Isn't the obvious answer here to use myODBC? (now called MySQL Connector/ODBC).
You get the ability to access your mySQL tables and use the easy "point and click" forms drawing of Microsoft Access.
A few things to know if you head down this path:
The first timestamp field in each table is grabbed to be the authoritative "who updated the record first" indicator for ODBC when update collisions happen. mySQL will overwrite the contents of that field whenever ODBC was used to update the record. Consider creating an ODBC timestamp field at the front of every table just for this purpose.
ODBC timestamps only resolve to the 1 second interval - therefore making ODBC inappropriate for critical or frequently updated tables - unless you want to layer additional collision detection logic into the application (update counters, etc..). Access does not hold row locks while you are browsing (and I'm sure you would not like the outcome if it did)
Be careful with using myODBC to update tables with mySQL replication in effect. I had issues with the slave getting invalid updates and discarding them because the myODBC constructed update statement created a very complex where clause (including the ODBC timestamp field) that resulted in record not found conditions.
The Find Record function is dumbed down by ODBC because of bad choices of MS Access defaults... if you want to find a record in the mySQL database, turn off Search Fields as Formatted, and use Match on Whole Field, not Start of Field. Otherwise, it will do a "one record at a time" ODBC scan to try to find the matching record on the client side, rather than constructing an effective Server Side where clause.
Create the tables in mySQL and import the definition into Access. If you define the tables in Access, and then Export to mySQL, you'll find more problems with data type conflicts and indexing issues.
But in general, it has been a useful solution for me. Your mileage will vary, especially if you hate Microsoft products and want to prove they can't work.
If dialup still costs $15/month, that most likely means that you live in area not subject to the effects of the 1996 Telecomm Deregulation Act. The CLECs have partnered with the ISP wholesalers to bypass the control of the local ILEC phone companies. Access charges for ISPs using those networks is generally around the $4/month range (somewhat depending of their user profile - avg hrs/month, etc...). So they can charge $10 a month or less and still pay their bills without going to forced advertising, outsourcing to India, etc...
If you are in a former Bell RBOC service area (Verizon, BellSouth, SBC, Qwest), do some more shopping [end shameless plug]. If not, consider moving:)
The way the business model has evolved - recognizing that there are exceptions to every generalization - is that the sender of IP traffic is paying most of the cost of the network traffic. This occurs in terms of paying "transit fees" for delivering the traffic, or peering arrangements where the party sending the more traffic pays more of the circuit cost.
So your local Phone/Cable company really doesn't much care how much you download. However, they -are- paying the transit costs for what you upload - so they keep the upload speeds relatively low. That's the number to keep your eye on.
>>This post is one of the most insulting posts I've seen in ages. >>[...]too stupid to avoid linear extrapolations from cyclic data. >>And that the more of the arctic ocean that is ice free, the more of the ice melts.
So how did all that ice get there to begin with then? Would growth of ice packs next year lead to the conclusion that uncontrolled future growth of ice will continue until all the world's oceans are frozen?
Why are there these big lakes with no summertime ice in between the US and Canada - where 10,000 years ago there was only glaciers year round and minimal human influence on the environment?
Do you not believe these mechanisms are self-limiting and have feedback loops? If this truly is a runaway positive feedback loop, then nothing we do now matters anyhow.
Maybe New Orleans needs to be built up a few hundred feet in the air.
>>The first thing we would [...]was to format the hard drive[...] In the year I worked for that company we probaly sold over a thousand used computers on eBay [...]
I think Microsoft may be interested in knowing if any operating system software was installed after the reformat of the hard drive.
Rather than relying on feelings, instinct or anecdotal information when a friend is "helping" someone with a UI issue by standing over their shoulder, Microsoft actually uses science to determine how people interact with a computer, and which approaches do and don't work.
3) You now can't write lawyer letters to companies using the term Linux in their name demanding payment in order to fund their litigation against your own interests 4) The cannot demand that companies deemed "not worthy to carry the Linux(sm) name" stop using the name in commerce.
Wishing for a utopian world without intellectual property rights cuts both ways.
This is probabaly why the document is called a draft, and Congress is requesting feedback.
Since it is a fair bet that most members of Congress grew up and received their education prior to the PC generation - and wouldn't know Skype from Kazaa from iPod from Linux - now is the time to help educate them before we wind up with yet more misguided laws.
Just as an aside, do you think Judge Roberts is computer and technology literate? - it's his Court that is going to inherit whatever this mess turns into. I tend to think so - he mentioned during the hearings that he was on the legal team that sued Microsoft over the anti-trust issue - surely every slashdotter's hero!
Between science (hey d00d, I cooled off my dorm room by blowing air over ice cubes) and economics (hey, Intel makes like totally obscene profits cause like d00d, it only costs $40 to make a chip), one has to wonder what exactly parents are getting for their money today sending junior off to the University (other than sensitivity training and self-esteem).
Just because a person has no health insurance does not mean they have "no medical care". Most doctors do still accept payment by check and credit card.
For those who may not know - AFT is the French news service - the ones that wrote the "white" caption. It is worth mentioning, at least in passing that many people in Lousiana have a strong historical connection with France.
The AP photo is still online with its original caption. One thing that may be lost here is that the photographers may have actually observed what happened, and know more than what is just captured in the one picture.
The most insightful post on this thread - once a company starts using Exchange, the people using the system will get used to things like expecting "Read receipts", integration with scheduling meetings and sending out the meeting invitations, emailing Office documents from inside Office... searching years worth of archived Exchange stored emails to say "See, I told you your idea wouldn't work"...
I vote for hiring a person with experience in managing large Exchange installations and identifying and fixing the existing problems.
If people are accessing the FEMA web site from a kiosk set up for that purpose, the chances that the kiosk is running an incompatible browser should be zero.
Another poster described this as a potentially life threatening issue. Oh, the drama here on slashdot. If a person has 1) Electricity, 2) A working computer, 3) a phone line or broadband connection, 4) enough computer literacy to run a computer - they are hardly still in a life threatening situation.
The biggest red flag I see is - they took a FEMA *internal* call center application, and opened it up for direct internet access.
Prediction: Within a week you will see the headline "FEMA applicants have personal data exposed on the internet"...
Or perhaps a more benign "FEMA receives 374 million applications for relief help from Asia and Eastern Europe"
Depending on which State you live in, of that $3.19 per gallon (which may only be temporary), from $.26 to $.53 of that price is State and Federal Taxes
How do we pay to build and repair the roads if everyone switched to electric cars? Excise taxes on electricity? Tolls? "Tax the Rich"?
The Government creates erosion control programs and flood control programs in the Midwest, and now there is not enough silt to keep the alluvial plain supplied with new material.
The Government starts a campaign to stop cigarette smoking and obesity breaks out - who could have seen that coming?
The "media" and politicians demand that the hole in the 17th Street canal levee be closed, but the aerial video shows water flowing out of the city through the breach.
This is a -excellent- point, one missed on most of the threads on this topic and apparently not known by most/. posters...
"Why doesn't the military do "X?".
The answer is - because the LAW says the US Military cannot be used inside the boundaries of the United States - only the National Guard, which is under the operational control of the States.
According to what I heard on a fairly authoritative radio show, only the President can authorize using the US Military, and then only in the case to put down civil unrest (like the riots against the draft in New York during the civil war). Someone besides the President in the White House authorized involving the US Military and ultimately that may become a bigger problem once this things resolves itself. It is a very dangerous precedent if not punished or the law revised.
Now seriously - if the US military was deployed and given bullets (!) and CBS News had video of a US soldier shooting an African American looter, what exactly do you think the consequences of that would be?
Contrary to common belief (including some in high places), the US Miitary are not trained to be police - they are trained to engage and destroy the enemy.
As I remember the events unfolding, the Mayor of New Orleans only finally agreed to a mandatory evacuation after FEMA scared the crap out of him about what was about to happen. Remember that President Bush declared this area a disaster area two days BEFORE the disaster happened - which is highly unprecedented.
At one of the first news conferences the day after the storm, the mayor in the same news conference said the following:
FEMA asked me what my priorities are, in order - and they'll work from that list. I told them: 1) Search and rescue 2) Repairing the levees 3) Evacuation of the people who hadn't left
Spin forward about a minute later, he says:
And I'm getting really angry about this hole in the 17th street canal. I was told they were going to drop sandbags in it to try to fill the hole, but the helicopters were diverted to work on Search and Rescue missions.
Is it at all clear now why people are running in circles?
By the way, if you read his biography, he's an "outsider". He ran on an anti-corruption compaign, and he won based on having no prior experience in city government.
"was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future,"
So what's that chance that anything that exists today (open or not) will be readable in 20 years? Tried to read your msdos 5 1/4" floppies lately? Still have any computer capable of running Electric Pencil?
Now of course, those are not "open" examples.
Been to a gopher site recently?
By the way, The Well is up for sale if anyone has a few million in cash sitting around idle:
Unforunately, New Orleans is having to relearn the lessons from the Great Chicago Flood (1992). If you build things below the level of the surrounding water, the hydrostatic pressure is unstoppable once the system restraining the water is breached. Just like Houdini could escape bank safes because they are built to keep people in - not keep people inside from getting out - a levee is generally not designed to deal with water on the inside. The only way you can begin to get control of the situation is when the pressure equalizes - then you can drive piles into the breach and and stop the flow - and begin the process of pulling the water back out. That took several MONTHS.
Making New Orleans much worse is that the land is NOT on bedrock. You have to go down 70 feet to reach bedrock. If New Orleans was on bedrock, it would not have sunk over the past decades. (Don't build your house on sand?)
One of the concerns in Chicago was that once the flood was stopped, if the water was pulled out too fast, it would cause uneven settling of the ground, and buildings would collapse.
In the case of Chicago, the tunnels that were flooded had extremely thick walls and they held up well - so removing the water didn't cause the kind of stresses that were anticipated. New Orleans will probably be a very different situation, since there will be months for the water to saturate the ground and undermine the foundations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Pat Robertson run for President of the United States in 1988? Some also credit Robertson with having an effect on turnout in the 2004 election. I think that may qualify him as a politician (not to be confused with elected officeholder)
What is possibly more interesting is to find out if he actually had a classified source that leaked information to him that the US was considering doing something about Chauvez. I wouldn't mind seeing Robertson sweat under some Congressional Hearing TV cameras.
On the other hand, if the pro-Castro Democrats look took much like they have blood lust, that will only help the Republicans in 2006 and 2008. Every political force needs a boogeyman to be the unifying force.
The net effect of doing this stupid thing is he now has seriously tied the US's hands, and built up support for Chauvez among those who otherwise might not have cared.
or even more to the point - why wouldn't the parents be that "personal lifeguard" who never lets their children out of their sight while they are at the pool, and would come to their rescue if they get in trouble?
The TOR dickhead rate has been picking up quite a bit. It's gotten so bad - with primarily Poker referring URL spam - that I have banned the entire TOR network from my web server.
How can one report / prevent abuse if the TOR system is truly anonymous?
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the obvious answer here to use myODBC? (now called MySQL Connector/ODBC).
You get the ability to access your mySQL tables and use the easy "point and click" forms drawing of Microsoft Access.
A few things to know if you head down this path:
The first timestamp field in each table is grabbed to be the authoritative "who updated the record first" indicator for ODBC when update collisions happen. mySQL will overwrite the contents of that field whenever ODBC was used to update the record. Consider creating an ODBC timestamp field at the front of every table just for this purpose.
ODBC timestamps only resolve to the 1 second interval - therefore making ODBC inappropriate for critical or frequently updated tables - unless you want to layer additional collision detection logic into the application (update counters, etc..). Access does not hold row locks while you are browsing (and I'm sure you would not like the outcome if it did)
Be careful with using myODBC to update tables with mySQL replication in effect. I had issues with the slave getting invalid updates and discarding them because the myODBC constructed update statement created a very complex where clause (including the ODBC timestamp field) that resulted in record not found conditions.
The Find Record function is dumbed down by ODBC because of bad choices of MS Access defaults... if you want to find a record in the mySQL database, turn off Search Fields as Formatted, and use Match on Whole Field, not Start of Field. Otherwise, it will do a "one record at a time" ODBC scan to try to find the matching record on the client side, rather than constructing an effective Server Side where clause.
Create the tables in mySQL and import the definition into Access. If you define the tables in Access, and then Export to mySQL, you'll find more problems with data type conflicts and indexing issues.
But in general, it has been a useful solution for me. Your mileage will vary, especially if you hate Microsoft products and want to prove they can't work.
If dialup still costs $15/month, that most likely means that you live in area not subject to the effects of the 1996 Telecomm Deregulation Act. The CLECs have partnered with the ISP wholesalers to bypass the control of the local ILEC phone companies. Access charges for ISPs using those networks is generally around the $4/month range (somewhat depending of their user profile - avg hrs/month, etc...). So they can charge $10 a month or less and still pay their bills without going to forced advertising, outsourcing to India, etc...
:)
If you are in a former Bell RBOC service area (Verizon, BellSouth, SBC, Qwest), do some more shopping [end shameless plug]. If not, consider moving
Not necessarily.
The way the business model has evolved - recognizing that there are exceptions to every generalization - is that the sender of IP traffic is paying most of the cost of the network traffic. This occurs in terms of paying "transit fees" for delivering the traffic, or peering arrangements where the party sending the more traffic pays more of the circuit cost.
So your local Phone/Cable company really doesn't much care how much you download. However, they -are- paying the transit costs for what you upload - so they keep the upload speeds relatively low. That's the number to keep your eye on.
>>This post is one of the most insulting posts I've seen in ages.
>>[...]too stupid to avoid linear extrapolations from cyclic data.
>>And that the more of the arctic ocean that is ice free, the more of the ice melts.
So how did all that ice get there to begin with then? Would growth of ice packs next year lead to the conclusion that uncontrolled future growth of ice will continue until all the world's oceans are frozen?
Why are there these big lakes with no summertime ice in between the US and Canada - where 10,000 years ago there was only glaciers year round and minimal human influence on the environment?
Do you not believe these mechanisms are self-limiting and have feedback loops? If this truly is a runaway positive feedback loop, then nothing we do now matters anyhow.
Maybe New Orleans needs to be built up a few hundred feet in the air.
>>The first thing we would [...]was to format the hard drive[...] In the year I worked for that company we probaly sold over a thousand used computers on eBay [...]
I think Microsoft may be interested in knowing if any operating system software was installed after the reformat of the hard drive.
One of the most important reasons for Microsoft's success is that early on they heavily invested in their "Usability Lab"
http://www.microsoft.com/usability/studies.mspx
Rather than relying on feelings, instinct or anecdotal information when a friend is "helping" someone with a UI issue by standing over their shoulder, Microsoft actually uses science to determine how people interact with a computer, and which approaches do and don't work.
3) You now can't write lawyer letters to companies using the term Linux in their name demanding payment in order to fund their litigation against your own interests
4) The cannot demand that companies deemed "not worthy to carry the Linux(sm) name" stop using the name in commerce.
Wishing for a utopian world without intellectual property rights cuts both ways.
This is probabaly why the document is called a draft, and Congress is requesting feedback.
t ml?articleID=166401173
Since it is a fair bet that most members of Congress grew up and received their education prior to the PC generation - and wouldn't know Skype from Kazaa from iPod from Linux - now is the time to help educate them before we wind up with yet more misguided laws.
Just as an aside, do you think Judge Roberts is computer and technology literate? - it's his Court that is going to inherit whatever this mess turns into. I tend to think so - he mentioned during the hearings that he was on the legal team that sued Microsoft over the anti-trust issue - surely every slashdotter's hero!
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jh
Between science (hey d00d, I cooled off my dorm room by blowing air over ice cubes) and economics (hey, Intel makes like totally obscene profits cause like d00d, it only costs $40 to make a chip), one has to wonder what exactly parents are getting for their money today sending junior off to the University (other than sensitivity training and self-esteem).
Just because a person has no health insurance does not mean they have "no medical care". Most doctors do still accept payment by check and credit card.
No need for a "hack" to see Mars in Google Earth.
Just click on the dropdown listbox at Login. Choose "Mars Database".
Shame the submitter tried to make an attempt at humo[u]r and never realized that Mars has been available in Google Earth since the beta.
For those who may not know - AFT is the French news service - the ones that wrote the "white" caption. It is worth mentioning, at least in passing that many people in Lousiana have a strong historical connection with France.
The AP photo is still online with its original caption. One thing that may be lost here is that the photographers may have actually observed what happened, and know more than what is just captured in the one picture.
The most insightful post on this thread - once a company starts using Exchange, the people using the system will get used to things like expecting "Read receipts", integration with scheduling meetings and sending out the meeting invitations, emailing Office documents from inside Office... searching years worth of archived Exchange stored emails to say "See, I told you your idea wouldn't work"...
I vote for hiring a person with experience in managing large Exchange installations and identifying and fixing the existing problems.
If people are accessing the FEMA web site from a kiosk set up for that purpose, the chances that the kiosk is running an incompatible browser should be zero.
Another poster described this as a potentially life threatening issue. Oh, the drama here on slashdot. If a person has 1) Electricity, 2) A working computer, 3) a phone line or broadband connection, 4) enough computer literacy to run a computer - they are hardly still in a life threatening situation.
The biggest red flag I see is - they took a FEMA *internal* call center application, and opened it up for direct internet access.
Prediction: Within a week you will see the headline "FEMA applicants have personal data exposed on the internet"...
Or perhaps a more benign "FEMA receives 374 million applications for relief help from Asia and Eastern Europe"
How do we pay to build and repair the roads if everyone switched to electric cars? Excise taxes on electricity? Tolls? "Tax the Rich"?
The Government creates erosion control programs and flood control programs in the Midwest, and now there is not enough silt to keep the alluvial plain supplied with new material.
The Government starts a campaign to stop cigarette smoking and obesity breaks out - who could have seen that coming?
The "media" and politicians demand that the hole in the 17th Street canal levee be closed, but the aerial video shows water flowing out of the city through the breach.
And people want Government to solve problems?
Perhaps "It's a beta" was a reference to New Orleans.
This is a -excellent- point, one missed on most of the threads on this topic and apparently not known by most /. posters...
"Why doesn't the military do "X?".
The answer is - because the LAW says the US Military cannot be used inside the boundaries of the United States - only the National Guard, which is under the operational control of the States.
According to what I heard on a fairly authoritative radio show, only the President can authorize using the US Military, and then only in the case to put down civil unrest (like the riots against the draft in New York during the civil war). Someone besides the President in the White House authorized involving the US Military and ultimately that may become a bigger problem once this things resolves itself. It is a very dangerous precedent if not punished or the law revised.
Now seriously - if the US military was deployed and given bullets (!) and CBS News had video of a US soldier shooting an African American looter, what exactly do you think the consequences of that would be?
Contrary to common belief (including some in high places), the US Miitary are not trained to be police - they are trained to engage and destroy the enemy.
As I remember the events unfolding, the Mayor of New Orleans only finally agreed to a mandatory evacuation after FEMA scared the crap out of him about what was about to happen. Remember that President Bush declared this area a disaster area two days BEFORE the disaster happened - which is highly unprecedented.
At one of the first news conferences the day after the storm, the mayor in the same news conference said the following:
FEMA asked me what my priorities are, in order - and they'll work from that list. I told them:
1) Search and rescue
2) Repairing the levees
3) Evacuation of the people who hadn't left
Spin forward about a minute later, he says:
And I'm getting really angry about this hole in the 17th street canal. I was told they were going to drop sandbags in it to try to fill the hole, but the helicopters were diverted to work on Search and Rescue missions.
Is it at all clear now why people are running in circles?
By the way, if you read his biography, he's an "outsider". He ran on an anti-corruption compaign, and he won based on having no prior experience in city government.
"was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future,"
h /c01083005_03.txt
So what's that chance that anything that exists today (open or not) will be readable in 20 years? Tried to read your msdos 5 1/4" floppies lately? Still have any computer capable of running Electric Pencil?
Now of course, those are not "open" examples.
Been to a gopher site recently?
By the way, The Well is up for sale if anyone has a few million in cash sitting around idle:
http://www.helenair.com/articles/2005/08/30/healt
Unforunately, New Orleans is having to relearn the lessons from the Great Chicago Flood (1992). If you build things below the level of the surrounding water, the hydrostatic pressure is unstoppable once the system restraining the water is breached. Just like Houdini could escape bank safes because they are built to keep people in - not keep people inside from getting out - a levee is generally not designed to deal with water on the inside. The only way you can begin to get control of the situation is when the pressure equalizes - then you can drive piles into the breach and and stop the flow - and begin the process of pulling the water back out. That took several MONTHS.
Making New Orleans much worse is that the land is NOT on bedrock. You have to go down 70 feet to reach bedrock. If New Orleans was on bedrock, it would not have sunk over the past decades. (Don't build your house on sand?)
One of the concerns in Chicago was that once the flood was stopped, if the water was pulled out too fast, it would cause uneven settling of the ground, and buildings would collapse.
In the case of Chicago, the tunnels that were flooded had extremely thick walls and they held up well - so removing the water didn't cause the kind of stresses that were anticipated. New Orleans will probably be a very different situation, since there will be months for the water to saturate the ground and undermine the foundations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Pat Robertson run for President of the United States in 1988? Some also credit Robertson with having an effect on turnout in the 2004 election. I think that may qualify him as a politician (not to be confused with elected officeholder)
What is possibly more interesting is to find out if he actually had a classified source that leaked information to him that the US was considering doing something about Chauvez. I wouldn't mind seeing Robertson sweat under some Congressional Hearing TV cameras.
On the other hand, if the pro-Castro Democrats look took much like they have blood lust, that will only help the Republicans in 2006 and 2008. Every political force needs a boogeyman to be the unifying force.
The net effect of doing this stupid thing is he now has seriously tied the US's hands, and built up support for Chauvez among those who otherwise might not have cared.
or even more to the point - why wouldn't the parents be that "personal lifeguard" who never lets their children out of their sight while they are at the pool, and would come to their rescue if they get in trouble?
The TOR dickhead rate has been picking up quite a bit. It's gotten so bad - with primarily Poker referring URL spam - that I have banned the entire TOR network from my web server.
How can one report / prevent abuse if the TOR system is truly anonymous?
>>There are serious questions about were all that money is going.
a pons.html
Well, one place the money is going is to buy 100,000 AK-47s and 40 MI-35 helicopters from Russia for a total of $5 billion:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/14956_we