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Chariots of Silicon
ToddML writes "I just spotted this article at wired.com which talks about the current deficiencies of the U.S. long-distance running program, and more importantly, what is being done about it. An interesting story from both a gadget perspective, and for the source of the program -- private industry."
fuck wtf! props to mine wenis
ps, saksux
first
How is this news for nerds?
You all should be running, not reading about it!
So I'm a pervert. Welcome to the Internet.
ToddMLwrites "Ijust spotted thisarticleat wired.com which talks about the current deficienciesof the U.S.long-distancerunningprogram, and moreimportantly, whatis being doneaboutit.An interesting story fromboth a gadgetperspective, and for the sourceof the program --privateindustry."
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that you perform keeping the system clean and building is what provides the platform for the obsessives and the prima donnas to have their moments in the sun. In the end, we need you all; in order to go forwards we must first avoid going backwards.
To the paranoid conspiracy theorists - yes, I work for Apple too. No, my resignation wasn't on Steve's direct orders, or in any way related to work I'm doing, may do, may not do, or indeed what was in the tea I had at lunchtime today. It's about real problems that the project faces, real problems that the project has brought upon itself. You can't escape them by inventing excuses about outside influence, the problem stems from within.
To the politically obsessed - give it a break, if you can. No, the project isn't a lemonade stand anymore, but it's not a world-spanning corporate juggernaut either and some of the more grandiose visions going around are in need of a solid dose of reality. Keep it simple, stupid.
To the grandstanders, the prima donnas, and anyone that thinks that they can hold the project to ransom for their own agenda - give it a break, if you can. When the current core were elected, we took a conscious stand against vigorous sanctions, and some of you have exploited that. A new core is going to have to decide whether to repeat this mistake or get tough. I hope they learn from our errors.
Future
I started work on FreeBSD because it was fun. If I'm going to continue, it has to be fun again. There are things I still feel obligated to do, and with any luck I'll find the time to meet those obligations.
However I don't feel an obligation to get involved in the political mess the project is in right now. I tried, I burnt out. I don't feel that my efforts were worthwhile. So I won't be standing for election, I won't be shouting from the sidelines, and I probably won't vote in the next round of ballots.
You could say I'm packing up my toys. I'm not going home just yet, but I'm not going to play unless you can work out how to make the project somewhere fun to be again.
= Mike
--
- poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
Soccer. Once the Americans dominate that sport by creating a team of ubermenchen they can finally tell the rest of the World to stop calling it 'football', too.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
just calling it "cheating"? it's helping the runners perform better by external aids. It's just as bad as dope, if you ask me.
But it isn't because of the shoes.
It's simply that the African athletes are naturally endowed with highly developed athletic ability. If you were to take two athletes, one white and one black, and trained them in the same manner, you will find that the black athlete will excel in endurance, strength, and power quite a bit beyond the white athlete's performance. This is made obvious by the repeated drubbing of white long distance athletes in the Olympics and other world athletic competitions.
So why doesn't America use black athletes in long distance events? Simply because of the dominance of America in the shorter sprinting events. The limited pool of black athletes can only be divided so much. Short distance sprinting and long distance running are not interchangeable, they are completely different styles. While a short distance sprinter may be able to become a world-class distance runner, the reverse is never true. So in order to garner more medals, America designates black runners as short distance competitors and leaves the less talented (relatively speaking) white runners to long distance events.
One interesting case is the women's marathon in the last Olympics by a Japanese. Short, with short legs and thus a short stride, she held on and placed first in the event.
I have been pwned because my
...we had this back in the 70's and it was called The Million Dollar Man. They even made a tv-series about the guy. Fascinating stuff.
Why not take it all the way and train in no oxygen? That would really make a difference!
The core feature of this (apart from all the bio-monitoring) seems to be the idea of keeping a whole house at equivalent air pressure to 12,000 feet. This lets the athletes train at sea level, while resting at altitude (which is seen as a 'good thing').
But doesn't it open the athletes up to altitude sickness? Granted, 12,000 feet is low to get this, but it's generally caused as much by the change in altitude as the absolute altitude (So generally if you take a week climbing to 16,000 feet you're much less likely to be afflicted than if you do it in a couple of days). Oddly enough, it affects fit people as much as (or often more than) the unfit, so I do wonder whether they have any problem with this.
Incidentally, I know that 20,000 feet is about half an atmosphere, so I guess they're talking about 2/3 (sea-level) atmosphere at 12,000 feet.
ROFL good one dude!!
Brent Jones
I just heard some sad news on talk radio -
Gnutella creator Gene Kan was found dead in his California home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I don't understand why americans are so concerned about winning at every damn sports competition in the bloody planet.
Let it go! Go... go play with your silly oblongated ball.
jocks... an entire country of them.
MoitaCarrasco "Everyday I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I've stayed alive." - CARLIN
similarly, if you put a white and a black in a classroom, and taught them the same amount, you would notice the white would get better grades and speak proper english while the black would struggle and speak in twisted ebonics. Whites are naturally more intelligent than blacks, and develop better language skills.
This is why america uses blacks for physical labour and 'simple' tasks, while whites run corporations and are involved in more intellectual work.
Now you cannot claim what I just said is racist, unless you also agree the parent post is.
They should have two categories for sports like distance running and track-and-field, one would be drug- and tech(blood doping, etc)- free, the other would be "anything goes". It would be interesting to see the steroid-charged atomic supermen in the "anything goes" category competing against each other. I wounder how fast we could engineer a human body to run?
Ever wonder which hand he used to masturbate and which one held the magazine?
RUN FOREST RUN!
So men can get pregnant hey...
Physicly (that is in fact) black african races have longer ham strings and are better runners, white nordic people tend to have better strength, got a problem with that, wake up to the real world, were all different just because you don't like someone saying so, it doesn't change the fact.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
similarly, if you take a man and a woman and train them next to each other, you would find the man outperformed the woman in every physical sport.
Now you cannot claim the parent post is racist unless you agree that this post is sexist.
Saying that there are differences between different groups of people is not the main characteristic of racism/sexism. If the poster had said that a white athelete shouldn't be allowed to compete because he wasn't black would have been racist - saying he expects a black athelete to win isn't.
I also agree that, in the absence of any evidence/logic, making an assertion that one group is 'better' than another is also group-ist. But he is alluding to a large amount of statistical data to back up his claim.
Of course, he might be wrong, and it could be just that long-distance running is a low-tech sport, in which Americans with sports-psychologists, nutritionists and personal trainers have no real advantage over Africans who can't afford any of that, and so it's just down to weight of numbers/luck.
Distance running is booooooring as hell. Running has a very high injury rate, one of the highest of sports. Why do people do it? I prefer Olympic lifting - these guys can out sprint the 100 meter sprinters in the 40m dash, out vertical leap the high jumpers & basketball players, come in second in flexibility to the gymnasts, and have the highest bone density on the planet. And they're the fastest & strongest athletes around. Running: yawn!.
doN'T forget, this is the last month for using your already paid for m$ ?products? without having to have your pocket picked AGAIN.
the filetmouse Justin de Linuxville Institute has come up with some handy guideLIEns for determining the best level for your hostage ransom eXPerience.
IF you are paying ANYTHING to use stuff you've ALREADY paid for, you are butt another victim of the ill eagle evile KingDumb's FraUDuleNT LIEsense hostage ransoming scam, which helps support yet another FraUD, the ill eagle payper hanging scams on wall street of deceit. that is all. thank you.
Invade Kenya.
This post is about as relevant as Timmy's infamous "Telephone Problems In Zimbabwe" post.
Will the last person to leave Slashdot turn off the lights?
Bowie J. Poag
My cross country coach in high school always said that McDonalds was the problem with the distance program at our high school. Perhaps a bit simplistic, but I tend to think that our culture in general tends to lend itself to be against such thing as having a large quantity (and high quality) of high speed marathon and long distance runners. Match that with the low profit margins of becoming a 'professional' runner, and there's little motivation for most people to try. Granted, there are many exceptions to this rule, but none have consistantly broken through to dominate the distance races. I somehow doubt that any technology will overcome a culture's (in this case, the United States) general mentality, no matter how motivated the individuals may be.
You're only as smart as your brain.
What you are saying is drastically over simplified, and largely wrong!
On average there are differences in muscle composition between whites and blacks. Blacks tend to have more muscles of the fast twitch variety, which contract very quickly, and are well suited to things like running and jumping. Whites tend to have more slow twitch muscle fibers whisk are well suited to things like weightlifting, cycling and swimming. This only accounts for a small portion of the difference.
The main difference is cultural. In America the high profile sports are basketball, baseball, and American football, the fact that these sports are so popular causes many of the gifted athletes to want to do these sports; we don't have someone allocating America's great athletes to different sports, they allocate themselves. Now in many parts of Africa, there is only one sport (unless you are one of the social elite), that sport is running (think about it, if you were extremely poor, what sport could you afford to do). Running in Africa is a way of life, school children run to and from school further than many of us drive to work. Running is the way out of poverty there, poor children dream of being world class marathoners, the same way many poor Americans dream of NBA careers.
Wish me luck, my first Marathon is on October 13th...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
If you cant beat 'em, spend loadsamoney out-teching them.
Whats the frigging point of having impeccably fair races, drugs testing, etc., when countries can do this sort of thing, giving athletes an unfair advantage over poorer nations' competitors? Granted, the results have yet to be seen but I doubt it will make them any worse athletes. The winning seems to count more than the sportsmanship and fairness.
A bit like U.S. foreign policy, then :-|
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
There appears to be no problem that someone won't try to solve by throwing huge amounts of money at it. Except maybe curing parasitic diseases in Africa.
And here is the thing that you cannot do in football. Out tech them! There is no tech to football. You could give a team more endurance, but at the end of the day it relies on the individual, team and trainer.
Otherwise Brazil would not dominate the way it does. Brazil has no tech, just cut throat competition and the football lifestyle. I watched how Brazilian players are trained and it starts when they are seven or eight. It is in their "blood". The truly elite players in football, live, breath and eat football. And more often than not they come from poor areas, eg Zidane...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Scanning the story, I thought it was talking about telephones, and was wondering why all the posts weren't offtopic. Ahh, must be too early in the morning :-)
its as simple as that, baseball players do it, and their breaking more records than ever, plus, their not stopping them so it must be legal.
$.02 charged
I want 2D games back.
great to see corporate industry wasting shareholder's money.
oops, sorry, i'm mimicking american conservatives incorrectly. i'm only supposed to short-sightedly criticise all gov't spending as waste, not corporate spending. damn, never could get the hang of shutting down 99.9% of my neurons to reach that level...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
This is /. Most of the readers here cosider the closest snack machine a long distance run.
We can't feed, clothe or house a large segement of the US population. WHY IN THE HELL do we need to spend millions of dollars on "long distance running deficiencies." Why don't we instead subsidize cock enlargments for the entire nation, just so we can say ours are the biggest. Someone should tell Nike about the rest of the world.
--Should work--
The "light" shoe is great for other sports but once you start running (and especially train) long distances their shoes break down a lot faster than Asics and New Balance. I got a pair of Kayanus (sp?) from Asics and I swear they look like I haven't put on half the miles I have. Plus it seems that Nike's running shoes are designed for someone with a perfect foot unlike half the population who pronates or supinates.
What I really hate are these companies like Foot Locker and Champs whose employees have no clue about the sport they support. With running shoes look should be the last thing you are looking for. It should all be comfort. The fact that some company designed a shoe for some athlete does not mean that I have the exact same foot as this athlete.
I have found that The Running Room (which is a chain in Canada) seem to have the most knowledgable staff. Course this may be because they specialize but at least their main criteria for a good shoe is not how pretty it is.
As for your mention of the Asic Kayanos - Asics, Saucony, Mizuno and the other small brands cleaned up the serious running market years ago. The Kayano is probably the best all around running shoe for advanced runners.
Nike will continue to build junk - they want you to buy new shoes every four months. This is why serious runners who have a choice won't touch them anymore.
What is wrong with you people??!?!
...faster, stronger ... we have the technology
Remember, a truly wise man never plays leapfrom with a unicorn
...nike running shoes have always done me pretty well. of course, i have a damn near perfect landing, so i don't need any real support so to speak, and the damn things tend to break/pop/fall apart on me after ~600 miles, but they're actually one of the only shoe brands i've found that don't make my shins/knees/hips/back hurt. shame the quality sucks so badly, though.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I like your points. I don't know enough about sports physiology to know whether this high-tech approach to running [arguably the lowest tech sport ] will succeed--I guess no one does. At the very least it signifies that the US distance running culture is turning its attention to the marathon and not just whining about it as much.
The racially-based arguments around why 'Americans' get their asses kicked at long distances are pretty absurd. In the US, we have a deep, deep gene pool that should pretty well ensure that certain individuals of any generation could be competitive at the marathon distance. To over-hype the genetics of Kenyans is to diminish the personal achievements of the runners themselves. Currently the men's world record is held by a Moroccan-born American citizen. As of last year, when he got his citizenship, Khalid Khannouchi has as much "American" genetic material as anyone, and probably as little Kenyan genetics as most.
People who complain about the physical genetic superiority of a race they don't belong to (e.g. excuse-spewing complacent white slackers complaining that blacks are stronger) need to either hit the gym more often, hit the track more often, or shut up and eat their potato chips. In the '30s these racial arguments were put forward to explain the higher than expected numbers of elite Jewish basketball players. Shaddup already.
'American' marathoners got handed their asses time and time again by smart, highly-motivated INDIVIDUALS. Even the 8k mentioned in the article is a race demanding not just technical ability, physical gifts beyond muscle-twitch [gait and other factors], but strategy--strategy about how to get yourself through 4.97 miles fast. You need to know a lot about your body to run 8k fast, you need to be able to monitor the body's telemetry closely and respond accordingly. I've never won an 8k, but I've beaten certain snide individuals in the 8k, and you need to know a certain amount about what their bodies are capable of as well. To toss this all off as genetic disposition is to miss most of the race.
Lastly, in response to the "why bother doing this" mentality, I'd format a proper response, but I've got to work on overclocking my processor so I can eke out a few more meaningless megahertz, then I've got to figure out why Eterm's transparency stopped working.
Nike is trying to solve a problem they helped create. Marathon running is very demanding on the body. Many experts say that a person can't run more than 2 competitive marathons per year without seeing a degradation in performance. It just takes too long for the body to recover.
Nike and the fitness industry in general, capatilized on the salad days of US marathoning in the 70's and early 80's, promoting it and profiting from its popularity. One thing that happened was that marathon racing (and other track and field sports) became quasi-professional. Athletes were allowed to accept prize and appearance money, and if it was laundered through a "training fund," they would still be eligible for the Olympics as an amateur. Nike was one of the big corporate sponsors who supplied the prize money.
For the top marathoners, it became profitable to run 4 or 5 marathons a year. Just showing up meant a paycheck. This type of schedule quickly started taking its toll, and US marathoners stopped being competitive on the world stage. As US atheletes' performance dropped, the sport's popularity nosedived as well, and marathon running has never recovered.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
While it has been shown that training at altitude helps an athelete compete at altitude, I don't believe there is much evidence showing that training at altitude helps performance at sea level. So, while training in Denver would help an athelete compete at the Mexico City Olympics, it wouldn't offer significant advantages at the LA Olympics.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
The equipment in the house removes some of the oxygen to simulate the oxygen levels found at an altitude of 12,000 feet. The air pressure remains the same, however.
-Mike_L
Okay there's ganeralization and there's rampant generalization. The one about "BLACK" athletes training against a white guy being better at endurance, power and speed is flat out wrong.
The problem is throwing endurance, power and speed together and all africans together. If it were the average african-american you'd find the average white guy pounding the crap out of them in endurance. On the other hand the average Kenyan will whip the white guy in endurance no problem.
On the other hand your average Dahomian (African American) will outdo the white guy and the kenyan in speed and power.
Your kenyan and dahomian population are vastly different in the preponderance of fast and slow twitch fibers. The white guys are different still.
and my point was that if you have perfect feet, nike's running shoes are actually really nice, even though the construction sucks.
i ran a loooong (~15-mile) slow workout in shox a few months ago, they actually seemed pretty nice - they have the same resilient feel as Air shoes, but without any of the squishiness. The impact absorbtion is much stiffer - not a harder percieved impact, it just seems there's less "give" with just as much "softness" (runners, you know what i mean). my legs felt pretty fresh afterwards, too; if the things weren't like $130 i'd consider investing in a pair (nothing to pop!)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley