He never gives you carte blanche to eat as much fat as you want.
This is not what I have heard from people I know who have tried Atkins. They told me that the theory is: fat makes you feel full, so you will self-regulate; you can eat as much fat as you want, because you won't want too much. I know someone who bought a deep-fryer to make Atkins recipes.
These people also talked about their attempts to reach ketosis and stay there for, say, a whole weekend. I haven't read the book, but my understanding is that the Atkins plan does not require ketosis but doesn't discourage the idea.
The takeaway point of Atkins is reduce carbs and sugar and increase protein.
This statement is sensible. The BFFM book will tell you how to calculate your ideal portion size for carbs, protein, and fat.
saying "cardio burns fat" is clearly a generalization that overlooks many of the other benefits you could be giving yourself.
My whole post was a quick summary of a long book. Generalization? Sure.
I think most electrode scales are total crap.
Concur. I have one, and it alwyas reports my body fat as well under 10%. I wish that were correct, but it's not. And I notice huge jumps depending on how much water I've drunk recently.
The book has a long discussion of ways to measure body fat. Bottom line: you can get a useful and repeatable measurement with a simple plastic calipers gadget called an Accu-measure. (You will note I carefully did not use the word "accurate" there, but I stand by "useful" and "repeatable".)
Robert Heinlein wrote a whole string of novels that were intended for the young-adult audience; these are generally called his "juveniles". I recommend them all; even the ones that are a bit weak have enough merit to be worth reading at least once.
By far the best of Heinlein's juveniles was Citizen of the Galaxy, where the main character winds up transitioning from one cultural milieu to another no less than three times over the course of the book. I read and re-read that book and I never get tired of it.
Jerry Pournelle wrote a book called Starswarm that is pretty much a juvenile in the Heinlein tradition, and I recommend this as well. Jerry Pournelle and Charles Sheffield together wrote another book called Higher Education that I would also recommend, although it's at least PG-13, so you might want to read it before you give it to a kid (to make sure you want that kid to read it).
Here is a model of how the human body works with respect to fat gain and fat loss. This is my summary of my understanding of the material in a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by a pro bodybuilder named Tom Venuto.
Your body is designed to keep you alive, even in hard times when it's difficult to get enough food. Thus, if you simply cut your calories back (say, to 1200 kCal per day) your body will store fat at every chance it gets. If you are really only eating 1200 kCal per day, yet burning more than that, you must burn fat (and perhaps some good stuff like muscle) so you will lose weight. However, your body will store fat any chance it can, so if you eat extra you can gain fat, and once you stop the 1200 kCal per day regimen you are almost certain to gain fat. Worse, it is likely you lost muscle during the 1200 kCal per day regimen.
So, the goal is for you to lose fat, without your keep-you-alive tricks kicking in and making your body stubbornly try to store fat. BFFM recommends multiple, smaller meals each day, rather than a few big ones. If you are eating every 3 hours, how can you be starving to death? Everything must be okay, so your body will let go of the fat. Also you need to get enough sleep, and try to avoid stress in general; stress is a signal that you are in hard times.
Muscle is your friend for fat loss. Muscle burns calories 24/7, so having more muscle means your daily base calorie burn goes up. This paragraph is important, so feel free to read it again.
The primary way to lose fat is through "cardio" exercise, aka aerobic exercise: running, bicycling, swimming, various gym machines like the elliptical or the stair climber, etc.
Another good thing is to eat a diet that fires up your metabolism. Imagine for a second that you had an entire mouthful of glucose, and you swallowed it all. That will pass straight out of your stomach and go straight into your blood as blood sugar, so it's just about 100% efficient as a food. For fat loss, this is a bad thing. How about a mouth full of vegetable oil? Pretty darn easy to digest, and it will be easily stored as fat since it's fat to start out. Imagine instead you have a mouthful of lean protein (skinless chicken breast, if you eat meat; non-fat cottage cheese if you are vegetarian, say). First of all you will expend some effort chewing, and then your digestive system has to work very hard to tear apart the proteins and turn them into something that can pass into the blood stream. If I recall correctly, you can burn about 30% of the calories in a serving of lean protein, just in the effort it takes to digest it. So the bottom line rule here is: complex carbs, high fiber, and lean protein are much better than simple carbs, low fiber, and high fat foods. Corollary: if you want seconds of anything, let it be lean protein.
So, BFFM tells you how to calculate a good portion size, so you don't eat too much. (If my instincts were good and I naturally took a good portion size, I'd probably not need a book like BFFM.) BFFM encourages multiple, smaller meals, with a high proportion of lean protein, and as much natural whole foods as possible (eat apples, not apple pie). BFFM encourages working out to increase lean muscle mass, plus cardio exercise to actively burn fat. If you do everything in the book, you will lose fat, unless you are one of the fraction-of-a-percent people who have a medical condition that keeps them fat all the time. (And if you are, you have probably figured that out by now.)
Tom Venuto has nothing good to say about BMI. He points out that bodybuilders with less than six percent body fat might still have a high BMI, because muscle is heavy. Body fat percentage is the best indicator, and it's not that hard to get a useful measurement.
He also has nothing good to say about Atkins. Carbs aren't your enemy; you need some. And the idea that you can eat as much fat as you want is just insane. You don't need t
Re:Tom's Diner: It was a fan
on
How MP3 Was Born
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, I just asked an expert in the field, and he told me that the issue with that song is that the mix makes little errors sound louder. I apologize, but I wasn't able to follow the technical details enough to explain them here.
I specifically asked about this fan story and he said "No, that's not it."
Now that I think about it, this explanation is patently silly. The whole job of a perceptual audio codec is to throw away anything that human ears cannot hear; if inaudible fan noise is being preferentially encoded, that's a horrible bug in a perceptual coder.
magnatune.com is great and I really want to see them prosper.
They offer you a range of prices you can pay for an album; the suggested default is $8, but if you like only one song on the album you might decide to pay only $4. You can even pay more than $8 if you really want to encourage the band.
Magnatune splits half of the take with the artist. If you pay $8 for an album, the band gets $4. That's awesome. Compare with evil big labels, which give a cut of the profits, but then cook the books and claim they never have any profits.
You can download the music in any or all of these formats: uncompressed wave files (CD-quality), CD-quality lossless FLAC files, Ogg Vorbis, or MP3.
Before you buy, you can listen to all the music, not just 20-second snips; you only can play it at 128kbps MP3, but that's enough to decide if you like the music.
They also have a policy that you can simply give away up to 3 copies of each album you buy! Viral marketing perhaps, but it's still nice of them.
Disclaimer: I have no connection with these guys other than being a very satisfied customer.
There is support for hardware in the kernel that is so obscure that there are probably less than 100 people in the world still using it.
I attended FreedomHEC in Seattle last year. Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a talk, and one point he made was that there are devices supported by the Linux kernel that are literally known to have only one or two users in the whole world; we are talking devices that are so obscure that only one or two people are known to even possess the hardware.
The point he was making is: if you make some hardware, and you are wondering whether your device is too obscure for Linux to accept drivers for it... don't wonder, just submit the drivers.
bleh, boot into windows, defrag and use gParted from within the Ubuntu Live CD to resize the partition,
No.
If something goes wrong with the resize, I'll just use his restore disks... oh wait, he doesn't have any yet.
Your advice is not helpful.
unless WinMCE did something stupid like use an NTFS partition
Are you kidding?
0) NTFS is the best file system Microsoft has. If his computer wasn't NTFS it would be FAT32, and FAT32 is really lousy compared to NTFS (or ext3, or any decent file system). All recent Windows computers come set up with NTFS. I don't think it is reasonable to call this "stupid".
1) Ubuntu should be able to resize an NTFS partition anyway, with ntfsresize. But I don't dare try it because he has no restore disks yet.
I was helping a friend get set up with a new computer. It's a sweet, sweet box from HP: Athlon 4200+ X2 processor, 1GB RAM, DVD burner. It's an HP Pavilion a1647c-b, and it cost US$900 (which included a nice widescreen LCD display with both analog and DVI inputs!). I upgraded it with a passively-cooled nVidia 7600GS graphics card, so it's now using the DVI input on the LCD display, and the display looks great.
I wanted to install Ubuntu on it, but I haven't done so yet. Here's why.
It turns out that the system doesn't come with an XP install CD. No surprise, Microsoft requires OEMs to provide "recovery disks". But it turns out that the system doesn't come with recovery disks either! It comes with a utility for burning a custom set of recovery disks. The manual says you are permitted to burn exactly one set of recovery disks.
It turns out that you need 18 blank CD-R disks, or 3 blank DVD+/-R disks, to burn your custom set of recovery disks! So I went home without installing Ubuntu.
The next day he bought a stack of DVD+R disks, and I went back. The recovery disk utility took a long time to burn the first disk, and then it said "verifying" and sat there, indicating 1% progress. So I left again without installing Ubuntu. He left it running and it never did finish.
So now he has a Windows system that he doesn't dare use, because if it gets messed up, there is no way to restore it. He told me he would call HP tech support but I haven't heard back from him.
By the way: it would have been easy to install Ubuntu before the first boot-up. I booted an Ubuntu CD and used it as a live CD, and looked over the hard disk without modifying it. Initially there was a 20GB partition and a whole bunch of empty space. On the first boot, the Windows system expanded the NTFS file system to fill the whole bunch of empty space. If I had just created a couple of partitions at the end of the empty space, I'm pretty sure that Windows would have left them alone, and then it would have been trivial to install Ubuntu. (Of course, if I had done that, I would have had a nagging worry that the recovery disk fiasco was somehow my fault. Because I didn't touch the machine before first boot, it's clear that the recovery meltdown has nothing to do with me.)
I was tempted to just grab a copy of XP and do a full re-install. But this particular system came with XP Media Center Edition, and I have no idea where I can get an install CD of XP MCE (or how much it would cost).
I'm half-tempted to buy one of these systems, though, because it was a good value for the money, and Ubuntu recognized all the hardware, right down to the flash card reader.
I have a CG software... [that] went too small with the icons to cram more in... I waste most of my time holding the cursor over icon after icon waiting for the roll over text to tell me what the function is.
Well, clearly the OLPC folks didn't make that mistake. They have a small number of large icons.
The OLPC approach makes a few functions very discoverable, with the tradeoff that the user will need to go to a dialog to do more tasks. For example, on my word processor I can make a bulleted list with one click of a toolbar button, but with the OLPC version of Abiword, the button for that isn't there.
I was also surprised they were boasting of no text bar on the browser.
I'll bet you an ice cream that the user can still go to an address by pressing Ctrl+L and typing it in.
If you consider the size of the OLPC screen, you would not be surprised that they didn't take the space to put an address bar. And the way they did it, newbies won't be trying to type their search keywords into the address bar; when the newbies are at the Google site there is only one place to type anything.
So the user can still go to bookmarks, still make bookmarks, can easily use Google to find things, and (almost certainly) can still go direct by using Ctrl+L (and probably with some dialog or menu pulldown as well).
n may be better for kids starting out the way they laid it out but how does it give them an education in computers when it doesn't teach them how any other computer on the planet works?
I'm partly in agreement with you here. Kids are like sponges, and they can soak up the basic principles of a modern desktop environment (DE) like GNOME.
On the other hand, this interface lowers the barriers to entry; there is much less to master before a kid can start using the laptop. Don't forget that these laptops aren't intended as a means to teach kids how to use a modern DE; these laptops are primarily intended as a replacement for all the kids' textbooks.
Also, these laptops have limited memory. I suspect that the limited "Sugar" DE they are showing us has a drastically smaller memory footprint than a full-blown DE like GNOME. Also, because the OLPC DE runs under Python, the DE can be precompiled Python bytecodes, which presumably take up less memory space than native compiled code. (Note that this whole paragraph is a guess; I welcome comments from someone who actually knows whether I got it right.)
Nice idea but it seems completely pointless.
Well, I think the OLPC DE does have some point to it.
Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.
If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)
If you enjoy pulp adventures, I highly recommend Aaron Allston's "Doc Sidhe" books. Sadly there are only two so far, but I'm eager for more. The first one is available completely free from the Baen Free Library:
When we were younger we had lots of time for games but little money. Now we have the money for games (but much less free time).
I haven't seen any ads that target the adult gamer segment specifically; I guess they figure ads that work for a 17-year-old will work just as well for someone twice that age. But soon enough we will probably see ads: "Forget the Civ games! I play Oasis because I can get in several games between feeding the newborn and changing his diaper."
BLATANT PLUG: If you are a member of The Video Game Generation and you have money now, why not bid on my auctions to benefit Child's Play?
For opening those plastic bubbles, I use EMT shears. You can get them at a hardware store and they aren't expensive. (I think I paid US$3 for mine.)
For round bubbles, I take my pocket knife and punch a starter hole, then switch to the EMT shears to open the package. But often there is a flat heat seal around the package, and you can simply take cut the seal part off and get the package open.
I don't know of any CD players with a "warmth" control. I have seen CD players that were taken apart, and put back together with vacuum tube amplifiers hacked onto them. The perfect gift for someone who likes "the warm sound of a tube amp".
You can do some things with a CD that you simply can't do with a vinyl record. Not all of these things are good. You can store a signal on a CD that is hideously clipped, and if you compare the badly mastered CD with a vinyl record, the vinyl record will sound much better. But hey, how common can hideous clipping be? All too common, alas.
I believe it was "Dr. Dobb's Journal" that used to publish code that could be scanned, sort of a variant on barcodes.
Several magazines did this. They used Cauzin Softstrip format. Wikipedia didn't have an article on Cauzin Softstrips so I just added one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip
I fail to see how a binary pixel can fail to take less space than a printed geometric shape. You can squirt an ink dot a lot smaller than you can a recognizable microscopic shape.
You also need to take into account the real-world issues, such as fibers in the paper wicking the ink and making your precise geometric shapes into fuzzy blobs. Careful bit patterns, with error-correcting bits, ought to be a lot more efficient than geometric shapes.
GNOME tries very hard to be a desktop environment that just works. KDE has more options you can set, which is great if you like that sort of thing. A typical comment from happy KDE users seems to be "I have my KDE desktop set up just the way I want it." A typical comment from happy GNOME users seems to be "It just works, and I don't need to fuss with it." (This is not to imply that you can't customize GNOME; of course you can. And there are plenty of people who are happy with the KDE defaults.)
I do agree that you might want to first boot a live disk of Ubuntu, and then boot a live disk of Kubuntu, and see whether they prefer GNOME or KDE. They should have the final say about what they prefer. But if they aren't sure, I suggest GNOME.
Remember: you can always run KDE apps under GNOME and vice versa. When I need to burn a CD or DVD, I pretty much reach for K3B, even though I run a GNOME desktop. And there are a couple of KDE games I like that don't seem to have GNOME equivalents.
As the article notes, hard science is a strong point for Wikipedia. If you are a troll, it's more fun to insert random flamage into the article on George W. Bush than it is to hack up the discussion of the Fourier Transform or something; and science geeks are more likely to be comfortable with computers than English teachers are. Another strong point of Wikipedia is pop culture. What's the name of Spiderman's secret identity? I don't know that the Encyclopedia Brittanica could even answer that one.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't perfect either. The biggest flaw: it costs money, while Wikipedia is free. If you value accuracy over all else, and don't mind the cost of Brittanica, of course Brittanica is the better choice. And if you are a University professor, the previous sentence probably describes you. But guess which one is more likely to be used in third-world classrooms. (If the teacher and the students have One Laptop Per Child laptop computers: Buy a USB flash drive for $30 at Fry's. Put a subset of Wikipedia on it. Plug it in to the teacher's laptop. Share it out over the wireless mesh. This will happen.)
My favorite part of the article: they had an expert check Wikipedia to see how good the information was. He spotted some minor errors... and couldn't resist fixing the errors!
The biggest question in my mind is: which approach is better, the "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, or a more restricted environment with hand-picked experts? Fortunately, this experiment is now being tried. We can wait and see whether one of the credentialed forks of Wikipedia turn out to be better, or if Wikipedia wins. And we can check them against each other!
...it could also be an elaborate ruse, as I would expect from a satirist of his pedigree.
It is ironic that you say this, because he wrote an elaborate short essay about this topic. The first blog entry where he announced his malady was here:
It's bad enough to find out that I'll probably never speak normally to another person for the rest of my life. But to make things worse, my notorious cleverness makes people think I'm joking when I explain it.
We've been heavily using the SessionSaver plugin feature with Firefox 1.5. When (not if, when) Firefox 1.5 uses up all the system memory and Linux kills it, we restart a minty-fresh new instance of it and all our windows come back.
It turns out that SessionSaver doesn't work with Firefox 2.0, and it doesn't really need to because Firefox 2.0 has a session saver feature built in. I have several dozen pages open, and I'm wondering: is there any convenient way to bring those pages forward? Basically I just want to import my session.
If no one knows any way to do this, I'll probably whip up a quick Python script to convert the SessionSaver saved URLs into a format that Firefox 2.0 can understand.
P.S. I really hope that Firefox 2.0 will take longer to use up all the memory and fall over. Or even, dare I hope for it, not leak significant amounts of memory at all.
If you would like to buy music from an online store, but you don't want DRM and you want top quality, check out magnatune.com. They let you download CD-quality (either as uncompressed wave files, or as FLAC), MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. And you can listen to everything before you buy. (128 kbps MP3, lower quality than you get when you pay.)
Not only do they not have DRM, but they encourage you to give away up to three copies of the music you buy, as a form of advertising.
They have a sliding scale on prices: you can choose what you want to pay, within a reasonable range. (I just checked, and at least for the album I checked, the range was from $5 to $18.) If you only like one song on an album, pay less for the album. If you really want to encourage an artist to make more albums, pay more. That's cool.
When you buy an album, the artist gets 50% of whatever you pay. Not 50% of the profits, and then they cook the books so they "don't have any profits"... 50% of the gross income. That's outstanding. I love their slogan: "We are not evil."
I have no connection to them, other than being a satisfied customer.
X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware).
Really? Can you please point me to some numbers that demonstrate this point?
X11 was invented in the bad old days, running on UNIX systems less powerful than today's PDAs. As I understand it, it's actually quite lightweight. Certainly the network transparency features don't cost much, because when you run the X server and the X client software on the same computer, they communicate by using domain sockets (which are very lightweight). Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X have abstraction layers that isolate the graphics hardware; do you have some numbers showing that X11 has significantly more overhead than those abstraction layers?
The latest versions coming out of X.org now have support for features similar to what OS X does: applications are rendered into offscreen buffers, and the buffers are composited together (with transparency effects, or other special effects if you desire). So, X11 is no barrier to cool eye-candy either.
The worst thing about X11 used to be way it was managed (under Xfree86). Now that the project has moved to X.org and has been revamped, progress has sped up a lot.
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He never gives you carte blanche to eat as much fat as you want.
This is not what I have heard from people I know who have tried Atkins. They told me that the theory is: fat makes you feel full, so you will self-regulate; you can eat as much fat as you want, because you won't want too much. I know someone who bought a deep-fryer to make Atkins recipes.
These people also talked about their attempts to reach ketosis and stay there for, say, a whole weekend. I haven't read the book, but my understanding is that the Atkins plan does not require ketosis but doesn't discourage the idea.
The takeaway point of Atkins is reduce carbs and sugar and increase protein.
This statement is sensible. The BFFM book will tell you how to calculate your ideal portion size for carbs, protein, and fat.
steveha
he obviously has not read the Adkins books and doesn't understand why fat is not such an issue with them.
He has read them, he understands them, read his book.
I stand by the statement that it is insane to eat as much fat as you want.
BFFM recommends eating no more than 15% to 20% of your calories from fat, and recommends quality fats (flax oil is better for you than Crisco).
Read the book.
steveha
saying "cardio burns fat" is clearly a generalization that overlooks many of the other benefits you could be giving yourself.
My whole post was a quick summary of a long book. Generalization? Sure.
I think most electrode scales are total crap.
Concur. I have one, and it alwyas reports my body fat as well under 10%. I wish that were correct, but it's not. And I notice huge jumps depending on how much water I've drunk recently.
The book has a long discussion of ways to measure body fat. Bottom line: you can get a useful and repeatable measurement with a simple plastic calipers gadget called an Accu-measure. (You will note I carefully did not use the word "accurate" there, but I stand by "useful" and "repeatable".)
steveha
Robert Heinlein wrote a whole string of novels that were intended for the young-adult audience; these are generally called his "juveniles". I recommend them all; even the ones that are a bit weak have enough merit to be worth reading at least once.
By far the best of Heinlein's juveniles was Citizen of the Galaxy, where the main character winds up transitioning from one cultural milieu to another no less than three times over the course of the book. I read and re-read that book and I never get tired of it.
Jerry Pournelle wrote a book called Starswarm that is pretty much a juvenile in the Heinlein tradition, and I recommend this as well. Jerry Pournelle and Charles Sheffield together wrote another book called Higher Education that I would also recommend, although it's at least PG-13, so you might want to read it before you give it to a kid (to make sure you want that kid to read it).
steveha
Here is a model of how the human body works with respect to fat gain and fat loss. This is my summary of my understanding of the material in a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by a pro bodybuilder named Tom Venuto.
Your body is designed to keep you alive, even in hard times when it's difficult to get enough food. Thus, if you simply cut your calories back (say, to 1200 kCal per day) your body will store fat at every chance it gets. If you are really only eating 1200 kCal per day, yet burning more than that, you must burn fat (and perhaps some good stuff like muscle) so you will lose weight. However, your body will store fat any chance it can, so if you eat extra you can gain fat, and once you stop the 1200 kCal per day regimen you are almost certain to gain fat. Worse, it is likely you lost muscle during the 1200 kCal per day regimen.
So, the goal is for you to lose fat, without your keep-you-alive tricks kicking in and making your body stubbornly try to store fat. BFFM recommends multiple, smaller meals each day, rather than a few big ones. If you are eating every 3 hours, how can you be starving to death? Everything must be okay, so your body will let go of the fat. Also you need to get enough sleep, and try to avoid stress in general; stress is a signal that you are in hard times.
Muscle is your friend for fat loss. Muscle burns calories 24/7, so having more muscle means your daily base calorie burn goes up. This paragraph is important, so feel free to read it again.
The primary way to lose fat is through "cardio" exercise, aka aerobic exercise: running, bicycling, swimming, various gym machines like the elliptical or the stair climber, etc.
Another good thing is to eat a diet that fires up your metabolism. Imagine for a second that you had an entire mouthful of glucose, and you swallowed it all. That will pass straight out of your stomach and go straight into your blood as blood sugar, so it's just about 100% efficient as a food. For fat loss, this is a bad thing. How about a mouth full of vegetable oil? Pretty darn easy to digest, and it will be easily stored as fat since it's fat to start out. Imagine instead you have a mouthful of lean protein (skinless chicken breast, if you eat meat; non-fat cottage cheese if you are vegetarian, say). First of all you will expend some effort chewing, and then your digestive system has to work very hard to tear apart the proteins and turn them into something that can pass into the blood stream. If I recall correctly, you can burn about 30% of the calories in a serving of lean protein, just in the effort it takes to digest it. So the bottom line rule here is: complex carbs, high fiber, and lean protein are much better than simple carbs, low fiber, and high fat foods. Corollary: if you want seconds of anything, let it be lean protein.
So, BFFM tells you how to calculate a good portion size, so you don't eat too much. (If my instincts were good and I naturally took a good portion size, I'd probably not need a book like BFFM.) BFFM encourages multiple, smaller meals, with a high proportion of lean protein, and as much natural whole foods as possible (eat apples, not apple pie). BFFM encourages working out to increase lean muscle mass, plus cardio exercise to actively burn fat. If you do everything in the book, you will lose fat, unless you are one of the fraction-of-a-percent people who have a medical condition that keeps them fat all the time. (And if you are, you have probably figured that out by now.)
Tom Venuto has nothing good to say about BMI. He points out that bodybuilders with less than six percent body fat might still have a high BMI, because muscle is heavy. Body fat percentage is the best indicator, and it's not that hard to get a useful measurement.
He also has nothing good to say about Atkins. Carbs aren't your enemy; you need some. And the idea that you can eat as much fat as you want is just insane. You don't need t
Okay, I just asked an expert in the field, and he told me that the issue with that song is that the mix makes little errors sound louder. I apologize, but I wasn't able to follow the technical details enough to explain them here.
I specifically asked about this fan story and he said "No, that's not it."
Now that I think about it, this explanation is patently silly. The whole job of a perceptual audio codec is to throw away anything that human ears cannot hear; if inaudible fan noise is being preferentially encoded, that's a horrible bug in a perceptual coder.
steveha
magnatune.com is great and I really want to see them prosper.
They offer you a range of prices you can pay for an album; the suggested default is $8, but if you like only one song on the album you might decide to pay only $4. You can even pay more than $8 if you really want to encourage the band.
Magnatune splits half of the take with the artist. If you pay $8 for an album, the band gets $4. That's awesome. Compare with evil big labels, which give a cut of the profits, but then cook the books and claim they never have any profits.
You can download the music in any or all of these formats: uncompressed wave files (CD-quality), CD-quality lossless FLAC files, Ogg Vorbis, or MP3.
Before you buy, you can listen to all the music, not just 20-second snips; you only can play it at 128kbps MP3, but that's enough to decide if you like the music.
They also have a policy that you can simply give away up to 3 copies of each album you buy! Viral marketing perhaps, but it's still nice of them.
Disclaimer: I have no connection with these guys other than being a very satisfied customer.
http://magnatune.com/
steveha
There is support for hardware in the kernel that is so obscure that there are probably less than 100 people in the world still using it.
I attended FreedomHEC in Seattle last year. Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a talk, and one point he made was that there are devices supported by the Linux kernel that are literally known to have only one or two users in the whole world; we are talking devices that are so obscure that only one or two people are known to even possess the hardware.
The point he was making is: if you make some hardware, and you are wondering whether your device is too obscure for Linux to accept drivers for it... don't wonder, just submit the drivers.
steveha
bleh, boot into windows, defrag and use gParted from within the Ubuntu Live CD to resize the partition,
No.
If something goes wrong with the resize, I'll just use his restore disks... oh wait, he doesn't have any yet.
Your advice is not helpful.
unless WinMCE did something stupid like use an NTFS partition
Are you kidding?
0) NTFS is the best file system Microsoft has. If his computer wasn't NTFS it would be FAT32, and FAT32 is really lousy compared to NTFS (or ext3, or any decent file system). All recent Windows computers come set up with NTFS. I don't think it is reasonable to call this "stupid".
1) Ubuntu should be able to resize an NTFS partition anyway, with ntfsresize. But I don't dare try it because he has no restore disks yet.
Your comment is not insightful.
steveha
I was helping a friend get set up with a new computer. It's a sweet, sweet box from HP: Athlon 4200+ X2 processor, 1GB RAM, DVD burner. It's an HP Pavilion a1647c-b, and it cost US$900 (which included a nice widescreen LCD display with both analog and DVI inputs!). I upgraded it with a passively-cooled nVidia 7600GS graphics card, so it's now using the DVI input on the LCD display, and the display looks great.
I wanted to install Ubuntu on it, but I haven't done so yet. Here's why.
It turns out that the system doesn't come with an XP install CD. No surprise, Microsoft requires OEMs to provide "recovery disks". But it turns out that the system doesn't come with recovery disks either! It comes with a utility for burning a custom set of recovery disks. The manual says you are permitted to burn exactly one set of recovery disks.
It turns out that you need 18 blank CD-R disks, or 3 blank DVD+/-R disks, to burn your custom set of recovery disks! So I went home without installing Ubuntu.
The next day he bought a stack of DVD+R disks, and I went back. The recovery disk utility took a long time to burn the first disk, and then it said "verifying" and sat there, indicating 1% progress. So I left again without installing Ubuntu. He left it running and it never did finish.
So now he has a Windows system that he doesn't dare use, because if it gets messed up, there is no way to restore it. He told me he would call HP tech support but I haven't heard back from him.
By the way: it would have been easy to install Ubuntu before the first boot-up. I booted an Ubuntu CD and used it as a live CD, and looked over the hard disk without modifying it. Initially there was a 20GB partition and a whole bunch of empty space. On the first boot, the Windows system expanded the NTFS file system to fill the whole bunch of empty space. If I had just created a couple of partitions at the end of the empty space, I'm pretty sure that Windows would have left them alone, and then it would have been trivial to install Ubuntu. (Of course, if I had done that, I would have had a nagging worry that the recovery disk fiasco was somehow my fault. Because I didn't touch the machine before first boot, it's clear that the recovery meltdown has nothing to do with me.)
I was tempted to just grab a copy of XP and do a full re-install. But this particular system came with XP Media Center Edition, and I have no idea where I can get an install CD of XP MCE (or how much it would cost).
I'm half-tempted to buy one of these systems, though, because it was a good value for the money, and Ubuntu recognized all the hardware, right down to the flash card reader.
steveha
I have a CG software... [that] went too small with the icons to cram more in... I waste most of my time holding the cursor over icon after icon waiting for the roll over text to tell me what the function is.
Well, clearly the OLPC folks didn't make that mistake. They have a small number of large icons.
The OLPC approach makes a few functions very discoverable, with the tradeoff that the user will need to go to a dialog to do more tasks. For example, on my word processor I can make a bulleted list with one click of a toolbar button, but with the OLPC version of Abiword, the button for that isn't there.
I was also surprised they were boasting of no text bar on the browser.
I'll bet you an ice cream that the user can still go to an address by pressing Ctrl+L and typing it in.
If you consider the size of the OLPC screen, you would not be surprised that they didn't take the space to put an address bar. And the way they did it, newbies won't be trying to type their search keywords into the address bar; when the newbies are at the Google site there is only one place to type anything.
So the user can still go to bookmarks, still make bookmarks, can easily use Google to find things, and (almost certainly) can still go direct by using Ctrl+L (and probably with some dialog or menu pulldown as well).
n may be better for kids starting out the way they laid it out but how does it give them an education in computers when it doesn't teach them how any other computer on the planet works?
I'm partly in agreement with you here. Kids are like sponges, and they can soak up the basic principles of a modern desktop environment (DE) like GNOME.
On the other hand, this interface lowers the barriers to entry; there is much less to master before a kid can start using the laptop. Don't forget that these laptops aren't intended as a means to teach kids how to use a modern DE; these laptops are primarily intended as a replacement for all the kids' textbooks.
Also, these laptops have limited memory. I suspect that the limited "Sugar" DE they are showing us has a drastically smaller memory footprint than a full-blown DE like GNOME. Also, because the OLPC DE runs under Python, the DE can be precompiled Python bytecodes, which presumably take up less memory space than native compiled code. (Note that this whole paragraph is a guess; I welcome comments from someone who actually knows whether I got it right.)
Nice idea but it seems completely pointless.
Well, I think the OLPC DE does have some point to it.
steveha
According to the article, there are three companies that have actually worked with the free software community on drivers. Here is the list:
Ralink Technology
Atmel Corporation
Realtek Linux drivers here
Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.
If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)
steveha
If you enjoy pulp adventures, I highly recommend Aaron Allston's "Doc Sidhe" books. Sadly there are only two so far, but I'm eager for more. The first one is available completely free from the Baen Free Library:
http://www.baen.com/library/aallston.htm
Enjoy!
steveha
When we were younger we had lots of time for games but little money. Now we have the money for games (but much less free time).
m =170059988064m =170059999729m =170060001967
I haven't seen any ads that target the adult gamer segment specifically; I guess they figure ads that work for a 17-year-old will work just as well for someone twice that age. But soon enough we will probably see ads: "Forget the Civ games! I play Oasis because I can get in several games between feeding the newborn and changing his diaper."
BLATANT PLUG: If you are a member of The Video Game Generation and you have money now, why not bid on my auctions to benefit Child's Play?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
steveha
http://www.compleatsteve.com/essays/cd_hell.htm
steveha
For opening those plastic bubbles, I use EMT shears. You can get them at a hardware store and they aren't expensive. (I think I paid US$3 for mine.)
For round bubbles, I take my pocket knife and punch a starter hole, then switch to the EMT shears to open the package. But often there is a flat heat seal around the package, and you can simply take cut the seal part off and get the package open.
steveha
I don't know of any CD players with a "warmth" control. I have seen CD players that were taken apart, and put back together with vacuum tube amplifiers hacked onto them. The perfect gift for someone who likes "the warm sound of a tube amp".
You can do some things with a CD that you simply can't do with a vinyl record. Not all of these things are good. You can store a signal on a CD that is hideously clipped, and if you compare the badly mastered CD with a vinyl record, the vinyl record will sound much better. But hey, how common can hideous clipping be? All too common, alas.
steveha
I believe it was "Dr. Dobb's Journal" that used to publish code that could be scanned, sort of a variant on barcodes.
Several magazines did this. They used Cauzin Softstrip format. Wikipedia didn't have an article on Cauzin Softstrips so I just added one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip
I fail to see how a binary pixel can fail to take less space than a printed geometric shape. You can squirt an ink dot a lot smaller than you can a recognizable microscopic shape.
You also need to take into account the real-world issues, such as fibers in the paper wicking the ink and making your precise geometric shapes into fuzzy blobs. Careful bit patterns, with error-correcting bits, ought to be a lot more efficient than geometric shapes.
steveha
GNOME tries very hard to be a desktop environment that just works. KDE has more options you can set, which is great if you like that sort of thing. A typical comment from happy KDE users seems to be "I have my KDE desktop set up just the way I want it." A typical comment from happy GNOME users seems to be "It just works, and I don't need to fuss with it." (This is not to imply that you can't customize GNOME; of course you can. And there are plenty of people who are happy with the KDE defaults.)
I do agree that you might want to first boot a live disk of Ubuntu, and then boot a live disk of Kubuntu, and see whether they prefer GNOME or KDE. They should have the final say about what they prefer. But if they aren't sure, I suggest GNOME.
Remember: you can always run KDE apps under GNOME and vice versa. When I need to burn a CD or DVD, I pretty much reach for K3B, even though I run a GNOME desktop. And there are a couple of KDE games I like that don't seem to have GNOME equivalents.
steveha
Wikipedia isn't perfect. Nothing is, after all.
As the article notes, hard science is a strong point for Wikipedia. If you are a troll, it's more fun to insert random flamage into the article on George W. Bush than it is to hack up the discussion of the Fourier Transform or something; and science geeks are more likely to be comfortable with computers than English teachers are. Another strong point of Wikipedia is pop culture. What's the name of Spiderman's secret identity? I don't know that the Encyclopedia Brittanica could even answer that one.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't perfect either. The biggest flaw: it costs money, while Wikipedia is free. If you value accuracy over all else, and don't mind the cost of Brittanica, of course Brittanica is the better choice. And if you are a University professor, the previous sentence probably describes you. But guess which one is more likely to be used in third-world classrooms. (If the teacher and the students have One Laptop Per Child laptop computers: Buy a USB flash drive for $30 at Fry's. Put a subset of Wikipedia on it. Plug it in to the teacher's laptop. Share it out over the wireless mesh. This will happen.)
My favorite part of the article: they had an expert check Wikipedia to see how good the information was. He spotted some minor errors... and couldn't resist fixing the errors!
The biggest question in my mind is: which approach is better, the "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, or a more restricted environment with hand-picked experts? Fortunately, this experiment is now being tried. We can wait and see whether one of the credentialed forks of Wikipedia turn out to be better, or if Wikipedia wins. And we can check them against each other!
steveha
It is ironic that you say this, because he wrote an elaborate short essay about this topic. The first blog entry where he announced his malady was here:
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2
A quote:
steveha
We've been heavily using the SessionSaver plugin feature with Firefox 1.5. When (not if, when) Firefox 1.5 uses up all the system memory and Linux kills it, we restart a minty-fresh new instance of it and all our windows come back.
It turns out that SessionSaver doesn't work with Firefox 2.0, and it doesn't really need to because Firefox 2.0 has a session saver feature built in. I have several dozen pages open, and I'm wondering: is there any convenient way to bring those pages forward? Basically I just want to import my session.
If no one knows any way to do this, I'll probably whip up a quick Python script to convert the SessionSaver saved URLs into a format that Firefox 2.0 can understand.
P.S. I really hope that Firefox 2.0 will take longer to use up all the memory and fall over. Or even, dare I hope for it, not leak significant amounts of memory at all.
steveha
Try Minesweeper with a custom board: the largest possible board size with the fewest possible mines. Now that's mindless!
I just played Gnome Mines 2.16.1 with a 100x100 board and one mine. Total time: 0.0 seconds. Try and beat that!
Actually, I did beat that once. Years ago, with an earlier version of Gnome Mines, I did the custom board trick, and my total time was "NaN". Heh.
steveha
If you would like to buy music from an online store, but you don't want DRM and you want top quality, check out magnatune.com. They let you download CD-quality (either as uncompressed wave files, or as FLAC), MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. And you can listen to everything before you buy. (128 kbps MP3, lower quality than you get when you pay.)
Not only do they not have DRM, but they encourage you to give away up to three copies of the music you buy, as a form of advertising.
They have a sliding scale on prices: you can choose what you want to pay, within a reasonable range. (I just checked, and at least for the album I checked, the range was from $5 to $18.) If you only like one song on an album, pay less for the album. If you really want to encourage an artist to make more albums, pay more. That's cool.
When you buy an album, the artist gets 50% of whatever you pay. Not 50% of the profits, and then they cook the books so they "don't have any profits"... 50% of the gross income. That's outstanding. I love their slogan: "We are not evil."
I have no connection to them, other than being a satisfied customer.
steveha
X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware).
Really? Can you please point me to some numbers that demonstrate this point?
X11 was invented in the bad old days, running on UNIX systems less powerful than today's PDAs. As I understand it, it's actually quite lightweight. Certainly the network transparency features don't cost much, because when you run the X server and the X client software on the same computer, they communicate by using domain sockets (which are very lightweight). Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X have abstraction layers that isolate the graphics hardware; do you have some numbers showing that X11 has significantly more overhead than those abstraction layers?
The latest versions coming out of X.org now have support for features similar to what OS X does: applications are rendered into offscreen buffers, and the buffers are composited together (with transparency effects, or other special effects if you desire). So, X11 is no barrier to cool eye-candy either.
The worst thing about X11 used to be way it was managed (under Xfree86). Now that the project has moved to X.org and has been revamped, progress has sped up a lot.
steveha