Posts by Absolute Cynic 22 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2008
I turned up 1 hour early for a meeting. I had checked the time of the meeting the evening before. However I had checked while waiting for my flight back from Iceland - who are 1 hour behind the UK.
My "smart" phone had automatically converted the meeting time to the local time. Maybe it should include the time zone.
Ah yes, I remember Business BASIC. My first job after college was at a company that used Business BASIC on Data Generals. I was horrified to find that their exception handling was to deliberately cause a divide by zero error.
So a customer would ring up to say they had an arithmetic error at line XXXX. You had to pull out the printout of the program, work out how it got to that line, ask the customer to print out the values of involved variables and decide what the problem was. Then get the customer to reset some variable and issue a GOTO to get it restarted.
How did they get away with it?
My first job after college was maintaining a suite of programs written in interpreted BASIC. The standard error handler was to put in a line with a division by zero. The customer would see an 'arithmetic error at line nnnnn' and phone in. We would then get them to print out the values of various variables and work out from the code what the problem was, reset a variable and then GOTO a line to restart the program.
You really should check out Firebird. As far as track record is concerned, it started life back around 1982/83, long before SQL Server was though of. It has existed in different incarnations, notably InterBase which is still marketed by Embarcadero.
There are plenty of large, mission critical installations of Firebird around the globe. But no cost means no marketing. Do not be blinded by the Microsoft marketing machine.
As for support, I've never needed in the 14 years I've used it. But there are companies who do support and they have close links to the development team.
A client was using one of my applications which uses a Firebird back end. They asked me to write a bespoke application for them but company policy was to use SQL Server. 2 years later, they asked me to switch the new app to Firebird. It is robust, reliable and fast. The fact that it is free was an issue but only in the sense that they could get for nothing what Microsoft charge and arm and leg for.
Why pay Microsoft these inflated licence fees?
btw As a member of the the Firebird foundation I pay to use it.
The AV, STV systems depend on people accepting that their vote may be transferred to a person who does not represent their views, or at least, less well than their 1st choice.
There can never be a truly representative system unless there are multi member constituencies based on counties or regions. In parliament, the vote of any member should be weighted according to how many votes they received instead of one member one vote.
Still, it will be interesting to see how the parties address the issue. Since no party is in favour of the AV system, how can any of them advocate the change? My own prediction is that electoral reform will be put back decades. And the Lib-Dems will be totally discredited and disappear into oblivion. So long, beardies!
Can I mention the free database that beats them all? I have been forced to use SQL Server and Oracle for projects by IT departments who are frightened to acknowledge that a free database can do it just as well. IMO Firebird leaves them behind. One client was so impressed with the performance and reliability of my application that uses Firebird, they asked me to switch the application I wrote for them which they originally insisted used SQL Server.
The original architect, Jim Starkey, was commissioned to write a decent backend to MySQL. Nuff said?
Don't waste tears on MySQL.
In all this discussion, there is no mention of Brian Howes and his wife. They had a legitimate business selling chemicals online, based in Scotland. This was correctly licensed and inspected by the authorities.
They sold a chemical to a customer in the US which is banned on that side of the Atlantic but perfectly legal here. But they find themselves fighting extradition and have already spent a considerable time in jail here and their children were taken into care. Yet, unlike McKinnon, they have not broken any law.
Check out: http://extradition.org.uk/
You should have mentioned Firebird. Anyone working with databases should try it out. It was originally the brainchild of Jim Starkey who was head hunted by MySQL to write a new backend incorporating ideas he has developed since the original for Firebird. He has now left MySQL ....
"The trial invitation will be presented through a special web page that will appear the first time those customers start a web-browsing session after BT Webwise becomes available. At this point, those customers invited can choose to click YES, NO or Find More to get more information"
http://webwise.bt.com/webwise/help.html
- how do they know it's the first time the customer starts a session? From a cookie? But I have disabled cookies. Does this mean I will be hassled every time I go online?
Surely somebody at BT could have foreseen the havoc this would cause? I can see the point of making this change but just implementing it without giving users time to prepare was lunatic.
And why direct you to a Yahoo help page? I have no relationship with Yahoo. And I failed to find any page with a button marked Options at the upper right corner. I attempted to find it by logging on to BT but failed because the user name and password I was successfully using to send emails through my @btinternet.com account were not accepted.
And then there is Phorm ...
Beware of BT
So. They want to prevent an international passenger swapping boarding cards with a domestic passenger. Em.. every international passenger has a passport with a photograph. If the photo doesn't match the passenger or the name on the passport isn't the name on the boarding card then they are caught!
What is the problem.
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