OnceShy: Technology

Being a huge Sims 2 fan, I was ecstatic to hear that Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, has plans for a new game called Spore that is currently due to release in September of this year.

The basic of this game is evolution from a cellular level to that of a creature (which is where we get to be artistic as we please) which develops to the point of space exploration. It all starts with a “blob” which can be molded into whatever shape then continue by adding eyes, mouths, legs, arms, hands, feet and so on and so forth! Then a color and pattern can be chosen (also includes a limitless amount of layers in different patterns and colors!)

And after all that designing, there is still game play to be conquered.

The only downfall to this game is that the release date keeps getting pushed back. Originally it was set to release a couple years ago, to May of this year, to September. But I’m sure that the wait will be well worth it (especially if it means that the amount of crashes and bugs will be greatly reduced!)

To get a better idea of what it will be like I found links to YouTube videos as well as the link to the offical Spore website.
Creatue Demo with Will Wright
Robin Williams plays Spore
Offical Spore Website

photos credit to EA/Maxis.

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While sitting and flipping through the channels this morning I happened to come across a rerun of The Colbert Report from last night. And while the witty banter proved to be funny at best, the guest he was interviewing was David Levy who wrote Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships and it got me to thinking, how much might we really be underestimating the power of robots?

Sure we all have these blockbuster ideas of what life with robots might really be like, For example movies like I, Robot, and Terminator, But can we really believe these idea to be realistic in the sense it could actually happen? No, of course not, that’s why they’re movies and not past historical events.

Then I did some more digging into the subject and found this article, and in summary, some scientists halfway across the world have found a way to make robots lie to each other. They recognize that what information they are giving is incorrect and in a way create an artificial thought process in which they either continue to deceive or save the others.

Unfortunately with advances like these I, Robot and the Terminator can be all to close for comfort. And although I think those advances might still be years and years away (Robot love? Not so much), but they are still there looming on the horizon.

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This morning in 271 we had our first day working with SQL Server, needless to say we didn’t get very far.

So for the purpose of this blog entry I’m going to go ahead and compare SQL Server to Microsoft’s Access, that way you can too understand what makes them so different, (and apperantly more unnecessarily difficult) and then finish out with my first impressions.

But first lets start with their similarities.

Both SQL Server and Access are made by, you guessed it, Microsoft. So assuming a producer will make somewhat identical products should be safe, Right? Well I guess not. SQL Server and Access both do the same things and have the same sort of functions, they just have very different ways at getting around to that.

So onto the differences!

While Access remains on your computer just like any saved document in the Microsoft Office line, SQL Server remains somewhere else, in the case of my class, it’s saved over on a server in the IT Building that we have to connect through a VPN to get to. Not to mention a more complicated dashboard.

And finally, lets not leave out my first impressions.

MS Access, like any other MS Office component, was easy to get the hang of. Minimum instruction from the prof and we were all off on to creating databases. Of course we had our hitches, but we were presently surprised to find out what was wrong after reading the error message, and then merrily continued on our way.

Then there was SQL Server, which had a very interesting way of getting you into the actual program. First you don’t even work with SQL Server software, in the case of my class we ended up using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to sign into the SQL Server (Username, Password, Database ID, oh my!). Next when it came to the tables and queries, they were also a bit more harder to find and start. Overall the class ended with the level of frustration being higher than it had been on MS Access days.

So in conclusion when people ask “what’s not to love about SQL Server?” I can say alot, and I’m just getting started.

As the the first week back to school is coming to an end I have to say that I’m already pretty syked because in 271 I have already built a database. 271 is one of those classes that makes me happy to say that MIS is my major, mostly because I find myself lost when I’m working with databases, but in a great way. Our first step was to use Microsoft Access to create a very basic database. So basic that there was only two forms: categories and products.
Once I got the hang of working with MS Access it became quite easy to figure out what I was actually doing. After we set up the the products table we had to add the relationship back to categories, which at first seemed like quite the task (the relationships section really wasn’t to fond of me!) but after working through various buttons I was able to put it all together.

Finally with 10 minutes of class left my professor decided to tell the class that many (as in close to all) business prefer things other than Access to run databases on. Needless to say it was still quite the learning process to discover and I can’t wait to see what our next database project SQL will hold!

Welcome to my technology blog! Here I will post numerous blogs about various technologies as I learn them through my MIS program! So check back often to see what new blogs I have posted!