Tag Archives: TWO

Top Buys by Top Brass: CEO Siering's $103.1K Bet on TWO

By DividendChannel.com

A company’s own top management tend to have the best inside view into the business, so when company officers make major buys, investors are wise to take notice. Presumably the only reason an insider would take their hard-earned cash and use it to buy stock of their company in the open market, is that they expect to make money ? maybe they find the stock very undervalued, or maybe they see exciting progress within the company, or maybe both. So in this series we look at the largest insider buys by the ”top brass” over the trailing six month period, one of which was a total of $103.1K by Thomas Siering, CEO at Two Harbors Investment Corp (NYSE: TWO). …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Markets

Taking stuff apart

Last Saturday, I took apart an old and broken laptop of mine: a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ31XN. That was once a top of the line executive laptop. I bought it in 2009 when the model had just been discontinued and superseded by a new one, so it wasn’t too expensive.

The laptop had an 11″ 1366×768 screen, a 1.2 ghz Core2duo, 2GB of ram and 120 GB hard drive. The reason I paid 1000 Euro for such lowly specs is that it had a weight of 1.25 kg, doing about 6 hours on a battery charge.

Impressive piece of tech

I’ve been wanting a new laptop since I started to bump into performance issues during 2011. 2 GB of ram is not sufficient in a time of HTML5 – there are web pages which eat several hundreds mbs of ram. And unfortunately the Linux desktop isn’t getting lighter either (it’s part of why I decided to help Will and Klaas with Klyde for hackweek). And I’ve been doing some light video editing lately as well as more image editing. So when the screen of my laptop finally gave beginning of last year, I simply ordered my new Samsung Series 9. That Series 9 was actually more expensive than the Sony (prices have gone down since then). It is a step forward, but it is sad that it took the IT world over 5 years to finally eclipse what Sony did in 2007. And not even on every level – my Sony included a DVD burner, 3-antenna wifi, TWO card readers, mini-PCI-express, 120 GB spinning rust, FULL ethernet and VGA ports, Firewire and a removable battery in barely 100 gram more!

Opening up

When you open up the Sony, it becomes apparent how they managed to cram so much functionality (essentially everything a ‘normal’ laptop offers) in such a thin enclosure: they must have worked with the assumption of an unlimited budget. Seriously, it is clear why this laptop was over 2K: the target user group seemed to be entirely unwilling to compromise on features. This thing is far more complicated inside than modern ultrabooks. My Samsung S9 is mostly battery inside: it has a single, laptop-wide motherboard with 2 boards (wifi and mSATA) attached to it.

Nothing compared to the Sony: taking it apart reveals a square motherboard, a battery-power related board inside a casing, wifi board (the usual), blue-tooth board (tiny), audio board (2 chips & capacitors, audio in/out, 2 speakers, microphone all attached), 2xUSB+card reader board, touchpad board (the touchpad itself also has logic, of course), quick function keys board, 2 more small board I can’t identify. Then the DVD burner has its own internal boards (2) and one on the outside, apparently to interface between the mobo and the dvd burner. Oh, and of course, memory is separate and can be replaced. The webcam also has its own 4 cm long/half wide/double sided board.

Crazy, huh? All that is connected via a

From: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2013/04/taking-stuff-apart.html

Problems with fetching data from Oracle database

By kumarjt

Here’s a database query which looks up the NAME column of PRODUCT table


SELECT NAME FROM PRODUCT ;


And this query retrieves me the following output
SUGAR
COCOA
HONEY
WHEAT
CABBAGE
CAULI FLOWER
[6 rows selected]
Please note the last record CAULI FLOWER contains TWO blank spaces between the two words.

Now I want to do the same using Unix script and I wrote the following :
set -A prod_list `sqlplus -s USER/PWD@DB <<!
SET HEADING OFF ;
SET NEWPAGE NONE ;
SET FEEDBACK OFF ;
SET LINESIZE 4000 ;
SET WRAP OFF ;
SELECT NAME FROM PRODUCT ;
!
`
and then queried the prod_list array to find 7 instead of 6 entries
for product in ${prod_list[@]} ; do
echo $product
done
The output is like
SUGAR
COCOA
HONEY
WHEAT
CABBAGE
CAULI
FLOWER
7 items in the array. 😮
My guess is the TWO interim spaces within the last record value is splitting the record in two seperate records
at that point of time when I am trying to fetch the records via sqlplus (ie., via Unix).
Can this behavior be overridden ? If yes how ?
Also we tried to use a SQL cursor to fetch the values into unix , but we do not know exactly how to do it. 🙁
Can anybody help us on that too ?

Please note :
Unix version : Korn Shell
OS : Linux
Database : Oracle 11g

Thanks
Kumarjit.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums

The Communist And The Chambermaid

By Jeff Greenlee

Nikita Kruschev and Fidel Castro SC The Communist and the Chambermaid

 

It was a chilly, early November night in New York City.  The mild fall weather was coming to an end, and winter was near on this memorable evening in 1960.  In a few days, Americans would go to the polls to choose a new president, either Vice President Richard M. Nixon or the popular Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.  Mountains of books would later be written to tell us about that historical election, but those stories are for another time.

This story is about the chance meeting of Russian Premier Nikita Krushchev and a pretty 17 year old who worked part time as a chambermaid at the Waldorf Astoria hotel on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan.  The Premier was on his second visit to the United States but was restricted to New York City and Soviet property on Long Island.  Krushchev had appointed himself the leader of the USSR’s United Nations delegation, and it was there a few days earlier when he had made the headlines with his famous shoe-banging-on-the-table demonstration decrying American colonialism.

Annie Swanson had come from her hometown in Ames, Iowa to New York City to seek fame and fortune as a Broadway actress following her graduation from high school in June, 1960.  She was an introvert, somewhat of a wallflower during her school years, and had a dream to become rich and famous and to show everyone back in Iowa that anything is achievable for those with goals and aspirations.  She was staying with her aunt and uncle who lived in New York while she pursued her dreams.  To help pay her way, she worked part time at the Waldorf Astoria hotel and took classes at night.

On Friday, November 4th, Krushchev came back to the hotel after a trying day at the United Nations.  He had planned to rest for a couple hours before going out to dinner and drinks with some members of his delegation.  It was a chance meeting as Annie, dressed in her proper maid’s attire, was startled when the door to the suite opened and Nikita Krushchev entered the room.  Without all the steamy details, let’s just stipulate that 40 weeks later, a baby boy was born in New York to an Iowa teenager and a Russian statesman.  What happened later is that Annie moved back to her parents’ farm near Ames.  Premier Kruschchev and the new American President, John F. Kennedy, had multiple confrontations that changed the world in the 3 years following early November of 1960; and the November night in New York was gone forever.

No one knew about the tryst for many years.  Andrew Campbell was raised to believe his father was Iowa farmer Nathan Campbell, a former classmate of Annie’s at Ames High School.  She reunited with Nathan when she returned from New York City with her bundle of joy.  They married in 1962 and raised Andrew and his two step-sisters as an ordinary Midwestern family while they farmed a section of ground north of Ames.

When Andrew finished high school in 1979, he was accepted at Yale.  At Ames High School, he was an award-winning debater, class president, and one of the most charismatic and popular students in the school.  He wanted to become a lawyer, advocating for the less affluent and also for political causes such as social justice and the unfairness of capitalism regarding wealth distribution.  He was a member of the Young Democrats and had dabbled in Karl Marx’s and Freidrich Engels’ theories.  But his biggest achievement up to then occurred when he was given a primetime speaker slot at the 2004 Democratic National Convention at the Fleet Center in Boston.  Even though John Kerry lost to incumbent George W. Bush in the 2004 election, a star was born in Boston.  Andrew was elected to the Senate from Iowa in 2006 and won the early Democrat Straw Poll in Iowa to propel him face to face with Hillary Clinton to run for President of the United States in 2008.

But when a background check revealed that his biological father was Russian Premier Nikita Krushchev, who had died in September of 1971, detractors were concerned that Andrew was not qualified to run for president because of the “Natural Born Citizen” clause contained in Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution.  Andrew was born in New York to an American citizen and a Russian.  That made him a U.S. citizen, and even a “native” U.S. citizen (as opposed to naturalized); but did it make him a natural born citizen?

The requirements for office holders are stated in the Constitution, but the definitions are not always clear.  That is why we have a Supreme Court.  It is supposed to rule on litigation according to the original intent of the founders.  We all know that liberal or progressive justices (even though they are supposed to be apolitical) do not like the Constitution and especially do not adhere to original intent.  If they did, we would have a federal government with an annual budget of about 10% of the bloated leviathan that is Washington D.C. and enumerated powers with the rest reserved to the States as the 10th Amendment requires.  Instead, we have the mess we now face with an unsustainable deficit and a debt that will never be repaid.

Natural Born is listed in the Constitution only for the President and Vice President.  Senators and Representatives do not have to be natural born citizens, only citizens.  For definition and precedence, never challenged, in the 1875 SCOTUS decision in Minor v. Happersett, it was unanimously agreed that to be a “natural born” citizen, a person must meet two qualifications:  1) born on U.S. soil (including territories and military bases) to 2) TWO citizen parents.  It does not say “a” citizen parent.  It says “citizen parents”.   Andrew Campbell, whose biological father was Nikita Krushchev, is NOT a Natural Born citizen of the United States of America.  The founders were clear that anyone with dual allegiances could not become president.

Therefore, Barry Soetoro, aka Barack Hussein Obama (not his legal name, never changed), is NOT eligible to be POTUS, regardless of whether he was born in Kenya, Honolulu, or Timbuktu.  It doesn’t even make a difference if his obviously fake long form birth certificate presented on April 27, 2011 is accepted – even by the co-conspirators in Hawaii.  The birth scenario or location is irrelevant.  It doesn’t even make a difference if his Social Security number #042-68-4425 does not pass the country’s E-Verify system and comes back flagged as fraudulent.  It doesn’t even make a difference if his Selective Service registration is bogus like it has been proven to be.  It doesn’t make any difference where he spent 1981-83 while he was supposedly matriculating at Columbia.  He is NOT a Natural Born citizen.  Period.  End of story.

Note:  Some of this story is fiction.  The last three paragraphs are not contrived; they are true.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”  — John 8:32

Photo Credit: Delmarva Dealings (Creative Commons)

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism