Fjool

Are you sure you're not thinking of Stephen Colbert? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOprXKpuVRc

Bacharach - Why do birds suddenly appear? That'll be the tray of chips you're carrying.

Brilliant! Really good to see this.

Yes... poor banks; scratching a living, eking out a meagre existance. All those guys on the breadline. They hardly manage to own any Ferraris and gold watches at all! Poor souls. Give me a break! Banks make an absolute fortune and do so at your expense. The number of ways in which the banking industry fleeces its customers are legion: Never mind the investment in weapons and explotation of third-world debt, sky-high interest rates on borrowing, minimal returns on your investment, exorbitant fees for minimal service. Does it really take 3 days to move electronic money from one system to another? They hold it, invest it, make money on your money simply by their inaction. But they'll still cheerfully charge you a 'late' fee because this 3-days caused your money to miss their arbitrary deadline. And if they make a mistake? The most you can hope for is a refund - where's your recourse to charge them £40 for being late? The thing that pisses me off most about all this? You cannot avoid using a bank! They have one by the testiclae and laugh into their cognacs, smoking the finest cigars while one is bobbing up and down saying 'Yes, sir.. please, sir. Can I have access to my money sometime this week, please? What... oh, the ATM is broken again? Well that's ok, if you'd see your way clear to letting me stand in your lovely queue for 30 minutes, I'd be ever so greatful, sir.'

Of course, but that's missing the point, Frankie. In many cases the charges levied are disproportionate and unfair. You could argue that they are punative and designed to dissuade you from managing your finances badly but, in many cases, these charges can result in further charges. Is it acceptable for a credit-card to charge £40 for a late payment and then, because this £40 pushes you over your credit-limit, to charge another fee for going over your credit limit? Work for the banking industry much, Frankie? I figure you must since nobody else could have sympathy for this kind of behaviour. Just because I manage to force you to sign an agreement saying that I can burn down your house if you forget my birthday, doesn't mean that my actions are moral or legal!

That seems to be a really interesting link Pooks. Thanks. I shall look into that further at home when I can pore over the legions of spurious charges levied by my bank.

Hmm... good question. I've no idea. Possibly, probably. If not now then there will be soon. Don't get me wrong; I understand the function behind these and I've used both a little bit myself, but they're just nothing special. Certainly they aren't the fantastic services that they're hailed to be. MySpace is fugly beyond belief. BeBo is a go-slow. They're just not there yet - eventually someone will do it properly but neither of these have got their act together yet.

You think everything's rubbish. Good shout inky Oh yes.. the argumentum ad hominem school of debate. Very internettish and completely off-topic! I still maintain they're a pair of poopy pieces of personal preening. Prove me wrong!

Perhaps I'm talking slightly at cross-purposes. I was responding specifically to your comment that as if this were a failing of Access. I agree that three tables are necessary for this scenario: tComputers, tApplications, then a table which lists which applications are on which computer. All I mean is that I'd never want to create a many-to-many relationship directly between tComputers tApplications, since this would be horribly denormalised. The third table is necessary for satisfying the ever-elusive 3rd-normal form, not an inconvenience. Since each computer has many entires in the middle table, and each application has many entries in the middle table, you have no direct many-to-many relationships at all but achieve the same result via an intermediary pair of one-many joins. I guess my point is only a question of terminology; a many-many relationship implemented as a pair of one-many relationships is much easier to design around than trying to implement with only two tables. I suppose the end result is still theoretically a many-many relationship, it's just implemented indirectly. Access is correct (in my opinion) in the way it insists that you do this.

There's your problem right there! Avoid many-to-many joins. I'm pretty sure they're never necessary and, if they are, they're much better implemented with (as you say) three tables anyway!

Not a complete load of sharn, no. I developed using versions of Access for many years and found it quite ok in lots of regards. Access has a GUI front-end which makes developing your database more visual and can be a lot quicker. It's pretty powerful in terms of features and capabilities (even supporting some which higher-end database servers (SQL Server for example) don't: cross-tabs, cascade-delete relationships and others. Having a complete programming language (albeit Visual Basic) behind it, you can do pretty much everything you need very easily from within a single application. All well and good so long as you don't want a web interface! On the downside, it's not designed for large-scale or distributed applications; it's really best suited for small, local applications. Anything requiring more than a couple of simultanous users or large volumes of data and Access really runs into trouble. It certainly doesn't support the level of security you'd expect to find in a multi-user distributed environment. MySQL is quite ok from my experience, but I haven't used it extensively for quite some time. I did find it more time-consuming and cumbersome to develop with overall but much of that was to do with the environment (OpenBSD running through Telnet, connecting back via my browser to view the end-result, among other hoops I needed to jump through) than it was a problem with MySQL. From what I could tell MySQL is just another database server, doing database server-y things. Once your database is designed and implemented, having a proper way to talk to it is vital and I'm not convinced that a PHP client is a hugely good idea if you want to keep your sanity. I'm developing in SQL Server these days and find the added 'power' comes at a cost of rapid development. The lack of decent relational features (maybe this is fixed in SQL Server 2005, not sure) has caused headaches and are something I miss. Access certainly handled it's relationships properly.

Hmm... seems that there might have been some crossed wires, Alan. I think we might be talking about the same gig but news of the cancelation never reached the Mind Setters! Oh well... can scratch this one from the agenda then Twerto! (can hear Twerto sigh with relief)

They're both rubbish.

I'm not sure who are playing but AB/CD have been mentioned. A mate is playing support that night but he doesn't know who they are supporting yet! I think this gig might be on the 20th rather than the 21st though.

Apart from the AC/DC tribute in the Legion you mean?

Strawberries are odd - they're not even actually berries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/Fruitandveg.png/300px-Fruitandveg.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit Vegetable is a culinary term. Its definition has no scientific value and is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable