In two days, Wednesday, is it assumed that the riksdag (The Swedish instrument of government) will give the surveillance service the right to scan all email, sms (phone texts) and phone traffic that pass through the borders of Sweden. Christoph Andersson is reminded by the surveillance machine in the past DDR - and wonder where the personal privacy is going.
IN THE EASTGERMAN SECURITY POLICE archives exists shelves with fire-yellow red or dark brown files. The combined length is 180 kilometers. Here exists printouts of common east german's phone calls and long lists of different people's phone contacts, right next to a date and time. Especially interesting to the Stasi was the phone traffic that passed abroad the boarders of East Germany.
This gigantic security surveillance system had the task of protecting "the democracy" within DDR against "hostile negative forces" and "terrorism". The threat picture gave the Stasi the right to collect all information about everyone.
Since 1989 the Stasi is but a memory. Despite this is a similar, but even worse surveillance system in the making - this time in Sweden. To accomplish this FÃrsvarets RadioAnstalt (Swedish Defence's Radio Department), the FRA, aquired a super computer, worth multiple millions kronor (SEK - the Swedish currency). It's expected to be more of them in the forthcoming years.
With the help of those machines the FRA will scan through all emails, all sms's and all phone calls that pass through the borders of Sweden. Every day, every hour, every minute and every second. Just like in the prior DDR is the goal to prevent "terrorism" and deflect outer threats against society.
In practice this is done by the FRA by feeding different search terms into the computer system, both in Swedish and other languages. In addition the FRA will search for strings with randomly chosen words and numbers.
- Cryptography, explains the defense minister's closest man, the secretary of state HÃ¥kan Jevrell in a video interview shown in the "Digging journalists' seminary" in GÃteborg (Gothenburgh) in April.
In this interview he makes it understood that email with encrypted contents is especially interesting to the FRA. To-be terrorists would not type in plain text where they will hit - and with amount of force. Sure, encryption systems like PGP is believed to be hard to crack - but with one or more computers in the million-range you can surely decrypt everything from encrypted love letters to journalists' exchange with sources. The latter being protected by the anonymity protection of Swedish law. FRA can thus impossibly know anything about the contents prior to breaking the encryption. Thus creating a catch 22. In practice the law's paragraphs about the source protection are rendered worthless.
Everything needed for the FRA to begin the work is for the Riksdag to pass the suggestion "An assimilated defense secret service". Behind the gibberish title hides a privacy breach that has no equal in Swedish history. The FRA will not just look for information about believed terrorist cells or acts of terrorism. According to the proposition the FRA will even search for information about "Income crisis, ecologic unbalances, environmental threats, ethnic and religious conflicts, large immigrant and emigrant movements and economic challenges in the form of currency and interest speculations". The thoughts are involuntarily drawn towards the Stasi surveillance machine of old.
HÃ¥kan Jevrell and other right-wing politicians ensures at the same time that the common person have nothing to fear. It's only traffic that passes the border that will be scanned, not domestic sms, phone and email traffic. The problem is that domestic email also is delivered through other countries. Partly because Swedish companies and organizations have servers in other countries, partly because email doesn't honor nation borders. The mail between, for example, LuleÃ¥ and MalmÃ, may very we
Betrayal at Krondor has to be one of the most unique gameplay RPGs out there, especially when it was created. It was such a big world, and the storyline was pretty set, but everything in the world changed for each chapter that you played through, you could literaly spend weeks on side quests (not like Daggerfall when you could feel it was generated, here you had hand-made sidequests that only 1-3% of the players playing the game would even see). It did have a semi-sequel in Betrayal at Antara, but it was different people developing (if I remember correctly, didn't find any resources about this), and definitely didn't have the same feel in any elements.
I've been tempted to go back and play it, but it has some flaws that quickly become annoying (you have to stop to turn, etc) - but it was a great game when it came out. I'd play it again in an instant with just a slightly different engine, same storyline and magic system.
Re:speaking of...
on
Bob Saget 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I guess this would be Bob Saget 6.9.
This is TOTALLY not safe for work, or the faint of heart or people getting upset about tasteless jokes.
Probably the most tasteless thing you'll see today.
Re:DBA, please. "unique pluggable"?
on
Pro MySQL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Subqueries are handled on a layer way above of the actual storage layer, so all engines can handle this.
Re:DBA, please. "unique pluggable"?
on
Pro MySQL
·
· Score: 1
Most of them are special purpose, and if you use them you design your whole application around the specific workings.
The more general purpose ones (InnoDB, MyISAM, BDB, NDB, Falcon) are quite transparent. MyISAM of course doesn't fill ACID, so that would be something you definitely would want to know about, but otherwise it you should be able to switch without a single line of application code needing to change. (only things I can think about with syntax differences is if you use the GIS extension or fulltext extension to the SQL syntax with MyISAM - you can't currently do that on the others).
Re:ANSI SQL conformance?
on
Pro MySQL
·
· Score: 1
MySQL uses the ` delimiter, but supports the correct (ANSI) " delimiter in ANSI mode or if you run with the ANSI_QUOTES option.
Neither LIMIT nor TOP N is correct from a standard point of view. SELECT c1 FROM t1 ORDER BY c1 LIMIT 10 | SELECT TOP 10 c1 FROM t1 ORDER BY c1 should according to the standard be written as:
SELECT c1 FROM (
SELECT
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY c1 ASC) AS rownumber, c1
FROM t1 ) AS tmp WHERE rownumber = 10
Re:SQL book recommendation?
on
Pro MySQL
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Those are maybe not newbie books, but the books here all have some nuggets while learning databases (maybe not the initial start, but after a while if nothing else)
SQL For Smarties - Joe Celko
A good SQL Programming book, covers normalization and most features found in databases, anyone programming databases should read this one
Translucent Databases - P. Wayner
Covers how to handle sensitive data in databases, letting users use data, but not be able to fetch or abuse it
The two MySQL books I'd recommend are "High Performance MySQL" by J.Zawodny and D.Bailing and "MySQL" by Paul Dubois.
Another good database book for performance tuning is "SQL Performance Tuning" by P.Gulutzan/T.Pelzer
Hope this helps... cheers,
Re:DBA, please. "unique pluggable"?
on
Pro MySQL
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Different workloads will have way different characteristics.
What you can tweak on locking level (table-level, page-level, row-level, MVCC, etc) in table/schema settings in other database products you pick by chosing engines in MySQL.
You can see it in a way as setting groups of settings that will be a good fit for the workload of your environment.
Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none concept, I guess.
MyISAM - Data warehousing/DSS/Read only archives optimized for bulk operations (big scans, flexible index formats, small disk footprint for data/index) but will not do well in a typical OLTP application because of table-level locking, bad crash durability and lack of ACID in general.
InnoDB - Typical traditional OLTP, row level locking, MVCC, Clustered PK w/ using B+tree with savepoints within transactions and other features for typical OLTP applications
Memory - No disk footprint, extremely fast - for summary tables, simulations, temporary operations (, session handling?).
NDB - Typical telcom, small rows, quite a few of them and high concurrency/throughput with automatic failover in the case of node failure. Slow for big scans and joins, but great for key lookups on single tables, but with transaction volumes and throughput you can't reach with the others for this niche usage.
Falcon - Jim Starkey's new engine with some cool new things (see this link for a presentation)
Arhive - On-insert compression of rows for dump-archive-forget style data.
You can achieve lots of those things with normal settings, but to optimize on a storage level for cecertain operations can give you quite a boost for some things.
There are some cool aspects to this when it comes to proprietary formats, though. You can create engines for reading log files so you can access log data with SQL commands (there are engines for reading CSV files, apache log files, etc - think I even saw someone working on reading MS Access.mdb files at some point).
Sure, it would be cool to have this one perfect storage system doing everything, but I guess you can use file systems in operating systems as an example, why doesn't all operating systems only use EXT3, Reiser, UFS, XFS, JFS, NTFS, etc? There are pros and cons to everything, just pick whatever fits your need, just like you would pick the programming language and database that would fit your application project the best.
If your database happens to be MySQL, you can go another step to pick the engine that will perform better or have the functionality you're looking for (or scalability or whatever you want).
Maybe not an acceptable reason for you, but I hope you at least understand the concept better...
cheers,
Re:DBA, please. "unique pluggable"?
on
Pro MySQL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And it's not pluggable until 5.1, prior to then it still has to be compiled in.
I've traveled to quite a few countries, in north america I've been in US, Canada and I've visited most countries in Europe (especially the North/West areas). I'll take a train ride almost any day over flying, more space for the seats, better Internet connectivity (unless you're in tunnels) - a bistro/restaurant where you can get a table sit down place and order what kind of food you want - all the seats have power, so you can use whatever gadget you want. Take all this and with less overhead of security checks and delayed baggage unloading, lost luggage, etc trains usually get you a better experience. Now, for intercontinental travels, there's not much choice, since the time it would take would be too big (especially for business travels).
I live in the south of Sweden and regularly go to Stockholm. With the train it takes me roughly 4:30h to get there door to door of whatever hotel I'm staying at in Stockholm. If I take a flight, it's usually a lot more than that, because of lines, having to check in, security screenings and waiting for my luggage. Even going to/from the airports add up to all this - finding parking, etc.
And since trains got Wifi here train rides are very pleasant, since I can work on the train without sitting with my elbows over my head trying to fit the laptop in and hope the person in front of me don't lean their seat back, like I would in a plane.
So, if I can, I always take the train. But yes, I have done the Amtrak thing in the US, so I understand why people over there are so sceptic to why train can be a viable replacement for travel.
I had a similar experience playing Resident Evil 4 resently. My apartment setup is on the 4th floor. To the right of where I play, I have 3 windows covering the wall, the "window wall" is about 6 feet to my right. The TV is about 9 feet ahead of me, and I have a full surround system, which RE4 supports quite well. This means that my back right speaker is just to the side of me against the corner of the normal wall and the windows.
At one point in the game, some of the bad guys broke a window just to the right of my character and made some gurgling noises, which coinscidentally came from the speaker just in front of my window. So, I hear a noise of windows breaking coming just from my windows... I jumped really high and it probably took around 10 minutes before my pulse was back to normal again.
That's an example of a CD with Copy Protection on it.
It's nonintrusive enough for people that don't care, and
easy enough for me that do care to see if it has something
on it, if I see the * I just won't get it.
The "singling" out part is not as random as it would seem, I think.
I'm not a US citizen, and about 18 months ago I was "randomly selected" for screening 13 flights in a row within US.
Now, I do know why I probably was selected, but it's still annoying, because the people that search you are generally very rude and like to break gadgets and when you ask them to be a bit careful you get the "Please be quiet, Sir" and they keep shoving your $100 sunglasses or $300 Bose headphones into your bag without the protective cover.
Now, do this on a webpage that advertises a humorous film clip, or the most popular online game, free ipod, or whatever and count the people clicking through, two clicks or not. They see it's not working with no, they'll try again til it works.
I think we're assuming that it is inferior because it is made in Taiwan
Yes, because no good technology is produced in Taiwan. Next time you go to a computer store, look at the motherboards section...
Nowadays most motherboard companies have alternative homepages, but I remember 5-6 years ago if you needed bios updates or driver patches, the pages were always at www.motherboardbrand.com.tw
I think one of the reasons it'll be a bigger hit in Europe compared to US is the price of gas. In some countries in Europe you pay up to 4x as much for gas as you do in US, which means that a car that uses less gas will be a lot cheaper in the long run.
Some European countries also let you pay less yearly tax on cars that use up little gas since they don't hurt the environment as much.
I don't think it's a status (or sexuality thing) just that there's no real incentive in the US to buy a car that use less gas.
I got this issue once with my Nvidia GeForce3 and some drivers.
I don't remember if it was the player program I used or the drivers that fixed it, but I remember it started working after I reinstalled something with a newer version.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweden's own Stasi
In two days, Wednesday, is it assumed that the riksdag (The Swedish instrument of government) will give the surveillance service the right to scan all email, sms (phone texts) and phone traffic that pass through the borders of Sweden.
Christoph Andersson is reminded by the surveillance machine in the past DDR - and wonder where the personal privacy is going.
IN THE EASTGERMAN SECURITY POLICE archives exists shelves with fire-yellow red or dark brown files. The combined length is 180 kilometers. Here exists printouts of common east german's phone calls and long lists of different people's phone contacts, right next to a date and time. Especially interesting to the Stasi was the phone traffic that passed abroad the boarders of East Germany.
This gigantic security surveillance system had the task of protecting "the democracy" within DDR against "hostile negative forces" and "terrorism". The threat picture gave the Stasi the right to collect all information about everyone.
Since 1989 the Stasi is but a memory. Despite this is a similar, but even worse surveillance system in the making - this time in Sweden. To accomplish this FÃrsvarets RadioAnstalt (Swedish Defence's Radio Department), the FRA, aquired a super computer, worth multiple millions kronor (SEK - the Swedish currency). It's expected to be more of them in the forthcoming years.
With the help of those machines the FRA will scan through all emails, all sms's and all phone calls that pass through the borders of Sweden. Every day, every hour, every minute and every second. Just like in the prior DDR is the goal to prevent "terrorism" and deflect outer threats against society.
In practice this is done by the FRA by feeding different search terms into the computer system, both in Swedish and other languages. In addition the FRA will search for strings with randomly chosen words and numbers.
- Cryptography, explains the defense minister's closest man, the secretary of
state HÃ¥kan Jevrell in a video interview shown in the "Digging journalists' seminary" in GÃteborg (Gothenburgh) in April.
In this interview he makes it understood that email with encrypted contents is especially interesting to the FRA. To-be terrorists would not type in plain text where they will hit - and with amount of force.
Sure, encryption systems like PGP is believed to be hard to crack - but with one or more computers in the million-range you can surely decrypt everything from encrypted love letters to journalists' exchange with sources. The latter being protected by the anonymity protection of Swedish law. FRA can thus impossibly know anything about the contents prior to breaking the encryption. Thus creating a catch 22. In practice the law's paragraphs about the source protection are rendered worthless.
Everything needed for the FRA to begin the work is for the Riksdag to pass the suggestion "An assimilated defense secret service". Behind the gibberish title hides a privacy breach that has no equal in Swedish history. The FRA will not just look for information about believed terrorist cells or acts of terrorism. According to the proposition the FRA will even search for information about "Income crisis, ecologic unbalances, environmental threats, ethnic and religious conflicts, large immigrant and emigrant movements and economic challenges in the form of currency and interest speculations". The thoughts are involuntarily drawn towards the Stasi surveillance machine of old.
HÃ¥kan Jevrell and other right-wing politicians ensures at the same time that the common person have nothing to fear. It's only traffic that passes the border that will be scanned, not domestic sms, phone and email traffic. The problem is that domestic email also is delivered through other countries. Partly because Swedish companies and organizations have servers in other countries, partly because email doesn't honor nation borders. The mail between, for example, LuleÃ¥ and MalmÃ, may very we
Betrayal at Krondor has to be one of the most unique gameplay RPGs out there, especially when it was created.
It was such a big world, and the storyline was pretty set, but everything in the world changed for each chapter that you played through, you could literaly spend weeks on side quests (not like Daggerfall when you could feel it was generated, here you had hand-made sidequests that only 1-3% of the players playing the game would even see).
It did have a semi-sequel in Betrayal at Antara, but it was different people developing (if I remember correctly, didn't find any resources about this), and definitely didn't have the same feel in any elements.
I've been tempted to go back and play it, but it has some flaws that quickly become annoying (you have to stop to turn, etc) - but it was a great game when it came out.
I'd play it again in an instant with just a slightly different engine, same storyline and magic system.
I guess this would be Bob Saget 6.9.
This is TOTALLY not safe for work, or the faint of heart or people getting upset about tasteless jokes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_cKCK6Blv0
Probably the most tasteless thing you'll see today.
Subqueries are handled on a layer way above of the actual storage layer, so all engines can handle this.
Most of them are special purpose, and if you use them you design your whole application around the specific workings.
The more general purpose ones (InnoDB, MyISAM, BDB, NDB, Falcon) are quite transparent.
MyISAM of course doesn't fill ACID, so that would be something you definitely would want to know about, but otherwise it you should be able to switch without a single line of application code needing to change.
(only things I can think about with syntax differences is if you use the GIS extension or fulltext extension to the SQL syntax with MyISAM - you can't currently do that on the others).
MySQL uses the ` delimiter, but supports the correct (ANSI) " delimiter in ANSI mode or if you run with the ANSI_QUOTES option.
Neither LIMIT nor TOP N is correct from a standard point of view.
SELECT c1 FROM t1 ORDER BY c1 LIMIT 10 | SELECT TOP 10 c1 FROM t1 ORDER BY c1 should according to the standard be written as:
SELECT c1 FROM (
SELECT
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY c1 ASC) AS rownumber, c1
FROM t1
) AS tmp
WHERE rownumber = 10
Those are maybe not newbie books, but the books here all have some nuggets while learning databases (maybe not the initial start, but after a while if nothing else)
An introduction to database systems - C.J. Date
Covers the relational model, quite heavy on theory, but gives an excellent walkthrough of the fundamentals.
SQL For Smarties - Joe Celko
A good SQL Programming book, covers normalization and most features found in databases, anyone programming databases should read this one
SQL 1999 Complete, REALLY - P. Gulutzan, T. Pelzer
Good coverage of what's included in the 1999 SQL standard and some examples and discussions around this.
Translucent Databases - P. Wayner
Covers how to handle sensitive data in databases, letting users use data, but not be able to fetch or abuse it
The two MySQL books I'd recommend are "High Performance MySQL" by J.Zawodny and D.Bailing and "MySQL" by Paul Dubois.
Another good database book for performance tuning is "SQL Performance Tuning" by P.Gulutzan/T.Pelzer
Hope this helps...
cheers,
Different workloads will have way different characteristics.
.mdb files at some point).
What you can tweak on locking level (table-level, page-level, row-level, MVCC, etc) in table/schema settings in other database products you pick by chosing engines in MySQL.
You can see it in a way as setting groups of settings that will be a good fit for the workload of your environment.
Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none concept, I guess.
MyISAM - Data warehousing/DSS/Read only archives optimized for bulk operations (big scans, flexible index formats, small disk footprint for data/index) but will not do well in a typical OLTP application because of table-level locking, bad crash durability and lack of ACID in general.
InnoDB - Typical traditional OLTP, row level locking, MVCC, Clustered PK w/ using B+tree with savepoints within transactions and other features for typical OLTP applications
Memory - No disk footprint, extremely fast - for summary tables, simulations, temporary operations (, session handling?).
NDB - Typical telcom, small rows, quite a few of them and high concurrency/throughput with automatic failover in the case of node failure. Slow for big scans and joins, but great for key lookups on single tables, but with transaction volumes and throughput you can't reach with the others for this niche usage.
Falcon - Jim Starkey's new engine with some cool new things (see this link for a presentation)
Arhive - On-insert compression of rows for dump-archive-forget style data.
You can achieve lots of those things with normal settings, but to optimize on a storage level for cecertain operations can give you quite a boost for some things.
There are some cool aspects to this when it comes to proprietary formats, though. You can create engines for reading log files so you can access log data with SQL commands (there are engines for reading CSV files, apache log files, etc - think I even saw someone working on reading MS Access
Sure, it would be cool to have this one perfect storage system doing everything, but I guess you can use file systems in operating systems as an example, why doesn't all operating systems only use EXT3, Reiser, UFS, XFS, JFS, NTFS, etc? There are pros and cons to everything, just pick whatever fits your need, just like you would pick the programming language and database that would fit your application project the best.
If your database happens to be MySQL, you can go another step to pick the engine that will perform better or have the functionality you're looking for (or scalability or whatever you want).
Maybe not an acceptable reason for you, but I hope you at least understand the concept better...
cheers,
And it's not pluggable until 5.1, prior to then it still has to be compiled in.
Up until MySQL 5.0 calculations with DECIMALs were still done as DOUBLEs, so you could get unexpected results.
I've traveled to quite a few countries, in north america I've been in US, Canada and I've visited most countries in Europe (especially the North/West areas).
I'll take a train ride almost any day over flying, more space for the seats, better Internet connectivity (unless you're in tunnels) - a bistro/restaurant where you can get a table sit down place and order what kind of food you want - all the seats have power, so you can use whatever gadget you want.
Take all this and with less overhead of security checks and delayed baggage unloading, lost luggage, etc trains usually get you a better experience.
Now, for intercontinental travels, there's not much choice, since the time it would take would be too big (especially for business travels).
I live in the south of Sweden and regularly go to Stockholm.
With the train it takes me roughly 4:30h to get there door to door of whatever hotel I'm staying at in Stockholm.
If I take a flight, it's usually a lot more than that, because of lines, having to check in, security screenings and waiting for my luggage. Even going to/from the airports add up to all this - finding parking, etc.
And since trains got Wifi here train rides are very pleasant, since I can work on the train without sitting with my elbows over my head trying to fit the laptop in and hope the person in front of me don't lean their seat back, like I would in a plane.
So, if I can, I always take the train.
But yes, I have done the Amtrak thing in the US, so I understand why people over there are so sceptic to why train can be a viable replacement for travel.
I had a similar experience playing Resident Evil 4 resently.
My apartment setup is on the 4th floor. To the right of where
I play, I have 3 windows covering the wall, the "window wall"
is about 6 feet to my right.
The TV is about 9 feet ahead of me, and I have a full surround
system, which RE4 supports quite well.
This means that my back right speaker is just to the side of me
against the corner of the normal wall and the windows.
At one point in the game, some of the bad guys broke a window just
to the right of my character and made some gurgling noises, which
coinscidentally came from the speaker just in front of my window.
So, I hear a noise of windows breaking coming just from my windows...
I jumped really high and it probably took around 10 minutes before
my pulse was back to normal again.
There's a store in Sweden that mark all their CDs in their online listing with a *.
I think that's a good way, they stand out in listings when you search and you can
chose very easily not to buy the CDs with DRM or copy protection.
http://www.ginza.se/index.aspx?artnr=12001
That's an example of a CD with Copy Protection on it.
It's nonintrusive enough for people that don't care, and
easy enough for me that do care to see if it has something
on it, if I see the * I just won't get it.
Well, we don't know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that
The way I was reading this was...
"We do know their slogan (Do no evil) - And we don't believe in that"
Of course, before reading the article, but I think that Microsoft's business practices shows that they do not belive in not doing evil?
Can enable it server-wide or on a per connection basis, actually.
SET {SESSION | GLOBAL } SQL_MODE = 'strict_all_tables'
You'd be surpised how accurate your scenario is since the patch they added the Darkmoon Faire.
The "singling" out part is not as random as it would seem, I think.
I'm not a US citizen, and about 18 months ago I was "randomly selected" for screening 13 flights in a row within US.
Now, I do know why I probably was selected, but it's still annoying, because the people that search you are generally very rude and like to break gadgets and when you ask them to be a bit careful you get the "Please be quiet, Sir" and they keep shoving your $100 sunglasses or $300 Bose headphones into your bag without the protective cover.
Now, do this on a webpage that advertises a humorous film clip, or the most popular online game, free ipod, or whatever and count the people clicking through, two clicks or not.
They see it's not working with no, they'll try again til it works.
I think we're assuming that it is inferior because it is made in Taiwan
Yes, because no good technology is produced in Taiwan. Next time you go to a computer store, look at the motherboards section...
Nowadays most motherboard companies have alternative homepages, but I remember 5-6 years ago if you needed bios updates or driver patches, the pages were always at www.motherboardbrand.com.tw
It still seems to be the case:
http://www.abit.com.tw
http://www.asus.com.tw
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw
http://www.msi.com.tw
http://www.epox.com.tw
http://www.tyan.com.tw
I think one of the reasons it'll be a bigger hit in Europe compared to US is the price of gas.
In some countries in Europe you pay up to 4x as much for gas as you do in US, which means that a car that uses less gas will be a lot cheaper in the long run.
Some European countries also let you pay less yearly tax on cars that use up little gas since they don't hurt the environment as much.
I don't think it's a status (or sexuality thing) just that there's no real incentive in the US to buy a car that use less gas.
A FaQ is in no way a legal contract, it's more of a sales pitch.
If a salesguy says something to you, but you don't have it in writing and signed there's nothing you can do when you come claiming something.
They'll just said "You should have read the contract" which in this case I guess would be the EULA?
See, they only had 3 votes for the films, two happened to be for Blade Runner and one for 2001.
So it does make sense...
"Blade Runner was the runaway favorite in our poll" since it had double the amount of votes as the #2.
"2001 was a very close second" since it was only one vote behind the winner!
I got this issue once with my Nvidia GeForce3 and some drivers.
I don't remember if it was the player program I used or the drivers that fixed it, but I remember it started working after I reinstalled something with a newer version.
They keep their own variation of SQL (with the #$^@ing backticks) so that software must be designed for use with MySQL.
You can still use the doublequote if you run with
--sql-mode="ANSI_QUOTES"
Din't they already do that movie in Bubba Hotep?