How is your BMI out of control? If your BMI is 30, that's almost certainly your fault. The few cases that exist where it's not your fault (anti-psychotics, anti-rejection drugs, basically powerful life-sustaining drugs with that side-effect) can be excused. There can be a process to submit a specific form (that the doctor must sign under penalty of perjury and fraud) that can be used to get out in those cases.
If you don't want to change your lifestyle so much, pony up the $10 a month.
That's basically my solution to the health care problem in the US. Everyone pays themselves. The government can take what you spend out of your gross income when calculating your taxes, or reimburse the poor a certain amount. Everyone should be carry insurance, but it would only cover catastrophic stuff (non-elective non-cosmetic non-reconstructive surgery, cancer, car accidents, etc). The government can pay for that for all I care. Make that universal. But you pay for your own pills, whether viagra, flonaze, or heart drugs. You pay to go to the doctor. Take responsibility for yourself.
A little free market will cure a lot of this. We do NOT have a free market now.
Bitter pill? Sure.
Solution B (far less optimal): All congressmen and senators must either use medicare, or put the rest of the country on their health plan.
I'm relatively new to it all, and I've worked on a horrid spaghetti-code application that can fall apart easily, has tons of hard-coded config values strewn about, and some code that could really make you scratch your head. My boss and the others who have worked on it all agree. I could write something better in about 6 months. That said...
I have the experience of maintaining that app, so I know things that they ran into (things you would never think of)
I know the first version was written in something like 3 months because they needed it quick
I know that features (both large and small) have been tacked on since the beginning, and the app now encompasses much more that its original scope
I know I've had formal training is some of this stuff (the first guy was self-taught in DB design, I think)
There are things we have that I could do better than in some areas. Some of our applications have come a LONG way from their beginnings and would take a very long time for me to rewrite (years to catch up to how fast and stable it is now). So remember that when someone complains "I could do better in 6 months", that might refer to 1 of the 6 systems they've seen.
Hubris seems common in our field, especially if you are good compared to your classmates (who can be poor and still graduate). However, it often doesn't take too long get humbled by someone or some amazing system.
No. But we were not looking for a senior programmer, someone middling would have been nice. But we had people applying for this job (again, not a high up job) and having them ask for up to 2x what my boss (the department head) makes. Now a small company may not pay as well as a big company, but what these people were looking to be paid compared to the job responsibilities could be really out of whack sometimes.
They were applying to be the most experienced sales guy at Best Buy and asking for a salary that the full store manager makes.
They may have deserved that salary in a bigger position, but not for what they were applying for. That wasn't what we were after.
No kidding. I graduated a little over a year ago, and will have had my job for a year later this month. I had a hard time even getting an interview at anywhere that had positions that even began to interest me. There was tons of stuff I would love to do but wasn't qualified for. Everything else seemed like the lowest level of grunt work available. There had to be something a little above that. I got some interviews that went really well, and even got callbacks, but in the end I lost the positions to people more qualified.
Getting in is tough. In the end I interviewed with a small company that had a job that seemed just fine (but not my really interesting to me). But because it's small I like the atmosphere, and I ended up getting lots of experience on lots of things. At this point (do to my work, company growth, and other personnel changes, not necessarily in that order) I have far more responsibility that I thought I would at this point and I'm really enjoying my job and working on things that are far more interesting that I thought I would.
While I still don't have that 5 years of professional whatever experience, I'm in a much better position now should I have to go look for a job again.
But getting my foot in the door of my first job was very though. I figured I'd have to end up working some dinky little job that I wouldn't like doing work anyone who managed to get a CS degree should be able to do until I got that experience and could get a "good" job, but things worked out pretty well.
Good luck. Maybe if you find a small company that is wiling to overlook that if you can demonstrate your skills some (the fact I had a senior project REALLY helped me) you'll have an easier time. Many big companies have so many options that getting in could be really tough.
The people out in the market place can be amazing. We were recently looking for more people, but watching the people come through was kinda fun. We are a small shop, now at 4 programmers. As you can guess, we don't get the high end people applying directly to us like they might to MS or Google or whatever. We have to go find people and attract them. We do get some submissions, but they tend to be.... interesting.
We have seen... the passable, those who are rediculously overqualified (if you read their resume, but you can tell they are lying about 90% of it), the guy who (as a programmer for 5+ years) didn't know what an array was, the people who's last job shoved them into one tiny area for years and years so they have lost skills outside of that small set (which is often esoteric). We've seen those just out of school that need more experience, and those with great experience who just want too much (salaries the larger companies around would have paid a few years ago when the market was better, but they have no chance with in our company for the position they are being hired for).
It can be hard to find good people when you aren't a Google or MS.
Agreed (although I'm guessing this one is Valve's fault). I wrote that because the troll I responded to was doing a "iD gets trapped by viral GPL" thing. I just thought I would point those three things out for anyone who didn't know beforehand (although I'm sure that troll either did or didn't care).
I read this while it was in the Firehose, and came up with one question: Why?
What would this tool provide above apt and dpkg? A graphical way of installing programs? There are front ends for dpkg and apt like Synaptic that don't have any of these downsides. Is this just to get things like some of these codecs? That has always been available through other package repositories. You just add a line to the config file (or use a program like Synaptic which lets you do the same thing) and all those packages just show up and work great.
I could see it a bit if it helped with commercial applications (like Click-N-Run does). But reading this stuff I just wonder... what was the point of using a program like this on a Debian based distro? Even with it's faults, even Yum makes these seem quite unnecessary.
I've been using this for a while now, since it first appeared mostly, but in the last week or two or three (since the last major update) things haven't been rendering correctly for me in Safari 2. It used to work perfectly, but now it doesn't. The problem I have is the article text is there when I expand it, but the links (read more, comment, etc) show up on top of the article text thus making some words and part of a line or two unreadable.
Since it is mentioned that it works in Safari, is anyone else having this problem?
I don't rember ever seeing DIVX ever being cracked. The fact that it failed in the market and you could get the exact same content off of a non-DIVX DVD aside, I don't know of a crack for it.
But everything that has been in use for a little while or on successful product? Yeah, it's cracked. The article doesn't even begin to mention all the software protection schemes that are no longer effective.
I'd say Blu-Ray. It's holds more, it uses Java (instead of that thing MS developed for HD-DVD), it has a larger installed base at this point, has a cooler name, is backed by Apple, etc.
Me? I use DVD. I'm not going to replace my nice 5 disc DVD player with a 1 disc player for one of the HD formats while paying $600+ for the privilege. I'm waiting for prices to drop.
I agree with your points. The one thing I would like to point out is USB ports. Many computers had them before the iMac, not the majority but many. I know my computer certainly did. That said, no one used them. There were essentially no USB products on the market, if you wanted to see more than 2 or three you had to go look online (shopping online was of course much less common then).
Then the iMac came out.
Within months there were USB everything, and more importantly, you could actually go down to a store and BUY the stuff. Apple wasn't the first to put USB ports on computers, but they were the ones to actually get them used. I wonder just how long it would have taken for USB to get used if Apple hadn't done that. Dell/Gateway/HP/Compaq/etc didn't have the guts to do it.
Linux doesn't support that, as far as I know. There are variables you can tune though. More on this later.
Something like that is very risky. Where as a filesystem can be used or not, and the code is only hit when accessing it, the scheduler is used constantly. If the scheduler could be switched at runtime, that means that either you have to have some kind of if statement on every scheduler entry point, or hide it all behind a pointer and a structure. Either one isn't as efficient as just having it hard wired in. You also have the complexities of being able to hand stuff off from one scheduler to another. Also, debugging get much harder (you have problem with slowness X, now which of the 3 schedulers are you using? Which version? What are the variables set to?).
As for selectable at compile time, that means you have a have a well designed interface that lets you swap things out. That means it either has to be generic, or would favor one scheduler to the detriment of others. Sometimes this tradeoff is acceptable, sometimes it isn't.
Now my understanding on this is that Linux doesn't support plugging in full schedulers. There were patches for that a few years go. Linus and others (Ingo especially, I think) said no, and the patches never made it in. Recently a system was developed that would allow a part of the scheduler to be plugged in. This way it could be better tuned for different workloads, without the full detriment of a full pluggable scheduler. This was done recently, and they were called out on this flip and explained quite well how they were a little hard, and this was a little different.
Go read LWN's kernel pages. They talked about this in the last month or so, so it should be available to non-subscribers by now (although you should subscribe, they're great).
Number one can't be done some times. You may want Linux on the desktop, but at this point it is big on the server. It is used for a LOT of important stuff. If a scheduler makes games better but hurts general server performance, they just can't put that in without people eithe forking or switching. Now if it improved games and other desktop usage quite a bit but had a tiny effect on servers, that could be tennable. But if the effect wasn'nt tiny, they just couldn't blindly merge it.
All that said Linus makes a good argument. If the guy wasn't addressing problems well and was just arguing "that's not my scheduler's fault" or "prove that's a big problem" etc instead of working with people, there is a very good reason not to merge the code. Ingo wrote his quick and has spent lots of time with people since he did that working with others to find and fix problem workloads. He just seems to have been much more responsible about maintaining his scheduler and it's good performace.
There are trade-offs in evertying, and it sounds like Linus made a perfectly valid one here.
The Prius was something of an experiment, so I don't think they wanted to retrofit an existing design. They wanted to start from scratch so they could design the car around it's needs instead of trying to shove that technology into a Corolla or something. The first Prius looked quite a bit like a normal car (although a little more egg shaped). The redesign made the car much more aerodynamic, and I think it actually made it bigger. It took some getting used to (I really liked the looks of the 1st gen), but I kinda like it now.
They didn't want to take things as far as Honda did when they designed the Insight (which was quite a bit more radical than the current Prius).
Now that the technology has proven viable (and even desirable), they are starting to put it into other cars ("normal" cars).
I agree, no question. There is plenty to be said for that argument. But the case the article is making is that there is more to it than that and that there is a specific influence there making things worse than fat people simply choosing to be with other fat people. I alluded to that argument in my post (the sympathy vs dirty look while stuffing your face part), but I wanted to specifically address my post to the idea that being friends with fat people causes you to be fat
After reading the article two or three times to double check things, the submitter really seems to have misinterpreted things.
That's kind of interesting because I know someone who is overweight and we both saw a teaser for info about this study that would be presented on the nightly news. It was presented in the standard "Do your fat friends make you fat? Find out at 6:00" style. My immediate reaction was "bull". That would only be true if it was a contagious virus, and if that was the case the headline would be "Virus found to cause obesity." The overweight person's reaction along the lines of "That's an interesting idea"/"Really?". Prospectives that fit in with our default views on the issue, I guess (plus my natural bit of skepticism and their bit of optimism).
Interesting. I hit upon my own ingenious thought the other day.
I live in the midwest, where things are worse than on the coasts (although I understand things are getting worse there).
It suddenly occurred to me that we in the midwest may be like goldfish. Our bowl is so big (few people / sq. mile compared to Seattle/NY/LA/Tokyo/whatever) that we are just naturally growing to fit our environment.
People's "intelligence" on this issue continues to amaze me. What does AA tell you to do? Stop hanging out with alcoholics because you are more likely to repeat your behavior if you do. What does NA tell you to do? Stop hanging out with druggies because you are more likely to relapse. If you go to OA (Over-eaters Anon.) I'm guessing they tell you something similar.
People follow their peers to a degree. People gain some weight, their friends see it and lose a little stigma of gaining weight, so they do, and the cycle repeats. If you are fat, you are more likely to hang out with other fat people. Thin people are more likely to not eat as much as you. They are more likely to give you a look for complaining about gaining weight while stuffing your face. Other fat people are likely to sympathize with you. After all, to tell you otherwise would be hypocritical (if they don't follow it) or "mean" (if they are working on it).
Do you wonder why when you see families at malls they are usually all thin or all fat? It's not genes. Maybe that contributes some, but mostly it is diet. If the mom cooks healthy most of the time, the family will be exposed to that very often. If the dad exercises a lot, the kids and mom will be exposed to that. If they just buy fast food and junk all the time and snack lots, the kids will learn those behaviors. I'd bet the relation between close relatives in the same house is about the same as the relation between adoptive parents and children. The habits the kids/family learn are a huge part of things.
I've lost a ton of weight. I didn't have a lot of tolerance for this before, and I'm losing what I have. The causes of obesity are not a mystery. They have been known for a LONG time. There are recent things that contribute (fast food, maybe HFCS, etc), but it is still no mystery. I'd peg it at mostly willpower and intolerance of anything that isn't fun or easy or doesn't feel good; an attitude that is becoming more and more common.
Our attitude has changed. Being fat is much more accepted now. People complain about the "unfair standard" on TV, but it's not like you have no choice. I'll agree the near anorexic models are not realistic, but more and more people seem to be moving into "the blob" territory. I've seen more than a few ultra-obiese people on scooters recently, something I don't remember seeing even 10 years ago.
It's people's fault. For most people it isn't fate. I see people who want to lose weight. Lots. Just about all complain. "I can't lose weight." Yet they continue to not exercise (or they do for about a week and then give it up). They either don't change their eating habits, give up the change after a week or two (which actually makes things worse for you), or change to eating "healthy" and end up eating constantly so the calories are just spread out over the day instead of in 3 huge meals. You don't need gastric bypass surgery. You don't need a miracle diet drug. You don't need a new diet food.
To use make my point in an extreme way, how many people in bad POW camps were overweight. How many in areas with food shortage problems? How many people in the old prison work camps or working in coal mines were overweight? Basically none because these people either got very few calories, or burned a ton. Now some of these fates are horrific, but it proves that basically anyone can lose weight. These days there are only a few people who I would excuse from this requirement, and those are some people on very serious prescription drugs that have strong side effects.
What does diet food do any way? As diet food became more common, people ate more of it. Each cookie may have had fewer calories, but a great many people made up for that with quantity. If someone did invent another miracle pill (something akin to Fen-Phen without the problems), I'm guessing most people would eventually start to gain weight again because they would start to eat more later. I think this is just like how many people who pay off debt with 2nd mortgages get back into debt.
OK. Isn't this why the State is supposed to certify this kind of stuff? That said, it's hard to tell. On the one hand, if you take advantage of an ATM machine, that's theft. On the other hand, the idea of a slot machine is to try to get money out of it, so if you find a way to do that (even it wasn't the way they intended) then you shouldn't get in trouble. Unless you are sticking your arm in the machine or zapping it with electricity or something else, you won. If you followed the rules (put money in, pulled levers/pushed buttons, won) then it should be yours even if the way you did it (maybe pulled level first, then hit buttons) caused it to malfunction.
I was under the impression that mDNS was not routable (and specifically designed not to be routed). If that is true, doesn't that restrict this to propagating to computers on the same subnet? This could effect a business, or a computer lab (say at a university), but this fact should prevent it from spreading around the internet at large (as various Windows worms have).
It's a bug, it's a problem, but it's no Blaster by a long shot.
Re:Marketshare and cracking
on
Zune DRM Cracked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't think so. That may have been the case when 10.0 or 10.1 came out, but at this point Macs are more common. Combined with the perception of security (and the Apple ads touting such), the Mac is a very nice target. If someone was able to make a good Mac virus that didn't require security authentication or other such things, they could get a lot of press (and probably a very easy shot at a good position in computer security). I'm sure there are plenty of people trying.
The Zune took so long because most people don't care. The average consumer doesn't care (or doesn't know that they should), and they bought an iPod anyway. The average techie (who does care) either bought an iPod, or probably doesn't buy DRMed music. Doing this is an interesting challenge, but it doesn't have the motivation behind it of cracking the DRM on the largest selling player and music store.
The market share thing for OS X is a myth. It's not perfect, but it is more secure by design than XP (Vista was supposed to improve that, I don't know how good a job it really did, I haven't looked). The Zune just wasn't a very temping target, so this took a while.
I'm not referring to sharing a printer for other computers, I'm referring to adding a printer that stands alone on the network with an integrated print server. To do this you have to go through adding a new printer, saying that it is LOCAL, adding a port, choosing the right port type, then other normal steps.
I haven't had those kind of problems, but I am still amazed that my LaserJet 2100 isn't supported in PostScript mode. I can use it in non-post script mode (PCL 6). I can use it as "generic postscript printer". But I have never been able to find how to make it work as it should. It prints fine, it's just slower this way when printing graphics heavy stuff.
But then again setting up a network printer in OS X is trivial compared to the lunacy you have to go through on XP.
Why does everyone here seem to assume I have to be making Doom 3? First, why does a graphics project have to be new? Why can't I add some graphics to my existing Java app? Porting the whole thing to Ruby then doesn't make much sense. Java is a modern, high-level language, and it is much more well known that Ruby. If you went through school more before one or two years ago (and probably up to now) chances are if you were taught one of Ruby and Java it was almost certainly Java.
Java isn't perfect, by why does every discussion even tangentially related to Java become a "Ruby r00lz!!!" discussion? I can think of many great reasons why someone might use Java. Libraries, familiarity, existing app, embedding (does Ruby have an equivelent of the applet that a large number of computers can run from a web page?).
Take it as a "If you must use Java, here is how it does graphics" if you want. The book is about graphics in Java. It's not called "How To Do Computer Graphics", "Making Wicked Fast Games", or "The Best Graphics Library Ever". It's about JAVA.
<hippy-voice>Why the hate, man? Just let it be........</hippy-voice>
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How is your BMI out of control? If your BMI is 30, that's almost certainly your fault. The few cases that exist where it's not your fault (anti-psychotics, anti-rejection drugs, basically powerful life-sustaining drugs with that side-effect) can be excused. There can be a process to submit a specific form (that the doctor must sign under penalty of perjury and fraud) that can be used to get out in those cases.
If you don't want to change your lifestyle so much, pony up the $10 a month.
That's basically my solution to the health care problem in the US. Everyone pays themselves. The government can take what you spend out of your gross income when calculating your taxes, or reimburse the poor a certain amount. Everyone should be carry insurance, but it would only cover catastrophic stuff (non-elective non-cosmetic non-reconstructive surgery, cancer, car accidents, etc). The government can pay for that for all I care. Make that universal. But you pay for your own pills, whether viagra, flonaze, or heart drugs. You pay to go to the doctor. Take responsibility for yourself.
A little free market will cure a lot of this. We do NOT have a free market now.
Bitter pill? Sure.
Solution B (far less optimal): All congressmen and senators must either use medicare, or put the rest of the country on their health plan.
I'm relatively new to it all, and I've worked on a horrid spaghetti-code application that can fall apart easily, has tons of hard-coded config values strewn about, and some code that could really make you scratch your head. My boss and the others who have worked on it all agree. I could write something better in about 6 months. That said...
There are things we have that I could do better than in some areas. Some of our applications have come a LONG way from their beginnings and would take a very long time for me to rewrite (years to catch up to how fast and stable it is now). So remember that when someone complains "I could do better in 6 months", that might refer to 1 of the 6 systems they've seen.
Hubris seems common in our field, especially if you are good compared to your classmates (who can be poor and still graduate). However, it often doesn't take too long get humbled by someone or some amazing system.
No. But we were not looking for a senior programmer, someone middling would have been nice. But we had people applying for this job (again, not a high up job) and having them ask for up to 2x what my boss (the department head) makes. Now a small company may not pay as well as a big company, but what these people were looking to be paid compared to the job responsibilities could be really out of whack sometimes.
They were applying to be the most experienced sales guy at Best Buy and asking for a salary that the full store manager makes.
They may have deserved that salary in a bigger position, but not for what they were applying for. That wasn't what we were after.
No kidding. I graduated a little over a year ago, and will have had my job for a year later this month. I had a hard time even getting an interview at anywhere that had positions that even began to interest me. There was tons of stuff I would love to do but wasn't qualified for. Everything else seemed like the lowest level of grunt work available. There had to be something a little above that. I got some interviews that went really well, and even got callbacks, but in the end I lost the positions to people more qualified.
Getting in is tough. In the end I interviewed with a small company that had a job that seemed just fine (but not my really interesting to me). But because it's small I like the atmosphere, and I ended up getting lots of experience on lots of things. At this point (do to my work, company growth, and other personnel changes, not necessarily in that order) I have far more responsibility that I thought I would at this point and I'm really enjoying my job and working on things that are far more interesting that I thought I would.
While I still don't have that 5 years of professional whatever experience, I'm in a much better position now should I have to go look for a job again.
But getting my foot in the door of my first job was very though. I figured I'd have to end up working some dinky little job that I wouldn't like doing work anyone who managed to get a CS degree should be able to do until I got that experience and could get a "good" job, but things worked out pretty well.
Good luck. Maybe if you find a small company that is wiling to overlook that if you can demonstrate your skills some (the fact I had a senior project REALLY helped me) you'll have an easier time. Many big companies have so many options that getting in could be really tough.
The people out in the market place can be amazing. We were recently looking for more people, but watching the people come through was kinda fun. We are a small shop, now at 4 programmers. As you can guess, we don't get the high end people applying directly to us like they might to MS or Google or whatever. We have to go find people and attract them. We do get some submissions, but they tend to be.... interesting.
We have seen... the passable, those who are rediculously overqualified (if you read their resume, but you can tell they are lying about 90% of it), the guy who (as a programmer for 5+ years) didn't know what an array was, the people who's last job shoved them into one tiny area for years and years so they have lost skills outside of that small set (which is often esoteric). We've seen those just out of school that need more experience, and those with great experience who just want too much (salaries the larger companies around would have paid a few years ago when the market was better, but they have no chance with in our company for the position they are being hired for).
It can be hard to find good people when you aren't a Google or MS.
Agreed (although I'm guessing this one is Valve's fault). I wrote that because the troll I responded to was doing a "iD gets trapped by viral GPL" thing. I just thought I would point those three things out for anyone who didn't know beforehand (although I'm sure that troll either did or didn't care).
Yes. It's not like iD has released anything GLP before.
Oh, wait...
I read this while it was in the Firehose, and came up with one question: Why?
What would this tool provide above apt and dpkg? A graphical way of installing programs? There are front ends for dpkg and apt like Synaptic that don't have any of these downsides. Is this just to get things like some of these codecs? That has always been available through other package repositories. You just add a line to the config file (or use a program like Synaptic which lets you do the same thing) and all those packages just show up and work great.
I could see it a bit if it helped with commercial applications (like Click-N-Run does). But reading this stuff I just wonder... what was the point of using a program like this on a Debian based distro? Even with it's faults, even Yum makes these seem quite unnecessary.
So I ask: has anyone used this? Why?
I've been using this for a while now, since it first appeared mostly, but in the last week or two or three (since the last major update) things haven't been rendering correctly for me in Safari 2. It used to work perfectly, but now it doesn't. The problem I have is the article text is there when I expand it, but the links (read more, comment, etc) show up on top of the article text thus making some words and part of a line or two unreadable.
Since it is mentioned that it works in Safari, is anyone else having this problem?
I'm on OS X, 10.4.10 for what it's worth.
I don't rember ever seeing DIVX ever being cracked. The fact that it failed in the market and you could get the exact same content off of a non-DIVX DVD aside, I don't know of a crack for it.
But everything that has been in use for a little while or on successful product? Yeah, it's cracked. The article doesn't even begin to mention all the software protection schemes that are no longer effective.
Me? I use DVD. I'm not going to replace my nice 5 disc DVD player with a 1 disc player for one of the HD formats while paying $600+ for the privilege. I'm waiting for prices to drop.
I agree with your points. The one thing I would like to point out is USB ports. Many computers had them before the iMac, not the majority but many. I know my computer certainly did. That said, no one used them. There were essentially no USB products on the market, if you wanted to see more than 2 or three you had to go look online (shopping online was of course much less common then).
Then the iMac came out.
Within months there were USB everything, and more importantly, you could actually go down to a store and BUY the stuff. Apple wasn't the first to put USB ports on computers, but they were the ones to actually get them used. I wonder just how long it would have taken for USB to get used if Apple hadn't done that. Dell/Gateway/HP/Compaq/etc didn't have the guts to do it.
Linux doesn't support that, as far as I know. There are variables you can tune though. More on this later.
Something like that is very risky. Where as a filesystem can be used or not, and the code is only hit when accessing it, the scheduler is used constantly. If the scheduler could be switched at runtime, that means that either you have to have some kind of if statement on every scheduler entry point, or hide it all behind a pointer and a structure. Either one isn't as efficient as just having it hard wired in. You also have the complexities of being able to hand stuff off from one scheduler to another. Also, debugging get much harder (you have problem with slowness X, now which of the 3 schedulers are you using? Which version? What are the variables set to?).
As for selectable at compile time, that means you have a have a well designed interface that lets you swap things out. That means it either has to be generic, or would favor one scheduler to the detriment of others. Sometimes this tradeoff is acceptable, sometimes it isn't.
Now my understanding on this is that Linux doesn't support plugging in full schedulers. There were patches for that a few years go. Linus and others (Ingo especially, I think) said no, and the patches never made it in. Recently a system was developed that would allow a part of the scheduler to be plugged in. This way it could be better tuned for different workloads, without the full detriment of a full pluggable scheduler. This was done recently, and they were called out on this flip and explained quite well how they were a little hard, and this was a little different.
Go read LWN's kernel pages. They talked about this in the last month or so, so it should be available to non-subscribers by now (although you should subscribe, they're great).
Number one can't be done some times. You may want Linux on the desktop, but at this point it is big on the server. It is used for a LOT of important stuff. If a scheduler makes games better but hurts general server performance, they just can't put that in without people eithe forking or switching. Now if it improved games and other desktop usage quite a bit but had a tiny effect on servers, that could be tennable. But if the effect wasn'nt tiny, they just couldn't blindly merge it.
All that said Linus makes a good argument. If the guy wasn't addressing problems well and was just arguing "that's not my scheduler's fault" or "prove that's a big problem" etc instead of working with people, there is a very good reason not to merge the code. Ingo wrote his quick and has spent lots of time with people since he did that working with others to find and fix problem workloads. He just seems to have been much more responsible about maintaining his scheduler and it's good performace.
There are trade-offs in evertying, and it sounds like Linus made a perfectly valid one here.
The Prius was something of an experiment, so I don't think they wanted to retrofit an existing design. They wanted to start from scratch so they could design the car around it's needs instead of trying to shove that technology into a Corolla or something. The first Prius looked quite a bit like a normal car (although a little more egg shaped). The redesign made the car much more aerodynamic, and I think it actually made it bigger. It took some getting used to (I really liked the looks of the 1st gen), but I kinda like it now.
They didn't want to take things as far as Honda did when they designed the Insight (which was quite a bit more radical than the current Prius).
Now that the technology has proven viable (and even desirable), they are starting to put it into other cars ("normal" cars).
I agree, no question. There is plenty to be said for that argument. But the case the article is making is that there is more to it than that and that there is a specific influence there making things worse than fat people simply choosing to be with other fat people. I alluded to that argument in my post (the sympathy vs dirty look while stuffing your face part), but I wanted to specifically address my post to the idea that being friends with fat people causes you to be fat
After reading the article two or three times to double check things, the submitter really seems to have misinterpreted things.
That's kind of interesting because I know someone who is overweight and we both saw a teaser for info about this study that would be presented on the nightly news. It was presented in the standard "Do your fat friends make you fat? Find out at 6:00" style. My immediate reaction was "bull". That would only be true if it was a contagious virus, and if that was the case the headline would be "Virus found to cause obesity." The overweight person's reaction along the lines of "That's an interesting idea"/"Really?". Prospectives that fit in with our default views on the issue, I guess (plus my natural bit of skepticism and their bit of optimism).
Interesting. I hit upon my own ingenious thought the other day.
I live in the midwest, where things are worse than on the coasts (although I understand things are getting worse there).
It suddenly occurred to me that we in the midwest may be like goldfish. Our bowl is so big (few people / sq. mile compared to Seattle/NY/LA/Tokyo/whatever) that we are just naturally growing to fit our environment.
That's right America. You are getting fat due to the Carassius Auratus Auratus Syndrome.
People's "intelligence" on this issue continues to amaze me. What does AA tell you to do? Stop hanging out with alcoholics because you are more likely to repeat your behavior if you do. What does NA tell you to do? Stop hanging out with druggies because you are more likely to relapse. If you go to OA (Over-eaters Anon.) I'm guessing they tell you something similar.
People follow their peers to a degree. People gain some weight, their friends see it and lose a little stigma of gaining weight, so they do, and the cycle repeats. If you are fat, you are more likely to hang out with other fat people. Thin people are more likely to not eat as much as you. They are more likely to give you a look for complaining about gaining weight while stuffing your face. Other fat people are likely to sympathize with you. After all, to tell you otherwise would be hypocritical (if they don't follow it) or "mean" (if they are working on it).
Do you wonder why when you see families at malls they are usually all thin or all fat? It's not genes. Maybe that contributes some, but mostly it is diet. If the mom cooks healthy most of the time, the family will be exposed to that very often. If the dad exercises a lot, the kids and mom will be exposed to that. If they just buy fast food and junk all the time and snack lots, the kids will learn those behaviors. I'd bet the relation between close relatives in the same house is about the same as the relation between adoptive parents and children. The habits the kids/family learn are a huge part of things.
I've lost a ton of weight. I didn't have a lot of tolerance for this before, and I'm losing what I have. The causes of obesity are not a mystery. They have been known for a LONG time. There are recent things that contribute (fast food, maybe HFCS, etc), but it is still no mystery. I'd peg it at mostly willpower and intolerance of anything that isn't fun or easy or doesn't feel good; an attitude that is becoming more and more common.
Our attitude has changed. Being fat is much more accepted now. People complain about the "unfair standard" on TV, but it's not like you have no choice. I'll agree the near anorexic models are not realistic, but more and more people seem to be moving into "the blob" territory. I've seen more than a few ultra-obiese people on scooters recently, something I don't remember seeing even 10 years ago.
It's people's fault. For most people it isn't fate. I see people who want to lose weight. Lots. Just about all complain. "I can't lose weight." Yet they continue to not exercise (or they do for about a week and then give it up). They either don't change their eating habits, give up the change after a week or two (which actually makes things worse for you), or change to eating "healthy" and end up eating constantly so the calories are just spread out over the day instead of in 3 huge meals. You don't need gastric bypass surgery. You don't need a miracle diet drug. You don't need a new diet food.
To use make my point in an extreme way, how many people in bad POW camps were overweight. How many in areas with food shortage problems? How many people in the old prison work camps or working in coal mines were overweight? Basically none because these people either got very few calories, or burned a ton. Now some of these fates are horrific, but it proves that basically anyone can lose weight. These days there are only a few people who I would excuse from this requirement, and those are some people on very serious prescription drugs that have strong side effects.
What does diet food do any way? As diet food became more common, people ate more of it. Each cookie may have had fewer calories, but a great many people made up for that with quantity. If someone did invent another miracle pill (something akin to Fen-Phen without the problems), I'm guessing most people would eventually start to gain weight again because they would start to eat more later. I think this is just like how many people who pay off debt with 2nd mortgages get back into debt.
OK. Isn't this why the State is supposed to certify this kind of stuff? That said, it's hard to tell. On the one hand, if you take advantage of an ATM machine, that's theft. On the other hand, the idea of a slot machine is to try to get money out of it, so if you find a way to do that (even it wasn't the way they intended) then you shouldn't get in trouble. Unless you are sticking your arm in the machine or zapping it with electricity or something else, you won. If you followed the rules (put money in, pulled levers/pushed buttons, won) then it should be yours even if the way you did it (maybe pulled level first, then hit buttons) caused it to malfunction.
It's a bug, it's a problem, but it's no Blaster by a long shot.
I don't think so. That may have been the case when 10.0 or 10.1 came out, but at this point Macs are more common. Combined with the perception of security (and the Apple ads touting such), the Mac is a very nice target. If someone was able to make a good Mac virus that didn't require security authentication or other such things, they could get a lot of press (and probably a very easy shot at a good position in computer security). I'm sure there are plenty of people trying.
The Zune took so long because most people don't care. The average consumer doesn't care (or doesn't know that they should), and they bought an iPod anyway. The average techie (who does care) either bought an iPod, or probably doesn't buy DRMed music. Doing this is an interesting challenge, but it doesn't have the motivation behind it of cracking the DRM on the largest selling player and music store.
The market share thing for OS X is a myth. It's not perfect, but it is more secure by design than XP (Vista was supposed to improve that, I don't know how good a job it really did, I haven't looked). The Zune just wasn't a very temping target, so this took a while.
I'm not referring to sharing a printer for other computers, I'm referring to adding a printer that stands alone on the network with an integrated print server. To do this you have to go through adding a new printer, saying that it is LOCAL, adding a port, choosing the right port type, then other normal steps.
I haven't had those kind of problems, but I am still amazed that my LaserJet 2100 isn't supported in PostScript mode. I can use it in non-post script mode (PCL 6). I can use it as "generic postscript printer". But I have never been able to find how to make it work as it should. It prints fine, it's just slower this way when printing graphics heavy stuff.
But then again setting up a network printer in OS X is trivial compared to the lunacy you have to go through on XP.
Why does everyone here seem to assume I have to be making Doom 3? First, why does a graphics project have to be new? Why can't I add some graphics to my existing Java app? Porting the whole thing to Ruby then doesn't make much sense. Java is a modern, high-level language, and it is much more well known that Ruby. If you went through school more before one or two years ago (and probably up to now) chances are if you were taught one of Ruby and Java it was almost certainly Java.
Java isn't perfect, by why does every discussion even tangentially related to Java become a "Ruby r00lz!!!" discussion? I can think of many great reasons why someone might use Java. Libraries, familiarity, existing app, embedding (does Ruby have an equivelent of the applet that a large number of computers can run from a web page?).
Take it as a "If you must use Java, here is how it does graphics" if you want. The book is about graphics in Java. It's not called "How To Do Computer Graphics", "Making Wicked Fast Games", or "The Best Graphics Library Ever". It's about JAVA.
<hippy-voice>Why the hate, man? Just let it be........</hippy-voice>