"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." -keynes
Then Warren Buffett and guys like him are 'gaming' the system?
'Buy and Hold' made him the 2nd wealthiest man in the world (currently) surpassed only by 'hated monopolist' and one-time computer programmer, William Henry Gates III.
What does Keynes and guys like hime really say about the market success of Buffett and guys like him?
Looks to me like 'Buy and Hold' works and avoiding investing in stuff 'you can't understand' served Warren and his ilk quite well....
We should have the same respect as engineers, doctors and other professionals for what we do.
But programmers don't get that respect if the people who depend on them lose money....
If the software you program isn't 'life critical' (e.g. medical/air traffic control/nuclear power plant mgt./meatspace structural design), you don't exist/matter much as long as everything is working properly. Once something happens to the software due to program/OS/hardware failure or (non)deliberate system compromise (i.e. system cracking), all bets are off!
All a programmer can really do is write code to the best of their abilities in as simple and obvious manner as possible to make software (re)coding as painless and bug free as possible.
Anything else/less is a recipie for disaster and possible tragedy....
Kodak probably 'rebranded' the MAM-As and sold them under the Kodak name years and years ago.
I miss the Kodak gold disks and still have a few around brand new and ready to burn.
As far as I know, the Kodak CDRs I've burnt are still 100% error free after having some of the burnt CDRs for well over 5 years. I simply stored them in a box out of direct sunlight and did what I could to keep them safe from extreme temperatures....
1. Die. (It's the only way to be sure - Hicks [Aliens - 1986])
2. Become a hermit in the wilderness with NO contact with the Internet/mass media/society at large.
3. Record media for later consumption and fast forward through the ads upon consumption -- all but impossible to do for audio-only media unless it is digitally edited and re-saved to eliminate the commercials.
Other than options 1 an 2, I see no way of avoid advertising at all. In my opinion, the truly best ads entertain while they inform. The best example of this would be the old 'Where's the beef' commercial from Wendy's. McDonald's may be the bigest hamburger seller on the planet, but I find Wendy's (and White Castle) hamburgers to be the tastiest of corporate fast food burgers out there.
In closing, making all ads illegal in order to stop them all is a utopian pipe dream -- there is just too much money (and too many wallet/purse carrying consumers) at stake to banish them. Free speech concerns are a non-issue in capitalist-driven societies like the 'western world' such as the USA.
If these individuals have any sort of 'moral conscience ', they will solve their problems without going to war which will inevitably lead to the events depicted in those two widely acknowledged 'antiwar' cinematic masterpieces.
If they don't care or if no other option is viable then go ahead, and fight it out and suffer the inevitable consequences....
All companies that do not have such a 'no-smoking' policy have to deal with that nasty stuff (blech!). On top of that the drug test mentioned for nicotine would 'nail you' in the end per the law of averages and large numbers.
Bottom line:
Best tip for smoking: Don't start. Glad I did.
Here's a brief true story for you.
At my previous job site, smoking was allowed in the building. I had nothing but breathing problems while working there. Management bought several hi-tech electric air filters to clean the air but it did little or no good.
At my current job site, there is a strict 'No smoking indoors' policy. I am happy and breathing better because I am not breathing in seconhand smoke.
XML is 'glorified HTML' -- stay away from XML to keep things as simple as possible. Stick to flat structured ASCII files with fixed record lengths with all numbers stored as readable text strings. I would strongly suggest using tab-delimited text files as these can be imported and exported in any 'officeware' spreadsheet program worth its salt.
Scalability, on the other hand is tougher to come up with a simple, reliable solution. The largest retailer on earth (who I won't mention to avoid flames/snide posts) uses a 'real' database system backed by a ton of expensive hardware. Due to the size and data complexity of the company, this was undoubtedly the best choice. But remember, they are still vulnerable to a DB repair tool letting them down when they need it the most.
If the situation warrants a 'traditional DB', why not implement one that 'logs' all the transactions to a plain ASCII file that can be easily backed up along with empty, starter DBs. That way, if the system crashes, you can 'play back' the log file and re-create the DB up to the moment of failure. This way, there is no need to mess with a DB repair tool that may or may not work. The only disadvantage with this approach is the volume of data being logged and the need to create 'checkpoint' DBs and log files to cut down the 'playback' time to re-create a crashed DB.
I hope this information can help you. Thank you for your consideration.
HangingChad: There's one twitwad company somewhere, in one of the Carolinas I think, that will fire workers for smoking on their own time. They have to take a piss test for nicotine!
Wow, that's in the heart of 'Tobaccoland'! Anyway, nicotine can be construed as a controlled substance as it is used in herbicides/(pesticides?). Plus, that company doesn't want to be bothered with all the healthcare expenses sick smokers rack up during their lifetime as well as all the secondhand smoke and waste tobacco products improperly disposed of at the job site
Tobacco is a proven killer and environment befouler. The twitwad company is saying NO to tobacco consumption/addiction. More power to them.
I have co-written a system that uses a bunch of structured, flat ASCII files for its 'database'.
The system is working properly. Data corruption is obvious and easy to fix when it is detected.
I'd be sunk if this system used a 'regular' DB and it got corrupted...
Again, (in closing), though regular DBs are compact and convenient and can be used to 'prototype' a DB solution, if you truly value your data and cannot risk losing it to some proprietary binary database format, stick to using ASCII files....
Years ago the same thing could be done with pennies 'inserted' into the coin return slot in early SPACE INVADER games. Once word got back to Bally/Midway, that 'feature' was disabled.
Just one more way to 'stick it to the Man' foiled....
Something similar 'happened' to me. Let me explain briefly.
Years and years ago a nearby donut shop had Bally Midway's Tapper in it (the real 'Budweiser' version not the 'root beer' version). So I started playing it and got really good at it.
That was the problem (it did help the game was at the lowest skill level).
Apparently, my long games I played used up more electricity than the profit the shop owner could have gotten from the 25 cents I put in the game to play it. He was very annoyed. So one day, just for me only, he temporarily adjusted the game to the highest skill level and I played it.
I lasted probably about half an hour before I lost. The game action was simply too fast for me. Oh well.
Perhaps I had the last laugh as around that time I had one game last about 8.5 hours. I did this to find out what happened to the game after 255 levels of play.
It starts all the way over like you just put a quarter in. It doesn't 'glitch out' like PAC-MAN or 'lock-up' like GALAGA does when they reach level 255 and beyond (if possible).
Because of the 'pattern play' I used against such Bally/Midway classics like TRON, PAC-MAN, (and BURGERTIME!) I gave up on them and started playing fighting games principally by CAPCOM and SNK and pretty much never looked back. Fighting the computer was diverting but the real fun was fighting another human in a 'versus' contest on these class of videogames.
Nowadays, its just 'graphics, graphics, graphics' and as a result I've all but stopped playing videogames except the classic ones from the late 1970s to early 1980s where, to paraphrase STREET FIGHTER's Ryu (Hoshin): 'The gameplay is all.'
Why would Hollywood invest $100 million plus for a reel of exposed motion picture film. For example, the film negative to T2 is intrinsically worth about $115,000,000.00 as that is the total production cost that went into creating the final product: a motion picture film negative. That negative was turn into motion picture prints that were exhibited back in 1991 to the tune of over $200,000,000.00 in box office receipts.
On the software front there is Microsoft--a very real corporate empire built on intangible, magnetically and optically encoded ones and zeroes since the late 1970s.
Sorry PinxXao, there is *BIG* money in "Intellectual property" which is truly a license to print money for wildly successful (usually 'branded') IP....
Sinus0idal: hmmm anti spam packages for sneaker net. Maybe slapping the postman each time he posts a spam letter. He'd soon learn to sort out the spam first..
colinrichardday: Not a good idea in the US. Interfering with mail delivery is a serious offense.
No need to attack the mailman for junk postal mail, just have a trashcan/paper recycling bin next to the maildrop. When you get your mail, drop the 'Occupant', 'To Our Friends At' - style paper mail into the trash/recycle bin.
Too bad the postman can't do that before they deliver your mail -- that'd be tampering with the mail as well.
P.S. for an added bonus, if they had a industrial strength document shredder handy, those annoying credit card solicitations could be destroyed on the spot instead of taken home and destroyed there....
I say that 'standard' databases are 'deathtraps' for the simple reason that the data is stored in a (usually) proprietary way that cannot be easily reversed engineered in case of a database corruption by way of hardware failure (a hard disk going bad) or some sort of software failure (a virus infected the affected software, causing it to introduce corrupt data records to the database).
Why not use structured, totally readable flat ASCII files (meaning all binary numbers are stored as bulky, readable ASCII strings) in conjunction with additional binary files to index and create the 'table relations' among 2 or more files. With this setup, if the flat file gets corrupted and is detected in time, all you've lost is a handfull of records. With a proper database getting corrupted, cross your fingers and hope the DB repair tool does its job correctly. If it fails you appear to be thoroughly SOL!:(
Any rebuttals?
PS: I know 'handmade' databases like this are a pain to develop and use, my aim was ultimately for the preservation and re-use of data in a readable and understandable format. The drawbacks are obviously size, speed, and complexity but what is more important to you -- your data or lining the pockets of somebody selling you a RDBMS that may fall flat on it's face when you need to get your data back after a system crash. And before it gets mentioned, I'm lumping the freeware RDBMSes out there in the same group as the commercial, gotta-pay-for-them versions -- their only difference is the price (the free ones are $0.00 in the USA).
The only pluses RDBMSes have that I can see is convenience, flexibility, and 'compactness' -- a 'standard' late-model DB created by a RDBMS usually has a handful of files with it -- perhaps as few as 1 or 2.
If a 'real' RDBMS can be implemented as a bunch of flat, 100% readable ASCII files and supported by additional binary files as mentioned above, I'd like to be one of the ones to use one if it is available (now). The one that came closest to that goal that I know of was Ashton-Tate's DBASE II from the 1980s (but I imagine it stored binary numbers in databases in binary and not readable ASCII strings)....
PPS: Those extra 'binary files' could be done as straight readable ASCII files and you have a fairly corrupt-proof system I'd say. The person or company that can make such a RDBMS stands to make a fortune with new customers and customers of competing RDBMSes 'jumping ship' and (paying for) using the 'new' RDBMS.
Reading about your loss, Fahrvergnuugen, gave me this simple(?) idea that should put a stop to this kind of 'the cashier's check cleared' crap.
Get 2 bank accounts. Keep a token amount in one of them to keep it open to use as follows:
If somebody wants to pay by cashier's check (or anything other than 'dead presidents') for something like this, tell them to use an Electronic Funds Transfer and give them the account number to one of the accounts. NEVER EVER GIVE OUT THE ACCOUNT NUMBER OF THE SECOND ACCOUNT! If the transaction is legit, the money instantly appears in the account. Once it does, transfer it to the 2nd account and completed the sale. Everybody is happy ('cept the banks): You got paid, the buyer got their stuff and you used the bank's EFT service legitimately for free. No checks/money orders/Western Union/whatever bounced as the funds transfer was instataneous. If the buyer was a scammer/crook, he/she will move on to another sucker to fleece who isn't savvy like this.
Paypal has been doing stuff like this on the internet for years. They get paid by you leaving your funds on account with them which they use to earn interest to pay for the upkeep of the Paypal system (and earn a tidy profit). To put Paypal out of business, everybody who uses it have to keep their balances at zero at all times.
AC: That's f*cking naive. The feds do not get involved unless sums greater than 50K have changed hands. All you're doing is spamming the feds when you forward emails to them.
If you prepend 'NO MONEY LOST' to the subject line (and you *truly* haven't) the USSS can hand those emails off to someone else for further analysis at their discretion. For example, if they get a lot of 419 spams being spewed from particular email account(s) or IP adress(es) THEN they might investigate. Until then, (a large amount of lost) MONEY TALKS! NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!
Selfbain: Why don't they just hold the astronauts funerals before they launch so they can attend.
Tastefully tasteless 'gallows humour'. Well done I must say.
One I 'vaguely' remember from 1986 (regretfully).
Q: What kind of shampoo does Christa McAuliffe use? A: Head & Shoulders.
Cheap, abrupt, and repugnant.
See the difference?
Violence and 'graphic imagery' is the key.
The same could be said of Maj. Kong's 'wild ride' from Dr. Strangelove but that was a cinematic work of brilliant satire and (thankfully so far) never happened.
Gallows humour is one way for people to deal/cope with tragedy in a comforting, somewhat uplifting fashion -- it is an outgrowth of the 'culture of death' purveyed by the USA media industry in the form of such things like gangsta rap, death metal, and corpse laden action movies.
Is it no wonder people watching '9/11' unfold on their TVs back on 2001-09-11 thought they were 'watching a movie'?...
Phillymjs: First of all, there will NEVER be another passenger aircraft hijacking again. The age of "Be cool, do what they say, and everything will be fine" ended at about 8:50 or so on September 11, 2001. Now, as soon as some schmuck stands up in a plane and says, "Okay, everybody this is a hija--," everyone within reach of him will try to tear him apart.
I take it you haven't seen Wrong Is Right? That chilling satire posited susicide bombers who had explosives surgically implanted within their bodies which are then detonated at the appropriate time. Why hijack a plane and (no doubt) planebomb (famous) buildings when you can blow a planeload of people up anyway. Think it's not possible?... Consider this:
1) Fashion the explosives into artificial limbs (if possible) and have amputee suicide bombers wear them on the plane -- being sure to sit next to a window in the cabin for obvious reasons....
2) Surgically replace arm and leg bones with explosives encased in metal rods and whatnot -- that oughta fool 'em -- they can even bring a doctor's note for the 'hardware' in their bodies....
3) The simple, elegant solution involving explosives and the use of that small hidden placeall women have (for the most part) if you know what I mean....
Richard Reid's attempted 'shoebomber' attack could be construed as the 'tip of the iceberg' for these kinds of attacks....
There are only two (extreme) ways to stop the deadly 'nonsense' of worldwide terrorism once and for all....
a) For there to be a lasting, permanent pardigm shift in USA foreign affairs that treats foreign nations as equals and not as resources to be plundered at the expense of the native population. By one account I read of, the USA consumes 60% of the world's resources but only has about 5% of the world's population. If this is done, worldwide terrorism will ratchet down to deadly, regional squabbles between neigboring groups of people sharing common resources or radically juxtaposed ideologies who can't 'all get along'. Unfortunately, this condition includes Pakistan and India who are now in the midst of their own (private?) 'cold war'.
b) Go the Deterrence route and be done with it and 'damn all consequences.' This rationale was 'espoused' by the character Gabriel Shear in Swordfish. In a nutshell: make the punishment disproportionate to the crime through the use of nuclear weapons with extreme prejudice!
P. S. The first 9/11 'planebombing' happened at 8:46:40 AM EST (12:46:40 UTC) on 2001-09-11 when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center complex. The attacks of that terrible day were breathtakingly spectacular in their visibility, intensity, carnage, damage, viciousness, and simplicity.
Had commercial passenger airline security in America (as well as the rest of the world) been conducted in the 'El-Al' style, this tragedy might not have happended in the first place!
Something is fundamentally wrong in the world at large when 'geopolitics' motivate people to kill as many other people as possible at one time in order to bring attention to their plight (since using nonviolent methods gets them nowhere)....
Please stop this sensless boodbath as soon as possible.
They gave RMS one of their 'genius grants' back in 1990.
Strange, a year later, Linus Torvalds began work on the software kernel that 'bears' his name.
Is he a crackpot too?
IBM doesn't think so. They invested heavily in Linux making it more that some obscure 'hobby OS'.
Then there is '(Ex) Chairman Bill' who happened to be at the right place at the right time and made the 'deal of a lifetime' at the dawn of the PC era that eventually made him the world's wealthiest man.
Is Bill Gates a crackpot?
Crackpot or not, the USA decided not to break Microsoft up like they did AT&T back in 1984.
That should give you some idea how much clout some people have in the world.
Too bad 'money makes the world go around' instead of something less...monetary....
interstellar_donkey: Or, if you are paying good money for an employee who, despite their best efforts can't handle the work load which other employees have no problem with, then she really isn't right for the job either.
In this case, you can:
1) Put/dump the extra work the employee in question can't handle on the other employees. If they are paid by the hour, you may be in for (unwanted) overtime expenses.
2) You can fire her and get someone else. Won't that be rather expensive (if she is not let go on solely job performance reasons)? Will her replacement be as trustworthy and more productive as she was? How many replacements will you have to hire and fire before you can find the one person who can take up the workload the employee in question couldn't handle? Could it be that it is ultimately cheaper to do option 1 or get rid of her and personally replace her (you do trust yourself, do you:) )?
No wonder the credo of entrepreneurship is 'Fire Your Boss!' The people who are truly self-employed and depend on no one but their customers for their next paycheck have nothing but awe and admiration from me--how about you?
AC: Computers are meant to work for us, not the other way around. Bloody typical Windows mindset.
Want to put Bill out of business?
Create a secure operating system.
The closest one to this goal might be 'NSA-Linux' from our 'friends' at Fort Meade, Maryland, USA.
Its existence won't put a dent in the 'Microsoft monopoly'. However, said 'friends' apparently asked/forced Microsoft to put in a backdoor for them in Windows. Moral of the story: Don't do anything sensitive on Windows period. If you must, use trusted, 3rd party crypto software (or write your own) to encipher your secrets.
Even better and more secure: write your own OS from the boot sector up using only BIOS, CPU-specific machine language, and a 'disk zapper' program that runs in another OS to get you started. Can you write an OS (even a 'toy' one)? I could probably write a 'floppy' based 'toy' OS if I had the time to do it--it would be nowhere near the (abysmal?) quality or have the mass acceptance of the stuff coming out of Microsoft.
Though Windows is a gigantic, insecure kludge of an operating system, it does have one shining plus: backwards compatibility. For example, I have a very good backgammon game programmed back in 1991 that runs on my Windows 2000 PC in 2005 without any problems. Can the same be said of MacOS?
If Apple Computers had the market share that Windows enjoys, Mac-based malware would be 'an unwanted evil that won't go away' and not a curiosity as it is today (anybody got links to documented Apple/Mac-based malware from the wild -- I heard it's out there and the {unscrupulous}Apple/Mac supporters just choose to ignore that it exists.)
money is far more important than people in this world today....:(
Just look at the insurance industry:
1) They reap far more money in premiums than they pay out to cover claims made against them. I have heard that most of the (prime?) real estate in the USA is owned in whole or part by insurance companies.
2) Their unwilingness to cover any and all forms of 'nuclear devastation' -- it would surely bankrupt them (if not already utterly destroyed by said devastation). I have heard 'horror stories' of hurricaine victims getting dropped/shafted(?) by their insurance companies due to them making a policy claim in the wake of hurricane damage. Eventually, the 'Feds' had to step in to 'make things right'! This proves an industry-wide reluctance to pay insurance claims in the aftermath of even a catastrophic natural event--'act of God' in insurance parlance.
3) Look at Lloyd's Of London. Those guys will insure just about anything for the right premium payments!
When you get right down to it, in today's world, the overriding attitude is that people are worthless, a renewable, exploitable resource individually replaceable in nine months or less. How long will it take for the painful memories of the London, England bombings of 2005-07-07 to fade into the mists of obscurity like the similar attacks carried out in Madrid, Spain on 2004-03-11.
In closing, it is my hope this tragedy will put 'the powers that be' on high alert, seeing how 2005-08-06 is 'right around the corner'....
Slashdot Mirror
"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." -keynes
Then Warren Buffett and guys like him are 'gaming' the system?
'Buy and Hold' made him the 2nd wealthiest man in the world (currently) surpassed only by 'hated monopolist' and one-time computer programmer, William Henry Gates III.
What does Keynes and guys like hime really say about the market success of Buffett and guys like him?
Looks to me like 'Buy and Hold' works and avoiding investing in stuff 'you can't understand' served Warren and his ilk quite well....
Any other views?
We should have the same respect as engineers, doctors and other professionals for what we do.
But programmers don't get that respect if the people who depend on them lose money....
If the software you program isn't 'life critical' (e.g. medical/air traffic control/nuclear power plant mgt./meatspace structural design), you don't exist/matter much as long as everything is working properly. Once something happens to the software due to program/OS/hardware failure or (non)deliberate system compromise (i.e. system cracking), all bets are off!
All a programmer can really do is write code to the best of their abilities in as simple and obvious manner as possible to make software (re)coding as painless and bug free as possible.
Anything else/less is a recipie for disaster and possible tragedy....
Contrast this to the good old "Kodak Gold" CDs I was burning onto back in 1996, almost all of which are still readable with 0% errors...
American Digital
Mitsui MAM-A CDRs
Kodak probably 'rebranded' the MAM-As and sold them under the Kodak name years and years ago.
I miss the Kodak gold disks and still have a few around brand new and ready to burn.
As far as I know, the Kodak CDRs I've burnt are still 100% error free after having some of the burnt CDRs for well over 5 years. I simply stored them in a box out of direct sunlight and did what I could to keep them safe from extreme temperatures....
1. Die. (It's the only way to be sure - Hicks [Aliens - 1986])
2. Become a hermit in the wilderness with NO contact with the Internet/mass media/society at large.
3. Record media for later consumption and fast forward through the ads upon consumption -- all but impossible to do for audio-only media unless it is digitally edited and re-saved to eliminate the commercials.
Other than options 1 an 2, I see no way of avoid advertising at all. In my opinion, the truly best ads entertain while they inform. The best example of this would be the old 'Where's the beef' commercial from Wendy's. McDonald's may be the bigest hamburger seller on the planet, but I find Wendy's (and White Castle) hamburgers to be the tastiest of corporate fast food burgers out there.
In closing, making all ads illegal in order to stop them all is a utopian pipe dream -- there is just too much money (and too many wallet/purse carrying consumers) at stake to banish them. Free speech concerns are a non-issue in capitalist-driven societies like the 'western world' such as the USA.
Food. Clothing. Shelter. Communications. Defense. Medical.
The only six industries vital to human existence.
All other industries can be construed as 'optonal luxuries'.
Count your blessings if you work in one of these six industries--your work is truly needed for continued survival of the human race on this planet.
This is not a joke/troll post--this is what I believe to be an undeniable fact of life:
Observe the conglomeration in the food and communications industries.
The prominence and power of the defence and medical industries.
The expensive hoopla revolving around the 'high end' part of the clothing industry.
The worry that a crash of the shelter industry will bring about a (worldwide) financial depression.
Is it no wonder the 10 'dot bombs' mentioned in the article bombed--they didn't effectively fill a need in one of the six industries I mentioned.
Since 1993, both Grave Of The Fireflies AND Schindler's List should be mandatory viewing by anybody contemplating warfare of any sort.
If these individuals have any sort of 'moral conscience ', they will solve their problems without going to war which will inevitably lead to the events depicted in those two widely acknowledged 'antiwar' cinematic masterpieces.
If they don't care or if no other option is viable then go ahead, and fight it out and suffer the inevitable consequences....
All companies that do not have such a 'no-smoking' policy have to deal with that nasty stuff (blech!). On top of that the drug test mentioned for nicotine would 'nail you' in the end per the law of averages and large numbers.
Bottom line:
Best tip for smoking: Don't start. Glad I did.
Here's a brief true story for you.
At my previous job site, smoking was allowed in the building. I had nothing but breathing problems while working there. Management bought several hi-tech electric air filters to clean the air but it did little or no good.
At my current job site, there is a strict 'No smoking indoors' policy. I am happy and breathing better because I am not breathing in seconhand smoke.
Smoking kills. Smoking discomforts.
Case closed.
XML is 'glorified HTML' -- stay away from XML to keep things as simple as possible. Stick to flat structured ASCII files with fixed record lengths with all numbers stored as readable text strings. I would strongly suggest using tab-delimited text files as these can be imported and exported in any 'officeware' spreadsheet program worth its salt.
Scalability, on the other hand is tougher to come up with a simple, reliable solution. The largest retailer on earth (who I won't mention to avoid flames/snide posts) uses a 'real' database system backed by a ton of expensive hardware. Due to the size and data complexity of the company, this was undoubtedly the best choice. But remember, they are still vulnerable to a DB repair tool letting them down when they need it the most.
If the situation warrants a 'traditional DB', why not implement one that 'logs' all the transactions to a plain ASCII file that can be easily backed up along with empty, starter DBs. That way, if the system crashes, you can 'play back' the log file and re-create the DB up to the moment of failure. This way, there is no need to mess with a DB repair tool that may or may not work. The only disadvantage with this approach is the volume of data being logged and the need to create 'checkpoint' DBs and log files to cut down the 'playback' time to re-create a crashed DB.
I hope this information can help you. Thank you for your consideration.
HangingChad: There's one twitwad company somewhere, in one of the Carolinas I think, that will fire workers for smoking on their own time. They have to take a piss test for nicotine!
Wow, that's in the heart of 'Tobaccoland'! Anyway, nicotine can be construed as a controlled substance as it is used in herbicides/(pesticides?). Plus, that company doesn't want to be bothered with all the healthcare expenses sick smokers rack up during their lifetime as well as all the secondhand smoke and waste tobacco products improperly disposed of at the job site
Tobacco is a proven killer and environment befouler. The twitwad company is saying NO to tobacco consumption/addiction. More power to them.
Just quick reply to your previous post.
I have co-written a system that uses a bunch of structured, flat ASCII files for its 'database'.
The system is working properly. Data corruption is obvious and easy to fix when it is detected.
I'd be sunk if this system used a 'regular' DB and it got corrupted...
Again, (in closing), though regular DBs are compact and convenient and can be used to 'prototype' a DB solution, if you truly value your data and cannot risk losing it to some proprietary binary database format, stick to using ASCII files....
Years ago the same thing could be done with pennies 'inserted' into the coin return slot in early SPACE INVADER games. Once word got back to Bally/Midway, that 'feature' was disabled.
Just one more way to 'stick it to the Man' foiled....
Something similar 'happened' to me. Let me explain briefly.
Years and years ago a nearby donut shop had Bally Midway's Tapper in it (the real 'Budweiser' version not the 'root beer' version). So I started playing it and got really good at it.
That was the problem (it did help the game was at the lowest skill level).
Apparently, my long games I played used up more electricity than the profit the shop owner could have gotten from the 25 cents I put in the game to play it. He was very annoyed. So one day, just for me only, he temporarily adjusted the game to the highest skill level and I played it.
I lasted probably about half an hour before I lost. The game action was simply too fast for me.
Oh well.
Perhaps I had the last laugh as around that time I had one game last about 8.5 hours. I did this to find out what happened to the game after 255 levels of play.
It starts all the way over like you just put a quarter in. It doesn't 'glitch out' like PAC-MAN or 'lock-up' like GALAGA does when they reach level 255 and beyond (if possible).
Because of the 'pattern play' I used against such Bally/Midway classics like TRON, PAC-MAN, (and BURGERTIME!) I gave up on them and started playing fighting games principally by CAPCOM and SNK and pretty much never looked back. Fighting the computer was diverting but the real fun was fighting another human in a 'versus' contest on these class of videogames.
Nowadays, its just 'graphics, graphics, graphics' and as a result I've all but stopped playing videogames except the classic ones from the late 1970s to early 1980s where, to paraphrase STREET FIGHTER's Ryu (Hoshin): 'The gameplay is all.'
PinxXao: "Intellectual property" is not real property.
Yes it is.
Why would Hollywood invest $100 million plus for a reel of exposed motion picture film. For example, the film negative to T2 is intrinsically worth about $115,000,000.00 as that is the total production cost that went into creating the final product: a motion picture film negative. That negative was turn into motion picture prints that were exhibited back in 1991 to the tune of over $200,000,000.00 in box office receipts.
On the software front there is Microsoft--a very real corporate empire built on intangible, magnetically and optically encoded ones and zeroes since the late 1970s.
Sorry PinxXao, there is *BIG* money in "Intellectual property" which is truly a license to print money for wildly successful (usually 'branded') IP....
Sinus0idal: hmmm anti spam packages for sneaker net. Maybe slapping the postman each time he posts a spam letter. He'd soon learn to sort out the spam first..
colinrichardday: Not a good idea in the US. Interfering with mail delivery is a serious offense.
No need to attack the mailman for junk postal mail, just have a trashcan/paper recycling bin next to the maildrop. When you get your mail, drop the 'Occupant', 'To Our Friends At' - style paper mail into the trash/recycle bin.
Too bad the postman can't do that before they deliver your mail -- that'd be tampering with the mail as well.
P.S. for an added bonus, if they had a industrial strength document shredder handy, those annoying credit card solicitations could be destroyed on the spot instead of taken home and destroyed there....
That stops ALL telemarketing.
(Telemarketing cell phone users is ILLEGAL in the USA.)
As Hicks(?) said in Aliens: "It's the only way to be sure."
I say that 'standard' databases are 'deathtraps' for the simple reason that the data is stored in a (usually) proprietary way that cannot be easily reversed engineered in case of a database corruption by way of hardware failure (a hard disk going bad) or some sort of software failure (a virus infected the affected software, causing it to introduce corrupt data records to the database).
:(
Why not use structured, totally readable flat ASCII files (meaning all binary numbers are stored as bulky, readable ASCII strings) in conjunction with additional binary files to index and create the 'table relations' among 2 or more files. With this setup, if the flat file gets corrupted and is detected in time, all you've lost is a handfull of records. With a proper database getting corrupted, cross your fingers and hope the DB repair tool does its job correctly. If it fails you appear to be thoroughly SOL!
Any rebuttals?
PS: I know 'handmade' databases like this are a pain to develop and use, my aim was ultimately for the preservation and re-use of data in a readable and understandable format. The drawbacks are obviously size, speed, and complexity but what is more important to you -- your data or lining the pockets of somebody selling you a RDBMS that may fall flat on it's face when you need to get your data back after a system crash. And before it gets mentioned, I'm lumping the freeware RDBMSes out there in the same group as the commercial, gotta-pay-for-them versions -- their only difference is the price (the free ones are $0.00 in the USA).
The only pluses RDBMSes have that I can see is convenience, flexibility, and 'compactness' -- a 'standard' late-model DB created by a RDBMS usually has a handful of files with it -- perhaps as few as 1 or 2.
If a 'real' RDBMS can be implemented as a bunch of flat, 100% readable ASCII files and supported by additional binary files as mentioned above, I'd like to be one of the ones to use one if it is available (now). The one that came closest to that goal that I know of was Ashton-Tate's DBASE II from the 1980s (but I imagine it stored binary numbers in databases in binary and not readable ASCII strings)....
PPS: Those extra 'binary files' could be done as straight readable ASCII files and you have a fairly corrupt-proof system I'd say. The person or company that can make such a RDBMS stands to make a fortune with new customers and customers of competing RDBMSes 'jumping ship' and (paying for) using the 'new' RDBMS.
Reading about your loss, Fahrvergnuugen, gave me this simple(?) idea that should put a stop to this kind of 'the cashier's check cleared' crap.
Get 2 bank accounts. Keep a token amount in one of them to keep it open to use as follows:
If somebody wants to pay by cashier's check (or anything other than 'dead presidents') for something like this, tell them to use an Electronic Funds Transfer and give them the account number to one of the accounts. NEVER EVER GIVE OUT THE ACCOUNT NUMBER OF THE SECOND ACCOUNT! If the transaction is legit, the money instantly appears in the account. Once it does, transfer it to the 2nd account and completed the sale. Everybody is happy ('cept the banks): You got paid, the buyer got their stuff and you used the bank's EFT service legitimately for free. No checks/money orders/Western Union/whatever bounced as the funds transfer was instataneous. If the buyer was a scammer/crook, he/she will move on to another sucker to fleece who isn't savvy like this.
Paypal has been doing stuff like this on the internet for years. They get paid by you leaving your funds on account with them which they use to earn interest to pay for the upkeep of the Paypal system (and earn a tidy profit). To put Paypal out of business, everybody who uses it have to keep their balances at zero at all times.
Problem solved.
AC: That's f*cking naive. The feds do not get involved unless sums greater than 50K have changed hands. All you're doing is spamming the feds when you forward emails to them.
If you prepend 'NO MONEY LOST' to the subject line (and you *truly* haven't) the USSS can hand those emails off to someone else for further analysis at their discretion. For example, if they get a lot of 419 spams being spewed from particular email account(s) or IP adress(es) THEN they might investigate. Until then, (a large amount of lost) MONEY TALKS! NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!
Note: This is an on-topic 'ad'. If you hate ads, read no further. If you are 'drowning' in unwanted spam email, please read on.
No single technology will bring spam under control. It's going to take a blend of technologies, namely:
Spam filtering.
Preventing forged headers.
Making e-mail sending computationally expensive.
I did this back in July, 2004 as Windows shareware, the platform that could *really* use such software.
Note: Submitted with 'No Karma Bonus' to prevent cries of 'Karmawhoring/astroturfing'.
Selfbain: Why don't they just hold the astronauts funerals before they launch so they can attend.
Tastefully tasteless 'gallows humour'. Well done I must say.
One I 'vaguely' remember from 1986 (regretfully).
Q: What kind of shampoo does Christa McAuliffe use?
A: Head & Shoulders.
Cheap, abrupt, and repugnant.
See the difference?
Violence and 'graphic imagery' is the key.
The same could be said of Maj. Kong's 'wild ride' from Dr. Strangelove but that was a cinematic work of brilliant satire and (thankfully so far) never happened.
Gallows humour is one way for people to deal/cope with tragedy in a comforting, somewhat uplifting fashion -- it is an outgrowth of the 'culture of death' purveyed by the USA media industry in the form of such things like gangsta rap, death metal, and corpse laden action movies.
Is it no wonder people watching '9/11' unfold on their TVs back on 2001-09-11 thought they were 'watching a movie'?...
Phillymjs: First of all, there will NEVER be another passenger aircraft hijacking again. The age of "Be cool, do what they say, and everything will be fine" ended at about 8:50 or so on September 11, 2001. Now, as soon as some schmuck stands up in a plane and says, "Okay, everybody this is a hija--," everyone within reach of him will try to tear him apart.
I take it you haven't seen Wrong Is Right? That chilling satire posited susicide bombers who had explosives surgically implanted within their bodies which are then detonated at the appropriate time. Why hijack a plane and (no doubt) planebomb (famous) buildings when you can blow a planeload of people up anyway. Think it's not possible?... Consider this:
1) Fashion the explosives into artificial limbs (if possible) and have amputee suicide bombers wear them on the plane -- being sure to sit next to a window in the cabin for obvious reasons....
2) Surgically replace arm and leg bones with explosives encased in metal rods and whatnot -- that oughta fool 'em -- they can even bring a doctor's note for the 'hardware' in their bodies....
3) The simple, elegant solution involving explosives and the use of that small hidden place all women have (for the most part) if you know what I mean....
Richard Reid's attempted 'shoebomber' attack could be construed as the 'tip of the iceberg' for these kinds of attacks....
There are only two (extreme) ways to stop the deadly 'nonsense' of worldwide terrorism once and for all....
a) For there to be a lasting, permanent pardigm shift in USA foreign affairs that treats foreign nations as equals and not as resources to be plundered at the expense of the native population. By one account I read of, the USA consumes 60% of the world's resources but only has about 5% of the world's population. If this is done, worldwide terrorism will ratchet down to deadly, regional squabbles between neigboring groups of people sharing common resources or radically juxtaposed ideologies who can't 'all get along'. Unfortunately, this condition includes Pakistan and India who are now in the midst of their own (private?) 'cold war'.
b) Go the Deterrence route and be done with it and 'damn all consequences.' This rationale was 'espoused' by the character Gabriel Shear in Swordfish. In a nutshell: make the punishment disproportionate to the crime through the use of nuclear weapons with extreme prejudice!
P. S. The first 9/11 'planebombing' happened at 8:46:40 AM EST (12:46:40 UTC) on 2001-09-11 when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center complex. The attacks of that terrible day were breathtakingly spectacular in their visibility, intensity, carnage, damage, viciousness, and simplicity.
Had commercial passenger airline security in America (as well as the rest of the world) been conducted in the 'El-Al' style, this tragedy might not have happended in the first place!
Something is fundamentally wrong in the world at large when 'geopolitics' motivate people to kill as many other people as possible at one time in order to bring attention to their plight (since using nonviolent methods gets them nowhere)....
Please stop this sensless boodbath as soon as possible.
Thank you for reading this.
elgee: Stallman is a crackpot. No more, no less.
Tell that to the MacArthur Fellowship people.
They gave RMS one of their 'genius grants' back in 1990.
Strange, a year later, Linus Torvalds began work on the software kernel that 'bears' his name.
Is he a crackpot too?
IBM doesn't think so. They invested heavily in Linux making it more that some obscure 'hobby OS'.
Then there is '(Ex) Chairman Bill' who happened to be at the right place at the right time and made the 'deal of a lifetime' at the dawn of the PC era that eventually made him the world's wealthiest man.
Is Bill Gates a crackpot?
Crackpot or not, the USA decided not to break Microsoft up like they did AT&T back in 1984.
That should give you some idea how much clout some people have in the world.
Too bad 'money makes the world go around' instead of something less...monetary....
interstellar_donkey: Or, if you are paying good money for an employee who, despite their best efforts can't handle the work load which other employees have no problem with, then she really isn't right for the job either.
:) )?
In this case, you can:
1) Put/dump the extra work the employee in question can't handle on the other employees. If they are paid by the hour, you may be in for (unwanted) overtime expenses.
2) You can fire her and get someone else. Won't that be rather expensive (if she is not let go on solely job performance reasons)? Will her replacement be as trustworthy and more productive as she was? How many replacements will you have to hire and fire before you can find the one person who can take up the workload the employee in question couldn't handle? Could it be that it is ultimately cheaper to do option 1 or get rid of her and personally replace her (you do trust yourself, do you
No wonder the credo of entrepreneurship is 'Fire Your Boss!' The people who are truly self-employed and depend on no one but their customers for their next paycheck have nothing but awe and admiration from me--how about you?
AC: Computers are meant to work for us, not the other way around. Bloody typical Windows mindset.
Want to put Bill out of business?
Create a secure operating system.
The closest one to this goal might be 'NSA-Linux' from our 'friends' at Fort Meade, Maryland, USA.
Its existence won't put a dent in the 'Microsoft monopoly'. However, said 'friends' apparently asked/forced Microsoft to put in a backdoor for them in Windows. Moral of the story: Don't do anything sensitive on Windows period. If you must, use trusted, 3rd party crypto software (or write your own) to encipher your secrets.
Even better and more secure: write your own OS from the boot sector up using only BIOS, CPU-specific machine language, and a 'disk zapper' program that runs in another OS to get you started. Can you write an OS (even a 'toy' one)? I could probably write a 'floppy' based 'toy' OS if I had the time to do it--it would be nowhere near the (abysmal?) quality or have the mass acceptance of the stuff coming out of Microsoft.
Though Windows is a gigantic, insecure kludge of an operating system, it does have one shining plus: backwards compatibility. For example, I have a very good backgammon game programmed back in 1991 that runs on my Windows 2000 PC in 2005 without any problems. Can the same be said of MacOS?
If Apple Computers had the market share that Windows enjoys, Mac-based malware would be 'an unwanted evil that won't go away' and not a curiosity as it is today (anybody got links to documented Apple/Mac-based malware from the wild -- I heard it's out there and the {unscrupulous}Apple/Mac supporters just choose to ignore that it exists.)
Sorry Andy,
:(
money is far more important than people in this world today....
Just look at the insurance industry:
1) They reap far more money in premiums than they pay out to cover claims made against them. I have heard that most of the (prime?) real estate in the USA is owned in whole or part by insurance companies.
2) Their unwilingness to cover any and all forms of 'nuclear devastation' -- it would surely bankrupt them (if not already utterly destroyed by said devastation). I have heard 'horror stories' of hurricaine victims getting dropped/shafted(?) by their insurance companies due to them making a policy claim in the wake of hurricane damage. Eventually, the 'Feds' had to step in to 'make things right'! This proves an industry-wide reluctance to pay insurance claims in the aftermath of even a catastrophic natural event--'act of God' in insurance parlance.
3) Look at Lloyd's Of London. Those guys will insure just about anything for the right premium payments!
When you get right down to it, in today's world, the overriding attitude is that people are worthless, a renewable, exploitable resource individually replaceable in nine months or less. How long will it take for the painful memories of the London, England bombings of 2005-07-07 to fade into the mists of obscurity like the similar attacks carried out in Madrid, Spain on 2004-03-11.
In closing, it is my hope this tragedy will put 'the powers that be' on high alert, seeing how 2005-08-06 is 'right around the corner'....