Posts by Reverend Jim

It is not specifically known for discussions on astrology or numerology

However, we probably have no shortage of people who would be willing to point out that astrology and numerology (and several other "ologies" and "opathies") have no basis in reality.

Are you sure you posted this in the right place?

I suppose that will partly depend on whether or not the inserted records are an "all or nothing" transaction. When I had to bulk insert 8000+ records at one time it was important that either all the records go in, or none. Recovering from a partial insert would have taken hours and would have interfered with further (every five minutes) inserts as well as the downstream processes.

Calling someone out for being uninformed is the epitome of rude in my head

One thing that came up recently was Y2K. In 1996 I was part of a small team that was tasked with keeping our existing AGC/SCADA system running through the change in the event that our replacement system was not in service by that time. We spent hundreds of hours poring through the entire code base (system and apps) looking for problems. In the end we had found three possible plans to keep it up and running. A week or so ago I was with a group of people when one of them made a comment like, "That reminds me of the Y2K thing. They made it out to be a coming disaster and in the end it was all nothing." I had to point out that the reason it was "nothing" was the thousands of hours that highly trained specialists worked to make "nothing" happen.

His was an uninformed opinion that really offended me, so I called him on it. I wasn't nasty about it. I just pointed out things that he had no way of knowing as an outsider.

On the other hand, if someone says to me "I think the Earth is flat." I have no problem replying "and I think you are a moron."

Is it nasty to have an opinion? Yes, if the comment is akin to "you are a dick", and no if the comment is like "You dislike software 'X' but did not give any reasons to back it up". I have no problem calling out someone for an uninformed or offensive post.

Also, nasty for the sake of being nasty is not something I have to accept.

I can't speak on optimization in general without seeing the code. In my previous life I was a Windows SysAdmin/dbadmin as well as a digital plumber. I wrote many apps that had to move large quantities of data from place to place, for example, importing 16000+ records into a SQL database every five minutes. I did all this with vbScript (today I would choose Python). The trick to processing that many records quickly was using vbScript to format the records, then using BULK INSERT to insert all of the records in one transaction. This drastically reduced the processing time by not having to submit each insert separately. The import load later grew to 16,000 records on the hour and 16,000 at five past the hour, plus the regular 16,000 every five minutes. Scripting easily handled the load. You could easily write the massaging code in c/c++ and compare it to the equivalent in Python. Considering the overhead for file I/O would be the same in both, I'd be surprised if the difference was significant.

You could start with w3schools.com java tutorial

Correct. It was a typo. Should have said "15 years too late" because that was when the question was first posted. I have noticed a number of new posts in old threads that essentially just rephrase (sometimes with only very minor changes) previous posts. There is no Daniweb rule against doing this but I think it is worth a comment and a down-vote.

Welcome to Daniweb.

Why is it your job to determine it?

It isn't my job to determine it but I think it is a fair question.

The only thing that is against our community rules is to not specifically ask for help to do something illegal

I did not flag the post as violating any rules. I also did not down-vote the post. I wasn't trying to suggest that the intentions were illegal, and there is no way to determine the OP's actual intentions, but if someone were to ask me "where can I learn how to pick locks", I would ask the same question. Hacking skills are a dangerous tool set likely far more often used to bad ends rather than good.

On checking your posts I see that you had one down-vote for posting in an 8 year old thread. When a thread is that old there is no reason to post in it unless you have something pertinent to add to the conversation. In your case you basically duplicated what had already been said. We frequently see old threads revived with posts like "Thanks. I found this really useful." In this case, instead of adding to the thread with a new post you should use the comment feature. This provides useful feedback without bubbling the thread back to the top.

Don't sweat the points. I've had my share of down votes, and so has Dani. Not everyone will agree with everything you have to say.

How are we to determine whether you want to learn hacking for ethical, or for non-ethical use?

What are you trying to do with collect2.exe?

What error?

Hello and welcome to Daniweb.

Let's not discount the untold thousands of office workers who will also view the site on (likely) 16x9 or 16x10 displays. Most Smart TVs also use the same wide formats.

I think it's high time that web developers focused less on mobile users, and more on what is really important.

Me ;-)

First I want to say that my only interest in the technical details of web development are from an end user perspective. I usually go to this site to get my weather forecasts. Their current display format is to present the forecasts horizontally but it will likely be changing soon to vertical. My two most visited pages are the hourly and seven day forecasts. It's always annoyed me that on my display (16x9 laptop) most of the space is wasted. On the seven day page it doesn't matter, but on the hourly page it could easily display twelve hours or more of data.

But when the switch is made to the vertical format the hourly page will show only five hours of data with pointless "content continues below" page breaks. The seven day forecast shows only one day per screen. It seems to me that if you are planning, for example, a multi-day activity (perhaps a trip to the beach/cottage) it makes for easier planning to see multiple days (the more the better) on one page. For single-day events, perhaps a trip to the park, seeing more hours at once is much better than fewer.

My question (and I do have one) is, how difficult is it for the web site to customize the html for the target device? I realize that many more people would access this site on a smart phone than a desktop/laptop computer, but shouldn't major sites like this try to please both …

A big problem today is that people have forgotten the purpose of language. In my day (cue Seth Meyers routine) language was intended to convey ideas from one person to another. Similarly to data transmission, we want to get the information from one person to another as quickly and as error free (unambiguously) as possible. Consider how the following three examples fail utterly to do this.

The first example is from this blog where the author is discussing system design.

The goal of the design process is not to generate a single point solution, but to instead characterize the design space for a given problem: a single point should then fall naturally out of that space given the problem constraints.

Clearly, the intent of this post is to impress upon the reader both the depth of the blogger's knowledge as well as the blogger's vocabulary. But as to imparting knowledge, I think it falls flat.

Here is a second example from the Steven Bochco series, Raising the Bar. In this episode a lawyer is defending a prisoner who was forced to attack a rival gang member. He was severely beaten several times prior to the attack to demonstrate the consequences of disobedience. His expert witness testifies:

The situational use of violence is central to both the order and hierarchy of prisons.

When the lawyer asks the witness to respond in English she says:

Generally they'll beat the crap out of someone until they do …

members with more than 15 reputation points

Perhaps she meant "less than"

Based on the proliferation of AI generated content, and the age-old rule of garbage in, garbage out, what will be the result of AI models being trained on ever increasing amounts of content generated by other AI platforms? Will we get into a negative feedback loop where the output will become so polluted with bad input that it will be effectively useless?

Welcome to Daniweb. What brought you here, and what do you hope to find?

Improve Content Quality

@Muhammed_356 - Do you not see the irony in this? You insist on making posts that almost literally duplicate what everyone else has said. This does nothing to improve content quality.

Hello, and welcome to Daniweb.

Actually, I think they did with the same results. Supposedly the temperature of the cigarette is below the flash point of gasoline.

Did anyone else suffer through the final season of Star Trek: Discovery?

Why is it that when people in shows light a fire (like when setting a vehicle on fire) with a lighter, they always throw the lighter into the puddle of gasoline? Do they not realize that a lighter is reusable?

On a related note, researchers tried hundreds of times to ignite a puddle of gasoline by throwing a burning cigarette into it. They were successful exactly zero times.

I understand this script does not work in all cases. If not you can try Policy Plus which is available on GitHub and MajorGeeks.

Very few humans are surfing the Web any more

I disagree. Just because the number of bots has grown exponentially relative to the number of meat-based surfers does not mean that very few humans are still surfing. Consider how much spam e-mail is sent every minute. That does not mean e-mail is dying.

There are at least two free options. One is VisiPics which I find works well. The interface is straightforward and it allows you to select a similarity threshhold. While not as robust as perhaps an AI based tool (I don[t know of any yet) I find it does the trick. Another is SimilarImages. It's a little more complex but can be used where VisiPics falls short. Both have not been updated in several years.

If you have multiple photos of the same subject that are similar but not identical, of multiple copies of the same image at different resolutions then both of these apps will detect them. VisiPics will also optionally detect images with different rotations.

My biggest fear is an expansion of misinformation to the extent that we will not be able to trust that anything we see, hear, or read will have any basis in reality.

Run appwiz.cpl and look at all the installed items. You may have several pieces of bloatware such as browser extensions that you don't need.

Check for apps that start automnatically when WIndows starts. Sysinternals autoruns is excellent for identifying and disabling.

How much RAM do you have? Excessive swapping due to too little RAM can seriously slow performance. Also, if you have an SSD, too little RAM and excessive swapping will prematurely age your drive.

Run Malwarebytes antimalware to check for other crap.

Seems like an extension of Sturgeon's Law which states "90% of everything is crap".

Are you trying to execute the query before opening the connection? I'm just guessing because you didn't post any code. Strictly speaking you didn't post a question either.

and some chickens :)

Ah. A hobby with many layers ;-)

We've had at least one dog and one cat for more than 40 years, sometimes two of each. There is something very calming about having a cat curled up on your chest while reading (me, not the cat) or a dog (our favourite - Irish Setters) walking by your side, tail wagging (the dog, not me). Sadly, we no longer have the energy for a dog so now we have but a single cat.

So basically my Palo Alto technique :)

A lot easier and more pleasant in mid-winter in Palo Alto than here in Winnipeg.

Also, in non-computing over the years I have heard comments like "if only I hadn't stopped for coffee I would have missed that accident, or several other variations. The thing is you never know what would have happened if you had made different decisions. Certainly making a different decision may have resulted in things being better. Or they might have been worse, or exactly the same. There's no need to beat yourself up wondering what if.

It's hard for me to imagine that all of the pleasure I've gotten out of Daniweb, the challenges, the insights, the friendships since I joined in 2010, are all dependent on the largesse of just one very talented person. I, for one, appreciate all you have done, particularly considering your current health issues. If you feel unappreciated then perhaps this post will make you feel a little less so.

I called Best Buy Friday morning to ask about the status of my laptop. I was told the average wait time was one minute. Fifteen minutes later I was told there were eight calls ahead of me and would I like to leave my number for a callback. I did so and after two more hours of waiting I called the local Best Buy direct. I was told my laptop would be ready within the hour. I was told that as per my instructions (reset to factory must work) they were doing a final test.

At two o'clock I went down. I was shown a laptop with Windows running. I told the guy that I had to see him reset to factory in front of me. He did so by going through Windows Settings. I had already explained to him (I dealt with the same guy through the whole process) that I have to be able to do a basic reset in the event that Windows won't boot. I had to go to another machine to look up the instructions and show him. He had wanted to do F2-power up which gets you into the UEFI/BIOS.

So finally he did F12-power up which presented the reset-to-factory option. Once it cycled through and got to the Windows config I gave him the thumbs up. Before I left he said "I didn't realize what you meant by factory reset".

Sigh.

So back home to finish the Windows setup and do the (seemingly) …

Yet another example of taking a simple concept (black hat vs white hat from old cowboy flicks) and diluting it until nobody can make sense of it anymore. Just like the myriad different coloured wrist bands and ribbons. What's next? Purple hat? Green Hat?

I too, have used Linux live bootable CD's to get files off a broken Windows.

I'm assuming the drive wasn't bitlockered?

I consider them all bloatware

Something I may try on this laptop (old ASUS K53E) once I get my other one back is a fresh install from USB but selecting "World" as my region. I read somewhere a while back that if you select any specific region, bloatware for that region gets installed, but if you pick World then no bloatware. You just have to remember to set the correct region after setup.

Create a new recovery partition for the current Windows

This I cannot do as I do not have the tools, the knowledge, or the desire to create a pre-install boot environment. We had IT people at the office who specialized in that but it's not something I care to waste my time learning to do since I would likely never use that knowledge again. And at this point I'm probably losing skills faster than I acquire new ones ;-)

Allocating enough space for the partitions can help prevent running into problems.

I've seen advice like this before but typically there is no advice on how to determine how much space is enough. Fortunately, I have determined over the years how big my C partition should be to allow for extra apps. And there is always EaseUS if partitions need to be resized.

Booting from a USB or external DVD, will let you use the Command prompt.

I actually tried this as well, running diskpart.exe. It couldn't see the SSD …

termites --> clint

As in "I have a pet termite named Clint. Clint eats wood".

Got a call from Best Buy at 6:30 pm the same day. He informed me that the Windows system that the tech installed was not the OEM version for my machine. I asked why this should matter since I requested a reset to factory from the recovery partition. He said they couldn't do that because the recovery partition had been corrupted. So that's two things they didn't test before returning it. It also verifies that they didn't even try reset-to-factory or they would have noticed a problem.

Also, by not using the correct OEM version my laptop was likely missing custom ASUS utilities. I wonder if the diagnostic partition is also fubar.

Sounds like a very bad recovery image

Possibly. But why didn't this show up when they did the reset prior to returning the laptop?

Imagine that you just bought a car (should be pretty easy for you). You and your wife take a drive in the countryside and at some point you drive over a nail and get a flat tire. No problem because you have a spare. But when you take out the spare you find that it is damaged and cannot be driven on. That's the situation I am in, except there is no way to examine the partition to see if it works. The only way is to try it out by wiping the exiting system.

So either they didn't do that in the lab (a test I explicitly requested), or something else failed between the lab and my local Best Buy. So either the lab tech was sloppy or the laptop is shit.

I got a call from Best Buy this morning to tell me my laptop was back. When I got to the counter I told the tech that I would not accept it until they showed me that it could be reset to factory. I'll leave out a few of the details that don't matter to the tale.

He powered up the laptop and showed me Windows 11. The touchpad was working. He went into settings and selected the reset option. After the usual restoring delay it finally reboot and displayed the screen that allowed me to pick a default keyboard, then the screen that gives me two options:

Troubleshoot this PC
Shut down

Neither of which is supposed to be shown on a reset to factory. He selected Troubleshoot, then something else (quickly) on the next screen and eventually Windows came back up with "Jim" as the user. I explained that this was not a factory reset, as a factory reset would not know my name. He said that he had put my name in when he did the reset before I got there.

I explained that this is not a factory reset. A factory reset would boot from the recovery partition and wipe/restore everything. When he tried the actual factory reset (shift/power) it failed to boot into the recovery partition.

It is being sent back to Toronto with the promise that if it fails to reset (in front of me) when it returns then they will refund my money.

I went to a site that sells wood veneer slat paneling. They make a nice range of products and seem reputable. However, on completing my order I found that my payment options were limited to

• shoppay
• paypal
• gpay

I have never seen a legitimate site that would not let me pay by credit card. There was a chat option and when I clicked on that it opened a chat window where I typed a question, and was immediately told to continue the chat on whatsapp. To do that I woud have to install a QR code reader on my phone, scan the given QR code, then install an app on my phone. Then link my phone to my laptop.

Or I could continue with the whatsapp web app. When I chose that I was immediately led down the rabbit hole again where I would have to install apps on my phone. Then link my phone to my laptop.

The only phone number provided was not a toll free number.

As a first time buyer I was offered a 10% discount on my first order. They emailed me the discount code. Entering the code on the purchase page did apply the discount. The email had an option of "if you have questions just reply to this email". When I did that I got "invalid recipient" and the email was never sent.

I've bought plenty of stuff from Amazon, and even from etsy. I never had this problem. This is …

Likewise...

Whenever I reinstall Windows, other than the times I've reset to factory, when it gets to the "where do you want to install to" I always get the installer to delete, then recreate the partition.

Further...

Python gets converted to byte code which is then cached in a sub-folder. As long as the source code and packages have not changed there is no need to reconvert so subsequent runs should start faster. Also, I strongly recommend that you look into wxpython as a much better alternative to tkinter. Wxpython is a wrapper for wxwidgets which is a library of controls that are OS specific. No matter what platform you are running on, controls rendered in wxpython/wxwidgets will always render as native controls for the platform.

There is also a python package called pyinstaller which you can use to wrap a python application as an executable (.exe). I find ths useful when I want to assign custom actions for my logitech mouse. I can assign actions, for example, to hmviewer.exe (home movie viewer) rather than python.exe, which I would have to do wthout running it through pyinstaller.

I asked someone who is an acknowledged expert (not just by me). He agreed with the generated answer. If I had instead written him that advice, letting him believe it was mine, he would have given the same response. In other words, it was most definitely not simply AI generated garbage.

If I asked ChatGPT and my doctor what to do for a particular pain and they both replied with "Take two Aspirin, get a good night's sleep, and call me in the morning if it still hurts", would you consider the advice from your doctor to be garbage simply because the AI gave the same response?

see if you can convert it to a WHERE clause

I made a foolish assumption that the HAVING was something that depended on the GROUPing and thus could not be converted to a WHERE.

As for my expert, I also assumed that if he could have been more specific he would have been. That would have required more info on your specific situation. May I suggest that next time, you post your query? Changing the HAVING to a WHERE might have been obvious on seeing it.

If I had taken the ChatGPT reply, reworded, then posted it, would that have been OK? Or would that be plagiarism? What if I posted my reworded version AND credited it as a rewording of a ChatGPT generated answer? Then that just makes me look like an idiot.

Where is the line?