At one point about two years ago, I was parsing a lot of web log files, so I whipped up a perl script to do it. It was taking forever to run, and a coworker suggested that I rewrite the parser in Java. I looked at him like he was from Mars, but I also had nothing better to do while perl was chugging away, so I rewrote the parser.
I rewrote the perl code basically line for line (i.e. no optimizations) in Java using Java's built in regular expression parser, and the thing ran about 100x as fast.
That was the last line of perl I have ever written, and probably ever will write.
I'm sorry. You argued so persuasively and authoritatively against the TSA, who has not allowed a single terrorist attack against the airline industry, that I mistook you for someone who knew what he was talking about.
I apologize with deepest sincerity for jumping to that unfortunate conclusion. Rest assured that from now on, I'll take you at your word that you do not at all know what you are talking about. Feel free to go back to your php scripting.
If I ever need some help in the "question dodging" industry, the "making lame excuses" industry, or the "criticizing things I don't understand" industry, you'll be my first call.
The benefits conferred to infants via breast milk are vastly and dangerously overstated. New mothers are so brainwashed by well-meaning people like yourself that they actually endanger their babies by purchasing breast milk from unscreened donors--breast milk that could infect their children with hepatitis or HIV.
The benefits of breastfeeding can only be measured over large populations. If you think your individual child is going to get sick any less, or be any smarter, or even any measurable benefit from breastfeeding, you are crazy.
Perhaps you think that I am crazy. Perhaps you are right. But if I am, please show me the test that can determine even whether or not a 5 year old kid was breastfed (let alone, whether that 5 year old kid got any benefit/detriment from breast milk vs. formula).
2. Given the fact that I've done quite a bit of research, I have bothered (a lot) to compare the curricula. When I say "opportunities" I mean the opportunity to get out of college and also be marketable.
Well, you should extend your research beyond curricula. Depending on what you want to do after graduation, whether your took that undergraduate algorithms class stateside or in Timbuktu is going to be either a) irrelevant, or b) totally and completely irrelevant.
I don't know if there even is a University in Timbuktu (I suspect that there is not), but studying abroad will definitely make you more marketable. In the modern, global economy, you'll have familiarity with another culture, another language, and will be comfortable working with people in another culture (even if it's not Malian culture). You'll have handled weird situations and weird bureaucracy. No amount of US-based corporate red tape can phase you after what you'll have already dealt with at a foreign Interior Ministry in another language.
I'm not trying to sell you on it, since you're already going. I just wanted to let you know that you won't need to hide it on your resume. Hell, when I graduated, I had a separate section for international experience.
You'd probably have less chance than studying a broad in the USA. Just find yourself one of the "top 10" party universities, and DON'T TELL THEM YOU'RE A CS STUDENT!!!
I know this was meant to be funny, but most people I know (including myself) had absurdly good luck with non-American women. The rest of the world may claim to hate us, but if that's what it means to hate us, then I don't want to be liked.
Which bank do you use? I download transactions from B of A with no problems. Could the problem be with your bank?
I didn't mean to imply that I thought QB was perfect, but just try Peachtree once and you'll see what I mean. QB just blows Peachtree out of the water.
Intuit has about 80% of the US SMB market, in spite of the fact that they suck.
Quickbooks has their insane market share because Quickbooks is, hands down, the best SMB accounting package.
I wish I could possibly tell you how much my life has improved since converting from Peachtree (which I got free after rebate) to Quickbooks (which I paid full price for). It really is that much better. I used to fall way behind in my books because of how much I dreaded fighting with Peachtree. Quickbooks just works.
Competition is a good thing, and I'd love to see someone else raising the bar, but right now, Quickbooks is the only game in town. You couldn't pay me to go back to Peachtree.
Quickbooks, for those of us who aren't accountants, really kicks some serious ass. Everything about it is easy, from accounts receivable, to accounts payable, to payroll, to customer statements, to financial statements, to inventory, to every damn thing.
I hate accounting, and Quickbooks makes it so easy that I don't have to spend much of my time at it.
Quicken doesn't cost $50 if you buy a copy that's a year or two out-of-date. Not much has changed in the field of checkbook balancing since the 14th century, give or take a few hundred years, so if you run Quicken 2006, you're not sacrificing a whole lot. I think I paid about $10 for my copy of Quicken 2006.
With Quicken, the entire setup, from the time I took the CD out of the wrapper, to the end of setting up transaction download for about 15 accounts, took under 90 minutes. Given what I know about open source, I'm going to hazard a guess that GNUCash could not match this learning curve.
If I have physical access to the machine, it's mine.
That may be true, but can you make that machine be "yours" in a way that I can't tell the machine's been tampered with?
Maybe you can, and maybe you can't, but would you risk it when I can punish you for violating the rules? Especially since for 90% of the kids, this laptop isn't going to be their only computing device?
Personally, I could probably subvert the security on my work laptop and use it for non-work-related tasks. But why would I do that when I have a perfectly good laptop that I own and can use without restriction? Especially considering that I could be terminated for a policy violation?
As an aside, I think that providing middle school kids with school-issued laptops is a horrible idea.
Being Jewish in this Christian country (Christmas is a "secular" holiday? Riiiight...), my wife and I had to solve the issue of what to tell our kids about Santa when they were young. On the one hand, we were not comfortable lying to them, but on the other hand, we did not think it was fair to their Christian friends' families for us to send them to school saying, "I know something you don't know! Santa Claus is fake. I have proof!"
While I'll never understand why Christians find it so damaging to a child to think presents come from their parents as opposed to Santa Claus, in the end, we simply pleaded ignorance on the whole Santa issue and let them know what their Chanukah presents came from us (how funny is that? Traditionally, Jews exchanged gifts on Purim, not Chanukah. Chanukah is a minor holiday, but it happens to coincide with Christmas, and well... the rest is history.). They were happy to receive gifts, and it turned out they didn't much care whom the delivery agent was.
To expand a bit on that, though, I think that the phenomenon of 7-year-olds becoming upset to learn that Santa did not deliver their Christmas gifts has more to do with the worldview shift than anything Santa-related. 7-year-olds are beginning to understand a fair amount of nuance, but at the end of the day, they still need to live in a world of absolutes. When something so absolute as their favorite magical person in the world goes up in a puff of logic, then, yeah, they are not going to react well.
The parents' reactions could have been a lot better, however. I mean, think about it. You've got a kid who had believed in Santa--who still *wants* to believe in Santa--but who just got confronted with an uncomfortable revelation. The parents reacted by blowing up about what a terrible person that teacher that was, and how the teacher lied, and how you shouldn't listen to your teachers, and whatever else. But at the end of the day, we're talking about a mysterious creature. Would it have killed these parents to just keep the mystery alive?
"Your substitute teacher doesn't believe in Santa Claus?!?"
"No, she said that Santa is really you and dad! And that it's physically impossible for one person to visit every home in the world in one night and..."
"But you sat on Santa's lap at the mall and I was standing right there... if I Santa were me, wasn't *that* impossible?"
"But she said that isn't really Santa! That it's just an actor and..."
"Well I guess that's what your teacher believes...and I can understand how that would make her sad. (Smile deeply and look at the kid in the eye) I believe that Santa is wonderful and real and magic! Tell me, what do you believe?"
If the kid still believes the teacher (yeah right), then call the kid's bluff and offer to write a note for Santa saying that all the children in the home don't believe in Santa anymore and to just go away without leaving any presents and never to come back. That should buy you another year of blissful ignorance.
You know, it's funny. The older I get, the more and more I believe in Santa Claus. And that the parents are the little Christmas Elfs. Tell me, Mantrid, what do you believe?
Server hardware and consumer PC hardware are different. Server hardware doesn't traditionally get powered down (hell, many servers have dual power supplies in case one fails), so the hardware manufacturers don't test this as much.
But the bigger issue is software. If a desktop PC doesn't boot cleanly, it's a bummer, and one employee will lose some productivity, but ultimately it's not a big deal. If server processes don't come up, the stakes are a lot higher.
When you press the power button on that server, are confident that everything will come up cleanly? How confidant are you? Would you bet your job on it? If you keep your payroll server down for the two weeks it is idle, try to bring it up to run payroll, discover that it won't come up, would you be comfortable with having your boss on line 1 asking where the fuck his paycheck is, your boss's boss on line 2 wondering the same thing, the Department of Labor on like 3 demanding to know why they just got 1000 complaints filed against you and how you are going to resolve them right fucking now?
Sure, the server will probably boot cleanly and doom will probably not strike. But when it does, the cost is going to exceed, many times over, the savings you'll ever see on your electric bill by powering-down a few servers.
(1) *ALL* of these sites buttress MySQL with support code. Take a look at what Slashdot has to do to enable MySQL to keep up with the sites needs.
You are going to have to do that with any database. My current client is a large publisher, and you should see the shit we have to do to Oracle to get it to perform, and that is with 6 full-time DBAs.
(2) None of these sites are mission critical. Would you TRUST your bank transactions on MySQL? LOL, no way!
This is not exactly a scientific metric.
None of the sites you mention simply execute a query and display the results. Every single one of them requires a lot of extra programming work to serialize and cache load because MySQL sucks.
Like I said, if we just had "pages calling Oracle", we would fry Oracle. It required extensive SQL tuning, client optimization, denormalization, caching, clustering, load-balancing, etc. to keep Oracle alive.
Given all of the framework we have built around Oracle, I would bet that MySQL with NDB-cluster would be able to keep up, but I have no data to back that claim up with. The point, of course, is moot, because we use a lot of other features in Oracle that are not present in the open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
That implies that making antibiotics non-prescription for humans is more important to avoid than reducing the use of antibiotics in animals, even though purely considering the amount of usage in each case would suggest that the animal case is far more critical.
For what it's worth, antibiotics are non-prescription in parts of the world.
When I was in Thailand, I got a case of the "traveler's shits" (I think that's the technical term), walked into a pharmacy, and ordered a pack of Ciprofloxacin (it's not branded Cipro there); and 2 minutes and $2 later, I was on my way. I didn't even have to tell the pharmacist what I wanted it for (although I'm sure he knew.... why else would an American tourist walk in and ask for Cipro?).
I was referring to everything that you and other straight men avoid doing for fear of being accused of being gay, so you are more of an expert than I am.
I'm sorry if I offended you, but my comment was intended as an admission that my "gaydar" is not particularly well calibrated, so I wouldn't necessarily notice the same social cues that you would.
I can assure you that I do not make a conscious effort to avoid being "accused" of being gay, whatever that means. It's been a lot of years since I've done anything to project "I'm available" signals to anyone, male or female.
As someone with an addictive personality, I disagree with you.
As someone without an addictive personality, I don't think it's society's responsibility to remove everything that might be dangerous to you. I don't think we should ban WoW because you might play it 100 hours/wk, lose your job, your wife, your life. I don't think we should ban alcohol or tobacco because you might lose your job, your wife, your life.
The world is not your personal Disneyland. If you have a problem, get help. But don't expect society to protect you.
Banning alcohol is simply impossible. It's just too easy to make. The ingredients for beer are the same as the ingredients for bread, and it's simple to brew high-quality beers, ales, meads, etc. both safely and inexpensively.
And also undetectably, I might add. In college, some fraternity brothers of mine brewed enough beer for the entire house for all of our parties (we served the guests Busch Light) inside a small closet. There would be no way to spot a home brewery.
But none of those are failures of the databases themselves. I won't blame MySQL if a meteor takes out the data center.
Actually, what you said was "A database should work 100% of the time, for everyone, and discussion should revolve around features or price or support. It should go without saying that it never loses data. That's just not something you should ever even have in the back of your mind.", and I was bringing up those other failure modes to reinforce the fact that you should always have data loss in the back of your mind.
No one is offering you a 100% guarantee that when you put data into your RDBMS, you will necessarily be able to get it out. This is why god invented backups, binary logs, point in time recovery, etc. Even your beloved PostgreSQL has an entire facility for Backup and Recovery.;)
I'll blame the heck out of it when I get "Table 'FOO' is marked as crashed and should be repaired" for no apparent reason.
If you are going to chastise me for bringing up older pg examples, you are going to need to start talking about InnoDB. MyISAM made some design choices to favor speed and simplicity over data consistency, and this fact is not in dispute.
InnoDB will not randomly tell you your table is corrupt and lock you out until you issue some weird command.
Slashdot Mirror
At one point about two years ago, I was parsing a lot of web log files, so I whipped up a perl script to do it. It was taking forever to run, and a coworker suggested that I rewrite the parser in Java. I looked at him like he was from Mars, but I also had nothing better to do while perl was chugging away, so I rewrote the parser.
I rewrote the perl code basically line for line (i.e. no optimizations) in Java using Java's built in regular expression parser, and the thing ran about 100x as fast.
That was the last line of perl I have ever written, and probably ever will write.
I'm sorry. You argued so persuasively and authoritatively against the TSA, who has not allowed a single terrorist attack against the airline industry, that I mistook you for someone who knew what he was talking about.
I apologize with deepest sincerity for jumping to that unfortunate conclusion. Rest assured that from now on, I'll take you at your word that you do not at all know what you are talking about. Feel free to go back to your php scripting.
Ok, good to know.
If I ever need some help in the "question dodging" industry, the "making lame excuses" industry, or the "criticizing things I don't understand" industry, you'll be my first call.
What would be your recommendation for preventing terrorist attacks?
Break the mirror, pull out one drive, relocate it to a secure location, replace the drive with another, and rebuild the array.
There. A mirror is a backup. QED.
Personally, between a Linux and an OSX server to admin I just flip a coin if there is no price difference.
I dunno. A buddy of mine had 3 kernel panics this year under OSX, and I have had zero under Linux. I'm convinced.
The benefits conferred to infants via breast milk are vastly and dangerously overstated. New mothers are so brainwashed by well-meaning people like yourself that they actually endanger their babies by purchasing breast milk from unscreened donors--breast milk that could infect their children with hepatitis or HIV.
The benefits of breastfeeding can only be measured over large populations. If you think your individual child is going to get sick any less, or be any smarter, or even any measurable benefit from breastfeeding, you are crazy.
Perhaps you think that I am crazy. Perhaps you are right. But if I am, please show me the test that can determine even whether or not a 5 year old kid was breastfed (let alone, whether that 5 year old kid got any benefit/detriment from breast milk vs. formula).
2. Given the fact that I've done quite a bit of research, I have bothered (a lot) to compare the curricula. When I say "opportunities" I mean the opportunity to get out of college and also be marketable.
Well, you should extend your research beyond curricula. Depending on what you want to do after graduation, whether your took that undergraduate algorithms class stateside or in Timbuktu is going to be either a) irrelevant, or b) totally and completely irrelevant.
I don't know if there even is a University in Timbuktu (I suspect that there is not), but studying abroad will definitely make you more marketable. In the modern, global economy, you'll have familiarity with another culture, another language, and will be comfortable working with people in another culture (even if it's not Malian culture). You'll have handled weird situations and weird bureaucracy. No amount of US-based corporate red tape can phase you after what you'll have already dealt with at a foreign Interior Ministry in another language.
I'm not trying to sell you on it, since you're already going. I just wanted to let you know that you won't need to hide it on your resume. Hell, when I graduated, I had a separate section for international experience.
You'd probably have less chance than studying a broad in the USA. Just find yourself one of the "top 10" party universities, and DON'T TELL THEM YOU'RE A CS STUDENT!!!
I know this was meant to be funny, but most people I know (including myself) had absurdly good luck with non-American women. The rest of the world may claim to hate us, but if that's what it means to hate us, then I don't want to be liked.
Which bank do you use? I download transactions from B of A with no problems. Could the problem be with your bank?
I didn't mean to imply that I thought QB was perfect, but just try Peachtree once and you'll see what I mean. QB just blows Peachtree out of the water.
Intuit has about 80% of the US SMB market, in spite of the fact that they suck.
Quickbooks has their insane market share because Quickbooks is, hands down, the best SMB accounting package.
I wish I could possibly tell you how much my life has improved since converting from Peachtree (which I got free after rebate) to Quickbooks (which I paid full price for). It really is that much better. I used to fall way behind in my books because of how much I dreaded fighting with Peachtree. Quickbooks just works.
Competition is a good thing, and I'd love to see someone else raising the bar, but right now, Quickbooks is the only game in town. You couldn't pay me to go back to Peachtree.
Quickbooks, for those of us who aren't accountants, really kicks some serious ass. Everything about it is easy, from accounts receivable, to accounts payable, to payroll, to customer statements, to financial statements, to inventory, to every damn thing.
I hate accounting, and Quickbooks makes it so easy that I don't have to spend much of my time at it.
Cute, but two things:
If I have physical access to the machine, it's mine.
That may be true, but can you make that machine be "yours" in a way that I can't tell the machine's been tampered with?
Maybe you can, and maybe you can't, but would you risk it when I can punish you for violating the rules? Especially since for 90% of the kids, this laptop isn't going to be their only computing device?
Personally, I could probably subvert the security on my work laptop and use it for non-work-related tasks. But why would I do that when I have a perfectly good laptop that I own and can use without restriction? Especially considering that I could be terminated for a policy violation?
As an aside, I think that providing middle school kids with school-issued laptops is a horrible idea.
Being Jewish in this Christian country (Christmas is a "secular" holiday? Riiiight...), my wife and I had to solve the issue of what to tell our kids about Santa when they were young. On the one hand, we were not comfortable lying to them, but on the other hand, we did not think it was fair to their Christian friends' families for us to send them to school saying, "I know something you don't know! Santa Claus is fake. I have proof!"
While I'll never understand why Christians find it so damaging to a child to think presents come from their parents as opposed to Santa Claus, in the end, we simply pleaded ignorance on the whole Santa issue and let them know what their Chanukah presents came from us (how funny is that? Traditionally, Jews exchanged gifts on Purim, not Chanukah. Chanukah is a minor holiday, but it happens to coincide with Christmas, and well... the rest is history.). They were happy to receive gifts, and it turned out they didn't much care whom the delivery agent was.
To expand a bit on that, though, I think that the phenomenon of 7-year-olds becoming upset to learn that Santa did not deliver their Christmas gifts has more to do with the worldview shift than anything Santa-related. 7-year-olds are beginning to understand a fair amount of nuance, but at the end of the day, they still need to live in a world of absolutes. When something so absolute as their favorite magical person in the world goes up in a puff of logic, then, yeah, they are not going to react well.
The parents' reactions could have been a lot better, however. I mean, think about it. You've got a kid who had believed in Santa--who still *wants* to believe in Santa--but who just got confronted with an uncomfortable revelation. The parents reacted by blowing up about what a terrible person that teacher that was, and how the teacher lied, and how you shouldn't listen to your teachers, and whatever else. But at the end of the day, we're talking about a mysterious creature. Would it have killed these parents to just keep the mystery alive?
"Your substitute teacher doesn't believe in Santa Claus?!?"
"No, she said that Santa is really you and dad! And that it's physically impossible for one person to visit every home in the world in one night and..."
"But you sat on Santa's lap at the mall and I was standing right there... if I Santa were me, wasn't *that* impossible?"
"But she said that isn't really Santa! That it's just an actor and..."
"Well I guess that's what your teacher believes...and I can understand how that would make her sad. (Smile deeply and look at the kid in the eye) I believe that Santa is wonderful and real and magic! Tell me, what do you believe?"
If the kid still believes the teacher (yeah right), then call the kid's bluff and offer to write a note for Santa saying that all the children in the home don't believe in Santa anymore and to just go away without leaving any presents and never to come back. That should buy you another year of blissful ignorance.
You know, it's funny. The older I get, the more and more I believe in Santa Claus. And that the parents are the little Christmas Elfs. Tell me, Mantrid, what do you believe?
Server hardware and consumer PC hardware are different. Server hardware doesn't traditionally get powered down (hell, many servers have dual power supplies in case one fails), so the hardware manufacturers don't test this as much.
But the bigger issue is software. If a desktop PC doesn't boot cleanly, it's a bummer, and one employee will lose some productivity, but ultimately it's not a big deal. If server processes don't come up, the stakes are a lot higher.
When you press the power button on that server, are confident that everything will come up cleanly? How confidant are you? Would you bet your job on it? If you keep your payroll server down for the two weeks it is idle, try to bring it up to run payroll, discover that it won't come up, would you be comfortable with having your boss on line 1 asking where the fuck his paycheck is, your boss's boss on line 2 wondering the same thing, the Department of Labor on like 3 demanding to know why they just got 1000 complaints filed against you and how you are going to resolve them right fucking now?
Sure, the server will probably boot cleanly and doom will probably not strike. But when it does, the cost is going to exceed, many times over, the savings you'll ever see on your electric bill by powering-down a few servers.
Any big IT department is also pushing out patches at night when the computer is on.
Three words for you: Wake On LAN
(1) *ALL* of these sites buttress MySQL with support code. Take a look at what Slashdot has to do to enable MySQL to keep up with the sites needs.
You are going to have to do that with any database. My current client is a large publisher, and you should see the shit we have to do to Oracle to get it to perform, and that is with 6 full-time DBAs.
(2) None of these sites are mission critical. Would you TRUST your bank transactions on MySQL? LOL, no way!
This is not exactly a scientific metric.
None of the sites you mention simply execute a query and display the results. Every single one of them requires a lot of extra programming work to serialize and cache load because MySQL sucks.
Like I said, if we just had "pages calling Oracle", we would fry Oracle. It required extensive SQL tuning, client optimization, denormalization, caching, clustering, load-balancing, etc. to keep Oracle alive.
Given all of the framework we have built around Oracle, I would bet that MySQL with NDB-cluster would be able to keep up, but I have no data to back that claim up with. The point, of course, is moot, because we use a lot of other features in Oracle that are not present in the open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
why then has skin cancer only increased in spite of sun screen?
I don't know whether it's increased or not, but there could be any number of culprits, including, but not limited to:
That implies that making antibiotics non-prescription for humans is more important to avoid than reducing the use of antibiotics in animals, even though purely considering the amount of usage in each case would suggest that the animal case is far more critical.
For what it's worth, antibiotics are non-prescription in parts of the world.
When I was in Thailand, I got a case of the "traveler's shits" (I think that's the technical term), walked into a pharmacy, and ordered a pack of Ciprofloxacin (it's not branded Cipro there); and 2 minutes and $2 later, I was on my way. I didn't even have to tell the pharmacist what I wanted it for (although I'm sure he knew.... why else would an American tourist walk in and ask for Cipro?).
I shudder even at the thought of smoking joints rolled from poison ivy leaves,
That sounds like an especially painful death. Wow.
I was referring to everything that you and other straight men avoid doing for fear of being accused of being gay, so you are more of an expert than I am.
I'm sorry if I offended you, but my comment was intended as an admission that my "gaydar" is not particularly well calibrated, so I wouldn't necessarily notice the same social cues that you would.
I can assure you that I do not make a conscious effort to avoid being "accused" of being gay, whatever that means. It's been a lot of years since I've done anything to project "I'm available" signals to anyone, male or female.
As someone with an addictive personality, I disagree with you.
As someone without an addictive personality, I don't think it's society's responsibility to remove everything that might be dangerous to you. I don't think we should ban WoW because you might play it 100 hours/wk, lose your job, your wife, your life. I don't think we should ban alcohol or tobacco because you might lose your job, your wife, your life.
The world is not your personal Disneyland. If you have a problem, get help. But don't expect society to protect you.
Banning alcohol is simply impossible. It's just too easy to make. The ingredients for beer are the same as the ingredients for bread, and it's simple to brew high-quality beers, ales, meads, etc. both safely and inexpensively.
And also undetectably, I might add. In college, some fraternity brothers of mine brewed enough beer for the entire house for all of our parties (we served the guests Busch Light) inside a small closet. There would be no way to spot a home brewery.
But none of those are failures of the databases themselves. I won't blame MySQL if a meteor takes out the data center.
Actually, what you said was "A database should work 100% of the time, for everyone, and discussion should revolve around features or price or support. It should go without saying that it never loses data. That's just not something you should ever even have in the back of your mind.", and I was bringing up those other failure modes to reinforce the fact that you should always have data loss in the back of your mind.
No one is offering you a 100% guarantee that when you put data into your RDBMS, you will necessarily be able to get it out. This is why god invented backups, binary logs, point in time recovery, etc. Even your beloved PostgreSQL has an entire facility for Backup and Recovery. ;)
I'll blame the heck out of it when I get "Table 'FOO' is marked as crashed and should be repaired" for no apparent reason.
If you are going to chastise me for bringing up older pg examples, you are going to need to start talking about InnoDB. MyISAM made some design choices to favor speed and simplicity over data consistency, and this fact is not in dispute.
InnoDB will not randomly tell you your table is corrupt and lock you out until you issue some weird command.
I think you might want better examples next time.
OK, here are over 70,000 of them: http://www.google.com/search?q=postgresql+data+loss.
What did you say your point was, again? "That it's happening to some people often enough that people are talking about it."? ;)
Any database might, for one reason or another, eat your data. I'm not sure why you insist upon acting so surprised at this fact of life.