Given that most of the complexity and PITAness in software stems from feature creep, and feature creep is simply the result of some people demanding that feature, while most of the other users don't want it, it was for a long time a benefit of Linux, that nobody liked it.
Take for instance the much hated systemd. For some people it solves the major problem of dealing with complex init dependencies in uncertain conditions and they would not want to do without. For others this is exactly the opposite of what's happening and systemd is a problem in itself.
Similar things can be observed at the application level, with professional spreadsheet, CAD, graphics and audio software definitely leading the field: All of them have many thousands features, but every user deems a different subset of them essential. Thus they cannot simply use the open source alternatives, which still lack some of these features. Whereas I would not even run libreoffice, since everything too complex for gnumeric calls for a script and I enjoy the ultrafast startup times.
In this sense, a small userbase is an asset, not a liability. Like many things in live, it's more a concave relationship. Too little users and your project is dead, too many users and it starts to become an unwieldy beast.
Also, walk on the correct side, which is in absence of a designated pedestrian area AGAINST the traffic, so in almost all of the world on the left, and in Britain/Australia/what have you on the right. That way, even if the driver does not see you, at least you see him, and if the driver sees you, he can better gauge whether you are aware that he's coming or not.
It is nice to see more confirmation in this direction. Almost all research in the past decades was focussed on the health benefits of endurance training, however strength seems to be a better indicator for health than endurance, e.g. as noted in this longterm study, even when equating for lifestyle choices like smoking (so it's not that stronger people just make better decisions).
Grip strength seems also to be a good (and easy to measure) indicator. Also the stand-sit test which has become common practice in geriatry is practically a measure of strength.
Why muscle and strength (of course one has to exclude enhanced athletes with supraphysiological amounts of muscle) is so healthy is still not totally clear, but there are already two factors standing out, which cannot be replicated by endurance type of training: The first benefit is better mobility and protection against injury, in particular in high age. Second, when you are hit with a wasting disease, or just stop eating like you used to and get into a protein deficit, your body can take those aminos from your muscle instead from your precious vital organs. In particular atrophy in the heart is very hard to reverse (a struggle many recovered anorexics have).
Anecdotal evidence shows that people, who used anabolic stereoids in the past, will still benefit from them, although clearly to a lesser extent. The same is true for male-to-female-transgenders. Research on this topic is however quite difficult, as no ethics board will allow you to shoot realistic dosings of testosterone in people, who are also willing to lay them off later.
As to your personal experience, bike racing is actually a pretty catabolic sport, i.e. high level cyclists show very little muscle, in particular outside of the legs. Consequently muscle memory is pretty irrelevant, if not hindering, and other factors should determine how fast you get back on track. One thing might be that with declining testosterone (just a shot in the dark) the ability to innervate your muscles goes down, so you are less efficient in terms of force production per muscle mass.
Finally, I am quite happy to see some more evidence for the nuclei-theory of muscle memory. It is long enough around to even be featured in textbooks, but we are still not sufficiently sure about it.
Actually most of the alleged health benefits of fasting have not been confirmed to a point where they are physiologically significant. You often get some markers to improve in a statistical significant way, but that does not yet tell you if it is actually better, as the human body functions in a wide range of many parameters. Maybe with exception of acidity, which people still do not understand and I just yesterday saw a real life ad for some alkaline diet supplement.
On the other hand, we have evidence for the utility of breakfast or regular eating, my favorite example being that food intake after waking can help to shift the circardian rhythm into waking up earlier, because you anticipate food at that time.
My guess is that in the end we will find that different feeding schemes (fasting, intermittent fasting, regular eating) always make slight tradeoffs. It is to be expected that it turns out similar to the vegetarian/meat eating diet, i.e. the same all cause mortality, but just a shift in the causes.
By current evidence (and as stated, I do not expect this to change) it boils down to the right tool for the right job. For some populations such as manual laborers or heavy athletes (strongmen, bodybuilders, hammer throwers, what have you) a time restriction on food intake may make it very difficult to meet caloric goals. On the other hand, if you are sedentary and only need something around 2Mcal a day, have a bad habit of snacking, are already fat or just don't like to prepare food, eating only in a certain time window (or even once a day) may be the thing to do.
Finally, do not trust anyone who talks to you about autophagy.
I always thought that this was just some dumb usage of statistic tools, like sorting people by the correlation of the items they already bought with the items you try to sell.
Clearly, most people who bought a lawnmower have also bought a lawnmower, so you should show them ads of your lawnmower.
Actually not anymore, because Google's walled garden and shitty webexperience made me switch back to calcurse and pen&paper. But before that, pretty much everything went into my google calendar.
Yeah, it pays well and if you are good at math, it is easy, but actuarial science is in some sense the dullest, most boring and saddest field in applied math,
since you usually do the additional certifications while you are already employed in an insurance company (similar to certifications for system administrators), which in turn means, that you probably hold a degree in math or physics. Here in Germany that usually means at least a MSc, but usually a PhD. And then you go back to undergraduate level statistics, which again is pretty much high school mathematics.
But it pays well, has almost 100% job guarantee and usually means very manageable work conditions with many benefits, which is everything you wish for after working in academia.
While a lack of information inhibits repairs, companies have displayed malevolence in this regard. A few years ago here in Germany quite a lot of repair shops for TVs and appliances sprouted, as often only some capacitor would blow out, which was easily detectable and could be replaced. However, as companies took note of it, they started to glue those parts in so that you simply could not replace them in a non-destructive way, although there was no need to glue them (smartphone manufactures at least can argue that it is due to size constraint).
This is true. Also, even if people do not necessarily code later on, knowing a bit about how computers make things happens removes magical thinking, which is a good thing.
Plus, the more people can code, the more people want to code, increasing the demand for systems where you can actually do some coding. Which is the only insurance against ever more locked and dumbed down systems.
Here in Germany flossing is quite uncommon and I know only few persons that even own floss. Dentists also never seem to mention it. However, I do not know how dental health here compares to the one in the US and assume that other factors play a much bigger role then.
I do not think that producing biofuel is such an disaster, of course depending on how you implement it. In Germany quite a few farmers already produce biogas using large fermenters on their farm, most often then to directly use it for electricity and heat production, as pressurizing it is too costly. But well, all you are doing is pumping some cubic metres of liquid manure and some other decomposable materials in a huge tank and let anaerobic digestion do their work. As it turns out this even improves the fertilizing properties of the leftovers, since you create an optimal environment for the bacteria involved in the rotting process, just like in a well structured composter.
Holding the soil in place can be done via in-between-cultures like mustard or spinache. Of course then one can not use only one crop specifically designed to withstand herbicides and kill off absolutely all other plants on the ground, as it is commonly practiced and doing a huge environmental damage, not only on the soil itself, but also on the surrounding ecosystem (bee colony collapse for example).
The real problem here is that bio fuel is often used as an incentive to further subventionize farmers and the malpractice of huge mono cultures, especially of corn. Mining stuff to undo a bit of the damage done by these is just another bad idea.
It's sad how google still implements user agent detection. Somewhere around 2005 I hoped these funny 'this website is optimized for IE 5'-messages would be a thing of the past soon, although my browser at the time (Opera at the time I guess) obviously was superior or had at least the same capabilities. Yet google is doing the same thing, even worse. While the websites in the past didn't switch to different sites if you had the wrong user agent, or at most included some stupid javascript overlay, google redirects you. In case of google calendar, if you have a user agent string not matching one of the major browsers (for example uzbl, surf or the like), you're asking for trouble, since google won't allow you to use the fully featured version of the calendar and you can only use the non-javascript version (although I hate js, this is one of the few exceptions where js is indeed the better choice). It is one thing not to support some browsers and handle problems that might occur, but at least they should give one the choice to use the service at one owns risk.
I really hoped that at least the worst practices from the late 90s would someday disappear from the net, but with google doing much stupid stuff and getting away with it or even being praised for it, because nobody likes IE, my hope is crushed.
I'd agree, however Intel really seems to win when you consider power consumption, at least in the latest generations. A i7 desktop can be built almost fanless, since in daily use except for some broken javascript pages you'll never hit 100% cpu for a prolonged timespan and the idle consumption is really low. I'd rather pay much more for less noise (and over the long run lower electricity cost, but that's secondary for me). And it's still cheapter than a water cooling solution.
However, being an AMD-Fanboy, I just wait until they ship the next low power cpu to replace my 5050e.;)
I agree. Most of my techie friends run their own e-mail services, mostly only for themselves and sometimes for their families, and I never heard them complaining about their mailservers. Well, they still have google or something similar (especially the android-users for obvious reasons), but most private e-mail is handled on their private servers. One thing I really like about this is that one has almost unlimited e-mail adresses for signing up on different services, so if you get spam, you know where it comes from. Of course google offers yourmail+facebook@gmail.com or similar, but I don't think this is a viable option in the long run, because one can easily cut off the part after the +.
But even more important I think it's beneficial if services like e-mail or webhosting are as distributed as possible, such that the internet reduces the single points of failure to a minimum. In the end that's what everything is about. If you think almighty and benevolent corporate gods like google will keep the internet running for you, it would be the most wise choice for you to use their services. But if you don't believe these or value your privacy, you're probably better of running your own mail-server or share one with some friends.
Actually you can have a torrent of torrents; at least rtorrent has the ability to scan specified directories for new.torrent-files, and automatically add them to your queue (and move them to destination folders if finishied, so you can download your torrent-torrent to that directory and automatically add them to your conventional torrent-dir. However, I'd go for a simple zip-file and a web-interface where you can check the torrents you want to download, and then download and unpack the zip file with all the selected torrents to a scanned directory.
At least in Germany there is the so called "Atomausstieg", which means that governmant (after democratic pressure) wants to ensure that we are nuclear free in the near future. However, in reality we only extend the lifetime of the old, insecure and ineffecient reactors, while the developement of newer reactors has virtually stopped. The growing demand of energy forces us to buy our electricity from France, where as far as I know the most reactors in Europe are running and I guess they also have the biggest growth rate. However, they build cheap and old reactor types, so we not only inhibit our development, but also miss the main goal of a more secure environment.
Thermite would probably be the better and easier choice, because as far as I know, the magnetic fields you'd need to wipe out a disk are very strong (guess some T). Furthermore, it's much easier to set off a fuse without external power than a electricity powered coil.
However, it's not guranteed, that they x-ray your case before they open it, so some additional security layers would be needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that most of the complexity and PITAness in software stems from feature creep, and feature creep is simply the result of some people demanding that feature, while most of the other users don't want it, it was for a long time a benefit of Linux, that nobody liked it.
Take for instance the much hated systemd. For some people it solves the major problem of dealing with complex init dependencies in uncertain conditions and they would not want to do without. For others this is exactly the opposite of what's happening and systemd is a problem in itself.
Similar things can be observed at the application level, with professional spreadsheet, CAD, graphics and audio software definitely leading the field: All of them have many thousands features, but every user deems a different subset of them essential. Thus they cannot simply use the open source alternatives, which still lack some of these features. Whereas I would not even run libreoffice, since everything too complex for gnumeric calls for a script and I enjoy the ultrafast startup times.
In this sense, a small userbase is an asset, not a liability. Like many things in live, it's more a concave relationship. Too little users and your project is dead, too many users and it starts to become an unwieldy beast.
Also, walk on the correct side, which is in absence of a designated pedestrian area AGAINST the traffic, so in almost all of the world on the left, and in Britain/Australia/what have you on the right. That way, even if the driver does not see you, at least you see him, and if the driver sees you, he can better gauge whether you are aware that he's coming or not.
It is nice to see more confirmation in this direction. Almost all research in the past decades was focussed on the health benefits of endurance training, however strength seems to be a better indicator for health than endurance, e.g. as noted in this longterm study, even when equating for lifestyle choices like smoking (so it's not that stronger people just make better decisions).
Grip strength seems also to be a good (and easy to measure) indicator. Also the stand-sit test which has become common practice in geriatry is practically a measure of strength.
Why muscle and strength (of course one has to exclude enhanced athletes with supraphysiological amounts of muscle) is so healthy is still not totally clear, but there are already two factors standing out, which cannot be replicated by endurance type of training: The first benefit is better mobility and protection against injury, in particular in high age. Second, when you are hit with a wasting disease, or just stop eating like you used to and get into a protein deficit, your body can take those aminos from your muscle instead from your precious vital organs. In particular atrophy in the heart is very hard to reverse (a struggle many recovered anorexics have).
It's okay, you can just containerize each step of the pipeline.
Anecdotal evidence shows that people, who used anabolic stereoids in the past, will still benefit from them, although clearly to a lesser extent. The same is true for male-to-female-transgenders. Research on this topic is however quite difficult, as no ethics board will allow you to shoot realistic dosings of testosterone in people, who are also willing to lay them off later.
As to your personal experience, bike racing is actually a pretty catabolic sport, i.e. high level cyclists show very little muscle, in particular outside of the legs. Consequently muscle memory is pretty irrelevant, if not hindering, and other factors should determine how fast you get back on track. One thing might be that with declining testosterone (just a shot in the dark) the ability to innervate your muscles goes down, so you are less efficient in terms of force production per muscle mass.
Finally, I am quite happy to see some more evidence for the nuclei-theory of muscle memory. It is long enough around to even be featured in textbooks, but we are still not sufficiently sure about it.
Actually most of the alleged health benefits of fasting have not been confirmed to a point where they are physiologically significant. You often get some markers to improve in a statistical significant way, but that does not yet tell you if it is actually better, as the human body functions in a wide range of many parameters. Maybe with exception of acidity, which people still do not understand and I just yesterday saw a real life ad for some alkaline diet supplement.
On the other hand, we have evidence for the utility of breakfast or regular eating, my favorite example being that food intake after waking can help to shift the circardian rhythm into waking up earlier, because you anticipate food at that time.
My guess is that in the end we will find that different feeding schemes (fasting, intermittent fasting, regular eating) always make slight tradeoffs. It is to be expected that it turns out similar to the vegetarian/meat eating diet, i.e. the same all cause mortality, but just a shift in the causes.
By current evidence (and as stated, I do not expect this to change) it boils down to the right tool for the right job. For some populations such as manual laborers or heavy athletes (strongmen, bodybuilders, hammer throwers, what have you) a time restriction on food intake may make it very difficult to meet caloric goals. On the other hand, if you are sedentary and only need something around 2Mcal a day, have a bad habit of snacking, are already fat or just don't like to prepare food, eating only in a certain time window (or even once a day) may be the thing to do.
Finally, do not trust anyone who talks to you about autophagy.
I always thought that this was just some dumb usage of statistic tools, like sorting people by the correlation of the items they already bought with the items you try to sell.
Clearly, most people who bought a lawnmower have also bought a lawnmower, so you should show them ads of your lawnmower.
Actually not anymore, because Google's walled garden and shitty webexperience made me switch back to calcurse and pen&paper. But before that, pretty much everything went into my google calendar.
Yeah, it pays well and if you are good at math, it is easy, but actuarial science is in some sense the dullest, most boring and saddest field in applied math, since you usually do the additional certifications while you are already employed in an insurance company (similar to certifications for system administrators), which in turn means, that you probably hold a degree in math or physics. Here in Germany that usually means at least a MSc, but usually a PhD. And then you go back to undergraduate level statistics, which again is pretty much high school mathematics.
But it pays well, has almost 100% job guarantee and usually means very manageable work conditions with many benefits, which is everything you wish for after working in academia.
While a lack of information inhibits repairs, companies have displayed malevolence in this regard. A few years ago here in Germany quite a lot of repair shops for TVs and appliances sprouted, as often only some capacitor would blow out, which was easily detectable and could be replaced. However, as companies took note of it, they started to glue those parts in so that you simply could not replace them in a non-destructive way, although there was no need to glue them (smartphone manufactures at least can argue that it is due to size constraint).
This is true. Also, even if people do not necessarily code later on, knowing a bit about how computers make things happens removes magical thinking, which is a good thing.
Plus, the more people can code, the more people want to code, increasing the demand for systems where you can actually do some coding. Which is the only insurance against ever more locked and dumbed down systems.
Here in Germany flossing is quite uncommon and I know only few persons that even own floss. Dentists also never seem to mention it. However, I do not know how dental health here compares to the one in the US and assume that other factors play a much bigger role then.
I do not think that producing biofuel is such an disaster, of course depending on how you implement it. In Germany quite a few farmers already produce biogas using large fermenters on their farm, most often then to directly use it for electricity and heat production, as pressurizing it is too costly. But well, all you are doing is pumping some cubic metres of liquid manure and some other decomposable materials in a huge tank and let anaerobic digestion do their work. As it turns out this even improves the fertilizing properties of the leftovers, since you create an optimal environment for the bacteria involved in the rotting process, just like in a well structured composter.
Holding the soil in place can be done via in-between-cultures like mustard or spinache. Of course then one can not use only one crop specifically designed to withstand herbicides and kill off absolutely all other plants on the ground, as it is commonly practiced and doing a huge environmental damage, not only on the soil itself, but also on the surrounding ecosystem (bee colony collapse for example).
The real problem here is that bio fuel is often used as an incentive to further subventionize farmers and the malpractice of huge mono cultures, especially of corn. Mining stuff to undo a bit of the damage done by these is just another bad idea.
It's sad how google still implements user agent detection. Somewhere around 2005 I hoped these funny 'this website is optimized for IE 5'-messages would be a thing of the past soon, although my browser at the time (Opera at the time I guess) obviously was superior or had at least the same capabilities. Yet google is doing the same thing, even worse. While the websites in the past didn't switch to different sites if you had the wrong user agent, or at most included some stupid javascript overlay, google redirects you. In case of google calendar, if you have a user agent string not matching one of the major browsers (for example uzbl, surf or the like), you're asking for trouble, since google won't allow you to use the fully featured version of the calendar and you can only use the non-javascript version (although I hate js, this is one of the few exceptions where js is indeed the better choice). It is one thing not to support some browsers and handle problems that might occur, but at least they should give one the choice to use the service at one owns risk.
I really hoped that at least the worst practices from the late 90s would someday disappear from the net, but with google doing much stupid stuff and getting away with it or even being praised for it, because nobody likes IE, my hope is crushed.
Or given modpoints the ability to moderate without turning javascript on.
I'd agree, however Intel really seems to win when you consider power consumption, at least in the latest generations. A i7 desktop can be built almost fanless, since in daily use except for some broken javascript pages you'll never hit 100% cpu for a prolonged timespan and the idle consumption is really low. I'd rather pay much more for less noise (and over the long run lower electricity cost, but that's secondary for me). And it's still cheapter than a water cooling solution.
However, being an AMD-Fanboy, I just wait until they ship the next low power cpu to replace my 5050e. ;)
I agree. Most of my techie friends run their own e-mail services, mostly only for themselves and sometimes for their families, and I never heard them complaining about their mailservers. Well, they still have google or something similar (especially the android-users for obvious reasons), but most private e-mail is handled on their private servers. One thing I really like about this is that one has almost unlimited e-mail adresses for signing up on different services, so if you get spam, you know where it comes from. Of course google offers yourmail+facebook@gmail.com or similar, but I don't think this is a viable option in the long run, because one can easily cut off the part after the +.
But even more important I think it's beneficial if services like e-mail or webhosting are as distributed as possible, such that the internet reduces the single points of failure to a minimum. In the end that's what everything is about. If you think almighty and benevolent corporate gods like google will keep the internet running for you, it would be the most wise choice for you to use their services. But if you don't believe these or value your privacy, you're probably better of running your own mail-server or share one with some friends.
And well, the first two years of American college are more or less what central europeans call secondary education.
Actually you can have a torrent of torrents; at least rtorrent has the ability to scan specified directories for new .torrent-files, and automatically add them to your queue (and move them to destination folders if finishied, so you can download your torrent-torrent to that directory and automatically add them to your conventional torrent-dir. However, I'd go for a simple zip-file and a web-interface where you can check the torrents you want to download, and then download and unpack the zip file with all the selected torrents to a scanned directory.
At least in Germany there is the so called "Atomausstieg", which means that governmant (after democratic pressure) wants to ensure that we are nuclear free in the near future. However, in reality we only extend the lifetime of the old, insecure and ineffecient reactors, while the developement of newer reactors has virtually stopped. The growing demand of energy forces us to buy our electricity from France, where as far as I know the most reactors in Europe are running and I guess they also have the biggest growth rate. However, they build cheap and old reactor types, so we not only inhibit our development, but also miss the main goal of a more secure environment.
The children are old enough.
Pretty much everyone who knows anything is against it
And that's why the criticism is not really massive and there are many supporters.
In German "fucker" translates to "Ficker".
Thermite would probably be the better and easier choice, because as far as I know, the magnetic fields you'd need to wipe out a disk are very strong (guess some T). Furthermore, it's much easier to set off a fuse without external power than a electricity powered coil.
However, it's not guranteed, that they x-ray your case before they open it, so some additional security layers would be needed.
No, you only have a low setting for your recursive depth. Very interesting point though, I just can't stop thinking about it...