Autodesk Self-Kevorkians

Instead of their stupid "subscription model," all they had to do was to set 3D Studio's price to around $250 or similar and make it more attractive to buy a legal copy than bootleg it. I would have been first in line.

Instead they decided to keep it a couple thousand and go bankrupt trying to rent it. These companies couldn't succeed despite being given a license to print money. Anybody could have made a profit off 3D Studio by simply lowering the price tag on it. The morons are headed for insolvency if they keep it up.

I am amazed when non-technical people take over companies founded on tech and they cannot even hold the line for a few months just keeping the core business alive. Apple really needs to get a decent CEO to lead it, the current one is like Ballmer's doppleganger.

Mad Cackler From Hell

I predict if she goes to Federal Prison she is going to sit in her cell and laugh all day long like this the same way mental patients do in the day room.

Democrats want to vote for this thing. It tells you who and what they are.

"Zika" - Or The New TDAP Vaccine?

Vaccine manufacturers may have gotten their friends in Washington, D.C. to pull some strings in order to avoid losing billions in a class-action suit. The entire "Zika" hysteria may have been generated purely to avoid them having to pay out half of Brazil.

No? Too crazy? Today the newspapers were saturated with the joys of raising microcephalic babies. How did this causality explode into a factoid overnight? Hasn't this virus been around for at least 70 years? Don't you need at least a decade of sound science to establish something like that? Tex smells a rat here and it's a big, fat, greasy, hairy black chittering one.

Here's what Tex thinks really happened.

Brazil got a bad batch of vaccines. Really bad. Nine months later the pharmaceutical labs realised a huge percentage of children who got that vaccine were developing incorrectly.

So their next luncheon with a politician they hatched a plan for all this. They did it purely because the lawsuits could have crushed them. This way they escape scot-free.

I'd like all Vault-Co readers to do me a favour and never, ever purchase a newspaper for any reason ever again. Even a dollar is too much for their collaborators. Don't give them a penny ever again.

Protothreads

Was messing around with these last night. Didn't originally understand what I was doing when I looked at these last year. Was thinking about how evil threads are (been doing tons of coding with locking and mutexes) and wondering if my old polling model could be salvaged. Remember once you have solved a deadlock problem you have not solved all the deadlock problems. You have discovered your program can generate a deadlock condition in some situations. After that there will always be peculiar circumstances that can generate deadlocks somewhere in your code. If you pretend it is possible to fix all these situations you are faking it. It isn't. That's threads for you. If you're smart you think of a way to avoid using them except as a process in the OS that runs completely apart and is very loosely coupled to your app. It is the only safe way to expose your program to threading. Plenty of people think if you launch an app and it runs for a couple of months with threads no problem you win. Maybe you do in your context. In Vault-OS we lose if the program crashes in five years. Vault-OS is intended to never crash.

All of a sudden I just "got it." I realized what was happening with these things. Very exciting stuff. In addition to the fact you could definitely run a web server on these things you could also eliminate threads altogether in your design, meaning compiling Vault-OS on an Arduino or ARM board could become a snap.

Another thing. Having written a huge application with SQLite, not sure it was as useful as originally thought. If you could do co-synced threads or protothreads with a single flat file database system that supported in-memory tables, you might have a better option and it might be stabler long term. The journaling system is impressive in SQLite but the in-memory tables have to be shared for read-only amongst all your threads.

So imagine what sort of cross-platform simplicity you could reduce to if you went with the smaller alternatives :

SQLite = 670K + 400K SQL Handling Routines VS. Bullet ISAMic Key-stores with 38K and generic DB4 query system that is up to 1200% faster than SQLite for complex operations.

Pthreads or Winthreads = 470K .DLL (Sometimes larger for dependencies) VS.  30K Protothread library with no thread contention, fully cooperative task sequencing, safe polling for sockets and zero risk of thread contention also runs on all platforms with almost no headaches of any kind.

So the executable of the web server could start to come down drastically in size and maybe fit not just on a floppy but in REAL mode DOS 640K. That would be a real accomplishment. Right now it is getting pretty huge and also presents real problems in cross-platform compilation. I would rather have it compile anywhere on anything but be limited in features rather than be a 40 megabyte server when I have some machines sitting around that only have 64 megabytes (thin clients) to run anything on. For me personally, being able to run VOS on a thin client anywhere is a big plus because at $1.00 a pop on EBay they are the last word in cheap reconfigurable computing devices, perfect for the survivalist budget. You buy ten for terminals and one is modified to run the server, boom plug in a USB we're in operation.

The Sun Has Gone To Sleep

This is why they say we Neanderthals have "communication problems" with the humans.

I don't know how to say it any more simply. It doesn't matter because Saps has trouble following along no matter how you phrase it.

The Sun has gone dormant. No sun spots. Nothing to be scared of, this is the cyclic end of the Holocene. We should have another one just like the past 40,000 year cycle in another million years or so. Nothing to worry about, it is a natural cycle on this planet. Until then, the planet has gone back to normal ... which means cold. Neanderthal weather. This is the natural temperature on the planet ... well, actually it is still pretty warm. It ain't got "natural" yet ... but it is a barrel of monkeys if you are a Neanderthal. You really can't keep a Neanderthal interested at anything above 80 degrees below. It's just too muggy and humid above that. 80 degrees below is time to listen to chestnuts roaring on an open fire, it's Christmas every day for a million years after that.

I'm sorry if I am not communicating this idea simply enough. I can't make it any simpler.

The "Hu-Mans" (originally a Sumerian word that meant "A weakling sired for slavery by a serpent") just can't seem to understand reality. It's not their forte. You can't blame them, they act like they were designed to cart stones up the sides of pyramids with a whip at their backs and fight in games of war while Melonheads sat in the bleachers and threw slurpees at their generals for making bad decisions that cost them wagers.

Plausible Deniability

The U.S. is conducting a drill on days that terrorists strike and the drill is identical to the strike. The U.S. is afraid of a terrible plague at the same time it is spreading genetically modified mosquitos in the areas reporting plague cases from mosquitos.

See how that works?

You Gotta See This One

So fake it is mind boggling. Must see to believe.

I thought for sure this one had to be real. Nope. Now that I think about it, was clearly timed to intersect with policy. I just didn't think the Obamination would stoop this low.

Reporting Solution Found For Vault-OS

The HTML-to-PDF solution produces the most brilliant looking reports imaginable. Custom styles, formatting and layout are all faithful to the original. Sample output style above as example. It can be output with plain black and white or high contrast applied in the stylesheet.

I tried sending some of my inventory grids from the old VOS I had saved as HTML files except paginated lists to the PDF converter and they came out in the browser window correctly paginated for printing. I had always theorised this was possible and it is a fantastic way to generate a myriad of reports for the inventory manager, the shopping list, duty roster, radio contacts, inspection lists ... all as PDFs that can be viewed in the browser or sent to a printer. My 10 year old Compaq T5710 thin client that I purchased for $2 on EBay displays all of VOS correctly, including JQuery controls, Raphael vectors and has a built-in PDF viewer that comes installed. If the VOS server is running somewhere it is just plug-n-play and this box becomes a distributed terminal to control or monitor anything else in the shelter. My whole system is based on a few dollars for the lot if you can't find half of it thrown out somewhere.

There's a drawback and it is that you need a 20 megabyte open source PDF converter and accompanying 22 MB .DLL in the "bin" directory for all this to come off correctly. The Lua script that generates the reports as HTML calls the converter when it is done. It is easy to disable this feature and instead pop up the HTML in a new browser window which the user can then arrange to send to a freeware PDF printer or even send it directly to the printer if he thinks it will turn out looking okay.

The thing that bugs me about this approach is that it breaks my all-in-one .EXE superserver architecture by requiring a platform specific utility in the "bin" directory as well. It also adds a physical cache that needs automated management. (To delete old files on a regular basis and keep it from growing too big) This isn't too hard to implement, however. Most web servers do this. This open source converter comes with executable binaries compiled for almost all major OSes as well as all source code. It is totally portable.

Of course, I could just add a configuration flag that turns this process off and launches the HTML report in a browser window and leave it to the user to output the document however their local setup permits.

The reason I am telling Vault-Co readers all these details is that I am hoping somebody out there knows an even better way. For example ...

1. A much smaller HTML-to-PDF converter that either comes as a library or with source under a megabyte. Or a portable renderer that is an executable that takes up less space than 40+ MB.

2. Another way altogether to approach the problem ... like a report formatting tool that would plug into my former solution, LibHaru, with commands to draw tables, grids and layouts and then dump it into a PDF.

3. Another alternative like a way to build rich text files from a Lua script with tables or a Lua plug-in with some C code to render to some other document type that would be smaller and more efficient than what I am using, mostly important to compile it right in with what I have and return to my all-in-one total solution server that can do everything.

I may be making a fool out of myself but I just wonder if I throw a net out there somebody might have a better paradigm. Forty megabytes in the 'bin' directory is a little heavyweight compared with all the other code I have now.

ICBMs Are So Last Tuesday

The real power in the Third World War will come from hypersonic nuclear glider drones.

A cloud of red mercury nuclear cluster bomblets and then spray plutonium out the back for a couple of years until it finally crashes.

A proper vault is required for this war.

America continues to prepare for nuclear war in the 1960's. My former nation doesn't stand a ghost of a chance.