Science Tony

By   McDonald, T.    | Date 29th of November 2020 The future as we know it is uncertain. As we become more and more dependent on computers and machine do we put our very existence at risk? Even in entertainment, sci-fi is constantly airing our subconsciousness concerns about our own demise. Now we have the problem of algorithms determining what type of propaganda gets the best results from us. As we move into an uncertain future due to the high levels of propaganda from politics and religion on the net not to mention the violence, the tension on the street and in everyday life grows. What are the problems that we face?   Influence from outside our nations: bots on the net.   By this i mean foreign countries with malicious intent.  You know how businesses collect information for advertising purposes so they can make adverts that are more appealing to someone?  Well, political parties can do the same.  Algorithms collect information on you and then determine what type of person

By McDonald, T.   |  Date 11th of February 2021 Starting the 100 days of code challenge? New to coding? The first thing that you need to do is get a suitable coding editor or IDE. This will allow you to code and make it a much easier experience. For instance, a good editor will highlight any syntax errors and throw up exceptions that once you have learned what they mean will give you clues as to the mistakes in your code. In addition, you will need to compile some code, the IDE will do for you, in order to make it run. Exceptions are errors found in the code at either runtime, when you try to run the code, or by the complier when you compile the code. Notably, you will need to install some languages in order to start coding.  For example, if you want to code in Java, you will need to install Java on your computer. However, if you want to code something more server side like javaScript, you will not need to install a language called javaScript. Coding Languages that we th

By McDonald, T.   |  Date 5th of November 2020 Why use a database? Databases are a great way to store and retrieve data.   Since they are so widely used in computing, knowing how to use them is a must have skill in this industry.   For instance, many websites use databases to store product details.   One of the main benefits to databases is allows data to be organised, manipulated and retrieved rather than just storing it making it a very powerful tool.      Tables and keys First let’s look at the parts of the table  Customer_Table customer_id name address phone 1 Tony McDonald Some place 0788454567 2 A man 17 somewhere else 0793453459 3 A woman 45 who knows 0712311180   All relational databases have columns and rows.   Columns are vertical, so phone is the label of a column containing phone numb

  By   McDonald, T.    | Date 20th of November 2020 What is a database? A database can be anything that stores collection of information and is often abbreviated to DB. A relational database stores information that is related in some way. For example, a shopping list is a relational database since it is a list of related information. Other examples include: Phone book. List of twitter users. Your families favourite foods. Now you have an idea of what a database is we can talk about where to store it. In the examples above, the phone book is a list of numbers and related information that can be stored in a book. The shopping list is stored on paper. We can also store these databases on a computer. Notably, the computer can be in your office or be a dedicated computer in a server room or even stored in a virtual machine in the cloud, which uses dedicated computers. Keeping it simple for now we can just think of a computer hosting the database. Now we have a place to store the d