Did you ever see the old Tunnels and Trolls game? It came with everything you need in one box: the rules, tips for GMs, a solo adventure so you could get a feel for things.
In the tips for GMs section, one tip said
Don't be unfair to the players. Don't have a room like: "The Sun Room: You open the door, and everybody dies instantly."
In the solo adventure, one of the rooms was
The Sun Room: You open the door and die instantly. (We told you not to do it, but we never said we couldn't do it.)
These appeared to be well-to-do kids who were very likely to have used computers before. That is not who OLPC is aimed at.
Once the OLPC is distributed, there will be a growing population of kids who have "used computers before".
And I don't think the plan is to limit the maintenance teams to 8 and 10 year old kids. Even if your assumption is correct, and unprivileged kids in poor countries can't fix things as well as these Canadian kids can, do you think that maybe unprivileged 14 and 16 year olds might be able to do what these Canadian 8 and 10 year olds managed to do?
It would be much more telling to see tests with kids in poorer nations for whom OLPC is their first PC.
Those tests will come, in time. Meanwhile this was simply a fun test that someone did just because they could.
What I find telling is that the manual dexterity of a 10 year old is adequate to the task of disassembling the OLPC, pulling the motherboard, then putting it all back together again.
Oh, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor... and 0.002% "other". Even if almost all of "other" was H2, that's a ridiculously small yield. And every other gas will liquefy at a higher temperature than the H2, so you will have to deal with everything else first and only at the end get the H2.
Let's double check. Look up "Hydrogen" in Wikipedia:
I suppose it might be possible to use a "cold box" to produce some hydrogen, but I'll bet the electricity costs would be far higher than simply buying some hydrogen from a gas company. If you wish to claim otherwise, please provide references.
But it sure looks to me like you are just trolling, in which case: shame on you.
No, I'm convienced the cause of obesity are lazy people without any self control. The way to lose weight is to consume less calories.
It's not that simple.
Your body is designed to keep you alive even when food is difficult to get; if you just cut calories, your body can react by trying to store as much as it can in the form of fat, and your metabolism can slow way down. If you had a slow metabolism to start with, it can seem impossible to lose weight.
If you eat low-fat but high-carb foods, you may also find it very tough to lose weight. That was one of my problems.
Someone with one or both of the above problems may despair of ever losing weight!
The "Burn the Fat" book I linked in my post higher up tells how to eat a high-protein, moderate-carbs, healthy diet and exercise a lot to lose weight, and that works well.
Sure, some fat people are lazy slobs; others aren't so lazy but haven't found a diet that works for them. Don't be too quick to condemn every overweight person as lazy.
And if just talking about looks and all, showing fit and lean, non-obese women is a good thing. We've got a horrible obesity problem out there, so, some skinnier role models are a good thing IMHO.
I agree it's a good thing if young people have fit role models. However, young people are constantly bombarded these days with images of people so perfect as to represent a crushingly unattainable standard of perfection, and I don't think that's a good thing.
A fit, attractive young girl might feel ugly in comparison with some Hollywood actresses who started with good genes, work out quite a bit, had plastic surgery to enhance certain bits, and are carefully photographed wearing makeup and amazing clothes. And then the image is edited with Photoshop to improve it even more! Even those actresses don't look that good all the time, but those are the only images the young girl sees, and she feels hopelessly ugly.
A fit, attractive young boy might feel pathetic in comparison with some famous guys who started with good genes, work out quite a bit, and then spent several months preparing for one particular day. (You know those photos where every single muscle stands out through the skin? How bodybuilders look in competition? Yes, those guys spend months to look like that on one particular day. They dehydrate themselves for the last couple of days too, to get the so-called "dry look". More info here.) The famous guys don't look that ripped all the time, but those are the only images the young boy sees, and he feels hopelessly pathetic.
I know I'm smart in general, but that doesn't mean I'm smart all the time about everything. When I was an overweight teen nerd, I just figured I had genetics predisposed towards overweight and the guys with muscles had better genes. I tried dieting and I ran cross-country, but I never for a moment considered that maybe I should lift weights too. It was a shock when, a couple of decades later, I finally figured out that working out a gym would work for me too. Posters with Arnold Schwarzenegger might have reinforced the "I'll never look that good" attitude, but posters of someone with whom I could identify might have convinced me to look into working out at a gym.
As to causes of obesity: I think the worst one is that people don't really know what to do about it. There are so many different books, diet plans, etc. and it's hard to figure out which one works.
But I think I know the secret and I'll give it to you. You need to change your diet, and eat healthy foods in the correct proportions; you need to do aerobic exercise, like running or bicycling or swimming; and you also need to do strength training. If you do all of that together, you will get healthier and lose excess fat. (And the strength training can be as little as three hours per week... actually the hardest part is managing the food, really.) My bible on this subject is the book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by Tom Venuto. (Disclaimer: I don't get anything for referring you to that link.)
Re-reading TFA, it looks like this new spec is intended for two uses: capture by cameras (as a RAW format) and general high-definition photos. OpenEXR can be used for the latter, but it currently won't work as a RAW format.
So, I guess my question is better asked as two questions:
Does this new format have any advantages over OpenEXR as a general photo format?
Does it make sense to try to extend OpenEXR to be a RAW image capture format?
Is OpenEXR more computationally expensive? (In other words, would the Microsoft format allow for longer battery life and shorter time interval between taking pictures?)
Actually, are there any cameras available that can capture to OpenEXR? If not, perhaps that's a clue.
Unfortunately, that solution breaks down when you have multiple different pointer variables pointing to the same location.
Okay sure, the FreeFoo() logic will not, by itself, take care of the case where you have multiple pointers. Only the pointer you actually use to free the object would be automatically nulled.
As you note, it is possible to pass around "handles" and make the handles safe, and as you note, there can be a performance hit.
But if you have a clean code design, you will have an expected lifetime for those extra pointers, and when you are done using a pointer, you can NULL that pointer. When you are done, you should have only one pointer left pointing to the object, and when you call FreePfoo(), you will then have zero pointers left pointing to the now-freed object.
Another simple trick you can use: at the beginning of your structure, place a member variable called "signature" or something like that, and set it to some unique value. Then, in FreePfoo(), zero out the signature before you call free(). Then start each function that uses a PFOO with an assert() that checks that the signature is sane. Even if you have a dangling pointer, and even if that pointer can still be used to reference your structure after you free() the structure, the assert() will fail. If you like you can put the "signature" member under #ifdef so that you don't even compile it in unless asserts are enabled.
The last major application I developed, I used the above tricks. The most important data structures each had their own unique signature. Functions that took a PFOO started with a call to AssertValidPfoo(pfoo), which would check the signature and also perform every other sanity check I could think of upon the FOO and the pointer (and which would not be compiled for a release build). Once the compile succeeded with no errors or warnings, I would run a test and immediately get an assert() if I had a code bug. Once I fixed the code to no longer assert(), in general my code Just Worked.
Asserts are like unit tests that run every time you run your code, and don't cost anything in the final release build. I love asserts.
Does this sound like more work than a garbage-collected language like Java or Python? Well, it is. C is just plain a lower-level language and you need to do more stuff by hand.
I have written a bunch of C code, and a little C++ code. I have made it a habit to set a pointer to NULL after I free the pointer's data. If I had code that allocates a FOO structure, I would make a function to free the FOO structure; in C, my FreeFoo() function would not take a pointer to a FOO, but a pointer to a pointer to a FOO, and after freeing the FOO it would set the pointer to NULL. Like so:
Note that if you acidentally try to double-free the FOO, the above code will not crash; the first free sets the FOO pointer to NULL, and the second one notices that the pointer is already NULL and exits early. It does assert() when you try to free a NULL pointer, so you can catch the error and see what else you might have messed up.
For C++ you should be able to write a template that takes a reference to any pointer type and applies the above logic.
I once had to maintain a legacy code base, a whole bunch of C implementing a fairly complicated application. The app had a whole bunch of crashing bugs. I went through and applied the above logic everywhere the app was calling free() and suddenly the app stopped crashing. I wonder if the previous developers were using a different compiler or something, and the dangling pointers just happened to work for them?
I have actually been waiting for this "cheaper" 360. I don't like noisy fans, so I want a 360 that dissipates less heat. The new 65nm process chip will dissipate less heat and, I hope, will not require the fans to be as loud.
What I really want is the new 65nm chip combined with the improved heat-pipe cooling system, and quiet fans. If the new "cheaper" 360 still has noisy cheap fans, I hope Microsoft will introduce a "Mega Super Elite" version that has a bigger hard disk or something, and has more expensive fans. It should have a quiet optical drive too.
Ray Bradbury said it best: the remedy to speech you don't like is more speech. (As opposed to censoring the speech you don't like.)
A Google person is offering to help health care organizations tell their side of the story, and this is "evil"? If you think this is "evil" then I guess you think there is no room for debate here.
Personally, I think health care issues are not so cut-and-dried as that. For a look at the other side of the story, consider this editorial from MTV:
It really is true: if you apply too much sound-level compression to a recording, the recording sounds worse. Music is more interesting with some dynamic range. Some of my favorite classic rock songs sound much better from the CD than they do when played on the radio, because the radio station applies sound-level compression.
On the other hand, it's not really wrong for the radio station to apply the sound-level compression; you wouldn't thank them if you set your volume control knob for one song and then the next song was much louder. And the compression helps the music "cut through" the background noise of driving, so you can hear it better. But it is a pity if the CD is mastered with that kind of sound-level compression from the beginning!
Just take a look at the Ricky Martin song. The gain was set far too high, and as a result many waveforms went outside legal bounds; when you try to master a CD with a wave that is simply too extreme to be legal, it is hard-clipped to make it legal. That sort of clipping makes an unpleasant sound, and makes the CD sound even louder. And hard-clipping means discarding audio data; there is no way to reconstruct it later.
The above is one of the reasons why vinyl LPs still have their fans. You simply cannot push an LP so hard that it's playing hard-clipped square waves. But a well-mastered CD will have more dynamic range than even the best-mastered LP, and less distortion. (Some of the distortion you get with an LP can actually improve your music, and that's another of the reasons why LPs still have fans. But you could apply a digital effect that sounded like LP distortion, if you wanted to.)
One interesting theory I heard: there were two shooters, but the second shooter might not have intended to shoot.
There were various Secret Service people around, armed with various weapons. If you are well trained, you carry a weapon with the safety applied, and with your finger off the trigger, and the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. But sometimes people do screw up.
So, according to this theory, Oswald starts shooting at JFK, and someone screws up and fires off an accidental shot from an AR-15 or something. Then the person who screwed up never admitted it, because if you fatally shot the man you were trying to protect, would you be in a hurry to admit it?
The accidental shot could have been while taking the safety off in a hurry with a finger on the trigger, for example. (One of Cooper's famous three laws of firearm safety: keep your finger outside the trigger guard until you have the sights lined up on a target you are willing to shoot.)
I heard this theory from Massad Ayoob years ago during a lecture on safety. He felt that JFK's head wound was consistent with the small, fast bullet fired by an AR-15, while JFK's other wounds were consistent with a big, heavy, slow bullet fired by the Carcano rifle used by Oswald.
At home, I have a good espresso machine, and I use that. Starbucks sold this machine years ago; it was so good they now put their own name on it and they still sell it. Mine says "Estro Vapore" on it, but the new ones say "Starbucks Barista". Highly rated on coffeegeek.com.
Note that other models of espresso machine have come and go, but this one has been selling for at least a decade now.
At work, I use the AeroPress. It was invented by the same guy who invented the Aerobie flying disc toy. The Aerobie web site has various flying toys... and one coffee maker. US$30 suggested retail, quick and easy to use and clean up.
I bought mine from a mail-order company on Whidbey Island (in Washington state) called Locals Only Coffee. They offer a deal where you can get an extra pack of filters for only $2 when you buy the press.
The coffee beans I use are from Caffe Appassionato. I use their house brand, "Appassionato Blend", ground fine. Even though I live in the area and could theoretically get the beans from a local grocery store, we just order the beans direct from the company by mail.
When you get the beans mail order, they come in a sealed foil pack, and I believe they replace the air inside the foil pack with nitrogen to keep the beans fresher.
I have an espresso grinder with a "doser"; so at home, I can grind just enough beans each day that I am always brewing from fresh-ground beans.
For coffee at work, I grind every few days and keep the ground coffee in a tightly sealed jar.
I disagree with you. I want true undelete on my desktop.
First, it misleads users who expect some degree of data security.
Yes, true undelete is the enemy of true delete, and when you have a document with sensitive info in it, you want true delete. That is not a good reason to refuse to implement true undelete; it just means we need a way to control the file versioning on a file-by-file basis.
The second argument is that it's better handled in user space, so the OS doesn't have to make that sort of policy. There's no reason you can't just alias rm to some.Trash
Not enough. Suppose the user overwrites one file with another, by mistake. One common way this can happen:
Or the classic mistake of editing a file, and writing it out in the wrong place (clobbering a backup version you actually intended to keep, or whatever).
The final argument I can come up with is security problems. We can't have one global.Trash bin in a multiuser system. And quotas. And permissions.
True undelete should ideally be controlled by some flag on the file. If you create a file, the default flag should be inherited from the directory in which you create the file. We even have the flag already; if you are a Linux user, run "man chattr" and look up the "undeletable" flag (-u).
I guess Torvald's opinion is that anything that CAN go in the userspace SHOULD.
The tools for viewing your pool of deleted files, requesting an undelete, etc. should all be user-space tools. But you really can't do true undelete without file system support.
A sniper's job will become a whole lot easier... unless you want to get into the fact that the majority of a sniper's job is about getting in and then hopefully back out.
Actually, this would be a win from that standpoint as well. Current sniper bullets are always supersonic, and thus there is a loud *CRACK* sound that helps indicate the location of the sniper. The laser beam would be silent.
(If you are interested in snipers, you ought to read the book Marine Sniper, a biography of Carlos Hathcock. Hathcock commented that a sniper usually gets one free shot, because no one is expecting the shot, and surprised people don't do a good job of figuring out where the shot came from; if the sniper fires a second shot, all the people in the area will start looking in the correct direction, because this time they are expecting something. So he figured it was better to get close enough to get a guaranteed one-shot kill; even though he would be closer, he would be much harder to find than if he had to take a second shot.)
Imagine a sniper killing someone, and the only sound is the body falling over. Kind of creepy. The sniper might be able to kill the person without other people in the area even noticing!
On the other hand, assuming a high-tech enemy, it might be possible to track the sniper by waste heat from the laser. If you are putting enough energy to kill out of a laser rifle, there will be nontrivial amounts of waste heat. So there might be a special "sniper model" battlefield laser weapon that contains the heat somehow (cartridges with compressed gases, and you use the expanding gas to cancel the waste heat?). Thus the sniper model would probably be the heaviest model.
(Or perhaps the heaviest model would be the "squad automatic" laser, which could be fired many times rapidly...)
Actually, a physics question: would there be a trail in the air, caused by the laser traveling through the air, that could be seen with some sort of vision enhancer goggles? Would the air molecules be ionized or something, and could that be used to track a sniper? If so, there would be a line drawn in the air pointing from the target straight back at the sniper. But I really have no idea if that is possible.
Would guns on campus have prevented more people from getting shot? Who the hell knows? Maybe it would have meant several people trying to play hero and causing even more casualties by shooting wildly in the direction of the gunman. It's just idle speculation.
Actually, if you check the statistics, armed citizens have a better record than the police do of only shooting the actual bad guy. This is mostly because the police come on the scene late and need to figure out who the bad guy is; a citizen on the scene who witnesses the bad guy in action knows who the bad guy is. And responsible adults don't lightly pull out guns, especially if they have had good training.
I believe that if armed citizens trying to play hero caused even more casualties, that would be big news, carried by all the mainstream media. (If someone shoots a bunch of students, that's big news; if a citizen shoots someone by mistake, that's big news; and if a citizen stops a bad guy before he can shoot a bunch of people, that's local-interest news only. You never see a headline like "local man heroically stops gunman at school"; it's more like "local man shoots teen", and it goes downhill from there if the local man is white and the gunman isn't.) Anyway, I cannot recall seeing any news stories like this.
The real question here is how a 911 call about shots fired gets to police at 7:15am and the same gunman (apparently) is allowed to come in and shoot up another building on the same campus TWO HOURS LATER with no police presence.
That's just horrible. But it is an example that you can't count on the police to protect you. In general, the police do their best, and lapses like the above are rare; but it remains true that you can't count on the police to protect you.
This reminds me of something I read about a few years back: "wafer scale integration", an idea for making much cheaper RAM at a performance penalty.
The idea was that you would design a wafer with a bunch of RAM units on it, and have a control patch with a bunch of fusible links. You would test the wafer, and find out which RAM units were good and which were defective; and then you would blow the fuses to take out the defective ones and connect in the good ones. In theory, with decent yields, you would get a predictable and large number of good RAM units per wafer.
Normally, chips are made on a wafer and the wafer is cut apart, and then the chips mounted in packages; the idea with WSI was that the wafer would not be cut apart, you would use the whole thing.
WSI never really happened; I just checked Wikipedia and there is a terse comment that poor yields killed the idea. Too bad; I'd love a large wad of really cheap RAM in a 3.5" hard disk-shaped box with a SATA connector...
The article makes it hard to tell, but perhaps he is proposing something similar. Imagine a chip with extra logic circuits that you could switch in by blowing some fusible links. If you have a defective floating point multiply, maybe you can switch out the defective one, and switch in enough logic correctly connected to make a new one that works better.
What would be kind of neat would be if you could blow a few links, and take an instruction that would have gone to dedicated hardware and make it execute out of microcode; and of course have field-upgradable microcode. Then, as long as you don't run out of space in your microcode ROM, you could fix any problem; the fixed code would run slower (microcode!) than the dedicated hardware it replaced, but presumably that would be better than getting wrong answers or crashing. And if you are lucky, you might be able to special-case the problem: check for the special case, and if you aren't in the special case, go ahead and use the dedicated hardware for full speed.
The summary leaves me scratching my head because the Quincey project is a Microsoft data center, nothing to do with Google. Google is building a data center in The Dalles, Oregon, right on the Columbia River.
Quincy is near enough to the Columbia to have cheap hydro power, but I just looked at the map and it's not right on the Columbia like The Dalles. I wonder if Google will use water from the Columbia to help cool their data center; and I wonder what the plan is for the Quincy data center. (Ordinary air conditioning? That part of Washington is cold in the winter but hot in the summer.)
I suspect that Windows/386 didn't fly off the shelf for two reasons: 0) you couldn't run "DOS-extender" applications, and businesses cared about such apps; 1) in 1988 there weren't as many 386 machines in circulation.
I never ran Windows/386; when I started at Microsoft, I was running OS/2 and Windows 3.0 (the latter before it shipped, it was an internal beta or some such).
Not providing that capability would have had a seriously negative impact on IBM's reputation
Yes. But still, keeping that promise seriously cost them, and with hindsight I think they would have done better to take that hit once. Offer trade-in pricing on 286 machines or something.
I'm top-posting this instead of replying to individual posts because there are just so many posts with one conspiracy theory or another. Microsoft tricked IBM into taking OS/2, Microsoft made Office 95 break OS/2, etc. etc.
I worked at Microsoft from 1990 to 1996, and during part of that time I worked on Microsoft Word. And I'm here to tell you: Microsoft really believed in OS/2, back in the day. They really thought it would be the future.
In 1990, I got an OS/2 machine on my desk, as did the other folks around me, because we all knew OS/2 was the future. The MS library had OS/2 machines for looking up books (and as far as I remember, the MS library had only OS/2 machines). And all the major MS apps were shipped for OS/2: Word, Excel, etc. (But they were also shipped for Windows. MS covered all the bets.)
Now, I was only a lowly developer, not a strategy architect, and I never ate lunch with Bill Gates, so it's possible there was some amazing subterfuge going on without me knowing. But I don't believe it.
Here is my summary of what happened, based on what I saw then, and on various articles I read in PC Week, Infoworld, etc.
Microsoft started developing Windows back in the 80's. The early Windows was a laughingstock in the industry: it was a primitive toy. Apple seriously jump-started their GUI efforts by building a closed platform and tailoring their GUI specifically for that platform; Microsoft was hobbled by the suckiness of the 8088 and awful graphics adapters like the CGA card. MS actually tried to get Windows to run on that sort of pathetic hardware. Windows 1.0 did run but no one wanted it.
MS doesn't give up easily. They kept plugging away at Windows, and it started to suck less, as the machines got more powerful. Also, IBM and Microsoft decided to cooperate on a new OS: OS/2.
Microsoft wanted to make OS/2 as compatible as possible with Windows, to make it easy to port applications. IBM wanted to make OS/2 "better" than Windows. (My memory is dim here, I don't remember specifically why it was better to be incompatible with Windows. Compatible with some graphics API that IBM already had?) So now, the plan was to sell Windows only until OS/2 conquered the world. But the Windows guys kept plugging away on Windows, even as the OS/2 guys did their thing.
Around the time I was hired, Microsoft and IBM were telling customers that basically if you have lame hardware, go ahead and run Windows on it, but if you have good hardware, you want OS/2 because that is the future. (IIRC the decision point was: if you have less than two megabytes of RAM, run Windows.)
Then, in 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0... and everyone, including Microsoft, was stunned by how well it sold. It flew off the shelves. Egghead (at the time, a successful brick-and-mortar chain of computer stores) sent trucks with ice cream over to Microsoft; along with everyone else, I had a free ice cream bar to celebrate the success of Windows 3.0.
The key feature was actually that it ran DOS apps very well. You could have multiple DOS shells open at the same time, and it would multitask them well (pre-emptive multitasking, even though Windows itself used round-robin multitasking for Windows apps at the time!). You could even have a DOS app crash, and your other DOS apps would keep running just fine. Compare with the "compatibility box" in OS/2, which was usually called the "Chernobyl Box" by geeks because a misbehaving DOS app could take down your whole machine. The Chernobyl Box could only run a single DOS app at a time.
Why? Why was Windows 3.0 better than OS/2? Because at the time OS/2 was written only to support the 286, and even if you ran it on a 386 it would just run in 286 mode. Windows 3.0 would only do the cool DOS app multitasking if you ran it on a 386. My understanding is that IBM promised, early on, that OS/2 would run great on a 286; and IBM felt it was seriously important to keep that promise. With hindsight, I
First you build a big RAID server, with lots of storage. Put this in a closet or something, such that it runs and doesn't overheat, but you aren't near it and you don't hear any noise it makes.
Second, you build a desktop with absolutely no moving parts. Specs: AMD X2 processor that dissipates 35 Watts max; giant heatsink; motherboard with passive heatsink only on the north bridge chip; PicoPSU power supply with silent brick; no hard drive; passively cooled graphics adapter that has adequate power to run a 3D desktop like Beryl.
Okay, I'll allow these moving parts: keyboard/mouse/joystick/whatever, DVD drive, and emergency fan to be used if the weather is really hot or something and the passive cooling won't cut it.
Give it a few GB of RAM, and boot Linux over the net, from the large RAID server box.
Boot Windows XP in VirtualBox or VMWare, for random Windows-only app needs, such as iTunes.
I plan to build these later this year: a terabyte server, and the quiet desktop with about 4 GB of RAM. (1 GB for VirtualBox and 3 GB for Linux.)
I'll hook up some nice speakers to enjoy music; the box will be absolutely silent.
Back in the day, our Atari ST was absolutely silent, and it was nice.
As for glucose - note that going directly into blood stream does not change the calorie contained within in any given type of food - glucose has a certain amount of calorie per gram, starch has such and such, fat has such and such.
There is no point in arguing about the details of how starches are metabolized. I'm not even an expert anyway.
Let's just agree: eating large amounts of simple starches is not recommended for fat loss.
You are probably meaning to say, as there is very little effort spent in digesting glucose, most of the energy taken remains. Which, intuitively implies that as you spend more energy digesting fat or protein, you kinda take less energy in the end - which is wrong.
References, please. According to the BFFM book, you can spend up to 30% of the calories in lean protein by the effort of digesting the lean protein. You say this is not so? (If you read BFFM, search for the part about the "thermic effect of food".)
advises only 10-20% protein intake.
BFFM recommends 30% of calories come from protein; as long as you drink plenty of water to help your kidneys you should handle the extra protein just fine, and the thermic effect of the protein is good for people who want to lose fat. BFFM never claimed that everyone needs 30% calories from fat.
you have reiterated what i said about burning calories in matter of burning the protein based materials last ? hence, whatever protein you take, it will go directly into building body stuff - to loose muscles if you are not working ? to the ass, to be precise ?
Perhaps I misunderstood you. I thought you were claiming that the body was stripping proteins from the muscles, but then building them back more strongly later. As I understand it, the "damage" the muscles from exercise is micro-tears, and this micro-damage signals the body to rebuild the muscles, and make them stronger.
If this is what you were really saying, then we don't disagree.
As for "go directly into building body stuff" -- my understanding is that it might, if your body needs protein, but if your body doesn't need protein it might be broken down into carbs instead. But the pathway of protein to carbs to fat is so long and difficult that it's very difficult to put on fat by eating too much protein. (If you eat too many calories, and some of them are protein but some are carbs and/or fat, it's very easy for the carbs and/or fat to be stored as fat.)
yet im still in the body/weight proportionality i described. its all a matter of metabolism i think.
Yes, I think so. The diet you describe would not work at all for me. Your metabolism is much better than mine for living in the modern, affluent society; my more-efficient metabolism would be much better for subsistance living in pre-technological days, but since I'm not a cave man during an ice age, I rather wish my metabolism was less efficient.
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In the tips for GMs section, one tip said
In the solo adventure, one of the rooms was
steveha
These appeared to be well-to-do kids who were very likely to have used computers before. That is not who OLPC is aimed at.
Once the OLPC is distributed, there will be a growing population of kids who have "used computers before".
And I don't think the plan is to limit the maintenance teams to 8 and 10 year old kids. Even if your assumption is correct, and unprivileged kids in poor countries can't fix things as well as these Canadian kids can, do you think that maybe unprivileged 14 and 16 year olds might be able to do what these Canadian 8 and 10 year olds managed to do?
It would be much more telling to see tests with kids in poorer nations for whom OLPC is their first PC.
Those tests will come, in time. Meanwhile this was simply a fun test that someone did just because they could.
What I find telling is that the manual dexterity of a 10 year old is adequate to the task of disassembling the OLPC, pulling the motherboard, then putting it all back together again.
steveha
The major characters in the comic The Whiteboard are drawn as various animals. The big polar bear is Doc, the main character.
http://the-whiteboard.com/autowb643.html
http://the-whiteboard.com/autowb645.html
steveha
Parent post is so nonsensical that it must be a troll.
i on.htm
Luckily, hydrogen is easy to produce. You just suck in atmospheric air, distill the contents and, voila! H2.
Let's check Wikipedia. What's the atmosphere made out of?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere
Oh, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor... and 0.002% "other". Even if almost all of "other" was H2, that's a ridiculously small yield. And every other gas will liquefy at a higher temperature than the H2, so you will have to deal with everything else first and only at the end get the H2.
Let's double check. Look up "Hydrogen" in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
Oh look, less than 1 part per million of the atmosphere is H2, and practical methods for producing H2 don't mention chilling the atmosphere.
Let's triple check. Google search for "methods hydrogen production". Here's one result:
http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Hydrogen/Product
Nope, still not listed.
I suppose it might be possible to use a "cold box" to produce some hydrogen, but I'll bet the electricity costs would be far higher than simply buying some hydrogen from a gas company. If you wish to claim otherwise, please provide references.
But it sure looks to me like you are just trolling, in which case: shame on you.
steveha
No, I'm convienced the cause of obesity are lazy people without any self control. The way to lose weight is to consume less calories.
3 43433
It's not that simple.
Your body is designed to keep you alive even when food is difficult to get; if you just cut calories, your body can react by trying to store as much as it can in the form of fat, and your metabolism can slow way down. If you had a slow metabolism to start with, it can seem impossible to lose weight.
If you eat low-fat but high-carb foods, you may also find it very tough to lose weight. That was one of my problems.
Someone with one or both of the above problems may despair of ever losing weight!
The "Burn the Fat" book I linked in my post higher up tells how to eat a high-protein, moderate-carbs, healthy diet and exercise a lot to lose weight, and that works well.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=226411&cid=18
Sure, some fat people are lazy slobs; others aren't so lazy but haven't found a diet that works for them. Don't be too quick to condemn every overweight person as lazy.
steveha
And if just talking about looks and all, showing fit and lean, non-obese women is a good thing. We've got a horrible obesity problem out there, so, some skinnier role models are a good thing IMHO.
I agree it's a good thing if young people have fit role models. However, young people are constantly bombarded these days with images of people so perfect as to represent a crushingly unattainable standard of perfection, and I don't think that's a good thing.
A fit, attractive young girl might feel ugly in comparison with some Hollywood actresses who started with good genes, work out quite a bit, had plastic surgery to enhance certain bits, and are carefully photographed wearing makeup and amazing clothes. And then the image is edited with Photoshop to improve it even more! Even those actresses don't look that good all the time, but those are the only images the young girl sees, and she feels hopelessly ugly.
A fit, attractive young boy might feel pathetic in comparison with some famous guys who started with good genes, work out quite a bit, and then spent several months preparing for one particular day. (You know those photos where every single muscle stands out through the skin? How bodybuilders look in competition? Yes, those guys spend months to look like that on one particular day. They dehydrate themselves for the last couple of days too, to get the so-called "dry look". More info here.) The famous guys don't look that ripped all the time, but those are the only images the young boy sees, and he feels hopelessly pathetic.
I know I'm smart in general, but that doesn't mean I'm smart all the time about everything. When I was an overweight teen nerd, I just figured I had genetics predisposed towards overweight and the guys with muscles had better genes. I tried dieting and I ran cross-country, but I never for a moment considered that maybe I should lift weights too. It was a shock when, a couple of decades later, I finally figured out that working out a gym would work for me too. Posters with Arnold Schwarzenegger might have reinforced the "I'll never look that good" attitude, but posters of someone with whom I could identify might have convinced me to look into working out at a gym.
As to causes of obesity: I think the worst one is that people don't really know what to do about it. There are so many different books, diet plans, etc. and it's hard to figure out which one works.
But I think I know the secret and I'll give it to you. You need to change your diet, and eat healthy foods in the correct proportions; you need to do aerobic exercise, like running or bicycling or swimming; and you also need to do strength training. If you do all of that together, you will get healthier and lose excess fat. (And the strength training can be as little as three hours per week... actually the hardest part is managing the food, really.) My bible on this subject is the book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by Tom Venuto. (Disclaimer: I don't get anything for referring you to that link.)
steveha
Re-reading TFA, it looks like this new spec is intended for two uses: capture by cameras (as a RAW format) and general high-definition photos. OpenEXR can be used for the latter, but it currently won't work as a RAW format.
So, I guess my question is better asked as two questions:
Does this new format have any advantages over OpenEXR as a general photo format?
Does it make sense to try to extend OpenEXR to be a RAW image capture format?
steveha
Would someone who understands these issues please explain how this standard is similar and different to OpenEXR?
http://www.openexr.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR
Is OpenEXR more computationally expensive? (In other words, would the Microsoft format allow for longer battery life and shorter time interval between taking pictures?)
Actually, are there any cameras available that can capture to OpenEXR? If not, perhaps that's a clue.
Unfortunately, that solution breaks down when you have multiple different pointer variables pointing to the same location.
Okay sure, the FreeFoo() logic will not, by itself, take care of the case where you have multiple pointers. Only the pointer you actually use to free the object would be automatically nulled.
As you note, it is possible to pass around "handles" and make the handles safe, and as you note, there can be a performance hit.
But if you have a clean code design, you will have an expected lifetime for those extra pointers, and when you are done using a pointer, you can NULL that pointer. When you are done, you should have only one pointer left pointing to the object, and when you call FreePfoo(), you will then have zero pointers left pointing to the now-freed object.
Another simple trick you can use: at the beginning of your structure, place a member variable called "signature" or something like that, and set it to some unique value. Then, in FreePfoo(), zero out the signature before you call free(). Then start each function that uses a PFOO with an assert() that checks that the signature is sane. Even if you have a dangling pointer, and even if that pointer can still be used to reference your structure after you free() the structure, the assert() will fail. If you like you can put the "signature" member under #ifdef so that you don't even compile it in unless asserts are enabled.
The last major application I developed, I used the above tricks. The most important data structures each had their own unique signature. Functions that took a PFOO started with a call to AssertValidPfoo(pfoo), which would check the signature and also perform every other sanity check I could think of upon the FOO and the pointer (and which would not be compiled for a release build). Once the compile succeeded with no errors or warnings, I would run a test and immediately get an assert() if I had a code bug. Once I fixed the code to no longer assert(), in general my code Just Worked.
Asserts are like unit tests that run every time you run your code, and don't cost anything in the final release build. I love asserts.
Does this sound like more work than a garbage-collected language like Java or Python? Well, it is. C is just plain a lower-level language and you need to do more stuff by hand.
steveha
I have written a bunch of C code, and a little C++ code. I have made it a habit to set a pointer to NULL after I free the pointer's data. If I had code that allocates a FOO structure, I would make a function to free the FOO structure; in C, my FreeFoo() function would not take a pointer to a FOO, but a pointer to a pointer to a FOO, and after freeing the FOO it would set the pointer to NULL. Like so:
/* C code */
void
FreeFoo(PFOO *ppfoo)
{
PFOO pfoo;
assert(NULL != ppfoo);
if (NULL == ppfoo)
return;
pfoo = *ppfoo;
assert(NULL != pfoo);
if (NULL == pfoo)
return;
free(pfoo);
*ppfoo = NULL;
}
/* typical use:
PFOO pfoo = PfooNew(args);
...do something with FOO object...
FreeFoo(&pfoo);
*/
Note that if you acidentally try to double-free the FOO, the above code will not crash; the first free sets the FOO pointer to NULL, and the second one notices that the pointer is already NULL and exits early. It does assert() when you try to free a NULL pointer, so you can catch the error and see what else you might have messed up.
For C++ you should be able to write a template that takes a reference to any pointer type and applies the above logic.
I once had to maintain a legacy code base, a whole bunch of C implementing a fairly complicated application. The app had a whole bunch of crashing bugs. I went through and applied the above logic everywhere the app was calling free() and suddenly the app stopped crashing. I wonder if the previous developers were using a different compiler or something, and the dangling pointers just happened to work for them?
steveha
I have actually been waiting for this "cheaper" 360. I don't like noisy fans, so I want a 360 that dissipates less heat. The new 65nm process chip will dissipate less heat and, I hope, will not require the fans to be as loud.
What I really want is the new 65nm chip combined with the improved heat-pipe cooling system, and quiet fans. If the new "cheaper" 360 still has noisy cheap fans, I hope Microsoft will introduce a "Mega Super Elite" version that has a bigger hard disk or something, and has more expensive fans. It should have a quiet optical drive too.
steveha
Ray Bradbury said it best: the remedy to speech you don't like is more speech. (As opposed to censoring the speech you don't like.)
A Google person is offering to help health care organizations tell their side of the story, and this is "evil"? If you think this is "evil" then I guess you think there is no room for debate here.
Personally, I think health care issues are not so cut-and-dried as that. For a look at the other side of the story, consider this editorial from MTV:
'Sicko': Heavily Doctored, By Kurt Loder
steveha
You can read more about the loudness war here:
m ics.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
It really is true: if you apply too much sound-level compression to a recording, the recording sounds worse. Music is more interesting with some dynamic range. Some of my favorite classic rock songs sound much better from the CD than they do when played on the radio, because the radio station applies sound-level compression.
On the other hand, it's not really wrong for the radio station to apply the sound-level compression; you wouldn't thank them if you set your volume control knob for one song and then the next song was much louder. And the compression helps the music "cut through" the background noise of driving, so you can hear it better. But it is a pity if the CD is mastered with that kind of sound-level compression from the beginning!
Here's another really good web page about this.
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dyna
Just take a look at the Ricky Martin song. The gain was set far too high, and as a result many waveforms went outside legal bounds; when you try to master a CD with a wave that is simply too extreme to be legal, it is hard-clipped to make it legal. That sort of clipping makes an unpleasant sound, and makes the CD sound even louder. And hard-clipping means discarding audio data; there is no way to reconstruct it later.
The above is one of the reasons why vinyl LPs still have their fans. You simply cannot push an LP so hard that it's playing hard-clipped square waves. But a well-mastered CD will have more dynamic range than even the best-mastered LP, and less distortion. (Some of the distortion you get with an LP can actually improve your music, and that's another of the reasons why LPs still have fans. But you could apply a digital effect that sounded like LP distortion, if you wanted to.)
steveha
One interesting theory I heard: there were two shooters, but the second shooter might not have intended to shoot.
n otated.asp
There were various Secret Service people around, armed with various weapons. If you are well trained, you carry a weapon with the safety applied, and with your finger off the trigger, and the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. But sometimes people do screw up.
So, according to this theory, Oswald starts shooting at JFK, and someone screws up and fires off an accidental shot from an AR-15 or something. Then the person who screwed up never admitted it, because if you fatally shot the man you were trying to protect, would you be in a hurry to admit it?
The accidental shot could have been while taking the safety off in a hurry with a finger on the trigger, for example. (One of Cooper's famous three laws of firearm safety: keep your finger outside the trigger guard until you have the sights lined up on a target you are willing to shoot.)
http://www.sportshooter.com/safety/safetyrules_an
I heard this theory from Massad Ayoob years ago during a lecture on safety. He felt that JFK's head wound was consistent with the small, fast bullet fired by an AR-15, while JFK's other wounds were consistent with a big, heavy, slow bullet fired by the Carcano rifle used by Oswald.
http://ourworld.cs.com/mikegriffith1/id89.htm
I have not researched this enough to have an opinion on how likely it is, but I do find it interesting.
steveha
At home, I have a good espresso machine, and I use that. Starbucks sold this machine years ago; it was so good they now put their own name on it and they still sell it. Mine says "Estro Vapore" on it, but the new ones say "Starbucks Barista". Highly rated on coffeegeek.com.
b arista
- TM-p/aer01.htm
Note that other models of espresso machine have come and go, but this one has been selling for at least a decade now.
http://coffeegeek.com/reviews/consumer/starbucks_
At work, I use the AeroPress. It was invented by the same guy who invented the Aerobie flying disc toy. The Aerobie web site has various flying toys... and one coffee maker. US$30 suggested retail, quick and easy to use and clean up.
http://www.aerobie.com/Products/aeropress.htm
Here is the review that convinced me to buy one.
http://www.dansdata.com/aeropress.htm
I bought mine from a mail-order company on Whidbey Island (in Washington state) called Locals Only Coffee. They offer a deal where you can get an extra pack of filters for only $2 when you buy the press.
http://www.localsonlycoffee.com/Aerobie-AeroPress
REI also sells this now.
http://www.rei.com/product/745004
The coffee beans I use are from Caffe Appassionato. I use their house brand, "Appassionato Blend", ground fine. Even though I live in the area and could theoretically get the beans from a local grocery store, we just order the beans direct from the company by mail.
When you get the beans mail order, they come in a sealed foil pack, and I believe they replace the air inside the foil pack with nitrogen to keep the beans fresher.
I have an espresso grinder with a "doser"; so at home, I can grind just enough beans each day that I am always brewing from fresh-ground beans.
For coffee at work, I grind every few days and keep the ground coffee in a tightly sealed jar.
steveha
I'm glad they are lost on Earth rather than being lost in space; the irony would have been terrible.
steveha
I disagree with you. I want true undelete on my desktop.
.Trash
.Trash bin in a multiuser system. And quotas. And permissions.
First, it misleads users who expect some degree of data security.
Yes, true undelete is the enemy of true delete, and when you have a document with sensitive info in it, you want true delete. That is not a good reason to refuse to implement true undelete; it just means we need a way to control the file versioning on a file-by-file basis.
The second argument is that it's better handled in user space, so the OS doesn't have to make that sort of policy. There's no reason you can't just alias rm to some
Not enough. Suppose the user overwrites one file with another, by mistake. One common way this can happen:
$ cp old_version new_version # oops, wanted cp new_version old_version
Or the classic mistake of editing a file, and writing it out in the wrong place (clobbering a backup version you actually intended to keep, or whatever).
The final argument I can come up with is security problems. We can't have one global
True undelete should ideally be controlled by some flag on the file. If you create a file, the default flag should be inherited from the directory in which you create the file. We even have the flag already; if you are a Linux user, run "man chattr" and look up the "undeletable" flag (-u).
I guess Torvald's opinion is that anything that CAN go in the userspace SHOULD.
The tools for viewing your pool of deleted files, requesting an undelete, etc. should all be user-space tools. But you really can't do true undelete without file system support.
steveha
A sniper's job will become a whole lot easier... unless you want to get into the fact that the majority of a sniper's job is about getting in and then hopefully back out.
Actually, this would be a win from that standpoint as well. Current sniper bullets are always supersonic, and thus there is a loud *CRACK* sound that helps indicate the location of the sniper. The laser beam would be silent.
(If you are interested in snipers, you ought to read the book Marine Sniper, a biography of Carlos Hathcock. Hathcock commented that a sniper usually gets one free shot, because no one is expecting the shot, and surprised people don't do a good job of figuring out where the shot came from; if the sniper fires a second shot, all the people in the area will start looking in the correct direction, because this time they are expecting something. So he figured it was better to get close enough to get a guaranteed one-shot kill; even though he would be closer, he would be much harder to find than if he had to take a second shot.)
Imagine a sniper killing someone, and the only sound is the body falling over. Kind of creepy. The sniper might be able to kill the person without other people in the area even noticing!
On the other hand, assuming a high-tech enemy, it might be possible to track the sniper by waste heat from the laser. If you are putting enough energy to kill out of a laser rifle, there will be nontrivial amounts of waste heat. So there might be a special "sniper model" battlefield laser weapon that contains the heat somehow (cartridges with compressed gases, and you use the expanding gas to cancel the waste heat?). Thus the sniper model would probably be the heaviest model.
(Or perhaps the heaviest model would be the "squad automatic" laser, which could be fired many times rapidly...)
Actually, a physics question: would there be a trail in the air, caused by the laser traveling through the air, that could be seen with some sort of vision enhancer goggles? Would the air molecules be ionized or something, and could that be used to track a sniper? If so, there would be a line drawn in the air pointing from the target straight back at the sniper. But I really have no idea if that is possible.
steveha
Would guns on campus have prevented more people from getting shot? Who the hell knows? Maybe it would have meant several people trying to play hero and causing even more casualties by shooting wildly in the direction of the gunman. It's just idle speculation.
Actually, if you check the statistics, armed citizens have a better record than the police do of only shooting the actual bad guy. This is mostly because the police come on the scene late and need to figure out who the bad guy is; a citizen on the scene who witnesses the bad guy in action knows who the bad guy is. And responsible adults don't lightly pull out guns, especially if they have had good training.
I believe that if armed citizens trying to play hero caused even more casualties, that would be big news, carried by all the mainstream media. (If someone shoots a bunch of students, that's big news; if a citizen shoots someone by mistake, that's big news; and if a citizen stops a bad guy before he can shoot a bunch of people, that's local-interest news only. You never see a headline like "local man heroically stops gunman at school"; it's more like "local man shoots teen", and it goes downhill from there if the local man is white and the gunman isn't.) Anyway, I cannot recall seeing any news stories like this.
The real question here is how a 911 call about shots fired gets to police at 7:15am and the same gunman (apparently) is allowed to come in and shoot up another building on the same campus TWO HOURS LATER with no police presence.
That's just horrible. But it is an example that you can't count on the police to protect you. In general, the police do their best, and lapses like the above are rare; but it remains true that you can't count on the police to protect you.
steveha
This reminds me of something I read about a few years back: "wafer scale integration", an idea for making much cheaper RAM at a performance penalty.
The idea was that you would design a wafer with a bunch of RAM units on it, and have a control patch with a bunch of fusible links. You would test the wafer, and find out which RAM units were good and which were defective; and then you would blow the fuses to take out the defective ones and connect in the good ones. In theory, with decent yields, you would get a predictable and large number of good RAM units per wafer.
Normally, chips are made on a wafer and the wafer is cut apart, and then the chips mounted in packages; the idea with WSI was that the wafer would not be cut apart, you would use the whole thing.
WSI never really happened; I just checked Wikipedia and there is a terse comment that poor yields killed the idea. Too bad; I'd love a large wad of really cheap RAM in a 3.5" hard disk-shaped box with a SATA connector...
The article makes it hard to tell, but perhaps he is proposing something similar. Imagine a chip with extra logic circuits that you could switch in by blowing some fusible links. If you have a defective floating point multiply, maybe you can switch out the defective one, and switch in enough logic correctly connected to make a new one that works better.
What would be kind of neat would be if you could blow a few links, and take an instruction that would have gone to dedicated hardware and make it execute out of microcode; and of course have field-upgradable microcode. Then, as long as you don't run out of space in your microcode ROM, you could fix any problem; the fixed code would run slower (microcode!) than the dedicated hardware it replaced, but presumably that would be better than getting wrong answers or crashing. And if you are lucky, you might be able to special-case the problem: check for the special case, and if you aren't in the special case, go ahead and use the dedicated hardware for full speed.
steveha
The summary leaves me scratching my head because the Quincey project is a Microsoft data center, nothing to do with Google. Google is building a data center in The Dalles, Oregon, right on the Columbia River.
m mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001262
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
Quincy is near enough to the Columbia to have cheap hydro power, but I just looked at the map and it's not right on the Columbia like The Dalles. I wonder if Google will use water from the Columbia to help cool their data center; and I wonder what the plan is for the Quincy data center. (Ordinary air conditioning? That part of Washington is cold in the winter but hot in the summer.)
steveha
You could actually [multitask DOS apps] with Windows 2.1/386, ca. 1988 (although, unsurprisingly, not many people are probably aware of that).
I just looked this up, and you are correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.x
I suspect that Windows/386 didn't fly off the shelf for two reasons: 0) you couldn't run "DOS-extender" applications, and businesses cared about such apps; 1) in 1988 there weren't as many 386 machines in circulation.
I never ran Windows/386; when I started at Microsoft, I was running OS/2 and Windows 3.0 (the latter before it shipped, it was an internal beta or some such).
Not providing that capability would have had a seriously negative impact on IBM's reputation
Yes. But still, keeping that promise seriously cost them, and with hindsight I think they would have done better to take that hit once. Offer trade-in pricing on 286 machines or something.
steveha
I'm top-posting this instead of replying to individual posts because there are just so many posts with one conspiracy theory or another. Microsoft tricked IBM into taking OS/2, Microsoft made Office 95 break OS/2, etc. etc.
I worked at Microsoft from 1990 to 1996, and during part of that time I worked on Microsoft Word. And I'm here to tell you: Microsoft really believed in OS/2, back in the day. They really thought it would be the future.
In 1990, I got an OS/2 machine on my desk, as did the other folks around me, because we all knew OS/2 was the future. The MS library had OS/2 machines for looking up books (and as far as I remember, the MS library had only OS/2 machines). And all the major MS apps were shipped for OS/2: Word, Excel, etc. (But they were also shipped for Windows. MS covered all the bets.)
Now, I was only a lowly developer, not a strategy architect, and I never ate lunch with Bill Gates, so it's possible there was some amazing subterfuge going on without me knowing. But I don't believe it.
Here is my summary of what happened, based on what I saw then, and on various articles I read in PC Week, Infoworld, etc.
Microsoft started developing Windows back in the 80's. The early Windows was a laughingstock in the industry: it was a primitive toy. Apple seriously jump-started their GUI efforts by building a closed platform and tailoring their GUI specifically for that platform; Microsoft was hobbled by the suckiness of the 8088 and awful graphics adapters like the CGA card. MS actually tried to get Windows to run on that sort of pathetic hardware. Windows 1.0 did run but no one wanted it.
MS doesn't give up easily. They kept plugging away at Windows, and it started to suck less, as the machines got more powerful. Also, IBM and Microsoft decided to cooperate on a new OS: OS/2.
Microsoft wanted to make OS/2 as compatible as possible with Windows, to make it easy to port applications. IBM wanted to make OS/2 "better" than Windows. (My memory is dim here, I don't remember specifically why it was better to be incompatible with Windows. Compatible with some graphics API that IBM already had?) So now, the plan was to sell Windows only until OS/2 conquered the world. But the Windows guys kept plugging away on Windows, even as the OS/2 guys did their thing.
Around the time I was hired, Microsoft and IBM were telling customers that basically if you have lame hardware, go ahead and run Windows on it, but if you have good hardware, you want OS/2 because that is the future. (IIRC the decision point was: if you have less than two megabytes of RAM, run Windows.)
Then, in 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0... and everyone, including Microsoft, was stunned by how well it sold. It flew off the shelves. Egghead (at the time, a successful brick-and-mortar chain of computer stores) sent trucks with ice cream over to Microsoft; along with everyone else, I had a free ice cream bar to celebrate the success of Windows 3.0.
The key feature was actually that it ran DOS apps very well. You could have multiple DOS shells open at the same time, and it would multitask them well (pre-emptive multitasking, even though Windows itself used round-robin multitasking for Windows apps at the time!). You could even have a DOS app crash, and your other DOS apps would keep running just fine. Compare with the "compatibility box" in OS/2, which was usually called the "Chernobyl Box" by geeks because a misbehaving DOS app could take down your whole machine. The Chernobyl Box could only run a single DOS app at a time.
Why? Why was Windows 3.0 better than OS/2? Because at the time OS/2 was written only to support the 286, and even if you ran it on a 386 it would just run in 286 mode. Windows 3.0 would only do the cool DOS app multitasking if you ran it on a 386. My understanding is that IBM promised, early on, that OS/2 would run great on a 286; and IBM felt it was seriously important to keep that promise. With hindsight, I
What I want is really two computers.
First you build a big RAID server, with lots of storage. Put this in a closet or something, such that it runs and doesn't overheat, but you aren't near it and you don't hear any noise it makes.
Second, you build a desktop with absolutely no moving parts. Specs: AMD X2 processor that dissipates 35 Watts max; giant heatsink; motherboard with passive heatsink only on the north bridge chip; PicoPSU power supply with silent brick; no hard drive; passively cooled graphics adapter that has adequate power to run a 3D desktop like Beryl.
Okay, I'll allow these moving parts: keyboard/mouse/joystick/whatever, DVD drive, and emergency fan to be used if the weather is really hot or something and the passive cooling won't cut it.
Give it a few GB of RAM, and boot Linux over the net, from the large RAID server box.
Boot Windows XP in VirtualBox or VMWare, for random Windows-only app needs, such as iTunes.
I plan to build these later this year: a terabyte server, and the quiet desktop with about 4 GB of RAM. (1 GB for VirtualBox and 3 GB for Linux.)
I'll hook up some nice speakers to enjoy music; the box will be absolutely silent.
Back in the day, our Atari ST was absolutely silent, and it was nice.
steveha
As for glucose - note that going directly into blood stream does not change the calorie contained within in any given type of food - glucose has a certain amount of calorie per gram, starch has such and such, fat has such and such.
There is no point in arguing about the details of how starches are metabolized. I'm not even an expert anyway.
Let's just agree: eating large amounts of simple starches is not recommended for fat loss.
You are probably meaning to say, as there is very little effort spent in digesting glucose, most of the energy taken remains. Which, intuitively implies that as you spend more energy digesting fat or protein, you kinda take less energy in the end - which is wrong.
References, please. According to the BFFM book, you can spend up to 30% of the calories in lean protein by the effort of digesting the lean protein. You say this is not so? (If you read BFFM, search for the part about the "thermic effect of food".)
advises only 10-20% protein intake.
BFFM recommends 30% of calories come from protein; as long as you drink plenty of water to help your kidneys you should handle the extra protein just fine, and the thermic effect of the protein is good for people who want to lose fat. BFFM never claimed that everyone needs 30% calories from fat.
you have reiterated what i said about burning calories in matter of burning the protein based materials last ? hence, whatever protein you take, it will go directly into building body stuff - to loose muscles if you are not working ? to the ass, to be precise ?
Perhaps I misunderstood you. I thought you were claiming that the body was stripping proteins from the muscles, but then building them back more strongly later. As I understand it, the "damage" the muscles from exercise is micro-tears, and this micro-damage signals the body to rebuild the muscles, and make them stronger.
If this is what you were really saying, then we don't disagree.
As for "go directly into building body stuff" -- my understanding is that it might, if your body needs protein, but if your body doesn't need protein it might be broken down into carbs instead. But the pathway of protein to carbs to fat is so long and difficult that it's very difficult to put on fat by eating too much protein. (If you eat too many calories, and some of them are protein but some are carbs and/or fat, it's very easy for the carbs and/or fat to be stored as fat.)
yet im still in the body/weight proportionality i described. its all a matter of metabolism i think.
Yes, I think so. The diet you describe would not work at all for me. Your metabolism is much better than mine for living in the modern, affluent society; my more-efficient metabolism would be much better for subsistance living in pre-technological days, but since I'm not a cave man during an ice age, I rather wish my metabolism was less efficient.
steveha