I think a lot of people don't think about the energy per unit mass of what they are eating. Cheese, chocolate/candy, beer, bread, pretty much any dessert are all incredibly energy-rich and a minute of indiscretion with a box of cookies can ruin a whole day of being careful. The aim is to find foods which make you feel very full for the longest possible time whilst being relatively energy-poor but also palatable so you want to eat them. Cheap canned soup works for me. Diet foods (other than fizzy / soda drinks which are actually quite good) are usually useless as they're often low fat but not really very low calorie.
Interesting, I just skim-read that and realised that I came to pretty much the same conclusions from pretty much the same scenario about 8 months ago. I've been losing weight since I started eating less and people who haven't seen me for a few months keep asking me if I'm dieting. I think the biggest problem is actually lunches - if you add up the calories of a sandwich and a packet of crisps (chips) or a chocolate (candy) bar, it's easy to consume 600+ kcal for lunch. I replaced that with a 120 calorie can of soup (not good from the salt point of view but I'll worry about that later...) and it's working perfectly.
Well, I think the bill is about an entire healthcare system, my post was just about increasing the supply of cheap(er) doctors. I have to say I'm not very clued up about this bill, I'm just a Brit watching in confusion and bemusement as Americans argue that it's better not to have a universal baseline level of healthcare.
For me it's a simple argument: I consider it self-evident that the citizens of any nation deserve high quality and equitable healthcare, free at the point of delivery. Whatever changes need to be made to support that, should be made. The details of what constitutes high quality and equitable heathcare is what has led to institutions such as N.I.C.E. which has charmingly been referred to as a 'death panel' in the more rabid parts of the U.S. press. What's ridiculous about the whole debate is that, in the UK, anyone can chose to take additional insurance to top-up their healthcare, so we really do enjoy the best of both worlds.
The point of my earlier post was to point out that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem. The real question in this debate is - what is the bottom-line ethical principle? I think it is indefensible to not have universal healthcare for all, and all developed (and developing) nations should be working towards that. The rest is detail.
How do you know that increasing the pay of medical providers is the best way to get more of them? There are a limited number of healthcare professionals in the world. It's expensive and time-consuming to become a doctor, so just increasing the wage won't bring in a flood of new professionals in the same way that it would for, e.g., a checkout clerk. The chances are that you would be draining the medical workforce from a poorer economy which many would consider unethical. Another option is to lower the barrier to entry to medical school by providing more and better scholarships so that bright students from poorer backgrounds can become doctors. By creating a slight surplus of doctors, their salaries will not need to be so high, and the US could become a net exporter of medical professionals therefore benefiting the developing world whilst being able to keep a cap on the cost of the medical workforce.
Because the value of some people to society cannot be predicted before the fact, or may even take generations to become obvious. Steven Hawking is a classic example - even though he was hilariously misused during this debate - his motor neurone disease would have caused him to be considered a huge 'burden' during his childhood, and he is clearly someone who cannot produce enough for society to afford his care, unless you take into account the huge contribution he has made to cosmology and the implications that will have for future generations as his contributions to our understanding of the physical universe move from the theoretical to the concrete and produce new inventions and new fields of study, some of which I am sure will result in improved healthcare for others.
Actually, that's not entirely true. A fuse in the appliance in series with the live/hot will protect the cable too, so long as it is a captive cable (i.e. can't be removed) and the fuse is correctly rated. There's no electrical difference between having a fuse in series with the live and locating it in the plug end of the circuit or the appliance end of the circuit. The problem comes with appliances such as a table lamp where there may not be anywhere to locate the fuse - when the British system was first brought in there were loads of table lamps with very long flex/cord and putting the fuse in the plug was the safest option.
Because the circuit breakers are rated to protect the circuit, the fuse is rated to protect the cable/flex/cord. A 2A flex/cord will catch fire if the appliance starts drawing 5A whilst the breaker will be perfectly happy.
Target Disk Mode is amazing. Interestingly, I found out the other day that it was an add-on feature of the SCSI interface on the very first Mac Portable and included out of the box on the Powerbook 100.
I don't think you know what you're talking about, although I'm not sure you deserve Troll moderation for that. MacBooks are used daily in the Pro/Semi Pro video field. It's very common to use a MacBook or a MacBook Pro to bash together a quick edit at the end of a day's filming. You'll also often see an Apple logo glowing on the stage being used live by a VJ. You're right that in a proper edit suite it would be more normal to use a Mac Pro or a PC/Windows based system.
You're spot on with the CPU load. The reason Firewire is still so popular, and the reason why Mac users were so up in arms when Apple dropped it from their alu MacBook is that for video and audio there's still no good alternative. I can hang 16 channels of digital audio I/O from the Firewire bus and do live digital mixing on a Mac and run digital effects etc.. There's no way I could do that with USB and expect it to be stable if it works at all. Jobs made a big thing about newer digital video cameras being USB2, but the point is it's offline in the sense that you're transferring data from one hard drive in the camera to a hard drive in the computer - if there's a problem with the USB2 bus the camera can throttle back the data transfer or repeat if necessary. If you're using a tape-based digital format (which is still the mainstream standard in the pro/semi-pro world) then you need Firewire because it will reliably import a full tape without dropping frames; effectively it's streaming rather than just copying, for which I wouldn't trust USB2.
That's really stupid. People who chose to buy an Apple usually do so because they want the software. It's seen by the majority of users as part of the package they are buying. No-one buys a Dell so that they will get a demo version of McAfee or whatever, and Dell only puts it on there because they are paid to by the software companies.
Saying that Apple iLife etc. is the same as crapware is a bit like saying that a news articles in a newspaper is the same as the pizza vouchers just because I happen to not want to read the article. Whether I happen to read it or not, the article is there as part of the product I bought and most people would be happy with that; the pizza voucher is there to make extra money (or offset the cover price depending on how you look at it) and the majority of people will chuck it in the bin whilst a small minority who happen to want a pizza will keep it and use it.
Also, as far as I am aware, none of the Apple software 'bogs down the hardware'. All of the optional stuff that might run background tasks, e.g. MobileMe, Time Machine, Spotlight etc. can be turned on and off in System Preferences, and if you turn off that feature it doesn't bog the hardware down at all.
By the same token, it's unfair to describe software needed for the media buttons on some laptops as 'crapware' - the laptop was bought with media buttons and presumably the purchaser want to be able to use them.
The point of crapware is that it's software added in by the computer manufacturer, in addition to that usually supplied with the operating system. It's added not because they want to benefit the consumer, but because they're paid money by the software companies. Usually it is demo software, adware, nagware etc.. iLife doesn't fit this definition, any more than IE on Windows does. About the only thing that could fit that category on the Mac is MobileMe which is useless unless you pay a subscription, but as one of the most useful features of the OS for those that do pay I think it's excusable.
...essentially, the same people who used to complain that Microsoft is an evil monopoly and is destroying small companies by bundling their own XYZ into the operating system...
Actually, that spectacularly misses the point. Microsoft were including bundled products then threatening to withdraw preferential OS licensing terms from OEMs who installed alternative software e.g. Netscape Navigator. That was the behaviour that was censured, not just bundling application software per se otherwise Windows Movie Maker and the built-in antivirus in Windows Vista and Windows 7 would have been outlawed. In the EU Microsoft has been forced to include a feature to select a web browser from a number of options, but that was a remedial measure to try to reverse the damage that Microsoft has done to that market through its abuses.
I think if you were to sell your phone on as a private sale I think that would count as "noncommercial", in which case you would apply clause 3c of the GPL v2.0 and "Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code."
So if you're redistributing something in a noncommercial way (and I'm guessing a private sale would count in that sense) then you can refer the recipient on to the offer from the original distributer. In all other cases it is required to provide the source or a written offer to provide the source. So if you bought 100 G1s on the cheap to sell on eBay then you would need to provide a written offer or the source itself.
This is interesting, because it would seem to me that a shop selling G1s would, under the terms of this license, need to provide the source themselves and not just refer to the manufacturer of the device. I can't see another reasonable plain-English interpretation of section 3. I guess that's one of the issues with the GLP - it's not just/even a 'nice' license, it's actually a piece of clever social engineering - PC World, Best Buy etc. ought to have leaflets at the Customer Service desk explaining their source code policies, just like they have leaflets to comply with local recycling/environmental laws.
You have no idea whether I have to deal with collaborating on large documents or not. My experience is that there are enough difficulties even with everyone on the same package that it's not worth worrying about finalising formatting until the end, so I don't care whether people are using OpenOffice or Word or whatever. Even with everyone on the same package, people will have different approaches and different levels of skill with the software and ultimately someone has to be the style master and go through it all at the end.
Last year I moved to a new job and the IT department had control of sending any 'whole organisation' mailing list messages. The problem was, everyone sent their messages as Word documents, and the IT people would send an email that said "please see attached circular" and attach the document.
I sent a politely-worded email to the sysadmin pointing out that one of the big advantages of email was being able to search for things that I remembered receiving a month ago, and that this was broken by sending out Word documents. Since then, all of the messages have read "please see attached memo about parking in the staff car park" or whatever. I was hoping he would just ban Word attachments but you can't have everything;).
The whole point of this part of the thread is that people were complaining that the formatting didn't look good when they sent a document to someone. If you're collaborating it doesn't matter - you send it back and forth and things will go awry whether you're all using the same package or not. So long as it's roughly right, when it's all done the person with the best eye for aesthetics tidies it all up and saves to a portable format. Such as PDF. Which was my point.
Indeed, that is why, whatever package I am using, I always save as a PDF file in order to send to people. Sending files in a non-portable format is stupid. The most ridiculous thing I get is from work where other departments advertising meetings and Christmas events email out Publisher files.
In all honesty, a Mac with OS X is pretty much what I would have expected Amiga to have evolved into. The Amiga CLI was broadly based on BSD, it had lots of unnecessary pretty eye candy on the desktop, was popular with graphics, video and sound amateurs and professionals, and was considered fairly over-priced by many people (usually people who hadn't used one for an appreciable length of time). Every time I download a.dmg file, the massive icons to encourage me to drag the application to the Applications folder remind me of the huge custom icons on the Amiga Format cover disks. The white/plastic MacBook even reminds me of the Amiga 500 - wildly popular and iconic and still in production even when the better spec'ed machines should have taken over a long time ago. I just hope Apple don't drop the ball and go the way of Commodore by resting on their laurels too much.
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I think a lot of people don't think about the energy per unit mass of what they are eating. Cheese, chocolate/candy, beer, bread, pretty much any dessert are all incredibly energy-rich and a minute of indiscretion with a box of cookies can ruin a whole day of being careful. The aim is to find foods which make you feel very full for the longest possible time whilst being relatively energy-poor but also palatable so you want to eat them. Cheap canned soup works for me. Diet foods (other than fizzy / soda drinks which are actually quite good) are usually useless as they're often low fat but not really very low calorie.
Interesting, I just skim-read that and realised that I came to pretty much the same conclusions from pretty much the same scenario about 8 months ago. I've been losing weight since I started eating less and people who haven't seen me for a few months keep asking me if I'm dieting. I think the biggest problem is actually lunches - if you add up the calories of a sandwich and a packet of crisps (chips) or a chocolate (candy) bar, it's easy to consume 600+ kcal for lunch. I replaced that with a 120 calorie can of soup (not good from the salt point of view but I'll worry about that later...) and it's working perfectly.
It's begging the question to say that it works. I think it's highly debatable that it works at all.
Well, I think the bill is about an entire healthcare system, my post was just about increasing the supply of cheap(er) doctors. I have to say I'm not very clued up about this bill, I'm just a Brit watching in confusion and bemusement as Americans argue that it's better not to have a universal baseline level of healthcare.
For me it's a simple argument: I consider it self-evident that the citizens of any nation deserve high quality and equitable healthcare, free at the point of delivery. Whatever changes need to be made to support that, should be made. The details of what constitutes high quality and equitable heathcare is what has led to institutions such as N.I.C.E. which has charmingly been referred to as a 'death panel' in the more rabid parts of the U.S. press. What's ridiculous about the whole debate is that, in the UK, anyone can chose to take additional insurance to top-up their healthcare, so we really do enjoy the best of both worlds.
The point of my earlier post was to point out that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem. The real question in this debate is - what is the bottom-line ethical principle? I think it is indefensible to not have universal healthcare for all, and all developed (and developing) nations should be working towards that. The rest is detail.
How do you know that increasing the pay of medical providers is the best way to get more of them? There are a limited number of healthcare professionals in the world. It's expensive and time-consuming to become a doctor, so just increasing the wage won't bring in a flood of new professionals in the same way that it would for, e.g., a checkout clerk. The chances are that you would be draining the medical workforce from a poorer economy which many would consider unethical. Another option is to lower the barrier to entry to medical school by providing more and better scholarships so that bright students from poorer backgrounds can become doctors. By creating a slight surplus of doctors, their salaries will not need to be so high, and the US could become a net exporter of medical professionals therefore benefiting the developing world whilst being able to keep a cap on the cost of the medical workforce.
Because the value of some people to society cannot be predicted before the fact, or may even take generations to become obvious. Steven Hawking is a classic example - even though he was hilariously misused during this debate - his motor neurone disease would have caused him to be considered a huge 'burden' during his childhood, and he is clearly someone who cannot produce enough for society to afford his care, unless you take into account the huge contribution he has made to cosmology and the implications that will have for future generations as his contributions to our understanding of the physical universe move from the theoretical to the concrete and produce new inventions and new fields of study, some of which I am sure will result in improved healthcare for others.
And that is a circular argument. "Why should x be y?" "Because that's how it works."
Yes, the earth's magnetic field. That's pretty big really, much much bigger than a trickle of water.
Actually, that's not entirely true. A fuse in the appliance in series with the live/hot will protect the cable too, so long as it is a captive cable (i.e. can't be removed) and the fuse is correctly rated. There's no electrical difference between having a fuse in series with the live and locating it in the plug end of the circuit or the appliance end of the circuit. The problem comes with appliances such as a table lamp where there may not be anywhere to locate the fuse - when the British system was first brought in there were loads of table lamps with very long flex/cord and putting the fuse in the plug was the safest option.
Because the circuit breakers are rated to protect the circuit, the fuse is rated to protect the cable/flex/cord. A 2A flex/cord will catch fire if the appliance starts drawing 5A whilst the breaker will be perfectly happy.
Target Disk Mode is amazing. Interestingly, I found out the other day that it was an add-on feature of the SCSI interface on the very first Mac Portable and included out of the box on the Powerbook 100.
I don't think you know what you're talking about, although I'm not sure you deserve Troll moderation for that. MacBooks are used daily in the Pro/Semi Pro video field. It's very common to use a MacBook or a MacBook Pro to bash together a quick edit at the end of a day's filming. You'll also often see an Apple logo glowing on the stage being used live by a VJ. You're right that in a proper edit suite it would be more normal to use a Mac Pro or a PC/Windows based system.
You're spot on with the CPU load. The reason Firewire is still so popular, and the reason why Mac users were so up in arms when Apple dropped it from their alu MacBook is that for video and audio there's still no good alternative. I can hang 16 channels of digital audio I/O from the Firewire bus and do live digital mixing on a Mac and run digital effects etc.. There's no way I could do that with USB and expect it to be stable if it works at all. Jobs made a big thing about newer digital video cameras being USB2, but the point is it's offline in the sense that you're transferring data from one hard drive in the camera to a hard drive in the computer - if there's a problem with the USB2 bus the camera can throttle back the data transfer or repeat if necessary. If you're using a tape-based digital format (which is still the mainstream standard in the pro/semi-pro world) then you need Firewire because it will reliably import a full tape without dropping frames; effectively it's streaming rather than just copying, for which I wouldn't trust USB2.
That's really stupid. People who chose to buy an Apple usually do so because they want the software. It's seen by the majority of users as part of the package they are buying. No-one buys a Dell so that they will get a demo version of McAfee or whatever, and Dell only puts it on there because they are paid to by the software companies.
Saying that Apple iLife etc. is the same as crapware is a bit like saying that a news articles in a newspaper is the same as the pizza vouchers just because I happen to not want to read the article. Whether I happen to read it or not, the article is there as part of the product I bought and most people would be happy with that; the pizza voucher is there to make extra money (or offset the cover price depending on how you look at it) and the majority of people will chuck it in the bin whilst a small minority who happen to want a pizza will keep it and use it.
Also, as far as I am aware, none of the Apple software 'bogs down the hardware'. All of the optional stuff that might run background tasks, e.g. MobileMe, Time Machine, Spotlight etc. can be turned on and off in System Preferences, and if you turn off that feature it doesn't bog the hardware down at all.
By the same token, it's unfair to describe software needed for the media buttons on some laptops as 'crapware' - the laptop was bought with media buttons and presumably the purchaser want to be able to use them.
Then drag them to the trash can.
The point of crapware is that it's software added in by the computer manufacturer, in addition to that usually supplied with the operating system. It's added not because they want to benefit the consumer, but because they're paid money by the software companies. Usually it is demo software, adware, nagware etc.. iLife doesn't fit this definition, any more than IE on Windows does. About the only thing that could fit that category on the Mac is MobileMe which is useless unless you pay a subscription, but as one of the most useful features of the OS for those that do pay I think it's excusable.
Actually, that spectacularly misses the point. Microsoft were including bundled products then threatening to withdraw preferential OS licensing terms from OEMs who installed alternative software e.g. Netscape Navigator. That was the behaviour that was censured, not just bundling application software per se otherwise Windows Movie Maker and the built-in antivirus in Windows Vista and Windows 7 would have been outlawed. In the EU Microsoft has been forced to include a feature to select a web browser from a number of options, but that was a remedial measure to try to reverse the damage that Microsoft has done to that market through its abuses.
Hmm I invented a new license called the GLP. Meant GPL.
I think if you were to sell your phone on as a private sale I think that would count as "noncommercial", in which case you would apply clause 3c of the GPL v2.0 and "Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code."
So if you're redistributing something in a noncommercial way (and I'm guessing a private sale would count in that sense) then you can refer the recipient on to the offer from the original distributer. In all other cases it is required to provide the source or a written offer to provide the source. So if you bought 100 G1s on the cheap to sell on eBay then you would need to provide a written offer or the source itself.
This is interesting, because it would seem to me that a shop selling G1s would, under the terms of this license, need to provide the source themselves and not just refer to the manufacturer of the device. I can't see another reasonable plain-English interpretation of section 3. I guess that's one of the issues with the GLP - it's not just/even a 'nice' license, it's actually a piece of clever social engineering - PC World, Best Buy etc. ought to have leaflets at the Customer Service desk explaining their source code policies, just like they have leaflets to comply with local recycling/environmental laws.
Do you mean like Space Cadets?
You have no idea whether I have to deal with collaborating on large documents or not. My experience is that there are enough difficulties even with everyone on the same package that it's not worth worrying about finalising formatting until the end, so I don't care whether people are using OpenOffice or Word or whatever. Even with everyone on the same package, people will have different approaches and different levels of skill with the software and ultimately someone has to be the style master and go through it all at the end.
Last year I moved to a new job and the IT department had control of sending any 'whole organisation' mailing list messages. The problem was, everyone sent their messages as Word documents, and the IT people would send an email that said "please see attached circular" and attach the document.
I sent a politely-worded email to the sysadmin pointing out that one of the big advantages of email was being able to search for things that I remembered receiving a month ago, and that this was broken by sending out Word documents. Since then, all of the messages have read "please see attached memo about parking in the staff car park" or whatever. I was hoping he would just ban Word attachments but you can't have everything ;).
The whole point of this part of the thread is that people were complaining that the formatting didn't look good when they sent a document to someone. If you're collaborating it doesn't matter - you send it back and forth and things will go awry whether you're all using the same package or not. So long as it's roughly right, when it's all done the person with the best eye for aesthetics tidies it all up and saves to a portable format. Such as PDF. Which was my point.
Indeed, that is why, whatever package I am using, I always save as a PDF file in order to send to people. Sending files in a non-portable format is stupid. The most ridiculous thing I get is from work where other departments advertising meetings and Christmas events email out Publisher files.
Relax, we're OK. Now go and buy Snow Leopard like a good boy.
In all honesty, a Mac with OS X is pretty much what I would have expected Amiga to have evolved into. The Amiga CLI was broadly based on BSD, it had lots of unnecessary pretty eye candy on the desktop, was popular with graphics, video and sound amateurs and professionals, and was considered fairly over-priced by many people (usually people who hadn't used one for an appreciable length of time). Every time I download a .dmg file, the massive icons to encourage me to drag the application to the Applications folder remind me of the huge custom icons on the Amiga Format cover disks. The white/plastic MacBook even reminds me of the Amiga 500 - wildly popular and iconic and still in production even when the better spec'ed machines should have taken over a long time ago. I just hope Apple don't drop the ball and go the way of Commodore by resting on their laurels too much.