Mae'n gweithio'r ddechrau yn cyfraith sefydliadau rhagorau a'r ddechrau yn cyfrofiadau. Mae'sgafodd y�od o'r ddechrau yn cael ei ddweud o'r ddechrau. Gweithio'r ddechrau yn cyfrofiadau o'r ddechrau, ac yn cyfrofiadau ar y ddechrau, yn cael ei ddweud o'r ddechrau. Mae'n cyfrofiadau, rydw i'n wych yn cymrydau, o gyflym y byddai'n gweithio ar yr adnod yng Nghyrchu I will announce a new chair and an amendment that will be made to the inquiry's terms of reference. I begin by repeating my condolences to those bereaved during the pandemic. I also repeat my conviction that the scolish Covid-19 inquiry must help to provide the answers for those individuals and others affected by the pandemic's search. In fulfilling our commitment to establish a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic in Scotland, the Government took time to meaningfully and openly engage with the public on draft aims and principles for the Scottish inquiry. I again express my thanks to everyone who engaged with me and my officials during that important work around the design and scope of the inquiry. On 14 December 2021, I announced to Parliament the establishment of the Scottish Covid-19 inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005. Under the 2005 act, ministers have the power to establish an independent public inquiry to set terms of reference and to appoint a chair and panel. In my December statement, I announced the terms of reference of the Scottish Covid-19 inquiry and the appointment of the Honourable Lady Poole to be its chair. On 9 June 2022, I announced to Parliament three amendments to those terms of reference. The amendments were designed to clarify the scope of the inquiry following a period of reflection. My statement in June was intended to be the final word from Government on the establishment of the inquiry. In particular, I expected that statement to be my last word on the terms of reference, thereafter they move over to the inquiry itself. Section 17 of the 2005 act gives an inquiry chair a loan rather than ministers responsibility for deciding how an inquiry should operate. It was and is for the Scottish Covid-19 inquiry itself to comment on its work. On 30 September, I was given notice by Lady Poole that she intended to step down from the role of chair of the Scottish Covid inquiry for personal reasons. The Scottish Government was not given any indication before 30 September that Lady Poole had intended to resign. However, ministers fully respect Lady Poole's decision and I accepted notice of her resignation. The Scottish Government is grateful to Lady Poole for the work that she has undertaken since the establishment of the inquiry. I thank Lady Poole for her work and wish her well. The Scottish Government has always been clear that we want the inquiry to be delivered at speed and to address the range of questions that people have, the bereaved in particular, so that we can learn and benefit from those lessons as early as possible. I am acutely aware from recent discussions with bereaved families representatives how important it is that there be no delay to the inquiry arising from the resignation of Lady Poole's chair. That is why arrangements for identifying a new chair for the inquiry have been taken forward as a matter of urgency in order to ensure a swift and successful transition. To that end, I have liaged with the Lord President regarding the appointment of a new judicial chair in line with our previous commitment to having the Scottish inquiry led by a judge. I would like to thank the Lord President for his engagement and his co-operation on the matter. I have benefited from the insights and reflections of bereaved family groups about what they would want to see from a new inquiry chair, and I am especially grateful to them for their engagement at this time. As a result of this work, I am pleased to be able to announce that the Honourable Lord Brailsford, a sitting senator of the College of Justice of Scotland, will be the new chair of the Scottish Covid-19 inquiry and will assume the role of chair of the inquiry tomorrow. I am confident that Lord Brailsford will bring his extensive experience as a long-serving senator of the College of Justice to the role of chair of the inquiry and will approach its work in a way that properly addresses the need for answers to questions posed by those who have suffered through the pandemic. From my interactions with Lord Brailsford, I know that he is keenly aware of the need to ensure that the inquiry progresses and delivers at pace in order that the lessons can be learned within a timescale that will make them applicable and useful. I am also assured that Lord Brailsford will undertake the role of chair in an inclusive way with sensitivity, empathy and compassion. I am confident that Lord Brailsford will see that full scrutiny is applied in all directions that are required to ensure that this inquiry provides the answers that it has been established to find. I have asked Lord Brailsford at the earliest opportunity to meet with bereaved families so that he may hear at first hand their perspective about the inquiry and its approach. Lady Poole undertook in her resignation to support and assist with the transition to her successor. It will now be a matter for Lord Brailsford to determine how these handover arrangements will work in practice to best support continuity within the work of the inquiry. The Scottish Government, in its role as sponsor of the inquiry, will provide operational support, as the chair considers necessary and appropriate, in order to enable the inquiry to continue its independent work and ensure the progress that has been made so far by the inquiry is maintained. I can also announce today that the terms of reference for the inquiry will be supplemented in one important respect. This amendment has been discussed with Lord Brailsford and is designed to provide absolute clarity of the Government's desire that the inquiry will be taken forward in a way that supports our commitments to a person-centred and human rights-based approach. The terms of reference for the inquiry currently set out 12 areas of investigation, each covering a strategic element of the handling of the pandemic. In investigating those 12 strategic elements, the terms of reference asked the chair to consider the impacts of handling of the pandemic on the exercise of convention rights as they see appropriate and to create a factual record of the key strategic elements of the handling of the pandemic. In my June statement, we amended the terms of reference, including to expressly highlight the consideration of disparities by way of amendment to the terms of reference, which encompasses unequal impacts on people. Today I can confirm that we will make one further addition to the reporting requirements in the terms of reference, effective from the formal appointment of Lord Brailsford as inquiry chair. Specifically, this change will require the inquiry, and I quote, to demonstrate how a human rights-based approach by the inquiry has contributed to the inquiry's findings in fact and recommendations. This will co-exist with current references in the terms of reference to convention rights and to considering unequal impacts on people. The operation in practice of a human rights-based approach will still and must still lie in the hands of the inquiry chair. But this amendment reflects a joint commitment between the Scottish ministers and the new chair that the inquiry take a person-centred human rights-based approach to ensure that every person and organisation taking part can meaningfully participate, be treated fairly and be empowered to take part in the inquiry. I am grateful to Lord Brailsford for supporting this amendment, the announcement of which I hope gives confidence to bereave families and to others about the future direction of the inquiry. Presiding Officer, the inquiry operates independently of government, which is a key to its integrity and within the legal regime under which it has been established. The 2005 act sets out a clear framework for the independent functioning of the inquiry. This statement fulfills my duties under the act to inform Parliament of my intention to appoint a new chair. I have also set out today my intention to change the inquiry's terms of reference and how this will be done. An inspired parliamentary question to be answered tomorrow will fulfil the duty under the act to set out the terms of reference as amended and confirm that they have taken effect. I should also note that no panel members will be appointed today and that will be for Lord Brailsford to consider whether to appoint any assessors to provide expertise on particular subjects or any other assistance to the inquiry. From my own and the First Minister's interactions with Lord Brailsford, I am left with no doubt that he is fully qualified for the demanding task put in front of him. I express my gratitude and that of the First Minister to Lord Brailsford for his agreement to take on this important role on behalf of the people of Scotland. I reiterate that the Scottish Government undertakes to engage fully to support Lord Brailsford and the inquiry in the vital task before them. Thank you, Mr Swinney. The cabinet secretary will now take questions on the issues raised in his statement. I intend to allow around 20 minutes after which we will need to move on to the next item of business. I would be grateful if Members wish to ask a question, and we have not already done so. Press the requested beep buttons now or as soon as possible. I call Dr Sandra Scolhanny. In the gallery today is Caroline MacDonald. She is a long Covid sufferer and is here at personal cost to her health and well-being tomorrow. Long Covid has devastated her life, but we know that it has also devastated the lives of over 200,000 other Scots. All long Covid suffers. Everyone in Scotland will be dismayed by the resignation of Lady Poole. And there are still many unanswered questions regarding the resignation of Lady Poole, and I hope the cabinet secretary will explain these in due course. I welcome the appointment of Lord Brailsford. In the past, the tram and hospital inquiries have been beset with delays. With the resignation of Lady Poole, can the cabinet secretary guarantee that this will not happen again, and can he commit to long Covid being included in the inquiry? First of all, can I express my good wishes to Caroline MacDonald in the gallery today? I understand and fully appreciate the impact of long Covid personally, because I have not experienced it. To individuals, I understand the suffering and the endurance that is involved. The Government is entirely focused on ensuring that we address the clinical needs of individuals who experience long Covid. In relation to the conduct of the inquiry, as Dr Gohani will know, inquiries by their nature, particularly those set up under the Inquiries Act must operate independently of Government. The operation of the inquiry is a matter entirely for its chair. As I have indicated to Parliament, I very much regret the fact that Lady Poole felt it necessary to tender her resignation. She did so. I respect those reasons, and that is the end of the matter. I have moved swiftly to replace Lady Poole with judicial leadership of the eminence of Lord Brailsford, who will be able to start his activities in leaving the inquiry tomorrow. I am very grateful to the Lord President and Lord Brailsford for the substantial amount of reorganisation that has been involved in enabling that to be the case. Of course, the issues that Dr Gohani raised about long Covid are all legitimate issues to be raised as part of the inquiry, but it is wrong for me to prescribe beyond the setting of the terms of reference what should be discussed in the inquiry. That is a matter for Lord Brailsford to determine within the scope of the remit. I thank the Deputy First Minister for advance sight of his statement, and I welcome the news of the appointment of Lord Brailsford as the new chair and wish him well as he undertakes this incredibly important work. It is essential that there are no delays to the work of this inquiry in order to retain the confidence of those who lost loved ones to Covid. I do note, however, that the Deputy First Minister makes no mentioners to the appointment of new senior counsel given their resignation at the same time as Lady Poole. I wonder whether he can advise of the likely timescale that the chair will take this forward. When I raised this matter earlier this month, the Deputy First Minister was keen to quote section 17 of the Inquiries Act at me as an attempt, I think, to avoid comment on the resignation of senior counsel, but it is true in the same act that there are other sections that permit him to engage with organisational matters. Let's be clear, he must not interfere with the evidence-finding activities of the inquiry, but he has a responsibility and indeed a duty, quite frankly, to support the chair and ensure that the inquiry can function well. As such, can he tell me what delay will there be for the work of the inquiry? Will he ensure that the chair has all the necessary resources required and that he wishes that the chair can appoint people to staff the inquiry, who are entirely independent of Government? Finally, will he confirm in a follow-up to my colleague Sandish Gilhane's question that consideration of the impact of long Covid is actually within the scope of the terms of reference of the inquiry? The Presiding Officer, there is a lot in there, but I shall endeavour to work my way through. First of all, I welcome Jackie Baillie's comments in relation to Lord Bealsford's appointment. When I spoke with Lord Bealsford on Tuesday to advise him of my intention to appoint him, he indicated to me and he has said this in his public statement this afternoon that he believes that it would be an honour to be invited to lead this inquiry. I think that speaks for what Lord Bealsford will bring to the inquiry. He realises its significance. The other thing that I said in my statement that I asked Lord Bealsford to do was to engage with Bury families, and he has agreed to do that as an early priority, because I totally accept the importance of ensuring continued confidence. Indeed, just before I came into Parliament this afternoon, I had three separate discussions with Bury families groups to advise them of the contents of the statement. In relation to the conduct of the inquiry, and the appointment of senior councillor—it is not a pedantic point about section 17—there are very good reasons why the Government is not close to those matters and should not be close to those matters. Those are questions for Lord Bealsford, and he is engaged on those questions, and will be tomorrow when he assumes his formal responsibilities. I unreservedly give the commitment that the Government will provide whatever support Lord Bealsford considers necessary, and I have made that offer to him. In relation to the delay to the inquiry, I want to reassure Jackie Baillie that, since Lady Poole's resignation, she has remained engaged, staff have remained engaged, and the work of the inquiry is going on. The Government is undertaking work to support the inquiry in relation to requests for information that we have been asked of us, and that is all under way. As I indicated publicly before, there are already over 60 members of staff in the inquiry, so there are resources in there. If there are more resources required, Lord Bealsford will be advising me of the requirements. The Government, subject to ensuring that we are able to protect the independence of the inquiry, will give all operational support, but Lord Bealsford will be the judge of that point, as he is the custodian of the independence of the inquiry, and I am very confident that he will exercise that. Fulton MacGregor, to be followed by Murdo Fraser. Thank you, Presiding Officer. In response to the previous two questions as well, I welcome the Deputy First Minister's commitment to the long Covid issues that I have also been having raised. In relation to my question, Deputy First Minister, brief family should rightly be at the forefront of all our minds as the inquiry progresses. How will the Scottish Government ensure that their voices are kept central to the inquiry's work and their testimonies handled with sensitivity and respect? I apologise to Jackie Baillie that I omitted to deal with the point on the long Covid. I am not in any way avoiding the question, but we have set out the scope of the terms of reference. In my judgment, long Covid issues are certainly within the scope of the terms of reference, but fundamentally it is a matter for Lord Bealsford to determine as he leads the evidence in the inquiry. I hope that that addresses the first point that Mr MacGregor raises with me this afternoon. On the brief families, I cannot stress to Parliament more the importance I attach to the voices of brief families being heard in this inquiry. On the one thing that I have asked of Lord Bealsford, apart from asking him to cheer the inquiry to follow the terms of reference, I have asked him specifically to meet with the brief families groupings as an early priority. I think that it is important. As I have said to the families, I have done my best to convey to Lord Bealsford what the brief families have said to me about how they feel about the inquiry. I think that it is critical that Lord Bealsford hears that from those families himself, and he has given me the undertaking that he will do so. Were any of the four councils that resigned from the inquiry required to sign a non-disclosure agreement? If so, was there any payment associated with that? I do not know the answer to that question and it is not appropriate for me to know the answer to that question, because those are operational matters for the inquiry. If Mr Fraser wishes to pursue that issue, it is an issue that he could raise with the Secretary for the Inquiry. Nobody's life has been untouched by the pandemic, and people from all the areas of society will rightly be invested in this inquiry. With that in mind, how will the Scottish Government ensure public confidence in the inquiry and its new team? I think that there has to be very active engagement with those who have an interest in the inquiry, and the inquiry needs to make progress at an early stage to ensure that we address those questions. Covid has not disappeared from our lives. It is still part of the fabric of our society, unfortunately. There are many decisions as we go into a very challenging winter that will have to be taken that will be affected by the presence of Covid. Understanding and learning those lessons as quickly as possible is a critical part of the work that we must undertake to ensure that the inquiry fulfills its purpose and has an impact on public policy within Scotland in relation to Covid. The Deputy First Minister will be aware that Scottish Labour, Amnesty and other civil society organisations pressed for a human rights-based Covid inquiry. That is part of their letter. We and they were concerned that the terms of reference relied on the chair's professional experience in equality in human rights and personal commitment to look at rights breaches. We were unconvinced then that the chair's professional experience should substitute embedding human rights in the inquiry's terms of reference, and so I am pleased to hear today the commitment to do so. A human rights-based approach needs participation and accountability, and disabled people felt left out of the response to Covid and must be included in the inquiry. So can the Deputy First Minister set out whether he would agree to commit to supporting their active participation in the inquiry and signal that their involvement and others' involvement is key by being explicit about what the human rights means in the terms of reference, including to give explicit reference to a panel approach in the terms of reference? I welcome the comments that Pam Duncan-Glassie makes in her recognition of the steps that I have taken today. I think that what she invites me to do now is to prescribe to a degree not envisaged in the Inquiries Act, how the inquiry should operate. I have to be mindful of the legal basis for all the actions that I take as a minister. In section 17 of the 2005 act, as I read it, it gives the sole responsibility to the chair to decide how an inquiry should operate. If I did what Pam Duncan-Glansie invites me to do, I would be acting inappropriately within that section of the act. Pam Duncan-Glansie has, of course, put her comments on the record. I am certain that the official report of today's proceedings will be studied by Lord Bairdsford and I am sure that he will be interested to read the particular proposition that Pam Duncan-Glansie has fairly put on the record today. I noted in the cabinet secretary's statement that he used the words at speed, but I wonder sometimes if the words at speed mean something slightly different to the legal profession from the rest of us. Therefore, can he give any assurance to families that this inquiry will not drag on as I am afraid the Edinburgh trams one has done? I think the point that I would want to assure Mr Mason about is that the issues of Covid remain very present in our society. Indeed, Mr Mason is a member of the Covid-19 Committee of Parliament, is engaged in all of these questions. The inquiry in Lord Bairdsford come to me or strike me has been entirely seized of the importance of that point. I would say to Mr Mason that there are other inquiries that have taken a different approach to the trams inquiry. I have cited before the Scottish child abuse inquiry where Lady Smith has taken a modular approach and has reported on at least six modules of that inquiry. The findings of the inquiry are already in the public domain with evidence having been heard and further evidence has been taken. That is indeed the approach that has been taken by Baroness Hallott in the United Kingdom inquiry. There are ways of making sure that the issues of concern in this debate can be heard early and swiftly, and the point that Mr Mason raises can be satisfied to be addressed by the conduct and the structure of the inquiry. Alex Cole-Hamilton to be followed by Jackie Dunbar. I congratulate the Deputy First Minister on the swift turnaround of the appointment of Lord Bairdsford. He carries with us the good wishes of this chamber. I am gratified to hear that, in his judgment, the committee could look into long Covid, because there are 200,000 Scots, while all of Scotland wants to know how we handled our nation's response to Covid. We need to know how we handled our response to what Covid can become as well. Given the length of time that this may well take, and we know that inquiries such as Iraq, such as Penrose and the Trams, can take many years, whilst he cannot direct the inquiry, does he share my desire to see some kind of interim report to at least answer some questions as we have the answers to them? First of all, let me welcome the points that have been made by Mr Cole-Hamilton, and I think that they are encouraging in relation to the conduct of the inquiry. I think that the structure of the terms of reference are deliberately designed to enable Lord Bairdsford to take a modular approach. There are 12 different sections of the inquiry of the inquiry remit, and they are all reasonably compartmentalised, so it would be possible to do exactly what Mr Cole-Hamilton says, and as I have reflected my answer to Mr Mason, I think that the experience of Lady Smith's inquiry is a good experience of being able to give people timely conclusions based on the hearing of evidence rather than waiting sometimes a very long time for some conclusions to materialise. The points that Mr Cole-Hamilton makes are valid ones. The operation of the inquiries for Lord Bairdsford but he will hear the points that have been raised and will understand the seriousness with which they have been put forward. Jackie Dunbar to be followed by Gillian Mackay. Thank you, Presiding Officer. With the listening project still scheduled to go ahead later this year, does the Deputy First Minister feel confident that the inquiry team has the capacity to conduct this activity properly and impacted by recent staff changes? I think that that is possible. I think that the point that Jackie Dunbar raises with me is a good example of how the inquiry has been continuing to proceed with its activities whilst we have had the issue around its leadership. I pay tribute to the staff of the inquiry who have continued that good work and I think that it gives us the basis upon which we can ensure members of the public can engage with the inquiry through the listening project and their contributions can begin to be reflected within the conduct of the inquiry. Gillian Mackay to be followed by Brian Whittle. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I welcome the decision to put human rights into the terms of reference. I appreciate the inquiries independent but given the public interest in any outcomes of the inquiry, how will the Scottish Government ensure that its conclusions, including any interim conclusions if appropriate, are in accessible formats in order to provide all families who have lost a loved one the answers they deserve? The requirement that I am placing on the inquiry to demonstrate how a human rights-based approach has contributed to the inquiry's findings and recommendations would place that very obligation on the inquiry to ensure that it reports and engages at all times in an appropriate and accessible way to make sure that the needs of all interested parties are properly and adequately met as a consequence. Brian Whittle to be followed by Jim Fairlie. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Is this really a point of clarification for the Cabinet Secretary if I may? Can I ask if the Scottish Government's civil servants are directly involved with the inquiry and if they are, would you not recognise that that might be a significant conflict of interest? There may well be civil servants who have been seconded to the inquiry. That is a standard practice within public inquiries because they bring with them a great deal of expertise. However, it is absolutely critical that those civil servants exercise their professional responsibility, which in my experience of the civil service is an absolutely consistently delivered proposition. When I entered government in 2007, I had spent many years as a political activist, as a member of Parliament, as an observer of politics, been told that civil servants could one day support an administration of one colour, and then the next day the self-same people could support wholeheartedly a people of another political colour. I wondered if it was correct. I had no experience before early May 2007 and on day one I found out that it was correct because those civil servants operate in an entirely professional manner where they act in relation to the remit that they are following and the accountability that they follow. That is part of their professional contribution, and I am grateful to them for that. First, I will give you my apologies for being late into the chamber and to the chamber colleagues. I have listened carefully to what the Deputy First Minister has said, and I hope that Lord Bair's worth is listening today to the genuine concerns about the long Covid situation that a lot of our constituents keep coming to us with. It is unfortunate that the inquiry has been delayed because of the resignations, but I am sure that, once the new appointments have been made and finalised, the work will resume quickly. Regardless of the loss of time, can I ask the Deputy First Minister how the Scottish Government is going to ensure that no corners will be cut in order to complete the inquiry and that the work will continue to be a high and thorough standard? Lord Bair will bring his experience of many years in the court session to bear and leading the inquiry. We have had a period where the leadership of the inquiry has required to be changed. I have addressed that as colleagues across the chamber have recognised as swiftly as humanly could have been the case. I am grateful to the Lord President and Lord Bair's for their engagement on this question, and I am very confident that the inquiry will proceed in a professional manner to address the issues of vital importance to members of the public and members of the Parliament. Thank you very much, Deputy First Minister. There will be a brief pause before we move on to the next item of business.


What I am going to do now is introduce you to a few topics in the next 5 minutes or so without going into any detail whatsoever and let you read it offline. So, do not try to read the slides, please read only the headings of the slides. I know time is limited, but I wanted to introduce you to these terms so that you will go back and read them. The first one is an application architecture, there is something called model view controller architecture which is a buzzword many people throw around and this slide tells you what those things are. It is a way of building web applications which separates out the code into layers. One layer which has all the real logic is often called the business logic layer and that layer does not worry at all about how forms appear and displayed, how you collect input, how you validate input all that is irrelevant for the business logic layer. The business logic layer does simple things like register a student, look up a student's registration and return the data, it does not format it. The presentation or user interface layer takes the data which it gets from the business logic layer and formats it and displays it and vice versa. This helps build applications in a fairly modular fashion and below the business logic layer is the data access layer which actually talks to the database. Now typically data access is done directly in SQL however increasingly these days there is a something called object relational mapping which helps to hide the SQL from the upper level program and I have a slide coming up on that. So I will talk more about that in a little bit. So this is a pictorial depiction of the same architecture, model, view and controller. So a request comes to something called a controller which talks to the model which is basically the business logic and when it gets a response back it talks to the view part of the code which formats it, returns it and then that view is displayed to the user. This is a abstract model and the model itself talks to the data access layer which talks to the database. So as I said increasingly there is something called object relational mapping which is used in many applications. So what is object relational mapping? Many of you might know about object oriented databases and object relational databases. They were all designed to create a brand new language, object oriented databases took C++ or Java and said let us add features to the language which let us directly store objects in a database and fetch them without using SQL. The database cannot be an SQL database as a result. These systems were researched and developed extensively in the late 80s. There were a number of companies which brought out object oriented databases and many of the board syllabus in India include object oriented databases as an advanced topic. Some even have it as a basic topic unfortunately all of these object oriented databases are pretty much dead. One or two of those companies are barely alive with a few employees with a small revenue but they failed miserably. What went wrong? What went wrong was people actually do need a declarative language like SQL to do data analysis and so forth. It is not enough to have C program directly access the database that is one problem. Of course the vendors realized that they created their own language but those languages did not catch on. The second bigger problem was the moment you directly modify an object from C++ there were a lot of errors because a small pointer error somewhere messed up the database. They were horror stories of a small bug which would completely destroy a database. That is completely unacceptable for any real application. One small mistake can ruin a database nobody will touch it. So that is probably the biggest reason that those systems did not take off. So that you know they have kind of bit the dust and then people said that is a bad idea. Now let us add object oriented features to relational databases. This led to the object relational model which in some sense both preceded and succeeded the object oriented databases and SQL added a lot of object relational features around SQL 1999. This was after the object oriented databases were dead. Unfortunately for all those who put a lot of money into object relational features they have met more or less the same fate as object oriented databases. There are several reasons for this. One of the reasons is standardization never took place seriously for object relational features. Each database did its own thing. SQL had a standard but nobody bothered about the standard. Each one did its own thing. So the problem is if I use object relational features in my application and I am using Oracle, I am locked into Oracle. Oracle knows that once they know I am using it. And guess what? If I am a company and I use Oracle, I buy one license for my development. I want to deploy, I want to buy some licenses and guess what they are going to charge an arm and a leg. They are going to, they know what it will cost me if I do not deploy this and their quotation is going to be based on that. They can charge what they want, I am stuck. So getting locked into a vendor is something which people are really scared about because then they have to pay whatever price. You can get locked into PostgreSQL for the matter. Their price is not an issue. It is free. However, if you need a new feature which PostgreSQL does not offer and becomes critical like materialized views, then you are stuck. You cannot migrate to Oracle which offers you materialized views or SQL server. So people do not want to lock in even to something free like PostgreSQL. So given non-standardness, these did not fly. So more recently what people did is they said, let us forget about all these guys. They are wasting their time. Let us build a layer which sits on top of a relational database. It talks to the relational database in SQL. So you can talk to any database as long as you use SQL. But the interface it provides above is of objects very much like the old object-oriented databases. The database interface is pretty similar, but database access is purely in SQL. So what this means is if you have a small pointer goof up, that will cause the system which is which you are running to crash, but it will not cause any damage to the database. Unlike the old object-oriented database where you could mess up the database due to some pointer error. So these are fairly robust that is a public domain one called Hibernate which is very widely used these days. There are a few other proprietary ones also. Recently there was a project for NSDL, National Security Depository which is a company which does backend stuff for about 80% of all stocks that are traded in India. The BSE, NSC stock exchanges they do the actual trading. After the trading happens there is something called settlement. So NSDL has about I think 80% of the settlement so every share which was bought or sold eventually that has to go to NSDL for settlement. So that is a very, very big operation NSDL is processes huge amount of data every day. So NSDL has an old legacy system and they wanted to build a new thing and they consulted Professor Fartuck and one of the things Professor Fartuck told them is look you are a company which is obviously a very high value company. If you build an application which is locked into Oracle or DB2 or any other database the vendors are going to quote an arm and a leg for their product. They know you are locked in they know it is very high value instead use Hibernate. So Hibernate was used not for the object features really although that was a definite plus for the programmers for using it. But it was used because Hibernate can provide a single interface to the programmer where they have a notion of objects. Those objects are actually stored as tuples in a database. If you retrieve an object it is created dynamically by fetching the data from the database. If you update an object the updates are translated back into SQL updates to the database. All that is done by Hibernate and what is nice is that you can switch the back end. Hibernate will work equally well with Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2 you name it it will work. So without changing the application at all you can change the database underneath. So it is like take one out slide another in and it will work. Hibernate just works seamlessly. So for that reason they use Hibernate and then they may use Oracle or DB2 whatever but they are not locked in. If one of the vendors says quotes too high a price they can say fine we will take the lowest vendor and they know that and their prices will be under control. So Hibernate was used was recommended by Professor Fartuck for this non-technical financial reason that is one of the reasons it is taking off. But there is also a technical reason where when you have logic business logic which is written in Java Hibernate is Java based. So when you have stuff written in Java the programmer no longer has to write SQL. They can say fetch object student with this ID instead of writing a query select star from student where ID equal to this there is a simpler API. Then they can look up the fields of the student just as if it is an object Java object and then they can update the field and that update will be translated into SQL. So it is actually easier to use for a variety of tasks than to write it directly in SQL. So it is actually a big win. There are limitations. Hibernate is not the right choice if you are running complex queries. It has a query language but it is more work to learn it. You may find it easier to write queries in SQL. And it is also not the right choice if you are doing a batch update. If you are inserting a million rows at a time Hibernate will slow down the process. There are some limitations but it is a technology which is taking off and it will be good if your students know about it. So that is the reason I have spent nearly 10 minutes telling you more about Hibernate. I am not giving you actual Hibernate code. I am motivating Hibernate. So please go back and fool around with Hibernate. There is a little bit of description in the book. Not much kind of just enough to give you a flavor but if you actually want to code in Hibernate you will have to go read up more stuff. So this slide has a little bit about how it opens a session, create an object, save the object and retrieve run queries which fetch objects and so forth. Okay I am going to stop there with Hibernate. There are other things like the entity data model. I am going to skip that. There are some more slides. I am going to go really fast here on web services. The only thing I want to mention is this is again something which was introduced a long time back, 10, 12 years ago. It did not take off that much except in some limited domains, non-database domains. It is actually used a lot. But more recently even in database backed applications web services have become increasingly important. There is something called REST which is a way of accessing web servlets or any other web application. From a program as opposed to from a browser which is being used increasingly to build applications. So your advanced students may want to figure out more about REST and about something called JavaScript object notation. If you know XML, this is a simplified XML-ish thing which is very tightly integrated with JavaScript and it is used extensively off late in building applications where data has to be transferred to the browser from the back end. It is also used to store data in a database and retrieve it to the application. So it is used in both levels. There are a few slides on rapid application development. I am going to skip these, go read them offline. There are also a few slides on web server performance, something about parallelism which I already told you about. Some stuff on caching which you can read offline, I am going to skip it. There are a few slides on application security and we have a slide on SQL injection. This is actually the same stuff which I covered in chapter 5 but I just wanted to bring it up again because I want to remind you over and over again that SQL injection is by far the biggest danger and it is also unfortunately the most common loophole that programmers tend to leave. Even this semester in this course, after I told my student many times about one fourth of the student projects had SQL injection vulnerability. So it is something which has to be driven home. You have to be very careful about this. So let me wrap up with a quiz question but before that I have already told you yesterday about SQL injection, I am not going to do it. There is one other class of security vulnerability called cross site scripting which can occasionally be an issue. It is not very common but it can be a big danger in certain situations where you allow a get method to update the database. I told you at the beginning of today's talk if you remember the get method should never ever be used for updates. It should only be used for lookups and everything else should be done by post method. One of the reasons for that is if you allow the get method to do updates that leads to a class of vulnerabilities which what are called cross site scripting. I do not have time to describe it in detail. So let me wrap up with this stuff in the slides and in the book which tells you about what it is and what you can do to safeguard yourself. Producing the post method is certainly one of the important parts of safeguarding yourself. So let us wrap up the morning session with this last quiz question. Everyone please press the ST button and be ready. So the question is is the following prepared statement secure connection.prepare statement select star from instructor where name equal to quote plus name quote using a prepared statement and this name comes from some user input. So the questions are yes it is secure no it is not yes if the table is locked and the last one is none of the above. So please get ready to answer it. Time is out for that question. So yesterday I already had an almost equivalent question and I showed you and I told you that prepared statements are key to avoiding SQL injection but it is not a magic mantra. If I just say prepared statement that does not solve all the problems. What is important is any user input has to be mapped to question mark values in the prepared statement and then you have to use the set string or set in those functions to set the parameter values with the value provided by the user and then you execute the query. So there is a sequence prepare statement set the parameters execute. This particular prepared statement is screwing up because it is concatenating the user input which is the cause of all the problem and once you have concatenated user input it is too late saying prepared statement makes no difference the SQL injection can still happen. So let us see what people thought the number of centres responding has improved significantly 144 answers and yes this time the mass majority have got it right but again significant number have chosen one of the wrong options. So please revise these concepts and understand what is going on. I can now take questions so please indicate on a view if you have any questions. I am going to take questions on all the topics which we covered today morning. I see one question from NIT Varangal, NIT Varangal you are on. Okay we generally see the different web pages cache the contents and the next moment we open it up it opens up fastly. But my question is can the web server be cached for performance reasons if so how? So please turn off your mic. So the question is can the web server itself be cached well what is caching? Caching means creating a copy on the fly. So I do not quite know what you mean by caching a web server but let me interpret it as follows. The web server as I told you is often parallelized meaning there are thousands of machines Google dot com, Gmail dot com, Yahoo dot com, Bing dot com, Rediff dot com, I am sure you know economic times dot com. Any website which is high volume today will have many many servers running it and even though you have the same URL they do a trick to decide where your request goes to. So depending on which IP your request comes from it is routed to one of these hundreds or thousands of servers and it will be routed consistently to one server if that server fails it will be routed to somebody else. But the point is that server will keep track of interaction with you. So first of all it is highly parallel. The second thing is if the demand increases so supposing you know times of India most of the request will probably come in the morning some through the day some more in the evening. So there are going to be a lot of times in the night when basically the load is very low. So more still supposing some major event happens suddenly the new sites have a huge increase in the load whereas some other sites may not have such an increase. So what many data centers today can do is they can bring on more servers on the fly. So supposing they find that for times of India dot com they have allocated 10 servers and suddenly there is a spike in load. They can on the fly bring in 10 more application servers for times of India and now your request new request will be routed to one of these servers and as a result an increasing load can be met by increasing the number of servers. This is not the same as caching. These servers have to reside in the data center. They cannot reside on your desktop that does not make any sense. So caching only makes sense for data which you are seeing. It also makes even more sense for a lot of JavaScript code. So if you go to gmail.com what you see is just a little bit of stuff on the screen but to implement all these fancy user interfaces there is a lot of JavaScript code. If you had to load this every single time you went to gmail.com it would be very slow. So what they do what everybody does is they package this JavaScript code into a few library files. Yahoo has a similar library called Yahoo User Interface, YUI which is open source. It is a very nice resource for building rich web applications with JavaScript, Ajax support. It is really nice. If you ever code in JavaScript you should use YUI. You should never ever code JavaScript raw by the way for the simple reason that there are differences in the JavaScript support by browser. So IE deals with JavaScript in one way, Firefox deals with it in a slightly different way. And if you code it your application may work on IE it would not work on Firefox and vice versa. Then you have to sit and test it on each browser and make sure it works. Very often they do not. So I have had situations where I went to passport Nick in from Firefox. I could fill out a number of things and then when I submit it fails because they had included JavaScript which they only tested on IE. That was very unfortunate. I think they have fixed it now but this was the situation for a very long time. If you use YUI on the other hand you do not code directly in JavaScript certain things are hidden from you certain JavaScript libraries and YUI will take care of you know which browser you are on and generate an appropriate code use appropriate library function actually depending on the browser so that it will work correctly. So coming back to caching all of this code which your browser is executing the JavaScript code is downloaded as a file and cached in your browser.  So caching is certainly a very very important way of improving performance. Another way in which caching is used so if you go to let us say certain site like I go to New York Times dot com often because they have very nice articles on science and technology and health. Now if I have to go to their web server in the US each time there is a long round trip delay. So what they do is they outsource to a company they used to use Akamai I do not know what they do today but what that they do is that Akamai or similar companies cached the data from New York Times in a server which resides locally here in they have offices in Bombay I am sure in most of the metropolises in India and across the world. So what happens is that content is cached so when I go to New York Times New York Times actually redirects me quietly to Akamai I do not know about it but Akamai is the one which is actually serving me the actual data with the articles and the photos and so on. So it comes very fast because it is actually cached locally. So that is another kind of caching trick which is hidden from you but is used very widely to both to improve the response time and to deal with very high load. So New York Times server will get some initial request but the request for individual pages are handled by the thousands of servers which Akamai has. New York Times does not have to see all the details they will get summary information but they do not have to send all those bytes over. So the load on their servers is decreased drastically by such caching there is a whole lot of tricks which go on I would not get into the details. Back to you if you have a follow up question. Good morning sir. Sir I have a question you said about HTTP protocol. So we have something also called HTTP S protocol which stands for HTTP secure protocol. So can you state how the security consideration is different in HTTP protocol and HTTP S protocol. Thank you sir over to you. Thanks that is a useful question. So the question is what is the difference between the HTTP protocol and the HTTP S protocol. The HTTP S protocol is a protocol with security built in. Now what is the need for security you know I send a request to sbi.co.in it should go to sbi.co.in presumably what is the security problem. The problem is it is possible for hackers to hack into router and in fact such things have happened. Where they say that if a request comes to sbi.co.in they will redirect it to some machine which they probably captured using a virus and so the request is redirected to that machine and that machine captures your login and password which you are sending to sbi and forwards it to sbi and so you think you are talking to sbi they are sitting in the middle they have captured your login and password and hey they can go back tomorrow and take all the money out of your account. That is a serious problem and the problem arose because you cannot fully trust all the links between you and sbi.co.in somewhere in between somebody may hack and cost trouble. HTTP S is a protocol which deals with security at end to end. So one of the things it does is it is based on a system of certificates digital certificates there is some discussion about digital certificates in the book. But you can learn a lot more about HTTPS from Wikipedia or other sources we do not cover it in detail in our book. So the idea though since you have asked the question is there is a public private key encryption scheme which through certain mechanisms through digital certificates I do not have time to explain exactly how it works although a little bit is there in the book. So the key thing is that your browser can actually verify if it is talking to sbi.co.in or to somebody else that is part A. Part B what prevents is somebody sitting in the middle listening in on your conversation because there is a part of the protocol which uses public keys to exchange a secret key which somebody snooping in between cannot see. Your browser figures out the key which sbi.co.in is using to talk to you. So two of them use some protocols to prevent a man in the middle from ever figuring out what that session encryption key is and as a result if somebody reroutes through their site they cannot see what is the traffic being exchanged because it is encrypted. So the most important your login and password are being sent over HTTPS means that they cannot ever see it. On the other hand if you send login password over HTTP they do not even have to impersonate you they can just snoop on the wire they can put a tap on the wire see the packets going through and in the packet in plain text is your login and password they can just read it and save it. HTTPS prevents this. Now you will say it is not so easy to get into the network and tap in well what you are using Wi-Fi if you do not secure your Wi-Fi unsecured Wi-Fi people can listen in and tap into it easily. So there is a lot of risk of tapping especially when criminals get more sophisticated probably it does not happen that much in India yet but it will happen sooner or later. So HTTPS provides very good security to prevent such things from happening and one of the things you notice in your browser is it shows you a symbol which says it has verified that you are talking to SBI or you are talking to whichever HTTPS site you are talking you think you are talking to. So that is part of the implementation of HTTPS in the browser. I hope that answered your question back to you if you have a follow-up. Sir I have one more question in one of your slide you mentioned about application server and web server in the other part you combine those two things. So I wanted to know just we have something called CGA server so can I say a CGA server or web server or an application server over to you sir. Okay CGI is the protocol which web servers use to execute application programs and run the program get the result and ship it back. This was the original interface it is also not that efficient but it is fairly easy to use to put programs into the CGI folder including PHP and other programs. So in that case there is a web server and then there is a separate thing which process which runs the application. So that is typically a three tier meaning there is a web server application program or server in the database. In contrast when you use Tomcat there is no separate CGI Tomcat can directly receive a web request and then execute your servlet. So when you use Tomcat these have been folded into one. Now some sites do not directly use Tomcat they use Apache as a web server and then tell Apache when you get a request for this region of the website forward it to Tomcat. So in that case Tomcat is running as the application server there is a separate web server also. So that depends on the configuration which is used. Yeah good morning sir. My question is related to JSP sir like in one of the sites it is given that JSP is compiled into Java plus servlets. So you mean to say that JSP when compiled implicitly creates a servlet related to that? Yes exactly it creates a servlet servlets of course are in Java so when JSP is compiled it is done on the fly the application server Tomcat for example will take your JSP page create a Java servlet program out of it compile it and then execute it. How can provide security in JSP? Okay security in JSP is no different from security in Java now I told you one aspect which is when you talk to the database how to prevent SQL injection that is one part of security. A second part of security is you know cross site scripting and other such issues which I did not talk about but they are on the slide. A third and very important aspect which people sometimes forget is every JSP page must first authenticate users before doing anything it should make sure the session is active who is the user before proceeding. Now what I have seen is people will do this in 90 out of 100 JSP pages but in 10 out of 100 they will forget this check and this is not detected during testing because nobody is trying to break the system and once it is live somebody will eventually figure out that this particular JSP page can be executed without any login check or you know you can do something which violates the security policies of the site. So what is important is that every JSP or servlet regardless of how you code it every thing in there must check that the session is there people have logged in and that this person who is currently logged in is authorized to use this particular page that is a minimum security that is required. Now people forget to do this so a policy which we use at IITB for example is that all of these checks session active is the person authorized to use this check these are all put in one JSP file which is included in every other JSP file. In fact this file has some other stuff like headers information for display and so on. So the moment you include this file you can be sure that if the person is not logged in so if the session is not active the page will not get executed if the person is not authorized to view this page we have an authorization menus on the menu systems all that is checked and if it is not authorized the person is rejected only then the rest of the JSP code gets executed. So that is one way to secure a JSP application I hope that answered your question back to you if you have a follow-up. One more sir. Yeah. Do you need to install a Java package to execute an HTML is called as JavaScript? Okay the question is if you are using Eclipse or for that matter NetBeans if you are creating HTML with JavaScript do you need to install Java that is a good question the term JavaScript the name JavaScript is very unfortunate in some sense because JavaScript has absolutely nothing to do with Java. In fact the person who invented who created the JavaScript language called it something else then the marketing people said hey Java is hot by the way it was all from Sun. So JavaScript was from Netscape so the marketing people there said Java is hot if you call it XYZ people won't use it if you call it JavaScript then people will use it and that is how the name came about but it has nothing to do with Java you can create JavaScript from any language you want PHP dot net you name it and as a result if you are writing a PHP program using JavaScript there is no need for Java in your IDE okay I hope that answers your question back to you if you have any other question. Yes in credit card applications especially the debit cards master and visa cards and the database is a locally distributed or they have a copy of database but if someone withdraw money from Chennai airport could fly to Delhi in another hour can also withdraw money how they are integrated and how often that is getting updated that's a good question I think quite here the first few words but I think I understood the question so let me repeat what I understood the databases used by credit card things agencies are probably there are no single database centrally they are cashed locally in order to get performance and volumes and as a result if you use the credit card in medras and then go to Delhi in one hour and use it again there how do they make sure things are consistent and so good question which I will answer although in this particular course we don't have time to get into this issue of distributed data in detail there is a whole bunch of work on dealing with these kinds of issues in this case what they would probably do is see that kind of transactions which run are relatively straightforward so you run a transaction which says somebody is trying to you know buy a product for 2000 rupees or somebody is trying to withdraw 500 rupees from the machine and then in the first case if your card is swiped they trust the vendor who is doing it and then they give a response back saying okay authorized now at this point maybe your local database is doing the authorization and if you do the same thing in Delhi immediately you said you fly to Delhi but hey maybe you made a copy of your card and given it to your friend in Delhi and your friend uses it immediately in theory it would be possible for both of you to withdraw money let's say you are allowed to withdraw 10,000 rupees total and you withdraw 9,000 rupees your friend at the same time withdraws 9,000 rupees because the checking is happening against a local database it's possible that both of you succeed and you are overdrawn the bank will take a risk on this hey it can happen occasionally but it can also happen that you legally withdraw 9,000 rupees and don't pay it back then what in fact the secret dirty secret of credit card companies is that they hate customers who pay all their money in time they love customers who delay payments because then they can charge late fees and exorbitant interest rates so they probably love a customer who overdraws as long as they can trace that customer and extract the money from them in fact there is a whole dirty system of gundas so eventually a gunda will come knocking at your door if you do such things so they are reasonably protected it's a risk for them occasionally somebody may not pay back they are willing to take that risk so consistency in this sense is not guaranteed the moment you have copies of the data but at a business level let me be acceptable on the other hand if you absolutely need consistency then you cannot keep local copies of the database it has to be completely central in fact these days the need for local copies is diminishing connectivity on the Internet is very high bandwidth very fast so visa doesn't need to maintain copies of the database what they will do is each issuing agency will have its database visa will simply route it somebody swipes a card here visa will take that route it dynamically to your credit card issuer who will process it send the response and it comes back so in fact in this case it is not distributed each provider has its own copy and it will be 100% consistent that is what is actually happening these days but many ATMs and so on they are designed such that if the network fails they will still operate and that mode the mode of operating during a failure is where you can have an inconsistency but hopefully it will be rare so the chance of it is small okay I hope that answered your question if you follow please go ahead yes sir it's it's true in credit card but in that international debit card and they use some kind of I heard that some daily limit or banking risk amount say like 15,000 rupees are something is that true yes I don't know about international debit cards in general but your ATM card in general there is a limit and the limit is for couple of reasons the limit is not simply because of this distributed database issue the limit is because somebody may steal your card and spy your password there was a very recent scam where somebody installed a camera on the ATM machines tiny camera which could see what you are typing in and there would be people hanging out there and after you swipe in the credit card your bank debit card ATM card rather then they would say there is some problem and make you swipe the card in their reader and there's a more sophisticated version of it where they install their swipe reader on top of the banks ATM and when you put it in it is actually is getting your magnetic stripe information and the camera is getting the keystrokes and now they can withdraw money at will so it is to protect from such things you don't want a situation like this to clear out your account totally so by putting a limit they make sure you know you will discover it soon enough and the amount of money that is lost will be born day so that's the idea it's not a database consistency issue okay we have taken quite a few questions at this point I'm going to stop


I have tried and tested many quality audio interfaces over the last few years, however I use this one every day. But why? Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Some gear is at the heart of your studio and if you're lucky it should be high quality, have all the capabilities you need and I think it should be enjoyable as well. For almost a year now the Antelope Audio Discrete 8 Synergy Core has played that role for me. I was so excited when they asked me to try out the new Discrete 8 Pro Synergy Core. Honestly, this is so jam-packed with features, I don't know where to start, so let's start with the specs. The Discrete 8 Pro Synergy Core is a 26-in 32-out USB and Thunderbolt 3 interface with 8 console-grade discrete preamps on board and sample rates up to 192 kHz. It comes with 37 real-time low-latency effects, an incredibly versatile mixer and new for this model a virtual patch bay. On the front we see two XLR quarter-inch combo inputs, these are mic, line and high Z-level, so perfect for all things including electric guitars. Moving along we see 8 gain knobs, one for each preamp, quick and easy. Then we see the display which has been upgraded to colour for this version and three function buttons, more on these later. We then see our main rotary knob and a talk back button, by the way this unit has a built-in talk back mic, but we can also assign any other mic to talk with our artists. Finally we also see two knobs, one for each headphone output. At the rear we see the remaining six connections for our preamps, alongside our two main outputs and two reamping outputs, which can also be assigned to alternate speakers. The eight outputs are available via a DSub 25 connector, which saves space being used in the unit with many connectors that may not often be used, but they could be used for additional headphone mixes, effects loops or additional monitors. Above this we can see that the unit can connect to a PC or a Mac via a USB or Thunderbolt 3 connection, giving added flexibility. Next are four ADAT and two SPDIF connections, a watt pump us up to 26 inns and 32 outs. We also see a connection for a foot switch here to activate talk back. Finally we have our four word clock connections and our power connector. Word clock becomes important when we connect several digital devices together, ensuring they keep in sync and avoid artefacts. The new colour display combined with the various buttons and knobs gives us a lot of direct control from the interface itself. By default it displays level indicators for our preamps, but we can see for example that while adjusting a gain knob, it displays information for that preamp. The same is true for our main rotary control, talk back and headphone controls. Pushing our main rotary mutes our monitors, with the top and bottom function buttons doing the same for our headphones. The middle function button gives us some system info and a long press on the bottom function button gives us access to various settings. This interface is Thunderbolt 3 which can really help with latency, but for me it's the onboard real time effects which really make latency a thing of the past. Sure other interfaces will have something called direct monitoring to help with latency, but the payoff is you have to listen to a dry signal, not very inspiring. Also when I want to record electric guitars with an amp and cabinet sim, the lack of latency here is an absolute dream. Now the good news is not only does it have this capability, but you get 37 really useful real time effects for free. So the selection of effects included is really useful in my opinion, starting off with some vintage EQs which are modelled on classic hardware, a handy parametric EQ, a nice selection of compressors and limiters, some mic preamps, a gate and expander, some modulation effects and a tuner. These can all be applied to any source, most commonly a preamp, but it could also be for example an ADAT channel or even a channel coming back from your door. There's also an onboard reverb which is not a plug in, but is useful as a little bit of comfort reverb on the way in. Additional effects can be purchased on the Antelope site and I have to say compared to other companies doing this kind of thing, these are very competitively priced. So this is where the synergy core part of the model name comes in. Antelope Audio's highly efficient onboard effects processing when you're recording means that there isn't that extra load on your computer, but you do get the benefit of real time effects. But what about mixing? This is where something called AFX to door comes in. This is a plug in that gets inserted in your door and it gives you access to your Antelope Audio real time effects, but they're still being processed on the audio interface itself. So you don't get that extra load on your CPU. That means you can have bigger, more efficient sessions. This really is a sort of a game changer for me to be honest with you. Now, there's a couple of things that I do want you to understand about AFX to door. At the time of making this video, it isn't quite available for this unit yet, but who knows? By the time you actually watch this video, it could well be available. Check the link out in the description down below to go to Antelope Audio's website and make sure of that if you really think you want it at the time of purchase. Now, the other thing I want to mention is this is an additional purchase. OK, but again, check out that link in the description because once in a while there may be some specials. The routing on my previous discreet 8 was already incredibly useful, but Antelope Audio have taken it to a new level with this one, offering you some different options when it comes to routing. But let's start off by looking at the method that we use with the old model as well. Whilst the control panel may look similar to those you've seen with other interfaces, we soon find out it's a little different and very powerful. We actually have four virtual mixes available and each one of these can be used by our main outputs. In other words, some outputs could share a mix or they could each have their own individual mix. By the way, we're looking at the default view here, which shows eight channels, but we can also switch to the compact view and see all 32 channels at once. Now, at the top, we can see our controls for our eight preamps where we can set levels, change the input type and switch phantom power. But it's crucial to understand that unlike other control panels, these preamps are not hardwired to the first eight mixer channels. In fact, not only can any of the preamps be assigned to any of the mixer channels, but we can, for example, also assign ADAT inputs or computer outputs. This routing concept comes into play for me often when recording with real-time effects. If we go over to the AFX script, I can assign, for example, preamp 1 to both channels 1 and 2. I could then go ahead and apply real-time effects to just one of these and not the other. Now, importantly, in my DAW, these will be seen as two separate inputs, which means I can record both my wet signal and my dry signal separately, or perhaps apply separate effects to the left and right channels, with only a mono input. In other words, you're no longer constrained to only selecting fixed preamps in your DAW. This is one of those things where once you get used to it, it's hard to go back. New for this version of the interface are some alternate routing workflows. Here we have our from sources and two destinations, and we can drag between the two. For example, if I wanted to connect my ADAT input 1 to mixer channel 1, I can drag it from the top to its destination at the bottom. They're color coded and numbered by default, but we can rename them to make it easier to see what we're selecting. Clicking on them also reveals the routing in the middle. We can also make multiple selections and drag them to destinations. By the way, all of these changes are reflected in the main control panel and vice versa. Changes from the control panel are reflected here. You choose the workflow which works best for you. We also have access to the routing matrix view. For example, I'm selecting my ADAT inputs and assigning them to individual and multiple mixer channels. The flexibility of both routing and choices of methods here is just astounding. So as I said earlier, this model is USB and Thunderbolt 3, which is double the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2, which was used in the previous model. Now I've been using this successfully with my PC, which actually has a Thunderbolt 4 port and my Mac, which has a Thunderbolt 3 port, but I do see people having issues with Thunderbolt from all of the manufacturers to be honest with you. Over the past year I used the Discrete 8 Synergy Core every single day and I have to tell you, I had zero downtime and I think that's because I did carefully follow the instructions. Now I think that's important because in my experience Thunderbolt behaves just a little bit differently to USB and that's what most of us will be coming from. So I've put together a few tips about using Thunderbolt so you can avoid some of the pitfalls. So the first two points I want to make are to do with cables. Thunderbolt 3 cables use a USB-C type connection, but that doesn't mean all USB-C cables are Thunderbolt compatible. So do make sure when you purchase your cable that you are getting a Thunderbolt 3 compatible cable. The next thing you want to consider is the speed of the cable because not all cables are going to give you that maximum speed. It depends on whether they're passive or active and also the length of the cable. Now that's going to be a consideration for you depending on how far away your audio interface is from your computer. Now the final thing that I really found out is very very useful is to have your Thunderbolt audio interface switched on before you switch your PC on. I find that when I do that as I say with all audio interfaces from the different manufacturers I've tried I find that they are consistently discovered by my computer which is not and normally I'm using a PC if I have the device switched on before I switch the PC on. I've been so happy with my previous discrete 8 synergy core that continuing on with this new Pro version is a no-brainer for me and if I could summarize in just one word well I would but I can't because it's the way that this unit so comprehensively solves so many problems which makes it impressive. I mean we're talking about eight console grade discrete preamps. Two ADAT in and outs. SPDIF in and outs giving us a total of 26 inns and 32 out. Two headphone outputs with unique mixes. The choice of using either Thunderbolt 3 or USB. Multiple word clock connections. Internal or assignable talk back with a foot switch control. Advanced routing with multiple workflows. 37 included real-time effects with the option to buy more. All the switches knobs and casing a premium quality and an interactive color display but with all these bells and whistles to tell you the truth it's actually the quality of the preamps in fact all of the IO which impresses me most on a daily basis so must be expensive right. So let's not pretend this sells at some kind of a budget price I mean why would it and how could it at some point you do have to pay for quality and features but I reckon at $1995 US this is really competitive especially when you consider the IO and those onboard real-time effects. Now you do of course as I said earlier have to pay for AFX to door however when you consider the whole ecosystem I still reckon this works out much cheaper because the cost of those additional effects is so much cheaper than the competition. Now I'd recommend checking the link in the description down below to get the current pricing for the time that you're watching this video and also leave me a comment down below to let me know what you think about this unit. Are you tempted by give me your thoughts I'd love to hear them. Now if this is outside of your pricing then I recommend you check out this review here of the ZenQ Synergy Core an awesome unit also from Antelope Audio with some great features enjoy.


Hello, this is LaptopMedia, and today, we will show you how to open the Asus ZenBook Duo 14 UX482 and what's inside of it. To access this laptop's internals, you need to undo all 9 Torx head screws. After that, pry the bottom panel with a plastic tool, starting from the back. Please remember, it would be of great help to us if you just hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. That would motivate us to make even more and better videos for you. One of the few parts that come from last year's model is the battery. It has a capacity of 70 watt hours. Well, the memory here is soldered to the motherboard, which is pity. However, Asus offers options with 8, 16, and 32 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. Storage-wise, you get 1 M.2 PCI-EX4 slot. Quite interestingly, the cooling solution comprises a beefy heat pipe, a decently sized heatsink, and two small fans. If you'd like to see more disassembly videos of the latest notebooks we would highly appreciate if you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.


Hello everybody! Does your laptop get too hot or shuts down while you're playing a game or doing other resource-intensive work? It is probably one of the most widespread issues about laptops. In this video, I'm going to show you how to clean your laptop from dust and do it in a very easy and safe way. Here we go. If you need to recover deleted data, view or restore removed browsing history. Hetman software products will help you. Follow the link in the description. Download the necessary program for free. Install it and analyze the disk. The utility will show you the data you can recover, so you will be able to view it or get it back. In our channel and blog you will find solutions to any problem, from installing an operating system or configuring it, to fixing possible bugs and errors or optimizing mobile gadgets. Our specialists will answer any questions you ask in your comments, under the videos or articles. If a laptop becomes very hot or shuts off by itself when you least expect it or at the most inappropriate moment while its cooling fan is emitting a loud, buzzing noise, much louder than usual, then the most likely cause of the problem is overheating. Usually, it happens because the laptop has collected too much dust inside it, and on a hot summer day like this does become a problem. To clean things up, here is what you need. A Phillips screwdriver, cordon swabs or pocket tissues to clean surfaces from dust. A clean and dry level surface where all the cleaning operations will be performed. Also, you use a small brush for removing dust and other dirt you may find inside, if you like. First of all, make sure you have powered your laptop off. It should never be in a sleeping or hibernation mode while you are cleaning it. Disconnect the AC adapter and take out the battery if it's possible for your model. The actual steps to remove the access panel as well as the shape of this panel may differ depending on a specific model. For example, some laptops have to be completely taken apart for cleaning. I will show you how to do it with the example of Acer Aspire 5100, which I have available here in this studio. But generally speaking, you will need to remove all covers from the underside of the laptop. In my case, one of the covers reveals the hard disk, so I remove it. In the other cover, we can see the system memory, RAM, Wi-Fi model, and the cooling system for the central processor, chipset and the graphics adapter. After the bottom of the laptop is removed, we can go on to clean the cooling fan at heat sinks. Most present-day laptops have a cooling system similar to what we can see now. This kind of system makes use of copper pipes that connect the graphics chip and the CPU with a heat sink and cooling fan. In order to clean the cooling system clogged with dust, you can start with cotton swabs and then proceed with a brush or paintbrush. Be careful, cooling pipes that heat sink things can be bent easily, so work cautiously. Cotton swabs and brushes are also good for cleaning the fan itself. Some laptop models have several fans and heat sinks, if that's your case. Repeat the same cleaning steps for each one. After you have finished with cleaning the fans and heat sinks, it's a good idea to blow away the dust from all other parts of the laptop that are now open. Sometimes, you may need to replace the thermal paste applied onto the CPU and graphics adapter. To do it, dismantle the cooling system and remove the heat sink from the motherboard. However, it is not always possible to go as far as removing only the back panel. In my case, I can only remove one heat sink responsible for cooling the central processor and the chipset. In order to dismantle the other heat sink and clean the laptop from dust completely, I will have to take out the motherboard as well. It means the back and upper panels have to be taken away. So, I take out all screws and remove everything that may get in the way when taking the laptop apart. Remember that in some laptop models, screws can be hidden under stickers or rubber feet. In some cases, you can even find screws on side panels of the laptop body. After all, the screws have been taken out, remove the panel. Do it very gently. If you feel something is holding the panel in place, check for screws you may have missed. In order to remove the laptop's front panel cover, you need to disconnect and take out the keyboard. Sometimes, the display has to be disconnected too. Thoroughly, but carefully, take away the remains of old thermal paste from the CPU or the graphics adapter. Then, apply some new paste. Do it very carefully and use only a little bit of paste. Remember that when you put the heat sink onto it and press, the paste will be spread all over the chip surface. After cleaning, put everything back together and get all screws to their proper places. If you had to remove screws hidden under rubber feet, the feet must have been torn off in the process, so now you have to use some glue to put them back. If this is the case with your laptop, it is the part you should never miss. For laptops, having ventilation openings in the underside, the feet are a must-have. They help to create a clearance between the laptop body and the surface it is standing on, and it makes the air intake for the cooling system. After all of those steps, put the battery into its proper slot, plug in the power supply and check how the laptop works. Most likely, you will notice that the laptop has become not so noisy and hot as before. And that is all for now. You are welcome to watch another video on this channel about replacing the hard disk and system memory in a laptop. You can find the link in the description. And now, hit the like button below and subscribe to Hetman Software channel. Leave comments to ask questions. Thank you for watching and good luck.