I have long hated Macs but as of yesterday, I now own a 15" alum Powerbook.
I absolutely love this thing and while I still am an admin on a Windows network here at work, I think I am done with Windows on my own. I have increasing problems with Windows and having increasingly fewer reasons to hate Macs. As of OS X 10.3 and Xcode, I now have very few reasons to dislike it.
The only few gripes that I have right now are: 1) The aluminum keyboard feels like dragging my nails on a chalkboard if my nails (esp thumb) hit the hey instead of flesh.
2) The integrated Google search doesn't have buttons that let me search directly to images and/or discussions, and when the search comes up, there aren't buttons of the words that I just searched for allowing me to search within that document.
3) Many web pages totally break using Safari - I am going to debug one page that I use all of the time and send the fixes (JavaScript) to the person that maintains it since it is sommething I use daily when analyzing stock charts (well, nightly).
4) The resolution on this laptop isn't so great - but the screen does look fantastic.
5) I'm not sure that my backlit keyboard works. It is turned on and no matter what changes I make via F9/F10, I still see no backlighting. Not a huge deal, but still a gripe.
6) I have yet to figure out where the graphical FTP client is - so far I am largely just treating this like a Linux laptop and using a lot lof command line stuff.
7) I wish Komodo 2.5 was ported to Mac OS X 10.3 - I really like the way that it deals with Perl.
8) The trackpad is not responsive - it is almost like accelaration is turned on, but I didn't see anything that would indicate that in any mouse menu.
9) The single mouse button works if you press in the center, but not if you get it off to one side - which is usually where my thumb is (perhaps out of habit).
10) I'm still getting used to the kepay layout for shortcuts - fortunately my misstrokes have yet to do anyuthing harmful.
11) The spell checking thing doesn't let you bring up a quick selection of the word/words that it suggests - innstead you have to open the full spell window and then it wants to continue on - I miss the ability in Windows to right click and the first few words on that menu were the suggested words and you could just choose one and move on.
12) The iChat thing isn't as configurable as I had hoped. I hear there is another thing out there, I will test it out in a bit.
But the things I LOVE are:
1) Its weight - this thing is so light and thin. The battery is tiny and WOW 4+ hours on a charge.
2) The wireless is fast and VERY easy to setup (no real setup, just turn it on).
4) Mail app - this thing is great. Nice looking and all the features I want. I love it.
5) Snappy! Everything is quick on it.
6) Feels very stable.
7) FreeBSD command line - nuff said there.
8) Xcode is cool.
There is a ton that I have yet to figure out yet, but I really like it so far.
I am going to try to get OpenOffice on here and Xemacs and then I think I should be all set after I try to bring over my documents from my pc laptop.
I am also going to benchmark this laptop against my other one and my stateside server to see how it performs - initially will just be running Perl scripts that I use a lot. My previous laptop was an Athlon 4 (the mobile chip) 1G, and the server is an Athlon XP 2200+.
The laptop gets warmer than I had hoped - just to the edge of comfort, if not just over - but it doesn't melt any part of it like my pc laptop is doing now (its heatsink fan is broken - hence why I got a new laptop, will then take my time to fix that one).
Anyway - I love it - any suggestions from old pro Mac users would be highly welcome as I look for cool new things for my new shiny toy.
I always thought that MTV would get involved more with Launch.com - or in a buyout. Granted, Yahoo bought them out (Launch), but there was plenty of time beforehand.
Between the videos and the radio that they have, it seems like a good spot to them say "want to buy this song/album? click here"
My point, when saying that Atkins "wouldn't work" unless you were fat was that one will not continue to lose weight on it. You will reach a stopping point on it - that stopping point being based on your leptin levels - but it is generally around 12-15% bodyfat in men and closer to 20% in women. Your genetics and how long you have been fat comes a lot into play as well.
It will indeed work to maintain whatever level it stops at - and then once you go back to eating how you did before, you will see a fairly quick increase in weight as you start to retain more water.
Low carb diets see very fast losses of weight at first largely due to the loss of water - and then after that level you get steady fat loss. There is an enzyme that isn't created when you don't take in carbs, therefore you don't retain water under your skin and therefore you can have saltier food - once of the nice things about low carb diets.
I'm more of a fan of the cyclical type diets - but I work out, so they tend to go hand in hand.
As for my name, I think a lot of people immediately write me off based on that - it used to amuse me and now I have stopped caring one way or the other. If you like my website name, I can assure you that I own more offensive ones too - none of them pointing to anything more than just the same random stuff.
Re:More medical advice, worth absolutely nothing.
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 1
Hit up pubmed yourself and find out something interesting.
Read up on the Cyclical Ketogenic Diet (CKD) or the Cyclical Isocaloric Diet. The CKD was developed because the Atkins diet will stop working (meaning you will stop losing weight - not meaning that you will balloon up in weight). The CKD allows people that are into fitness - weightlifters and the like, to maintain a low-carb diet such as Atkins, but still grain muscle mass with the refeed periods. The CKD stops working as your bodyfat gets lower as well and that is where the cylclical isocaloric diet comes in.
Read up on leptin and what it has to do with your percent bodyfat. You can use bromocriptine to get around this - but the side effects of it are not worth it. (bromocriptine allowing you to regulate dopamine levels assuming that you don't take it around the time of insulin release - so usually on an empty stomach)
Lyle McDonald has written much on this - find his studies on it and you find a shortcut to the pubmed references.
Additional fun substances in weight loss: *Yohimbe for fighting estrogentic deposits *ALA (R-ALA) for partitioning of glucose disposal with higher affinity towards muscle *CLA for increased burning of brown adipose tissue
Everyone knows about caffeine, then there is the ECA stack - ephedrine, caffeine, and asprin. Ephidrine has been linked to issues if you have pre-existing heart problems. Don't add Yohimbe in to that stack though or else you are asking for trouble (although a high as well).
DNP was a big deal back in the day and saw great success, but its propensity to give women cataracts if they didn't use anti-oxidants and the ease of misuse (it will cause you to overheat from the inside out) made the FDA ban it.
If you are fat and on Atkins, you will lose weight quickly until you get to your set point (defined by your body's response to leptin) - by saying that it "won't work" after that doesn't mean that you will then bounce and get fat again if you stay on the diet - you just won't lose any more weight beyond your set point.
It is a higher percentage at which it stops in women since their bodies naturally tend towards a higher percent bodyfat.
I find it amusing that people are challenging me on this - if there is anything I am well versed in, it is nutrition and performance and the science behind it.
Re:More medical advice, worth absolutely nothing.
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 1
LOL
Unless you are referring to my joke reference to DNP (which is illegal in the States), then I have no idea what you are talking about.
Everything I said is 100% true and there are multiple studies to back it up.
If you find fault in anything, point it out and discuss it, otherwise your post is fairly useless (but you got to use more capital words than I did, so you got that going for you).
(I wonder if cocaine would be a good substitute? That's supposed to be a diet drug itself, right?;-)
Ideally it would be crystal meth if you are going for street drug of choice. The Twin Labs Ripped Fuel and the like are all just chemical veriants of meth anyway.
If you want the effects of a low carb diet, but you still want to eat carbs. Or if you want a cheat meal, but don't want all the carbs from it - you can take in ALA.
ALA will help shuttle the glucose out of your sytem faster - if you workout beforehand, then your muscles are more insulin sensitive anyway, so the ALA will help even more. The result of that will be your muscles getting more of it and your fat getting less. It also clears the blood of it faster, meaning that you don't get elevated levels of insulin which are the main reason that a high carb diet can be bad for you.
ALA in itself is also the best anti-oxidant available. The R isomer is more effective, but it is hard to produce and it isn't stable under normal heat (anything above about 78 degrees F). Once the isomer heats up, it will then revert to the racemic (mixed right and left) version of ALA - so you essentially pay a lot of the R and then can easily have it revert back to the regular kind.
Good stuff if you are willing to shell out the bucks and trust who makes/distributes it.
Only works if you are fat
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Atkins or any low carb diet will only work if you are fat. Once you get down to a reasonable 12-15% bodyfay, then the low carb diet will stop being effective. So you get to go through all of the annoyance of converting the keytones for energy instead of carbs, all of the discomfort, and without any of the benefits - BONUS!
Once you get to 12-15%, you are better off going to a isocaloric diet (even percentages of fats, carbs, and protein - where most all of the fats come from the Omega3/6/9). If you go lower total calories on that during the week and then going high carbs on the weekend (or just one day if you are highly sensitive), then you can see an anabolic rebound which is beneficial to those that are weight lifting.
It should also be noted that if you are trying to compete at all in any sort of endurance event - doing anyting low carb diet at all is about as retarded as you can get. If you feel that you are going to do that, at the very least, try to get a lot of fruit and fruit juices so as to be able to replenish your liver glycogen levels. But again - if you are you competetive at an endurance event, you are likely under 15% bodyfat - which means that you are wasting your time on the low carb diet.
No matter what diet you are on, as long as the calories are less than your expendatures for the day (so you can also not diet at all and just exercise more), then you will lose weight. If you are fat - then you will see fast and great results down to about 20% bodyfat or so - then after that, you will start seeing resistance.
Depending on how long you sat at your high bodyfat levels, your leptin levels might be your worst enemy at this point - the carb loading on weekends and caloric depletions on the weekdays will help counteract that.
Once you go back to normal eating, then your leptin levels will again come back to haunt you. So you can't just diet and then go back to eating like a pig - it is a lifestyle change.
Or you could just live life on the edge and use DNP - again, no good for endurance runners - and really no good for anyone. Especially if you are inclined towards depression at all since it prevents the conversion of tryptophan to serotonin. Generally speaking, there is a reason the FDA banned it from diet drugs back in the day - it is dangerous - although the most effective chemical in existance for burning fat.
I'd be content with a contact lens, normal looking glasses, or an implant in my head that makes me think I'm seeing the image. All of those with the obvious caveat of the thing can't do harm to me and it has to work and be easily updated.
It would also be nice to have it spell check (since I'm an awful speller), and it would be neat to have a GPS read out in there as well.
It could essentially become a display that gets its info from a wireless connection to whatever device you want. You could have a phone in your pcoket, it rings and the face of the person calling and their number and info pops up in your HUD. Or while you sit on a plane, your laptop could display a movie right there.
Obvious issues would be spoofs into that signal - whether it be advertising, or malicious manipulation of it (you could argue that both points are the same).
So I guess my idea is two part - the HUD for everything that only I can see, and then some way to non-invasively monitor my body's vitals. Heart rate and blood pressure seem relatively easy to do. Blood cell density is also relatively easy to do. But blood oxygen content and hormone/neurotransmitter levels are much harder to do with present tech AFAIK.
As a vaguely athletic and health conscious person, I want a HUD that will allow me to see my current vital stats. I want to know my testosterone/estrogen/progesterone levels. I want to know my serotonin/tryptophan/dopamine levels. I want to know my platlet count, and I want to know my red blood cell count. All in charts and graphs.
Along with that, it would also be nice for the old standby of a system that would allow me to look at someone and then have everything I know about them on screen so that I don't have to feel bad for not knowing their names. I am absolutely terrible with names.
we had a SCSI drive self destruct on Monday or Tuesday of this week. the rebuilding of that server and the headache on our network was what I spent my week doing. on the good side, it helped me argue for a much better backup system and a new server to add - so perhaps it was a good thing.
that drive was at least 5 years old though, so perhaps it was just time for it - if the new drive that in there dies, soon, then I will certainly wonder.
I didn't go to MIT, went to Williams. No longer in college and I now live in Bermuda. Lived in Cambridge after soon - from '99 until May of this year. I have never lived on the West Coast.
From what I have seen, the SUVs are far worse than the Volvo bitches. That said, I have twice nearly been killed by a woman in a Volvo in the Fresh Pond rotaries in Cambridge. Two different women, two different silver Volvo station wagons - both of Asian decent. They seemed to not like my honking after the fact. One was on a cell phone, the other was not on the phone.
I've owned an HP Pavilion XH575 for a few years now that I really like. The keyboard on it is nice, the screen is an SXGA+ 1400x1050 15" screen, 30g drive (which I have barely filled 10g), and 512M RAM - it also plays DVDs (poorly since it is software decompression) and records CDs. It is technically a Sager I guess, the company that sources most of the laptops sold. I didn't find out that I could get them cheaper from www.powernotebooks.com until after I'd owned this for awhile. I got it refurbished off of www.ubid.com and it was about $1200 I think.
I started actually carrying the thing to work and back home with me, the way a laptop should be. I have a Crumpler "Very Busy Man" messenger bag that I use - tons of space in that thing, and it is designed for laptops. Once I did that and no longer just moved if from the coffee table to my lap and instead actually jostled it a bit, I started having problems with it.
At first the internet ethernet in it failed. That was no sweat, I just bought a Netgear PCMCIA card and got back on the net. But more recently something much worse happned - the cpu fan failed. If I hold my laptop upside down and at a slight angle and then bash it against the edge of something hard just right, then the fan will start moving again, VERY loudly. I assume a bearing is messed up in there. If I turn it right side up again, then the fan dies again - probably gravity tugging and exacerbating the issue with the bearing. I haven't figured out how to use my laptop upside down without adding a monitor, keyboard, and mouse - which I refuse to do - the whole point of a laptop for me is to be totally portable.
I took it all apart to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. In the process, I broke the ESC key off of the keyboard. I also learned that the heat sink and fan are really really hard to get to if you don't have instructions. I also saw that the hard drive is really tiny and cute - and shock mounted. The CD drive is really impressively little as well.
When this device overheats, it just shuts off and it won't turn on agian until it cools off. Fortunately though I don't seem to lose any data on it. It is healthy aside from the tiny issues at hand. After I put the unit back together, the PCMCIA stopped working, but on the good side the internet ethernet started working again - then it would go out, but the PCMCIA would work - and back and forth until finally it seems to have decided on just the internet ethernet to keep.
As I'm sitting here typing, I have it on top of a metal tray out of my toaster oven - in the hope that it will act as a heatsink and help me get more use out of this until I can fix it.
I ordered an Apple PowerBook - one of the new Aluminum ones. I heard that its new 1.25Ghz processor runs less hot and is usable on the lap - I hope that is right. I'm going to give it a shot and if I don't like it, I can always put Linux on it. I live in Bermuda, so it has been a HUGE hassle to try to get an Apple laptop here that doesn't end up costing me $5K (it will cost me just under $4K the way I finally resolved it). So I can't imagine that this Panasonic thing would be too hard to get in comparison.
I would gladly have gotten one of these things were they able to do a 15" screen and a keyboard that is larger. I do Photoshop for basic web stuff and logos, but nothing fancy (since I just have the trackpad), and mostly I just program all of the time. I ssh (Putty) into servers in the States and work on code there. I also use Komodo on here as well. I look at web pages, read e-mail, write documents occasionally, and do relatively a lot in Excel. Essentially I do nothing that needs a lot of processor power (all of that is in my server in the States), and 512M RAM is "enough" for anything I do.
My dream laptop is something that has about a 15" screen that has great brightness. I ideally want 1600x1200, but I'm seeing that I will hae to wait a bit for that to be as universal as say 1280x1024. I want a keyb
Slashdot Mirror
I thought my room last night was dark enough, but perhaps not.
I will try it in a darker room this evening.
Where is the sensor that detects the light? Under one of the speaker grilles?
I have long hated Macs but as of yesterday, I now own a 15" alum Powerbook.
I absolutely love this thing and while I still am an admin on a Windows network here at work, I think I am done with Windows on my own.
I have increasing problems with Windows and having increasingly fewer reasons to hate Macs.
As of OS X 10.3 and Xcode, I now have very few reasons to dislike it.
The only few gripes that I have right now are:
1) The aluminum keyboard feels like dragging my nails on a chalkboard if my nails (esp thumb) hit the hey instead of flesh.
2) The integrated Google search doesn't have buttons that let me search directly to images and/or discussions, and when the search comes up, there aren't buttons of the words that I just searched for allowing me to search within that document.
3) Many web pages totally break using Safari - I am going to debug one page that I use all of the time and send the fixes (JavaScript) to the person that maintains it since it is sommething I use daily when analyzing stock charts (well, nightly).
4) The resolution on this laptop isn't so great - but the screen does look fantastic.
5) I'm not sure that my backlit keyboard works. It is turned on and no matter what changes I make via F9/F10, I still see no backlighting. Not a huge deal, but still a gripe.
6) I have yet to figure out where the graphical FTP client is - so far I am largely just treating this like a Linux laptop and using a lot lof command line stuff.
7) I wish Komodo 2.5 was ported to Mac OS X 10.3 - I really like the way that it deals with Perl.
8) The trackpad is not responsive - it is almost like accelaration is turned on, but I didn't see anything that would indicate that in any mouse menu.
9) The single mouse button works if you press in the center, but not if you get it off to one side - which is usually where my thumb is (perhaps out of habit).
10) I'm still getting used to the kepay layout for shortcuts - fortunately my misstrokes have yet to do anyuthing harmful.
11) The spell checking thing doesn't let you bring up a quick selection of the word/words that it suggests - innstead you have to open the full spell window and then it wants to continue on - I miss the ability in Windows to right click and the first few words on that menu were the suggested words and you could just choose one and move on.
12) The iChat thing isn't as configurable as I had hoped. I hear there is another thing out there, I will test it out in a bit.
But the things I LOVE are:
1) Its weight - this thing is so light and thin. The battery is tiny and WOW 4+ hours on a charge.
2) The wireless is fast and VERY easy to setup (no real setup, just turn it on).
4) Mail app - this thing is great. Nice looking and all the features I want. I love it.
5) Snappy! Everything is quick on it.
6) Feels very stable.
7) FreeBSD command line - nuff said there.
8) Xcode is cool.
There is a ton that I have yet to figure out yet, but I really like it so far.
I am going to try to get OpenOffice on here and Xemacs and then I think I should be all set after I try to bring over my documents from my pc laptop.
I am also going to benchmark this laptop against my other one and my stateside server to see how it performs - initially will just be running Perl scripts that I use a lot.
My previous laptop was an Athlon 4 (the mobile chip) 1G, and the server is an Athlon XP 2200+.
The laptop gets warmer than I had hoped - just to the edge of comfort, if not just over - but it doesn't melt any part of it like my pc laptop is doing now (its heatsink fan is broken - hence why I got a new laptop, will then take my time to fix that one).
Anyway - I love it - any suggestions from old pro Mac users would be highly welcome as I look for cool new things for my new shiny toy.
I always thought that MTV would get involved more with Launch.com - or in a buyout. Granted, Yahoo bought them out (Launch), but there was plenty of time beforehand.
Between the videos and the radio that they have, it seems like a good spot to them say "want to buy this song/album? click here"
My point, when saying that Atkins "wouldn't work" unless you were fat was that one will not continue to lose weight on it.
You will reach a stopping point on it - that stopping point being based on your leptin levels - but it is generally around 12-15% bodyfat in men and closer to 20% in women.
Your genetics and how long you have been fat comes a lot into play as well.
It will indeed work to maintain whatever level it stops at - and then once you go back to eating how you did before, you will see a fairly quick increase in weight as you start to retain more water.
Low carb diets see very fast losses of weight at first largely due to the loss of water - and then after that level you get steady fat loss.
There is an enzyme that isn't created when you don't take in carbs, therefore you don't retain water under your skin and therefore you can have saltier food - once of the nice things about low carb diets.
I'm more of a fan of the cyclical type diets - but I work out, so they tend to go hand in hand.
As for my name, I think a lot of people immediately write me off based on that - it used to amuse me and now I have stopped caring one way or the other.
If you like my website name, I can assure you that I own more offensive ones too - none of them pointing to anything more than just the same random stuff.
Hit up pubmed yourself and find out something interesting.
Read up on the Cyclical Ketogenic Diet (CKD) or the Cyclical Isocaloric Diet. The CKD was developed because the Atkins diet will stop working (meaning you will stop losing weight - not meaning that you will balloon up in weight). The CKD allows people that are into fitness - weightlifters and the like, to maintain a low-carb diet such as Atkins, but still grain muscle mass with the refeed periods.
The CKD stops working as your bodyfat gets lower as well and that is where the cylclical isocaloric diet comes in.
Read up on leptin and what it has to do with your percent bodyfat. You can use bromocriptine to get around this - but the side effects of it are not worth it. (bromocriptine allowing you to regulate dopamine levels assuming that you don't take it around the time of insulin release - so usually on an empty stomach)
Lyle McDonald has written much on this - find his studies on it and you find a shortcut to the pubmed references.
Additional fun substances in weight loss:
*Yohimbe for fighting estrogentic deposits
*ALA (R-ALA) for partitioning of glucose disposal with higher affinity towards muscle
*CLA for increased burning of brown adipose tissue
Everyone knows about caffeine, then there is the ECA stack - ephedrine, caffeine, and asprin. Ephidrine has been linked to issues if you have pre-existing heart problems.
Don't add Yohimbe in to that stack though or else you are asking for trouble (although a high as well).
DNP was a big deal back in the day and saw great success, but its propensity to give women cataracts if they didn't use anti-oxidants and the ease of misuse (it will cause you to overheat from the inside out) made the FDA ban it.
If you are fat and on Atkins, you will lose weight quickly until you get to your set point (defined by your body's response to leptin) - by saying that it "won't work" after that doesn't mean that you will then bounce and get fat again if you stay on the diet - you just won't lose any more weight beyond your set point.
It is a higher percentage at which it stops in women since their bodies naturally tend towards a higher percent bodyfat.
I find it amusing that people are challenging me on this - if there is anything I am well versed in, it is nutrition and performance and the science behind it.
Is she losing weight?
LOL
Unless you are referring to my joke reference to DNP (which is illegal in the States), then I have no idea what you are talking about.
Everything I said is 100% true and there are multiple studies to back it up.
If you find fault in anything, point it out and discuss it, otherwise your post is fairly useless (but you got to use more capital words than I did, so you got that going for you).
(I wonder if cocaine would be a good substitute? That's supposed to be a diet drug itself, right? ;-)
Ideally it would be crystal meth if you are going for street drug of choice. The Twin Labs Ripped Fuel and the like are all just chemical veriants of meth anyway.
If you want the effects of a low carb diet, but you still want to eat carbs.
Or if you want a cheat meal, but don't want all the carbs from it - you can take in ALA.
ALA will help shuttle the glucose out of your sytem faster - if you workout beforehand, then your muscles are more insulin sensitive anyway, so the ALA will help even more.
The result of that will be your muscles getting more of it and your fat getting less.
It also clears the blood of it faster, meaning that you don't get elevated levels of insulin which are the main reason that a high carb diet can be bad for you.
ALA in itself is also the best anti-oxidant available. The R isomer is more effective, but it is hard to produce and it isn't stable under normal heat (anything above about 78 degrees F).
Once the isomer heats up, it will then revert to the racemic (mixed right and left) version of ALA - so you essentially pay a lot of the R and then can easily have it revert back to the regular kind.
Good stuff if you are willing to shell out the bucks and trust who makes/distributes it.
Atkins or any low carb diet will only work if you are fat. Once you get down to a reasonable 12-15% bodyfay, then the low carb diet will stop being effective. So you get to go through all of the annoyance of converting the keytones for energy instead of carbs, all of the discomfort, and without any of the benefits - BONUS!
Once you get to 12-15%, you are better off going to a isocaloric diet (even percentages of fats, carbs, and protein - where most all of the fats come from the Omega3/6/9).
If you go lower total calories on that during the week and then going high carbs on the weekend (or just one day if you are highly sensitive), then you can see an anabolic rebound which is beneficial to those that are weight lifting.
It should also be noted that if you are trying to compete at all in any sort of endurance event - doing anyting low carb diet at all is about as retarded as you can get.
If you feel that you are going to do that, at the very least, try to get a lot of fruit and fruit juices so as to be able to replenish your liver glycogen levels.
But again - if you are you competetive at an endurance event, you are likely under 15% bodyfat - which means that you are wasting your time on the low carb diet.
No matter what diet you are on, as long as the calories are less than your expendatures for the day (so you can also not diet at all and just exercise more), then you will lose weight.
If you are fat - then you will see fast and great results down to about 20% bodyfat or so - then after that, you will start seeing resistance.
Depending on how long you sat at your high bodyfat levels, your leptin levels might be your worst enemy at this point - the carb loading on weekends and caloric depletions on the weekdays will help counteract that.
Once you go back to normal eating, then your leptin levels will again come back to haunt you.
So you can't just diet and then go back to eating like a pig - it is a lifestyle change.
Or you could just live life on the edge and use DNP - again, no good for endurance runners - and really no good for anyone. Especially if you are inclined towards depression at all since it prevents the conversion of tryptophan to serotonin.
Generally speaking, there is a reason the FDA banned it from diet drugs back in the day - it is dangerous - although the most effective chemical in existance for burning fat.
that would rule too
I'd be content with a contact lens, normal looking glasses, or an implant in my head that makes me think I'm seeing the image.
All of those with the obvious caveat of the thing can't do harm to me and it has to work and be easily updated.
It would also be nice to have it spell check (since I'm an awful speller), and it would be neat to have a GPS read out in there as well.
It could essentially become a display that gets its info from a wireless connection to whatever device you want.
You could have a phone in your pcoket, it rings and the face of the person calling and their number and info pops up in your HUD.
Or while you sit on a plane, your laptop could display a movie right there.
Obvious issues would be spoofs into that signal - whether it be advertising, or malicious manipulation of it (you could argue that both points are the same).
So I guess my idea is two part - the HUD for everything that only I can see, and then some way to non-invasively monitor my body's vitals.
Heart rate and blood pressure seem relatively easy to do. Blood cell density is also relatively easy to do.
But blood oxygen content and hormone/neurotransmitter levels are much harder to do with present tech AFAIK.
Anyway, that is my ideal gadget.
As a vaguely athletic and health conscious person, I want a HUD that will allow me to see my current vital stats.
I want to know my testosterone/estrogen/progesterone levels. I want to know my serotonin/tryptophan/dopamine levels. I want to know my platlet count, and I want to know my red blood cell count.
All in charts and graphs.
Along with that, it would also be nice for the old standby of a system that would allow me to look at someone and then have everything I know about them on screen so that I don't have to feel bad for not knowing their names.
I am absolutely terrible with names.
He likely didn't mean it that way - but his idea sounds a lot like something out of Harrison Bergeron (sp?).
I'm pretty sure that someone is spamming my brain with thoughts and dreams of porn like material. That said, I'm not too bothered by it.
we had a SCSI drive self destruct on Monday or Tuesday of this week. the rebuilding of that server and the headache on our network was what I spent my week doing.
on the good side, it helped me argue for a much better backup system and a new server to add - so perhaps it was a good thing.
that drive was at least 5 years old though, so perhaps it was just time for it - if the new drive that in there dies, soon, then I will certainly wonder.
Ben and I were on the track and XC team together at Williams. He was a year ahead of me. I knew that he worked at Intel, but hadn't kept in touch.
I didn't go to MIT, went to Williams. No longer in college and I now live in Bermuda. Lived in Cambridge after soon - from '99 until May of this year.
I have never lived on the West Coast.
The Volvos were of Swedish decent, the bitches driving them were the ones that looked all foreign and shit.
From what I have seen, the SUVs are far worse than the Volvo bitches. That said, I have twice nearly been killed by a woman in a Volvo in the Fresh Pond rotaries in Cambridge.
Two different women, two different silver Volvo station wagons - both of Asian decent.
They seemed to not like my honking after the fact.
One was on a cell phone, the other was not on the phone.
I've owned an HP Pavilion XH575 for a few years now that I really like. The keyboard on it is nice, the screen is an SXGA+ 1400x1050 15" screen, 30g drive (which I have barely filled 10g), and 512M RAM - it also plays DVDs (poorly since it is software decompression) and records CDs. It is technically a Sager I guess, the company that sources most of the laptops sold. I didn't find out that I could get them cheaper from www.powernotebooks.com until after I'd owned this for awhile.
I got it refurbished off of www.ubid.com and it was about $1200 I think.
I started actually carrying the thing to work and back home with me, the way a laptop should be. I have a Crumpler "Very Busy Man" messenger bag that I use - tons of space in that thing, and it is designed for laptops.
Once I did that and no longer just moved if from the coffee table to my lap and instead actually jostled it a bit, I started having problems with it.
At first the internet ethernet in it failed. That was no sweat, I just bought a Netgear PCMCIA card and got back on the net.
But more recently something much worse happned - the cpu fan failed. If I hold my laptop upside down and at a slight angle and then bash it against the edge of something hard just right, then the fan will start moving again, VERY loudly. I assume a bearing is messed up in there. If I turn it right side up again, then the fan dies again - probably gravity tugging and exacerbating the issue with the bearing.
I haven't figured out how to use my laptop upside down without adding a monitor, keyboard, and mouse - which I refuse to do - the whole point of a laptop for me is to be totally portable.
I took it all apart to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. In the process, I broke the ESC key off of the keyboard. I also learned that the heat sink and fan are really really hard to get to if you don't have instructions.
I also saw that the hard drive is really tiny and cute - and shock mounted. The CD drive is really impressively little as well.
When this device overheats, it just shuts off and it won't turn on agian until it cools off. Fortunately though I don't seem to lose any data on it. It is healthy aside from the tiny issues at hand.
After I put the unit back together, the PCMCIA stopped working, but on the good side the internet ethernet started working again - then it would go out, but the PCMCIA would work - and back and forth until finally it seems to have decided on just the internet ethernet to keep.
As I'm sitting here typing, I have it on top of a metal tray out of my toaster oven - in the hope that it will act as a heatsink and help me get more use out of this until I can fix it.
I ordered an Apple PowerBook - one of the new Aluminum ones. I heard that its new 1.25Ghz processor runs less hot and is usable on the lap - I hope that is right. I'm going to give it a shot and if I don't like it, I can always put Linux on it.
I live in Bermuda, so it has been a HUGE hassle to try to get an Apple laptop here that doesn't end up costing me $5K (it will cost me just under $4K the way I finally resolved it). So I can't imagine that this Panasonic thing would be too hard to get in comparison.
I would gladly have gotten one of these things were they able to do a 15" screen and a keyboard that is larger.
I do Photoshop for basic web stuff and logos, but nothing fancy (since I just have the trackpad), and mostly I just program all of the time. I ssh (Putty) into servers in the States and work on code there. I also use Komodo on here as well. I look at web pages, read e-mail, write documents occasionally, and do relatively a lot in Excel.
Essentially I do nothing that needs a lot of processor power (all of that is in my server in the States), and 512M RAM is "enough" for anything I do.
My dream laptop is something that has about a 15" screen that has great brightness. I ideally want 1600x1200, but I'm seeing that I will hae to wait a bit for that to be as universal as say 1280x1024. I want a keyb
No YOU do!
from what I have seen, fat people become heads of companies.
We are already at war in deep space - that is what all of today's youth are fighting via the "games" on the major platforms.
Apparently in deep space it is a lot like carjacking and beating hookers.
oops, should have previewed that - I have spent too much time on sites that use the brackets instead of regular HTML stuff.