The ideal solution, especially if you're starting from scratch, is to use UTF-8 on your entire code stack. Set your database to use an appropriate UTF-8 code page at all times, write your code using UTF-8 strings (e.g. in Python all strings are UTF-8 unless otherwise specified), set your various content headers to declare that you're sending UTF-8, etc.
Unfortunately, with legacy data you can't always do that, so under those conditions you're going to need to do a conversion into and out of your database and possibly plan to migrate to a converted database.
Music has always been more of a hobby than a career. Most musicians are either amateurs who play or sing for fun (or in some cases academic credit), or semi-pros who get paid to perform or teach but can't afford to quit their day job. And most professional musicians' primary source of income is teaching amateur musicians.
A 3-4 person bar band that is getting at least $2000 a week (and not spending it on booze or drugs or hookers) is more-or-less staying afloat. Everyone else is either broke or has another source of income.
But on the upside, being a good semi-pro musician will get you laid.
The biggest problem tends to be user data that includes Unicode code points that don't happen to match the equivalent ASCII value, such as accented vowels, the German sharp s, or the French and Spanish cedilla on the C. These are perfectly valid UTF-8 strings, but if you treat them as ASCII you will often end up with 2 mangled characters instead of the valid character you want. And of course anyone from an area that doesn't use the Roman alphabet at all is in real trouble: Greeks, Russians, anyone from Asia, Arabic-speakers, etc.
And lest you think this is no big deal, and it's just an annoying question-mark box on a web page somewhere, realize that this can also lead to things like database backups that can't be restored until someone finds the offending character, XML services that don't work properly on that one article about El Nino, and makes it difficult to catch security attacks that use Unicode to get around ASCII-based regex filters.
Actually, most developers and a lot of systems I encounter use a character encoding that they say is UTF-8, but actually kinda uses ASCII. This causes all sorts of interesting issues, which is why I've dubbed this encoding WTF-8.
The House districts are gerrymandered to the point where representatives pick voters rather than the other way around, so vote for whoever you like knowing it will have very little bearing on who has power.
You actually think that is shutting down or that the fake sequestration dance had shit to do with it?... I mean they closed down parks, did everything they could to make people feel the cuts as much as they could, all the while making no meaningful cut to anything.
You're confusing sequestration (passed in 2011 and 2012, to avert a government shutdown in 2012, and went into effect March 1, 2013) with the actual government shutdown (October 1, 2013). It's completely understandable why you'd make that mistake: The Republicans in the House have been trying to use various tactics to shut the US government down completely and then fund only those things that they think should be kept in place, at a rate of approximately once every 3-4 months, for the last 3 years.
I'm guessing the specs didn't include "Allow everyone and his kid brother to access other people's personal information as an aid to identity theft." I'm guessing they also didn't include "Crash all the time" and "Fail to actually allow people to sign up for health care."
Here's how I see this general situation: 1. Government contracts with company C to do task X. 2. Company C, instead of doing X, does the much cheaper Y that looks kind of like X and says they did X. 3. Conclusion: Company C defrauded the government, and should be held liable, as well as removed from any future consideration for any government contract. 4. Second conclusion: If government continues to do business with Company C or failed to sue the pants off of the company for breach of contract, then the government screwed up (or is corrupt). 5. Invalid conclusion: The government screwed up but Company C had nothing to do with it.
This is hardly a new phenomenon: The prominent US corporations (such as IBM and Coca-Cola) who traded with the Germans in the late 1930's and early 1940's should give you an idea of where corporate America's loyalties truly lie.
The impulse appears to be this: People who's stated values conflict with their what they actually wanted to do attempt control their universe so that they will never come in contact with the chance to do whatever it is they say is bad.
For example, a standard right-wing argument against any kind of sexual permissiveness is that it will lead to either pedophilia or beastiality (or both). As Bill Maher argued recently, what they're really saying is that the only reason they don't bang kids or animals is that there's laws preventing it, which simply makes these guys sick bastards.
Of course, they couch in terms of "I'm moral, so should everybody else." But they really mean "I'm having a harder time staying moral than everybody else."
To be fair, the land was not granted to the Christians who were promised an entirely new universe.
They certainly thought that they had a holy right to it, back when they decided to go and take it from the Muslims starting in 1095, spending the next 200 years trying to gain and maintain control of it.
but (however much comfort this is) is enforcing its claims only selectively
Doesn't that mean that it's not a valid trademark? I thought that trademarks had to be defended, always, or they lost their status.
Also, by their logic, I'm hereby trademarking the word "Hello", and that means that the makers of Hello Kitty must pay me approximately eleventy-billion dollars.
And a great deal of trouble might have been prevented had the god in question had not granted the land between the Euphrates and the Red Sea to all 3 groups!
My favorite similar question from an interviewer: "What Star Wars character would you describe yourself as, and why?"
After I got the job, I asked the fellow who'd asked the question about it, and he said, "Oh, I don't care which character you pick, what I care about is what qualities you like about that character."
That's actually my standard answer to that question, because in fact I am not a good liar, and it affects me professionally.
For example, one company I worked for wanted all their employees to fake enthusiasm for the company. I was of course no good at that, because I'm not a good liar. Another wanted me to say that a job would take 1 week when it would actually take 4 weeks, and management got mad when I refused to change my estimates (it of course took 5 weeks because they tried to take shortcuts).
And so on. Although I always liked an answer from the old 90's show Daria: "My main weakness is my inability to answer stock questions with stock answers."
More specifically, there are currently about 2 jobs per 5 job seekers. This is a big improvement over 1 job per 5 seekers that we had about 4 years ago, but it still means that 60% of people actively looking for work cannot find a job.
But in nearby Manchester, they vary between round and square.
The simplest argument for round: If you have to move them to get down under the street to fix something, you can roll them back into place instead of lifting them. That whole "wheel" thingy was a great idea, wasn't it?
While I'm not debating that the climate is changing, let's also not pretend that this is not all about $$$.
When the Maldives or New Orleans is underwater, in part because of climate change, people die needlessly. When the heat makes formerly arable land into desert, people starve. When formerly great sources of water dry up, people dehydrate and die.
So it's not all about money. It's partially about money: It's expensive to actually do something significant about climate change, and easier for the people in power to simply let the people without power die than it is to pay for fixing the problem.
The problem with this is that it is exactly what many of those so-called AGW "deniers" have been saying all along.
Well, to be fair, the AGW deniers said that only after it was repeatedly demonstrated that there was in fact some variety of global warming going on. This is the "The barge is headed towards the bridge abutment, but that's not the fault of the engines, it's the current instead." argument. Which doesn't make much sense, because even in that situation, you still want to do everything you can to solve the problem.
Are you claiming that roads wouldn't exist without government?
If we're talking about paved roads suitable for long-distance travel, absolutely. There's no law that I'm aware of that makes it illegal for somebody to buy a strip of land between two places that people might want to travel between, build a highway, and set up tollbooths to pay for it. But nobody does so and nobody has for about a century, which means either that the free market cannot provide this service at a favorable rate, or the government can do it cheaper.
There are private streets, but those are almost always short, and there's usually massive contention between neighbors about who's going to maintain it, who's going to clear it in the winter, how much money everyone's going to have to kick in, and so forth. Their primary purpose tends to be keeping out members of the public that the residents believe are "undesirables", not being a model of efficiency.
I have been in the private sector for decades and have never been actively motivated to screw anyone over, nor have I worked for any company that was.
Sure you are: 1. If you're in sales, you are incentivized (either formally or informally) to both sell people stuff they don't need (increasing volume), and sell people stuff at a price higher than they really want or need to pay. If you can sell a $200 product at $40,000, I guarantee you you'll get nothing but cheering from your bosses. 2. If you're in operations, you are incentivized to cut costs whenever possible. That includes cutting corners and making products cheaper and less resilient than they're billed as to the buyer. Again, if you succeed in doing this, you will get cheers and congratulations and perks from your bosses. 3. Even if you aren't cutting corners, when you cut costs to, say, save $15 on the manufacture of your $200 product, the last thing you want to do is pass those savings on to the customer by selling your product at $185, because that doesn't help the company at all. You will wait until one of your competitors figures out how to cut their prices to $185 before you make a similar move. 4. If you work in finance department of a corporation, part of your job is to make your bosses look good by making the company appear more attractive to investors. You are actively encouraged to fudge the facts a bit in your reports, and if you can bring in investment you will get approval from your bosses.
If you work in IT, then you're a support function for either sales, operations, or finance, depending on what you're actually doing. You personally didn't screw anyone over, but you are part of a system that actively encourages bad behavior.
What I should have done, but didn't, was figure out the frequency of the wireless mike the preacher almost certainly uses during his services, then secretly broadcast this message right after the pitch to donate to the replacement statue "DID YOU NOT GET THE MESSAGE THE FIRST TIME? I THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY CLEAR ABOUT IT!". The reaction of the congregation would probably have been priceless.
Slashdot Mirror
The ideal solution, especially if you're starting from scratch, is to use UTF-8 on your entire code stack. Set your database to use an appropriate UTF-8 code page at all times, write your code using UTF-8 strings (e.g. in Python all strings are UTF-8 unless otherwise specified), set your various content headers to declare that you're sending UTF-8, etc.
Unfortunately, with legacy data you can't always do that, so under those conditions you're going to need to do a conversion into and out of your database and possibly plan to migrate to a converted database.
Music has always been more of a hobby than a career. Most musicians are either amateurs who play or sing for fun (or in some cases academic credit), or semi-pros who get paid to perform or teach but can't afford to quit their day job. And most professional musicians' primary source of income is teaching amateur musicians.
A 3-4 person bar band that is getting at least $2000 a week (and not spending it on booze or drugs or hookers) is more-or-less staying afloat. Everyone else is either broke or has another source of income.
But on the upside, being a good semi-pro musician will get you laid.
The biggest problem tends to be user data that includes Unicode code points that don't happen to match the equivalent ASCII value, such as accented vowels, the German sharp s, or the French and Spanish cedilla on the C. These are perfectly valid UTF-8 strings, but if you treat them as ASCII you will often end up with 2 mangled characters instead of the valid character you want. And of course anyone from an area that doesn't use the Roman alphabet at all is in real trouble: Greeks, Russians, anyone from Asia, Arabic-speakers, etc.
And lest you think this is no big deal, and it's just an annoying question-mark box on a web page somewhere, realize that this can also lead to things like database backups that can't be restored until someone finds the offending character, XML services that don't work properly on that one article about El Nino, and makes it difficult to catch security attacks that use Unicode to get around ASCII-based regex filters.
It's Irish for, and I quote, "a bunch of stuff".
I mean, I'm glad it can do almost anything, but I'm still waiting for import antigravity to work properly.
Actually, most developers and a lot of systems I encounter use a character encoding that they say is UTF-8, but actually kinda uses ASCII. This causes all sorts of interesting issues, which is why I've dubbed this encoding WTF-8.
The House districts are gerrymandered to the point where representatives pick voters rather than the other way around, so vote for whoever you like knowing it will have very little bearing on who has power.
You actually think that is shutting down or that the fake sequestration dance had shit to do with it? ...
I mean they closed down parks, did everything they could to make people feel the cuts as much as they could, all the while making no meaningful cut to anything.
You're confusing sequestration (passed in 2011 and 2012, to avert a government shutdown in 2012, and went into effect March 1, 2013) with the actual government shutdown (October 1, 2013). It's completely understandable why you'd make that mistake: The Republicans in the House have been trying to use various tactics to shut the US government down completely and then fund only those things that they think should be kept in place, at a rate of approximately once every 3-4 months, for the last 3 years.
I'm guessing the specs didn't include "Allow everyone and his kid brother to access other people's personal information as an aid to identity theft." I'm guessing they also didn't include "Crash all the time" and "Fail to actually allow people to sign up for health care."
Here's how I see this general situation:
1. Government contracts with company C to do task X.
2. Company C, instead of doing X, does the much cheaper Y that looks kind of like X and says they did X.
3. Conclusion: Company C defrauded the government, and should be held liable, as well as removed from any future consideration for any government contract.
4. Second conclusion: If government continues to do business with Company C or failed to sue the pants off of the company for breach of contract, then the government screwed up (or is corrupt).
5. Invalid conclusion: The government screwed up but Company C had nothing to do with it.
This is hardly a new phenomenon: The prominent US corporations (such as IBM and Coca-Cola) who traded with the Germans in the late 1930's and early 1940's should give you an idea of where corporate America's loyalties truly lie.
The impulse appears to be this: People who's stated values conflict with their what they actually wanted to do attempt control their universe so that they will never come in contact with the chance to do whatever it is they say is bad.
For example, a standard right-wing argument against any kind of sexual permissiveness is that it will lead to either pedophilia or beastiality (or both). As Bill Maher argued recently, what they're really saying is that the only reason they don't bang kids or animals is that there's laws preventing it, which simply makes these guys sick bastards.
Of course, they couch in terms of "I'm moral, so should everybody else." But they really mean "I'm having a harder time staying moral than everybody else."
To be fair, the land was not granted to the Christians who were promised an entirely new universe.
They certainly thought that they had a holy right to it, back when they decided to go and take it from the Muslims starting in 1095, spending the next 200 years trying to gain and maintain control of it.
but (however much comfort this is) is enforcing its claims only selectively
Doesn't that mean that it's not a valid trademark? I thought that trademarks had to be defended, always, or they lost their status.
Also, by their logic, I'm hereby trademarking the word "Hello", and that means that the makers of Hello Kitty must pay me approximately eleventy-billion dollars.
And a great deal of trouble might have been prevented had the god in question had not granted the land between the Euphrates and the Red Sea to all 3 groups!
My favorite similar question from an interviewer: "What Star Wars character would you describe yourself as, and why?"
After I got the job, I asked the fellow who'd asked the question about it, and he said, "Oh, I don't care which character you pick, what I care about is what qualities you like about that character."
That's actually my standard answer to that question, because in fact I am not a good liar, and it affects me professionally.
For example, one company I worked for wanted all their employees to fake enthusiasm for the company. I was of course no good at that, because I'm not a good liar. Another wanted me to say that a job would take 1 week when it would actually take 4 weeks, and management got mad when I refused to change my estimates (it of course took 5 weeks because they tried to take shortcuts).
And so on. Although I always liked an answer from the old 90's show Daria: "My main weakness is my inability to answer stock questions with stock answers."
More specifically, there are currently about 2 jobs per 5 job seekers. This is a big improvement over 1 job per 5 seekers that we had about 4 years ago, but it still means that 60% of people actively looking for work cannot find a job.
But in nearby Manchester, they vary between round and square.
The simplest argument for round: If you have to move them to get down under the street to fix something, you can roll them back into place instead of lifting them. That whole "wheel" thingy was a great idea, wasn't it?
See, I have 2 other desires in a job: (4) Competent coworkers. (5) Sane and competent management.
So far, I've gotten (4) several times, but never seen (5) in action, in my decade-long career.
How about the most obvious application of being able to mix metals and plastics together: Converting yourself a whale tank using transparent aluminum!
While I'm not debating that the climate is changing, let's also not pretend that this is not all about $$$.
When the Maldives or New Orleans is underwater, in part because of climate change, people die needlessly. When the heat makes formerly arable land into desert, people starve. When formerly great sources of water dry up, people dehydrate and die.
So it's not all about money. It's partially about money: It's expensive to actually do something significant about climate change, and easier for the people in power to simply let the people without power die than it is to pay for fixing the problem.
The problem with this is that it is exactly what many of those so-called AGW "deniers" have been saying all along.
Well, to be fair, the AGW deniers said that only after it was repeatedly demonstrated that there was in fact some variety of global warming going on. This is the "The barge is headed towards the bridge abutment, but that's not the fault of the engines, it's the current instead." argument. Which doesn't make much sense, because even in that situation, you still want to do everything you can to solve the problem.
Are you claiming that roads wouldn't exist without government?
If we're talking about paved roads suitable for long-distance travel, absolutely. There's no law that I'm aware of that makes it illegal for somebody to buy a strip of land between two places that people might want to travel between, build a highway, and set up tollbooths to pay for it. But nobody does so and nobody has for about a century, which means either that the free market cannot provide this service at a favorable rate, or the government can do it cheaper.
There are private streets, but those are almost always short, and there's usually massive contention between neighbors about who's going to maintain it, who's going to clear it in the winter, how much money everyone's going to have to kick in, and so forth. Their primary purpose tends to be keeping out members of the public that the residents believe are "undesirables", not being a model of efficiency.
I have been in the private sector for decades and have never been actively motivated to screw anyone over, nor have I worked for any company that was.
Sure you are:
1. If you're in sales, you are incentivized (either formally or informally) to both sell people stuff they don't need (increasing volume), and sell people stuff at a price higher than they really want or need to pay. If you can sell a $200 product at $40,000, I guarantee you you'll get nothing but cheering from your bosses.
2. If you're in operations, you are incentivized to cut costs whenever possible. That includes cutting corners and making products cheaper and less resilient than they're billed as to the buyer. Again, if you succeed in doing this, you will get cheers and congratulations and perks from your bosses.
3. Even if you aren't cutting corners, when you cut costs to, say, save $15 on the manufacture of your $200 product, the last thing you want to do is pass those savings on to the customer by selling your product at $185, because that doesn't help the company at all. You will wait until one of your competitors figures out how to cut their prices to $185 before you make a similar move.
4. If you work in finance department of a corporation, part of your job is to make your bosses look good by making the company appear more attractive to investors. You are actively encouraged to fudge the facts a bit in your reports, and if you can bring in investment you will get approval from your bosses.
If you work in IT, then you're a support function for either sales, operations, or finance, depending on what you're actually doing. You personally didn't screw anyone over, but you are part of a system that actively encourages bad behavior.
Reminds me of the day that a giant statue of Jesus was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. And of course, the religious nutjobs immediately started raising money to rebuild it.
What I should have done, but didn't, was figure out the frequency of the wireless mike the preacher almost certainly uses during his services, then secretly broadcast this message right after the pitch to donate to the replacement statue "DID YOU NOT GET THE MESSAGE THE FIRST TIME? I THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY CLEAR ABOUT IT!". The reaction of the congregation would probably have been priceless.