Access has it's pros and cons. As stated in numerous other posts, it's not standard SQL.
Then again, which complex programs use ONLY standard sql? The vast majority of stuff I've seen uses stored procedures or special functions or special syntaxes (like outer join syntaxes) that are database specific. The difference is that Access is tuned to the small, easy, and simple projects, while others are (necessarily) tuned for performance, scalability, or reliability.
One very big plus with Access is that it's trivial to pass around the finished product. It's a single file. Double click and you're good to go. This, to me, would be the deal sealer for a beginners DB course. (Unless of course, you've got a nice VPN setup so that students can work from home while connected to your nicely managed server)
By the way, you can use Access as a "proper" front end to most any database - just be sure to use "passthrough" queries. Those queries do NOT get tampered with by Access and you can do exactly everything that your db engine provides (but for better or for worse, you do not get the visual query builder).
Yeah, overall I'm an Access fan - like everything else in life, you've just got to be smart about how and where you use it.
On a Windows XP box that otherwise worked quite well. Someone was trying to view some over-the-net presentation. I can't remember which site was providing the broadcasting software. Anyway, the box was running Sun's JVM, probably a few minor revisions old.
The presentation would work for a few minutes, until something (perhaps a newer api call that wasn't supported by the version of the JVM?) would REBOOT the machine!?
Anyway, there was no time to dig too deeply into the situation. I ended up upgrading to whatever was the latest JVM at the time and all was well. Your guess is as good as mine as to what was wrong, it might even just be a corrupt installation of the JVM... still, a reboot?
Don't forget, it's also a lot of circuits to put in the controller! Sure, the technology has improved a lot from the orignal N64, but it's still not easy to squeeze it all into that little space - looking at the photo of the circuit board proves that. So, at least part of the "bad design" (which doesn't look too bad to me) is probably due to space constraints.
Yep. It's quite interesting to play around with a card reader for the first time.
FWIW, I think there is a little bit of info on a credit card that isn't on the mag stripe, that being the 3 or 4 digit PIN(?). I'm not sure what it's supposed to be called, but it's visible on the backside of my Visa after the credit card number. Some online purchases require those numbers for verification now... so, I guess if you're going to clone your own CC, jot down that number too.
I doubt CC's will ever have real PIN's. Visa et al. want the whole credit experience to be drop dead easy - if it get's too cumbersome, there would be more pressure to move to alternative payment systems - the little bit of fraud that gets by is just a cost of doing business.
Excellent! I hate walking up to a pile of fruit that's been picked over. Invariably, 50 people before me have picked up, squeezed, and tossed 50 fruit trying to find 2 or 3 that they actually think are "good enough" to buy. It seems to me that all that handling ends up destroying (i.e. too many little bruises and cuts) whatever remains by the time I get there. =)
Look before you touch! Buy what you touch! I realize these spiffly labels probably won't eliminate this little pet peeve of mine, but one can always hope...
Why does a 2000 word New Yorker article not have a link or a graphic? Maybe you Americans already know how bad the boundaries are, and don't need to be reminded...
Anyway, for those who don't quite understand what Gerry-Mandering is about, check out the link in the parent post! A picture is a 1000 words...
True. To me, this appears to be a way for BigPond to have some recourse in case a spammer decides to program his software to send 399 messages per 15minutes. There's no reason to expect it to be enforced very strictly, but like the rest of the AUP (at least the one from my ISP) it gives them some options in case there is "abuse".
Yep. A full sentence is probably harder to attack with a dictionary, but it's also harder to remember (precisely). It took me a solid 10 minutes to guess the password to a encrypted file I had made about a year ago. PGP requested a sentence for a password, so I went with it. I actually parts of the sentence-password as a hint in a little password file of mine. Yet it still took me way too many guesses to finally open the file. Capitalization, abreviations, typing mistakes, punctuation... all bad memories. I've now written down most of the bloody password in case I forget again (it's not a file I access to often, but I want it secure).
Good idea. The main problem I see with this is that the torrents that overload tracker servers probably rise (and fall) in popularity quite quickly - far quicker than Google will ever get around to indexing and caching a page.
Really, this whole thing sounds like a nifty experiment that might have some use for folks trading warez or movies, but of minimal benefit to everyone else with legitimate torrents. For example, people releasing new Linux distributions can host a server to handle the tracking much more easily than they can put up a FTP server to handle the spike in d/l's.
When will the president visit for Thanksgiving?
on
Eating in Space
·
· Score: 1
Who cares what they ate at ISS, I wanna know when they're going to have guests for Thanksgiving. =)
Re:Slightly OT, but for hiding mailto links
on
Javascrypt
·
· Score: 1
Neither can the blind read PNG's.
Slightly OT, but for hiding mailto links
on
Javascrypt
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've recently discovered (or maybe I saw it on another/. article...) this nifty
javascript "mailto" encoder. It creates drop in javascript that obliviates the need to put email addresses in cleartext on a public webpage. The JS created mailto links work just like they should. Yes, spam bots could learn to read javascript, but, they won't for a while...
Yeah. I can legally copy a friends CD for personal use thanks to that levy. If they tax internet traffic users, does that mean I can download MP3's from other Canadians, legally?
Seriously though, there are many other things that are wrong with this scheme, and the CD royalty that came before it. Things like the fact that not all Canuck pirating is for Canadian artists, or that CDR's have uses besides music, or that once you've crossed the CDR line there's no reason to not tax hard drives, flash, or, internet traffic (oh wait, they've figured that out, it seems...)
if we ever have giant space invaders with 100 billion hit points wandering Earth, there'll be a few hundred brave people with pointy sticks to hack away at it until it dies. Maybe humanity will survive, afterall. =)
Well, with enough bits of identifying code, couldn't they make it impossible to do a simple "diff" to figure out what's changed? I.e. use so many identifying bits that you could figure out the ID of the combination of screeners that were used in the dvd-rip even if a "diff" was run on the files.
Seriously, who's going to use one of these domains when big chunks of your visitors can't call up your site, or at least can't call it up with the "same" address (I gather from one of the earlier posts that there is some sort of encoding to make it magically work for everyone).
OK, I can see a VPN or a private network to hook up from ATM's to Mainframes. But WHY would they be on the same network as ANY of the other internal PCs? It sounds like a machine from the internal network, possibly a laptop that went home and back, got infected, and in turn infected the LAN.
This is just scary. This time it was a mindless worm, next time, what if it's a black-hat?
Yeah. I remember hosing my system because of that stupid BIOS anti-virus thing. I can't remember exactly what happend now, I think I was trying to setup a dual boot w/Linux onto an already existing Windows PC. Somewhere along the line a partition manager was involved. Some change I requested didn't get done properly because of the anti-virus boot sector monitor, and I spent an afternoon trying to put things back together... grrr...
This was a few years ago, I sincerely hope that the technology has imprvoed a little bit since then - not that I'm ever going to enable that again!
Build yourself a little communications network for you and your friends.
Wanna call the kids in for supper? Don't buy them a cell phone! No, just point and click...click...clliiiick.. click...cliiiick... etc. Hire people to relay messages around corners and trees as necessary.
Why not? People go to a lot of effort to get "good" phone numbers. ICQ numbers are used just as frequently... for some people at least.
Besides, 8's or 7's (and probably others in other cultures) are good luck. So, what's a little investment in a good ICQ number if it brings you good fortunes in the future? =)
Re:Remember the Sonic Cruiser?
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 1
I'm not convinced that the Sonic Cruiser made much sense. It seemed like a whole lot of work (i.e. money) for not a whole lot of benefit. 15-20% faster isn't that much of a savings, especially when all the other things that consume time for an airflight (boarding, travel to airport, customs, etc.) are factored in.
I'd like to see a (cheaper to ride) Concorde II, I've always wanted to go supersonic...
Slashdot Mirror
Access has it's pros and cons. As stated in numerous other posts, it's not standard SQL.
Then again, which complex programs use ONLY standard sql? The vast majority of stuff I've seen uses stored procedures or special functions or special syntaxes (like outer join syntaxes) that are database specific. The difference is that Access is tuned to the small, easy, and simple projects, while others are (necessarily) tuned for performance, scalability, or reliability.
One very big plus with Access is that it's trivial to pass around the finished product. It's a single file. Double click and you're good to go. This, to me, would be the deal sealer for a beginners DB course. (Unless of course, you've got a nice VPN setup so that students can work from home while connected to your nicely managed server)
By the way, you can use Access as a "proper" front end to most any database - just be sure to use "passthrough" queries. Those queries do NOT get tampered with by Access and you can do exactly everything that your db engine provides (but for better or for worse, you do not get the visual query builder).
Yeah, overall I'm an Access fan - like everything else in life, you've just got to be smart about how and where you use it.
On a Windows XP box that otherwise worked quite well. Someone was trying to view some over-the-net presentation. I can't remember which site was providing the broadcasting software. Anyway, the box was running Sun's JVM, probably a few minor revisions old.
The presentation would work for a few minutes, until something (perhaps a newer api call that wasn't supported by the version of the JVM?) would REBOOT the machine!?
Anyway, there was no time to dig too deeply into the situation. I ended up upgrading to whatever was the latest JVM at the time and all was well. Your guess is as good as mine as to what was wrong, it might even just be a corrupt installation of the JVM... still, a reboot?
Don't forget, it's also a lot of circuits to put in the controller! Sure, the technology has improved a lot from the orignal N64, but it's still not easy to squeeze it all into that little space - looking at the photo of the circuit board proves that. So, at least part of the "bad design" (which doesn't look too bad to me) is probably due to space constraints.
Yep. It's quite interesting to play around with a card reader for the first time.
FWIW, I think there is a little bit of info on a credit card that isn't on the mag stripe, that being the 3 or 4 digit PIN(?). I'm not sure what it's supposed to be called, but it's visible on the backside of my Visa after the credit card number. Some online purchases require those numbers for verification now... so, I guess if you're going to clone your own CC, jot down that number too.
I doubt CC's will ever have real PIN's. Visa et al. want the whole credit experience to be drop dead easy - if it get's too cumbersome, there would be more pressure to move to alternative payment systems - the little bit of fraud that gets by is just a cost of doing business.
There's also cheating to worry about over the internet. On a 3rd party LAN Gaming Centre, everyone is theoretically at the same technical advantage.
It's also more fun to frag folks when they're physically with earshot!
Excellent! I hate walking up to a pile of fruit that's been picked over. Invariably, 50 people before me have picked up, squeezed, and tossed 50 fruit trying to find 2 or 3 that they actually think are "good enough" to buy. It seems to me that all that handling ends up destroying (i.e. too many little bruises and cuts) whatever remains by the time I get there. =)
Look before you touch! Buy what you touch! I realize these spiffly labels probably won't eliminate this little pet peeve of mine, but one can always hope...
Thanks for the link to a visual example!
Why does a 2000 word New Yorker article not have a link or a graphic? Maybe you Americans already know how bad the boundaries are, and don't need to be reminded...
Anyway, for those who don't quite understand what Gerry-Mandering is about, check out the link in the parent post! A picture is a 1000 words...
True. To me, this appears to be a way for BigPond to have some recourse in case a spammer decides to program his software to send 399 messages per 15minutes. There's no reason to expect it to be enforced very strictly, but like the rest of the AUP (at least the one from my ISP) it gives them some options in case there is "abuse".
Yep. A full sentence is probably harder to attack with a dictionary, but it's also harder to remember (precisely). It took me a solid 10 minutes to guess the password to a encrypted file I had made about a year ago. PGP requested a sentence for a password, so I went with it. I actually parts of the sentence-password as a hint in a little password file of mine. Yet it still took me way too many guesses to finally open the file. Capitalization, abreviations, typing mistakes, punctuation... all bad memories. I've now written down most of the bloody password in case I forget again (it's not a file I access to often, but I want it secure).
Update: 12/01 00:02 GMT by T: Ooops -- one "s" is enough to spell "Classroom."
Well, you're right, dictionaries can correct some errors...
Ooops -- one "r" is enough to spell "errors."
Good idea. The main problem I see with this is that the torrents that overload tracker servers probably rise (and fall) in popularity quite quickly - far quicker than Google will ever get around to indexing and caching a page.
Really, this whole thing sounds like a nifty experiment that might have some use for folks trading warez or movies, but of minimal benefit to everyone else with legitimate torrents. For example, people releasing new Linux distributions can host a server to handle the tracking much more easily than they can put up a FTP server to handle the spike in d/l's.
Who cares what they ate at ISS, I wanna know when they're going to have guests for Thanksgiving. =)
Neither can the blind read PNG's.
I've recently discovered (or maybe I saw it on another /. article...) this nifty
javascript "mailto" encoder. It creates drop in javascript that obliviates the need to put email addresses in cleartext on a public webpage. The JS created mailto links work just like they should. Yes, spam bots could learn to read javascript, but, they won't for a while...
The article was a little lite on details... is this ONLY higher capacity disks, or is the codec changed too?
Yeah. I can legally copy a friends CD for personal use thanks to that levy. If they tax internet traffic users, does that mean I can download MP3's from other Canadians, legally?
Seriously though, there are many other things that are wrong with this scheme, and the CD royalty that came before it. Things like the fact that not all Canuck pirating is for Canadian artists, or that CDR's have uses besides music, or that once you've crossed the CDR line there's no reason to not tax hard drives, flash, or, internet traffic (oh wait, they've figured that out, it seems...)
if we ever have giant space invaders with 100 billion hit points wandering Earth, there'll be a few hundred brave people with pointy sticks to hack away at it until it dies. Maybe humanity will survive, afterall. =)
Over time I've collected a disorganized handfull of links related to free ghost type stuff on my online dumping ground.
Of those, Partimagelooks the most promising to me, though I still haven't had the chance to try it.
Well, with enough bits of identifying code, couldn't they make it impossible to do a simple "diff" to figure out what's changed? I.e. use so many identifying bits that you could figure out the ID of the combination of screeners that were used in the dvd-rip even if a "diff" was run on the files.
we've all switched to IPV6. =)
Seriously, who's going to use one of these domains when big chunks of your visitors can't call up your site, or at least can't call it up with the "same" address (I gather from one of the earlier posts that there is some sort of encoding to make it magically work for everyone).
OK, I can see a VPN or a private network to hook up from ATM's to Mainframes. But WHY would they be on the same network as ANY of the other internal PCs? It sounds like a machine from the internal network, possibly a laptop that went home and back, got infected, and in turn infected the LAN.
This is just scary. This time it was a mindless worm, next time, what if it's a black-hat?
Yeah. I remember hosing my system because of that stupid BIOS anti-virus thing. I can't remember exactly what happend now, I think I was trying to setup a dual boot w/Linux onto an already existing Windows PC. Somewhere along the line a partition manager was involved. Some change I requested didn't get done properly because of the anti-virus boot sector monitor, and I spent an afternoon trying to put things back together... grrr...
This was a few years ago, I sincerely hope that the technology has imprvoed a little bit since then - not that I'm ever going to enable that again!
Build yourself a little communications network for you and your friends.
Wanna call the kids in for supper? Don't buy them a cell phone! No, just point and click...click...clliiiick.. click...cliiiick... etc. Hire people to relay messages around corners and trees as necessary.
Why not? People go to a lot of effort to get "good" phone numbers. ICQ numbers are used just as frequently... for some people at least.
Besides, 8's or 7's (and probably others in other cultures) are good luck. So, what's a little investment in a good ICQ number if it brings you good fortunes in the future? =)
I'm not convinced that the Sonic Cruiser made much sense. It seemed like a whole lot of work (i.e. money) for not a whole lot of benefit. 15-20% faster isn't that much of a savings, especially when all the other things that consume time for an airflight (boarding, travel to airport, customs, etc.) are factored in.
I'd like to see a (cheaper to ride) Concorde II, I've always wanted to go supersonic...