemicals that do not naturally occur! CFCs are manmade - they are no naturally occuring CFCs.
The hazards we now associate with CFCs were discovered in the 1960s when a British chemist (Lovelock) was interested in tracing the motions of air masses. He was using CFC's to do so, as they were ideal for tracing air motions, being chemically stable and not naturally-occurring (they are only man-made) so their presence in an air mass could not be confused with CFC's coming from natural sources.
Perhaps you are thinking of the theory that volcanic chlorine caused ozone depletion? There are a number of problems with this:
(1) There was significant O3 loss in the 1980's, but no major volcanic activity then.
(2) There has been major volcanic activity since O3 monitoring began in the 1950's, but it was not necessarily associated with declines in O3. That is, O3 losses and volcanic activity appear to be uncoupled in time (lack temporal consistency)
(3) Measures of hydrogen chloride in the stratosphere after the relatively recent eruptions of Mt. Pinatubo and El Chicon showed less than a 10% increase in stratospheric HCl following those eruptions, while stratospheric HCl has increased steadily across recent years. Furthermore, it is estimated that 1% of the Cl released by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo Cl made it to the stratosphere, judged by the increase in HCl in the stratosphere following the eruption and the estimated release of Cl by the volcano.
(4) Stratospheric hydrogen fluoride has also increased steadily in parallel with HCl, as would be consistent with CFC sources.
(5) Much of the HCl produced by volcanoes (or Cl from sea salt) is injected into the troposphere and very little of that makes it to the stratosphere, as it is washed out first. Volcanic emissions include abundant water vapor, and HCl and NaCl are quite soluble in water, while CFC's are not.
(6) Most of the HCl that does make it to the stratosphere is rapidly washed out -- that is the major removal mechanism for Cl from the stratosphere.
(7) After volcanic eruptions, scientists find enriched sulfate in ice caps, suggesting that the eruptions inject sulfate into the stratosphere, where it gets widely distributed before being washed out. However, ice caps are not enriched with Cl following volcanic eruptions, suggesting that most Cl doesn't make it to the stratosphere where it could get dispersed as sulfate does.
I'm not aware of any studies that have proven a link between a greater number of CCTV camera and lower, or slowing crime rates. I am aware of a number of studies that have shown CCTV camera to have no appreciable effect on crime rates, and some where there appears to be links between CCTV cameras and higher crime rates! *
Yes, I know it sounds hard to believe. How can CCTV cameras lead to higher crime rates? Simple. CCTV cameras are treated as surrogate policemen. Everyone in Britain knows we've been having a hard time recruiting enough police-officers - well now we don't need to!
It's quite easy.. Stick a load of CCTV camera everywhere and what's the point in having all those policemen wandering about to keep an eye on things (and act as a deterant).
Umm.. no.. CCTV cameras are crap. CCTV footage is inadmissable in court as identification. In many cases the footage in the cameras isn't kept long enough to be used anyway. Better hope the police get around to retrieving the footage before it gets taped over in the next 24 hour cycle. And they make rubbish deterents. What would stop you - seeing a policemen or some half-arsed camera ontop a pole that may or may not actually have some film in, that may or may not be kept, that can't be used to identify you in a court of law, all with a good chance that the police who's supposed to monitoring it is has nipped out for more donuts/a piss/a cigarette? Bear in mind, that if you'll about to commit a voilent crime you'll probably to drunk to care about the cameras anyway...
It is quite simply all a con. The government seems completely incapable of scrapping together enough policemen to stop the rising crime rates so they stick a load of CCTV cameras everywhere and try and get kudos for it. What a load of bollocks....
If you want to get the crime rates down you need better policing with more policemen. No some poor grainy footage of crime that's already taken place. That's not exactly prevention.
(*Unfortunately, I don't have links to hand - try searching the GreenParty's website, they should have a few)
(Amusing aside: A town in Devon had a spaite of robberies that all coincided with the shift change at the CCTV monitoring centre. They never did catch them...)
You're obviously quite young. Otherwise you'd remember the 'Home Computers' of the 1980's. Typically an 8k or 16k ROM would hold an entire OS and programming language.
Of course that was when an OS was an OS and not an OS, a GUI, various applications, sandwich toaster, cuddly toy... Damn straight 300k is a lot. The Amiga 2000 fitted it's whole multi-tasking OS into it's 512 ROM. And that includes the graphics and GUI subsystems. The earlier Amiga 1000's had only a 256K ROM - I've never used one, but IIRC they had to have more OS code loaded off disk.
Well, as many have already pointed out MySql has ODBC drivers which can be used to hook Access to MySql via Access's linked tables.
The question is "Do you really want to do this?". I only deploy MySql on web-backends where read speed is important. A carefully setup MySql/Apache/PHP combo rocks if you need a database driven website,
However, MySql is only used for the web-side of things. In the office we use MS Sql Server and a VB front-end. I'd recommend Oracle over SQL Server if you have a lot of data (millions of rows), a lot of users, or a lot of heavy duty querys, but all of these are fairly moderate where I work. We then regulary push the data from MS-SQL to MySql as a one-way op.
Access is great for RAD development & situations where long-term support isn't an issue. The Access forms lib make this stuff a breeze - VB and ADO takes longer.
I don't have much experience using Access with MySql, but I can offer some tips from my experience with Access/SQL Server which hopefully will give some kind of an idea what you can expect.
Firstly for god's sake don't use Access 2000 with linked tables! To get Access 2000 on Windows 2000 with SQL Server 7 requires that you have every available service pack for all three pieces of software client and server end, otherwise you'll have all sorts of problems with the linked tables (sometimes they will refuse to link, sometimes it will link but all your rows show up as #deleted, bit columns in MS-SQL that can be NULL give Access headaches, GUID's sometimes get treated as guid{x} in code instead of {x}, etc. etc). All of these problems can be fixed with the latest service packs but in my experience Access97 and Sql Server 7 make for a more reliable combination.
Don't attempt to use Access if you have a large amount of data. Access barfs once the tables get to large. Access's psuedo SQL implementation (Jet I believe?) is stoopid enough to try and do a lot of the processing client-side (like joins and the like - eek!). Remember Access was originally designed to work a local database.
Working with Access also gets nasty if you need to fill forms with data from more than one table (updatable joins? Have fun...). VB & ADO is much nicer for this sort of stuff.
Access2000 with SQL server can utilitize Access Data Projects. A custom mode designed to link the two together properly - you get access to all the SQL Server properties like views and stored proceedures, and decent query optimising (Jet is rubbish). In return you lose some of Access's features (you have no ability to create local Access tables etc.) I haven't played with this that much so I can't offer that much advice here.
Unless this RAD stuff, if you are using Windows clients I'd really recommend VB and ADO - it will connect nicely to MySql via MyODBC, and you have none of the Access headaches. VB and ADO are more widely used for real application than Access so you'll find more books and examples, and it seems to be more stable and better tested.
You really need to consider the choice of MySQL. SQLServer is great for middle-sized deployments and is very easy to maintain. Alternatively if you are on an OpenSource bender take a look at PostgreSQL. It seems to have a good rep but I haven't played with it that much.
If you choose SQLServer some advice:
*it needs a fair bit of diskspace - particulary for it's transaction logs, which due to the way they are allocaed and used can ballon waaay waay up (allocated space at the beginning and end and NOTHING used in the middle!). There's example stored proceedures on the web on how to get it shrink. Do your research!
*SQLServer backups are huge! We've ditched them now, and do a nightly backup to an new Access database everytime (SQLServer generates the Access db, Access the application is not involved), but ours is only a small operation.
Remember you pick the tools to suit the application - not the other way around. I could be wrong here but it sounds like you want to use MySql simply because it looks like the 133t OpenSource database of the hour. RESEARCH!
Anyway, enough rambling, hope this is of some use. It's very late here at the moment, and I'm tired so it could all be bollocks.
(And if you have the kind of enemies that might just abandon or shoot their wounded, you still haven't lost out).
Like the glue guns I heard about a while ago that caused *permament* blindness. Hell, imagine if you could create a weapon that didn't kill someone but blew their legs away. Putting aside the moral objections, it would be a very powerful weapon... Oh wait, it's called a landmine.
You use a cache and 99% of your reads complete in x seconds and 1% in 2x seconds. You don't use it and they all complete in 2x seconds.
What's wrong with using the cache and setting the "deadline" to 2x settings? Or is "too fast a responsive" a problem for real-time systems as well?
The RIAA aren't that bothered (at the moment) about the priacy taking place on Napster - honestly that doesn't eat into their profits that much. Ever wondering about those "studies" that show napster users buy more CD's - doesn't matter. What about the fact the RIAA aren't terribly interested in a subscription based Napster (ie. royalty payments).
The fact is that even if Napster demonstratedly improved CD sales, even by a sizable amount, it doesn't matter! More CD's sold != more profit as some would think. A lot of people use Naspter to make informed choices about the music they buy. You can source a wide-range of material, find what you like and just buy that. This means less profit!
The record companies use ecomonies of scale to keep their profits so high. Hypothetical record company "A" might have 1 million artists signed to it - but 995,000 are consigned to the "only make 50,000" copies basket. The record companies promote who they want to big, they get big and you print 5 million CD's of just them. There's very little waste, and you don't have to change the presses that often.
Now imagine that people start making highly informed choices about the music they buy - and are less swayed by the marketing pushes. You could no longer predict who's going to big. Obscure bands could become popular over-night, and "insert famous band X"'s latest album flops because everyone hears it first and decides it sucks.
Eventually you might have to print an even quanity of CD's across your whole range simply because you no longer have control over who makes it. A whole lot of a whole lot of different stuff to burn makes you a lot less cash!
They don't just want to be the content-providers they want to govern what people think the content is - they're had this hold for years and their shareholders will demand that they don't give it up now.
Hmmm.. Are you sure your machine is *actually* doing stuff faster, do does it just *feel* faster?
I suspect that a lot of applications you are running are only single-threaded so they can only use one CPU. The difference is that the other CPU is free for all the event and interrupt handling.
So when you are doing something that 100% maximises out one CPU, the other is still free for all the GUI and house-keeping stuff, so your machine doesn't feel as sluggish.
This puts me in mind of the old Amiga machines where all the GUI handling was handled in a seperate high-priority thread (I think it was priority 10, not sure). No matter how heavy a load your machine was under the GUI was always garenteed a certain timeslice if it had stuff to do. No matter how loaded your machine was it always remained responsive so people precieved it as faster than the 7.14Mhz most of them were (A500's etc.).
I think you could be experiencing something similar.
Course, I could be wrong - perhaps you run lots of multi-threaded apps?
Yeah, it's always a problem. I do PlayerObject collision on the client, and PlayerPlayer and ObjectObject on the server. As far as I can work out this gives the least visual disparity between what you are seeing and what the server (and everyone else) thinks is happening.
IIRC, Quake's biggest problem was that the server sent back more information than the client needed in an effort to speed up the connection. Clients could then do prediction and such, but once that got found out bots were created that predicted when people would come around the corner and blast them immediately. Trust me, Quake would had had a far bigger problem if the client's couldn't that prediction. It's a neccessary part of simulating an environment with mulitple client - otherwise lag and bandwidth problems just bite you in the arse.
This form of extrapolation (dead-reckoning) has been used in most of the military sims developed and is still in use the US's latest creation - the HLA (High Level Architecture). And it's been used in just about every realtime multiplayer game written.
If you can't extrapolate positions you can kiss bandwidth goodbye. Here's an example. You have 30 players, each player update take 20bytes, and you want 30 frames a second, so:
20 x 30 x 30 = 18000 = 140KB/sec
That's a lot of bandwidth. Now factor in weapon firing and you'll way up there.
Not to mention the effect variation in lag will have on the smoothness of your opponents movement.
Opensourcing the clients creates a really really difficult security problem. "Security through obscurity is no security at all" is a cryptography term, and the one thing crytographers don't have to worry too much about is efficiently. "Can't trust the client? Then don't" works get for them, but for MMP games it would kill them.
the server implements the "laws of nature"
than it is to actually do it. You have two major problems - bandwidth and latency. And while bandwidth gets better all the time latency doesn't improve nearly as quicker.
For example, you might say a Law of Nature is "Thou shall not walk through walks". For this to be done on the server everytime the client moves it has to check to see if it can move! Imagine you are playing with 200ms ping times - having the screen update a 1/5 of a second after you move the mouse/joystick is very noticable. Or a 1/5 of a second delay between pressing fire and having your gun fire? That's very annoying (it's what happens in my multiplayer space-sim at the moment, and it's very noticable).
Not to mention the fact that your server loads goes up a whole bunch. I've written a few very basic multiplayer games and, although I'm proabably a sloppy coder, server load is a real issue - particulary in MMP games.
Really the best you can do is to have the client obey the "Laws of Nature" and then have the server check up on it once in a while (and the checks would still be fuzzy - in a lot of cases you have to extrapolate position based on lag and that can give false positive collisions).
Bandwidth gets better everyday, and with boardband connections becoming more and more common it's almost ceases to be an issue. Latency is here for a long while though, and that's a far harder problem.
(Btw, some of the GPL'ed Quakes have tried to get around the open client problems by releasing "blessed binaries" that have an encyption key hidden in the data, surrounded by a random amount of data each side. It's a nice idea, but it's obviously breakable).
It's not a particulary great amount of money, but AFAIK the library does pay the publishers based on the number of books they lend - that's on top of the cost of buying the book in the first place.
Remember that WINE stands for: Wine Is Not an Emulator. Running windows apps only Wine should (theorically) be far more stable than running windows apps under Windows. And faster. And more efficient.
So you say Wine could be bad for Linux, but what you really mean is Wine could be bad for non-microsoft APIs.
If Wine gave a perfect implementation of the Win32 APIs under *Linux* then there'd be no reason to use Windows AT ALL. Ever. You could use apps coded to the Direct3D API (and others) under Linux.
If you don't like Microsoft APIs don't code to them - use OpenGL instead of DirectX etc. But the one thing Wine is doing is opening up the Microsoft APIs to a multiplatform audience and I don't really see how that can be that bad.
If Wine succeeds then the Win32 API and all the others, will become a cross-platform API, and you'll have a choice of implementations. Microsoft's one under W9x/NT (yuk!), or Wine's one under Linux. Which would you choose?
This really makes it a fair more level playing field. You choose your OS and you choose your API to code to - the two become less tied together. (Obviously there are still link between the OS API. Registry API's etc.). Now if the Win32 API is available on Windows and Linux thats a win for the Win32 API and the apps that use it. If you prefer a different API (Posix etc.) and that one is available under Linux and not Windoze them that's a loss for that API - it needs to get better to compete.
Sam
(Oh and those of you who are thinking M$ will just change the API... It's been pointed out before - they can't. Doing so would break all the existing apps on Win32 - all they can do is try and extend the API and not tell anyone about the extra bits).
Prove the cause of this warming trend: don't make me laugh.
It doesn't matter what the whether human activity is the sole cause of global warming or not. It only matters that it has some signifigant effect on it. It's looking more and more likely that our activities are worsening a natural occurance. Just because it might occur anyway is no excuse to not try and stop it.
It's like saying: "Well there was going to be a tidal wave anyway. That nuclear bomb we let off only made it 20% bigger, I don't know what all the complaining is about."
Last time I checked, the base element chlorine is what destroys ozone. The mix with CO2 doesn't help. Mt. Pinatubo spewed tons of chlorine miles into the stratosphere. CFC's take time to drift up to the upper atmosphere, they must get broken down into their base elements like bromine and chlorine*. It's like shooting a syringe of ink into a pan of water. Mankind produces far less chlorine through CFCs to what volcons produce.
Yes you are correct - chlorine does destroy Ozone. But chlorine on it's *own* isn't a problem - it would never get high enough in the atmosphere to react with the ozone layer. It would get rained out as hydrochloric acid.
CFC's on the other hand were orinigally designed (in the 1930's) to be as non-reactive as possible. When they were first presented to the world there was a famous demonstration were one researchers inhaled a lungful of CFCs and used it to blow out a candle. At the time they were hailed as a major breakthrough - a gas that was completely non-toxic, nonflamable and they hardly react with anything.
The last point is the problem. Those florine bonds are incredibly strong. So strong that it takes an awful lot of energy to break them. In fact energy of the sort of strength that the only place you'd find it naturally occuring is in the in UV light just around the ozone layer. Uh oh! Once the CFC's break down in this region that chlorine can get to work destoying ozone.
In fact it a little worse than that. The chlorine is just an initator in a chain reaction. It goes a little like this:
Photolysis of some CFC's releases chlorine radicals (the initiation step).
then the propegation steps:
Cl + O3 -> ClO + O2
ClO + O -> Cl + O2
Notice the chlorine radical is released again in the propegation stage (hence propegation). One chlorine radical can go on to destroy a lot of Ozone. And at these attitudes it has a high atmospheric halflife (50 years or so).
So CFC's can destroy the ozone whereas ordinary chlorine released in the atmosphere can't. Think of the CFC as protective armour around a chlorine radical to help it get high enough to do some real harm.
My memory is a little shaky here, but I suspect this is in reaction to a recent court case where a man was found to be guilty of a particulary gruesome rape - but had to be let go. The DNA evidence they had taken from the scene was matched against DNA of his taken during an earlier investigation into another crime - one he had been found innocent of. That's how they caught him. But under current UK law after an investigation is concluded all DNA evidence collected has to be destroyed (not sure about the DNA evidence of the accused but I think that has to go to).
So the police shouldn't had had the earlier DNA on file - it should had been destroyed years ago. The only evidence that could had convicted him was inadmissable in court and he was found to be innocent.
Oh, as regards CCTV camera's they are everywhere here! Mark Thomas said recently that we have the highest camera/person ratio in the world! (I'm told by an American friend of mine that schemes like this would never fly in the states.) And lots of studies have concluded that they do nothing to reduce crime - and in many case crime goes up. It's seen as an alternative to putting real officers on the beat and CCTV footage can't be used as proof of identification in court.
In Bridgewater, Devon there was a spate of robberies in the town centre timed to conincide perfectly with the shift change at the CCTV centre. Most CCTV footage is very low resolution - incredibly blurry. I believe they typically multiplex about seven feeds onto one tape. Unless the police eating doughnuts in front of the TV screens notices something happening and flicks it to a higher quality output they can be next to useless.
Oh this is amusing. Under the Data Protection Act 2000 any organisation, company or government body has to provide you with any information they have about you. It cost a tenner. And as Mark Thomas pointed out recently it include .. dah dah dah dah daaah... CCTV cameras!
That's right - you too can act like a loon in front of CCTV cameras, then write to your local council with a tenner inclosed and they have to send you a copy of the tape!
Been taped by the police at a local football match/protect/err...riot recently? They get a copy off the police to prove you were there..
Hours of fun...
However, I woudln't mind if Spanish was removed from the face of the earth. In fact, I woudln't mind of Danish was removed from the earth (my own native tongue). The reason for this is that it's simply stupid and unproductive for everyone not to speak the same langauge.
Some would say that this would destroy culture, but if a culture is so weak it cannot survive the "loss" of its language, I'd say that people weren't really serious about it anyway.
Language has far more of an effect on culture than you think. You *think* in language - if you cannot express an idea in your language you are going to find it extremely hard to express it.
Now, you don't notice this much in the Western world because all Western Languages (basically wesstern European languages) are capable of expressing the same ideas. Being Danish you don't have any trouble expressing yourself in English.
There are languages where the word for 'land', 'people' and 'culture' is the same. In these peoples mind there exists an inescapable link between all these concepts. If they were raised speaking a different langauge they wouldn't grow with this understanding, and the culture would end up changing.
The replacement of any European language with another (ie. Spanish or Danish for English) is unlikely to have much of an effect. But when the langauges are radically different and fundamentally incapable of expressing the same ideas then the changes are more subtle and far reaching.
Many cultures are capable of surviving of the loss of a language (and many have). But if you want to destroy a culture then you could do a lot worse than start with the language.
Eeek? Only 15 thousand joints? I sure came close to OD'ing yesterday - thank god I was just too stoned to reach for that fifteen-thousant joint, or I'd be in trouble :)
On a more serious note, I seen many techies affected by drugs, but that's probably more university life than computer scientists.
For what it's worth: I've lost family members to drug abuse (too many cigerettes - they couldn't quit); seen close friends lose family members to drug abuse (too much achohol, couldn't quit); had a friend nearly due to drug abuse (got addicted to ProPlus (caffine tablets), and ended up taking sleeping tablets at night just to sleep and nearly OD'ed); a kid in my school (years ago) got sent to a juvinile detention centre after he got caught stealing one to many times to support his glue-sniffing habbits.
Strangely I've known anyone who died of an illegal drug, dispite the fact I take the occasional drug (so obviously all my friends are crazy drug addicts). Strange how the world turns.