I even deleted the clip, then recopied it into the clipboard but I got the same error. I'll email you the same database.

-DanWilson (March 19, 2012, 09:33 PM)

Thanks for the database, it helps a lot. I can confirm your observations as well as my initial suspicion.

Some clips in the database have one of two problems:

(a) the main clip entry exists, so that the clip is displayed, but there is no actual data for the clip (the clipboard formats), i.e. Echo has nothing to put on clipboard.

(b) the main clip entry exists,  and some of its data exists, but the database has the clip's data only in HTML format (or only the rich text format). These clips can be copied (no error message in the status line), but they cannot be edited (there will be an additional error message if you try) and are therefore nearly useless as well.

As to why the database is in this state, I don't know yet. Echo requires that at least the plain text format or unicode text format is present for each clip. These formats cannot be deleted in the configuration and are always stored. If at least one of these two formats is not present, Echo will not even store such a clip in the database. In addition, these formats had to be present when Echo captured these clips, because without them Echo would not be able to display the clips in the list - and it does that.

This tells me that the clips are captured correctly, otherwise they could not even be displayed. Something happens later that causes those required formats to be removed, after which the clips become unusable.

One possibility is that there is a bug in the database maintenance routines (they changed somewhat in the current version). Perhaps Echo is deleting certain data it should not be deleting. I will recheck my sql code and will report of I find anything else.

I'm afraid the clips that won't load cannot be salvaged, as their data doesn't exist in the database. For the moment, I suggest that you disable database maintenance entirely to prevent any more clips from losing their data: Tools -> Preferences -> Database maintenance, and set AutomaticMaintenance to False. This means the clips will accumulate for a while, but this should not be a problem for at least several weeks. (You can always delete excess clips manually if you like, just as long as you don't use the Database Maintenance feature).

Meanwhile, I will try to find a fix asap.

I am also puzzled by this:

I even deleted the clip, then recopied it into the clipboard but I got the same error. I'll email you the same database.

If you tried to capture the same clip without deleting it first, then Echo might ignore it as a duplicate (depending on settings), so that the missing clip would still be missing. But if you physically deleted the clip before capturing it again, then the clip should be stored in full and behave correctly immediately after capturing. Can you please confirm that this is not the case?

A bug in the db maintenance cannot explain this last behavior, since the maintenance has to be performed for the bug to show up.

So the most important question right now is: does the bug (cannot load a clip) occur immediately after the clip has been captured? Or does it only occur at some later time (perhaps after Echo has performed db maintenance)?

Is this a question or a suggestion? (I'm not sure what you mean). Yes, if you changed the font of the labels, the tabs would become smaller or larger accordingly.

-tranglos (March 02, 2012, 08:35 PM)

We have this option now? Because i don't know how to do it.
If don't, then i hope to see this option on a newer version.

-sakiskom (March 06, 2012, 01:39 PM)

No, it's not available yet. I'll see if I can add it.

Are you aware of any place in the western world where a business is required at all times to maximize profit under penalty of law? I've been searching for such a thing for a long time (more out of personal curiosity than anything else) and I haven't ever been able to identify such a jurisdiction or law. Not surprising when you're as ignorant about international business law as I am. ;D

Any input would be greatly appreciated.  :)

-40hz (March 08, 2012, 02:24 PM)

Canadian author, professor at University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, has a fantastic (IMO) short book "The Corporation" (there's a 3 hour documentary film to go with it), where he does make that claim. In fact it is fundamental for his thesis. The thrust of the book is to show that the pathological behaviors of big corporations (of which he gives good examples, but you don't need to look far) do not happen because their CEOs are sociopaths. Rather, he says the corporation itself behaves as a sociopath since the law requires that profit be its primary goal and motivation.

If a person behaves like that, it's generally regarded as evil. We'd say a person like that would "sell their mother down the river" and it's never a good thing. Somehow the same behavior becomes a virtue when a corporation does it. Bakan shows plenty of examples where "shareholder value" trumps any ethical or moral considerations, like when the bosses at GM decided that they would rather pay compensation to victims of exploding gas tanks in Chevy Malibus (that was back in the 70s) than fix the design flaw, because fixing it would be much more expensive. They actually used an equation:

500 (estimated) fatalities x $200,000 per fatality / 41,000,000 cars = $2,40 per car.

This is what it cost GM to pay compensation, and apparently it was less costly than fixing the issue. Again, if a human being made a calculation like this, it would be considered very nearly psychopatic. For a corporation it's all in a day's work.

My personal favorite example (not from the book) is this quote from CEO of Roche Korea:

"We are not in business to save lives, but to make money. Saving lives is not our business."
http://naturalhealthnews.blogspot.com/2009/01/not-in-business-of-saving-lives.html

In the book, Bakan lists a behaviors that are understood to be indicators of clinical psychopathy (utter disregard for the well-being of others, inability to assume responsibility, there's a whole list of markers) and demonstrates how your typical corporation fits all of them. I

think the book is quite solid, though I am not a lawyer an the book itself is not lawyerly, either. But IMO it does lay a very solid foundation for a new way of thinking about corporate behavior, and the premise is the idea that yes, corporations are required to increase value for shareholders before anything else. I highly recommend the film as well.

I would also add that something does not have to be a written law in order to be a de-facto standard and expected behavior. There is no law anywhere that says corporations are persons, and yet this is what's being argued all the time. There was a case a few years ago where a court decided a company had a right to lie to its customers since it was a freedom of speech issue. (No link at hand, sorry). The history of the "corporate personhood" idea is traced in another book I highly recommend, "Unequal protection" by Thom Hartmann. He digs in historical court records and finds out it was a court clerk that overinterpreted/misinterpreted a judge's ruling. The judge was already on his deathbed by then, and the clerk was a friend of big railroad corps at the time. No-one contested what he wrote (since it was so convenient for the interested parties) and the idea stuck, although it is not and never was a law.