Starred the bit I have an issue with.

That's just it -- you AREN'T really communicating with anyone if you are driving at the same time. Go back to the multi-tasking issue. Ninety-nine percent of people aren't driving and communicating. They are driving POORLY and communicating POORLY. Your argument falls apart in a cost-benefit regard due to that.

The only cost-benefit, then, is in the cost because the benefit isn't anything of value in the first place. You can't compare that to staying in the basement to going out into the world, because for one thing, going out into the world doesn't necessarily entail doing two things at once and compromising concentration in doing so.

Thanks,
JoeK

You go on and on about smart/clever humor and then give a "yuck!" to Frasier?

You probably need to re-read your own post and follow your own advice. Frasier's mostly incredible, exactly in the background, character-driven, inflection sort of way you've gone on ad nauseum about.

Putting what people may or may not be able to figure out about you aside, at what point does the "I don't post anything like that" equate to, "Hm, I don't post ANYTHING very important on Facebook, and it actually takes a bit of CPU-time for me to even decide WHAT to post."

When that point is reached (if it is, at least in part), what are you gaining from Facebook? To put it another way, do the upside/downside ratio on using Facebook. We hear about the downsides all the time, though they don't appear to bother you, and that's cool. However, what is the upside? Furthermore, what upsides are there that you can't have via normal interactions, both virtual and non-virtual?

Does Facebook increase your quality of life, overall?
   

That's easily fixed then: I quit Facebook after a year, my wife quit Facebook after about nine months, IIRC, and another friend of mine quit Facebook not long after her daughter was born (again, IIRC).

Primary reason for quitting/deletion? Boredom, privacy concerns, and an overwhelming feeling of impersonal pointlessness (not necessarily in that order).

In any case, if you've never heard of anyone quitting it, you most certainly never looked very far along that particular vector of questioning, which I don't assume there would be much reason to do if you are enjoying the site.

Well, if you aren't going to try to set up any privacy boundaries in the first place, then yeah, I suppose Facebook is a pretty decent mechanism.

I recently went through a 48-hour labor (water break to C-section) with my wife (and a couple midwives, 40 hours of that was at home...) You know how many phone calls I got? None. Only a few family members even knew the labor had started, and they knew better than to bother us. Why on earth would you think you need to update everyone every step of the way?

Simple control over information vomit is the first thing that should be thought through in such times. In going straight to "how should I let people know?" you forgot the primary critical-thinking choices/questions from the outset: "Must I let people know?" and "Just because I can do something, should I?" Your communication dilemma wasn't a dilemma at all.

To make sure the person driving the car gets the ticket, of course, instead of just the car's registrant getting the fine?

Thanks,
sutekh137

The soybeans do not require Roundup to grow. They just don't die when sprayed with Roundup, while all the weeds around them die.

Let's see... I just did a query against a 1.5 GB table (DBF) that has an index file (CDX) of 240 MB. I did an indexed query that returned 435 records or so, and it did it in 1.11 seconds.

So, you are mistaken. Either that, or my machine downloaded 240 MB in under a second. Sorry, our network isn't that fast. *smile*

I don't know much about file servers, but the entire index file does not need to come down. Not sure if that is a boon of the file server or of Foxpro, but I have been fighting that myth for ten years -- Foxpro does NOT pull entire files down...neither the index files nor the data file.

Let's get some other "duh" stuff taken care of. ANY system will be slow if you pull down a lot of data. That's because the data is coming down. It has to traverse the network to become truly local. If it isn't coming down, like some sort of DataReader thingamabob, then OK, it isn't down. But then don't try joiing that table to another local one, because then you'll just have to wait _then_.

Foxpro is incredibly fast. We have custom applications totalling more than 600,000 lines of code. Everything from old DOS-based input screen to an imaging system (scan, classify, viewing) housing more than 5 million images/files across 2 SQL Server databases (yes, VFP does wonders with SQL Server databases as well). The file-based DBF problems arise as they would with any file-based solution: size limits, contention issues, corruption, etc. But we have over 50-60 users regularly pounding our system, a mix of DBF data and SQL Server data, and it works pretty darn well.

Foxpro's other advantage is what it does with client side data. I can read in an XLS file (one line of code), bring in data via a SQL Server query (3 lines of code), and query a local DBF file (one line of code). Each query will reside in it's own local cursor which can then be indexed, browsed etc. Even better, those cursors can then be joined, filtered, and queried to build another cursor with all of that data brought together. I hear Microsoft is still working on a local engine with that kind of power for .NET. It's called LINQ, and it isn't out yet. Foxpro has been doing this stuff for more than 15 years. I've accessed text files, Excel spreadsheets, AS/400 DB2 data, and SQL Server data all at one time and generated reports that can be viewed, printed, and/or exported back to Excel. All coming from million+ row data sources, all heterogenous.

Foxpro has a lot of problems, sure, and I am digging .NET. But I have never seen anything do what Foxpro can do with varied data sources and local cursor speed in 15+ years of business database programming.

And one more time: FOXPRO DOESN'T PULL DOWN THE WHOLE INDEX FILE WHEN DOING QUERIES! *phew* *smile*