Anyway, my doctor told me it was very common for men in particular to use some ritalin as a nightcap. Worked for me...
Good lord!!! The first doctor who prescribed me Ritalin warned me not to take it after 4 PM. He was right too. Even though Ritalin doesn't make me feel stimulated, I absolutely cannot sleep within 6 hours of taking it.
When doctors start making generalizations like this, watch out. They've probably just read some stupid study that makes absurd pronouncements based on all kinds of statistical fallacies. The literature is full of them.
Your point about the chemical complexity of coffee is well-taken (that's the problem with "natural" remedies -- you never know quite what you're getting). But I still feel there's a fundamental difference between the way Ritalin affects me and the way caffeine affects me. I can't say this with extreme certainty, since I've never tried your caffeine pill experiment, and probably won't find the time to do so any time soon. The bottom line is that Ritalin works well for me, and generic methyphenidate isn't that expensive. So I have little incentive to experiment.
I've done a bit of reading too, and I just don't agree with your belief that all these stimulants affect ADHD people the same way. In point of fact, I don't even believe there is a single condition that deserves this label. What we actually have is a cluster of behaviors/symptoms that are actually common in the general population (a certain amount of impulsivity, for example is healthy enough, especially in children) but which are out of control in a few cases.
Most treatment of ADHD tries to shoehorn everybody into some simpleminded model -- neurological, chemical, psychological. None of these models really fits even a majority of patients, and some are scientifically ridiculous. Yes, practitioners do have a lot of luck in treating this "disease". But that's due to intelligent empiricism and simple clinical judgment. Medicine has always had a certain skill at making good medicine out of bad science. But in the case of ADHD, you have to approach them with a certain skepticism.
You made some other good points here and there, but I'm out of energy to respond to them.
The big enemy of the somebody with ADHD -- indeed with any biopsychiatric condition -- is absolute statements like the one you just gave us. No treatment works for everybody. I myself spent years evolving a complicated treatment that involves multiple therapies -- one of which is a twice-daily dose of ritalin.
On another note: I am the only person I know who has not been diagnosed with having ADD or ADHD. What percentage of those tested come up positive?
Diagnosed by who? A lot of people seem to consider themselves experts on this condition.
Well, I guess I should assume you're not talking about the usual half-assed laypeople. (The teacher who tells the parent, "Johny acts up in class -- I think he has ADD.") But I'd even be cautious about accepting this diagnosis from family doctors or pediatricians. Legally, they can diagnosis and treat ADD, but really, you need to talk to somebody who's made a full-time study of it.
Ideally, I wouldn't even rely on a diagnosis from a biopsychiatrist, even though that's the specialist you'll end up with for actual treatment (usually). Their diagnostic models are too simplistic. Ideally, you should go to a neuropsychologist and spend a day or two getting your mental functions thoroughly examined.
But that's way beyond the financial reach of almost everybody. So you talk to a biopsychiatrist -- and accept his or her opinions sceptically.
I've often complained about the questions Cliff accepts for AS. Too many of them are questions that should be reserved for qualified professionals, not random strangers.
But this time, I think Cliff made the right call. ADHD isn't something you can just go to a doctor with and be reasonably sure you'll get the right treatment. Odds are you'll end up with a doctor who doesn't understand the condition as well as they think they do. You have to educate yourself about the condition (really a cluster of symptoms) and what your options are. And that means talking to other people with the same problem.
You read a lot about how drug X causes the brain to Y because it binds to receptor Z. The sad fact is that this is mostly crap. Nobody really understands exactly how most psychoactive drugs work. The politics of medicine requires that doctors talk about their therapies in absolute terms. But from a scientific point of view, they're guilty of a large degree of bullshit.
Which is not to say that biological psychiatrists don't actually help people. I myself have gotten a lot of good use out of them. But only after wasting a lot of time on blind alleys. It's taken them a long time for them to understand that people don't fit into the neat little models and categories that medicine likes to use. Only now are they beginning to understand how much empiricism there is in their art.
Now, whatever the chemical similarities between Ritalin and caffeine (and I don't think Eric Raymond is a reliable source for anything except his own pet theories) not everybody has a a similar response to these two drugs. I myself find R helpful for controlling the symptoms of ADHD, and coffee not at all. On the other hand I get a pleasant buzz from a cup of strong coffee, but no direct change of mood from Ritalin at all. (That's very atypical -- took my psychiatrist a long time to accept that I was being honest with him.) Bottom line: every body (pun intentional) is differnt. You use what works.
You describe the exact reason I find the OS marketplace so frustrating. In the 80s, I was working in DOS after spending years with "real" operating systems, like Unix and CTOS. Calling DOS an operating system seemed a bad joke -- it just didn't do most of the things an OS was supposed to do.
Now, the excuse for that was that you couldn't run complex software on an 8088. But QNX seemed to refute that assumption. Not only did it run well on very small, slow machines, it was highly clusterable. It was years before DOS/Windows had anything like the same sophistication or scalability.
I always itched to try it, but high licensing fees kept me away. And everybody else too, except for a few niche applications. I'm glad QNX is still around, but when I see what a mess we've ended up with, I have to view it as a great lost opportunity.
Although I was a newbie when I first read it, and learned a lot, i would recommend people look elsewhere. This book is simply too out-of-date. Half of it should be omitted, and the other half expanded so as to become usable.
That describes most hack computer books. The technology changes rapidly, and not everybody has the brainpower to keep up with it.
I remember trying to learn Windows 3.0 programming from Petzold's famous book. I struggled for days to get through the chapter on memory management. I nearly screamed when I came to the last paragraph (obviously the only part of the chapter that wasn't carried over from the 2.0 edition) that said, "oh, by the way, this only applies to protected mode programming". He couldn't even be bothered to rewrite the beginning of the chapter to emphasize that this was all legacy stuff!
I have to quibble with your notion of "obsolete". Certainly UUCP and SLIP are obsolete. But PPP won't be obsolete until modems go away. And IPX may be technically obsolete (many would vehemently disagree) but it's something that admins will have to know about for a long time -- Netware servers won't disappear any time soon.
For that matter, why would anybody refuse a free computer of any kind? Because they're not free, that's why.
People are always trying to donate old computers to schools. In some cases, you have a few tech-savy volunteers who donate the time (and it takes a lot of time) needed to reconfigure that old 100 Mhz Pentium so it can run some educational software. But most just end up gathering dust -- until the school has to pay to have them recycled. Needless to say, most schools are now cautious about computer donations.
I did some googling, and finally found version 1.1. Not easy, since RLVision seems to have scoured the net for any mirror copies. I can understand that they'd be pissed over all those unregistered copies. But not allowing anybody to download it seems petty.
I may send them a registration fee just by way of an insult! But only if the program's any good, of course.
EBook readers have two major problems. They haven't any hope of commercial success until these problems go away.
First problem is connectivity. EBook readers, like all network appliances, need internet connectivity. But who has internet connectivity now? Tech-savy people, or people who have friends or family who are tech-savy. Such people don't by network appliances, they buy computers or PDAs, and run the equivalent software application. Until the day comes when connecting to the internet is as easy as buying a cell phone, network appliances, including EBook readers, have no hope.
The second problem is all this damned IP hoarding. The media monopolies are very reluctant to let any of their content appear in a digital format. Too easy to make an exact copy. So nervously release one or two titles in this format or that, and even the people who can read the format don't buy it, because it's about the same price as the dead-tree version.
2D rpgs made me wonder how the lands really looked and made me think about the character personalities etc. (think about how Link from Zelda never speaks)
Well, take that a little further. Infocom used to boast that its text-only games used the ultimate graphics device: the human brain. But when was the last time you saw such a game released commercially? A game just doesn't sell without a lot of 3D eye candy. And that's why remakes are so lame -- all the creativity goes into the graphics.
I'd love to see a remake of my all-time favorite, Sword of the Samurai. Or maybe not. Everything I loved about the game was dictated by the limited technology of the time. Low-res EGA graphics? Make all the game screens look like a Japanese wood-cut. Junky MIDI music? Hire a good composer to write simple drum and lute pieces, then hire a clever designer to integrate the music seemlessly with the game action. Wonderfully beautiful. But if they remade it, it would have high production values and the playability of burnt toast.
Why do you have to take a digital camera? You're on a trip where you're deliberately avoiding the conveniences and comforts of a first-world lifestyle. Yet you want to drag along some very expensive, complicated, and high-maintenance technology along. Makes no sense.
Don't get me wrong, I love digital imaging. Fun to browse, to share, to manipulate. But I don't own a digital camera. Way too expensive for the amount of photography I do. I own several conventional cameras, and I have the lab scan everything when I get the film developed. That makes a lot more sense for what you're doing. You can get an excellent point-and-shoot autofocus camera for $100. It will store hundreds of high-resolution images on rolls of film that will be OK for months, with minimal care (temperature, avoid X-rays).
You might also consider an instant camera. The prints make excellent gifts for the people you meet. Scanning them in is a pain, but less so than losing all your images because your battery ran down or your backpack fell off the bus.
Insisting that your images be end-to-end digital smacks of technology for its own sake.
I find the entry for Los Gatos, CA switch rather interesting. "Company Type" is given as "ICO", which I assume stands for "Independent Central Office". The most common value for this field is "RBOC", short for Regional Bell Operating Company. Thing is, the owner is Verizon, a company that was formed by merger between an RBOC (Atlantic Bell) and an ICO (General Telephone and Electronics, which used to be the biggest of the non-Bell phone companies). Does the distinction between RBOCs and ICOs mean anything in this case? Or any case, now that the Bell System is 20 years gone?
You never buy any software? No game CDs? How about a system BIOS?
OK, that's a little unfair. And I have to applaud your social comittment. But I just don't see refusal to pay for software as a viable political strategy. It's simply impractical for 99% of all computer users.
But! you say. "Free" software is making big inroads against unfree software! Yes, and that's because companies like IBM, Borland, SGI, and Sun are pushing it. Although they prefer to call it "Open Source". They like it because its a better way to implement an industry standard than the old design-by-comittee approach. This doesn't prevent them from also selling closed-source software -- or from filing software patents of their own.
Your history is substantially correct. But you have an small but important omission, and also a sbi mistake. They both relate to naive mistakes by the System Enhancement Associates, the inventors of ARC -- and childish behavior both by SEA and by Phil Katz.
Omission: The ARC source code that Katz worked from was publically available. SEA released it so their competitors could write compatible software. The had the high-minded notion that they could make their format a defacto standard that way. Not that they weren't out to make a buck. They just figured that sharing a big market would be more profitable than monopolizing a small market. As for piracy, they assumed the copyright laws would protect them. Which turned out to be true, but useless. More on that below.
Error: It's true PKARC and PKXARC were drastically faster (10 to 1? 100 to 1? it was pretty extreme). But this had nothing to do with changes in compression formats. The problem was that SEA had this naive notion of C portability. They wanted source that would compile on every machine in existence. What they didn't count on was some fucked-up buffering in the C library that they used for the DOS version. Easy to work around with a simple buffering routine -- but that would have broken portability!
So Phil Katz, in typical hacker fashion, jumped in and "fixed" ARC. Like most hackers, he considered himself an expert on computing law, and convinced himself that any IP claims by SEA were bogus. Which left him free to sell his modified ARC software as shareware.
Which was quickly adopted by 99% of the DOS BBS community because of the speed difference. It might have ended there, given SEA's laid-back attitude, except, Katz indulged in another classic hacker blunder: he started tweaking the format.
The result was a fractional gain in compression speed and quality, at the expense of incompatibility with the original format. But since when do hackers care about that kind of issue? Problem is, the BBS's were soon flooded with ARC archives the original software couldn't grok. Now SEA started paying attention.
Neither side behaved maturely. SEA had every right to sue, of course, but they still refused to admit what every BBS user knew -- that the DOS version of their software was so slow as to be unusable. Instead, they insisted that people were switching to the PK products because of the incompatibilities that Katz "maliciously" introduced. For his part, Katz refused to admit that he'd done anything wrong by pirating the code. He was self righteous about the whole thing to the very end. (He died in 2000 at 37.) When the courts made him hand over all the rights to and income from his software, he went out and published his own archive format, accompanied by rants that would have made Stallman blush.
He did do one thing right: in his burst of self-righteousness, he renounced any control over his format, and documented it in nit-picking detail. A far more effective way to popularize a format than publishing source code.
Except BN.com has inventory problems and incompetant customer service. And besides, if you're going to boycott anybody who holds software patents, you'll never be able to buy software again -- every major firm hold them or relies on them. If you want to make a difference, write your congressperson, be politically active, join a movement, all the Citizen of a Democracy stuff. It's time consuming and hard work, but a lot more effective than this kneejerk boycott crap.
A fluid is any substance which undergoes continuous deformation when subjected to a shear stress.
OK, thanks for educating us as to the physicist's definition of the word fluid. And in that context it does make sense to call gas or plasma (or sand or granulated sugar) a fluid. It also makes sense with the original Latin word fluidus, "flowing".
But most people aren't physicists or classical scholars. So they use "fluid" as a synonym for "liquid". That's not a sign of rampant stupidity, it's just the way imprecise usages creep into any language.
Slashdot Mirror
When doctors start making generalizations like this, watch out. They've probably just read some stupid study that makes absurd pronouncements based on all kinds of statistical fallacies. The literature is full of them.
You are so right. Not just ADHD. Everybody who's read a self-help book seems to consider themselves an expert on mental health.
I've done a bit of reading too, and I just don't agree with your belief that all these stimulants affect ADHD people the same way. In point of fact, I don't even believe there is a single condition that deserves this label. What we actually have is a cluster of behaviors/symptoms that are actually common in the general population (a certain amount of impulsivity, for example is healthy enough, especially in children) but which are out of control in a few cases.
Most treatment of ADHD tries to shoehorn everybody into some simpleminded model -- neurological, chemical, psychological. None of these models really fits even a majority of patients, and some are scientifically ridiculous. Yes, practitioners do have a lot of luck in treating this "disease". But that's due to intelligent empiricism and simple clinical judgment. Medicine has always had a certain skill at making good medicine out of bad science. But in the case of ADHD, you have to approach them with a certain skepticism.
You made some other good points here and there, but I'm out of energy to respond to them.
The big enemy of the somebody with ADHD -- indeed with any biopsychiatric condition -- is absolute statements like the one you just gave us. No treatment works for everybody. I myself spent years evolving a complicated treatment that involves multiple therapies -- one of which is a twice-daily dose of ritalin.
Well, I guess I should assume you're not talking about the usual half-assed laypeople. (The teacher who tells the parent, "Johny acts up in class -- I think he has ADD.") But I'd even be cautious about accepting this diagnosis from family doctors or pediatricians. Legally, they can diagnosis and treat ADD, but really, you need to talk to somebody who's made a full-time study of it.
Ideally, I wouldn't even rely on a diagnosis from a biopsychiatrist, even though that's the specialist you'll end up with for actual treatment (usually). Their diagnostic models are too simplistic. Ideally, you should go to a neuropsychologist and spend a day or two getting your mental functions thoroughly examined.
But that's way beyond the financial reach of almost everybody. So you talk to a biopsychiatrist -- and accept his or her opinions sceptically.
But this time, I think Cliff made the right call. ADHD isn't something you can just go to a doctor with and be reasonably sure you'll get the right treatment. Odds are you'll end up with a doctor who doesn't understand the condition as well as they think they do. You have to educate yourself about the condition (really a cluster of symptoms) and what your options are. And that means talking to other people with the same problem.
If you "haven't really had a problem", WTF were you on Adderal in the first place?
Which is not to say that biological psychiatrists don't actually help people. I myself have gotten a lot of good use out of them. But only after wasting a lot of time on blind alleys. It's taken them a long time for them to understand that people don't fit into the neat little models and categories that medicine likes to use. Only now are they beginning to understand how much empiricism there is in their art.
Now, whatever the chemical similarities between Ritalin and caffeine (and I don't think Eric Raymond is a reliable source for anything except his own pet theories) not everybody has a a similar response to these two drugs. I myself find R helpful for controlling the symptoms of ADHD, and coffee not at all. On the other hand I get a pleasant buzz from a cup of strong coffee, but no direct change of mood from Ritalin at all. (That's very atypical -- took my psychiatrist a long time to accept that I was being honest with him.) Bottom line: every body (pun intentional) is differnt. You use what works.
Now, the excuse for that was that you couldn't run complex software on an 8088. But QNX seemed to refute that assumption. Not only did it run well on very small, slow machines, it was highly clusterable. It was years before DOS/Windows had anything like the same sophistication or scalability.
I always itched to try it, but high licensing fees kept me away. And everybody else too, except for a few niche applications. I'm glad QNX is still around, but when I see what a mess we've ended up with, I have to view it as a great lost opportunity.
Yeah, I know that's what you said. My way is cuter.
I remember trying to learn Windows 3.0 programming from Petzold's famous book. I struggled for days to get through the chapter on memory management. I nearly screamed when I came to the last paragraph (obviously the only part of the chapter that wasn't carried over from the 2.0 edition) that said, "oh, by the way, this only applies to protected mode programming". He couldn't even be bothered to rewrite the beginning of the chapter to emphasize that this was all legacy stuff!
I have to quibble with your notion of "obsolete". Certainly UUCP and SLIP are obsolete. But PPP won't be obsolete until modems go away. And IPX may be technically obsolete (many would vehemently disagree) but it's something that admins will have to know about for a long time -- Netware servers won't disappear any time soon.
Why does all the really fun software come from Poland, of all places? ;)
People are always trying to donate old computers to schools. In some cases, you have a few tech-savy volunteers who donate the time (and it takes a lot of time) needed to reconfigure that old 100 Mhz Pentium so it can run some educational software. But most just end up gathering dust -- until the school has to pay to have them recycled. Needless to say, most schools are now cautious about computer donations.
I may send them a registration fee just by way of an insult! But only if the program's any good, of course.
First problem is connectivity. EBook readers, like all network appliances, need internet connectivity. But who has internet connectivity now? Tech-savy people, or people who have friends or family who are tech-savy. Such people don't by network appliances, they buy computers or PDAs, and run the equivalent software application. Until the day comes when connecting to the internet is as easy as buying a cell phone, network appliances, including EBook readers, have no hope.
The second problem is all this damned IP hoarding. The media monopolies are very reluctant to let any of their content appear in a digital format. Too easy to make an exact copy. So nervously release one or two titles in this format or that, and even the people who can read the format don't buy it, because it's about the same price as the dead-tree version.
I'd love to see a remake of my all-time favorite, Sword of the Samurai. Or maybe not. Everything I loved about the game was dictated by the limited technology of the time. Low-res EGA graphics? Make all the game screens look like a Japanese wood-cut. Junky MIDI music? Hire a good composer to write simple drum and lute pieces, then hire a clever designer to integrate the music seemlessly with the game action. Wonderfully beautiful. But if they remade it, it would have high production values and the playability of burnt toast.
Don't get me wrong, I love digital imaging. Fun to browse, to share, to manipulate. But I don't own a digital camera. Way too expensive for the amount of photography I do. I own several conventional cameras, and I have the lab scan everything when I get the film developed. That makes a lot more sense for what you're doing. You can get an excellent point-and-shoot autofocus camera for $100. It will store hundreds of high-resolution images on rolls of film that will be OK for months, with minimal care (temperature, avoid X-rays).
You might also consider an instant camera. The prints make excellent gifts for the people you meet. Scanning them in is a pain, but less so than losing all your images because your battery ran down or your backpack fell off the bus.
Insisting that your images be end-to-end digital smacks of technology for its own sake.
I find the entry for Los Gatos, CA switch rather interesting. "Company Type" is given as "ICO", which I assume stands for "Independent Central Office". The most common value for this field is "RBOC", short for Regional Bell Operating Company. Thing is, the owner is Verizon, a company that was formed by merger between an RBOC (Atlantic Bell) and an ICO (General Telephone and Electronics, which used to be the biggest of the non-Bell phone companies). Does the distinction between RBOCs and ICOs mean anything in this case? Or any case, now that the Bell System is 20 years gone?
OK, that's a little unfair. And I have to applaud your social comittment. But I just don't see refusal to pay for software as a viable political strategy. It's simply impractical for 99% of all computer users.
But! you say. "Free" software is making big inroads against unfree software! Yes, and that's because companies like IBM, Borland, SGI, and Sun are pushing it. Although they prefer to call it "Open Source". They like it because its a better way to implement an industry standard than the old design-by-comittee approach. This doesn't prevent them from also selling closed-source software -- or from filing software patents of their own.
Omission: The ARC source code that Katz worked from was publically available. SEA released it so their competitors could write compatible software. The had the high-minded notion that they could make their format a defacto standard that way. Not that they weren't out to make a buck. They just figured that sharing a big market would be more profitable than monopolizing a small market. As for piracy, they assumed the copyright laws would protect them. Which turned out to be true, but useless. More on that below.
Error: It's true PKARC and PKXARC were drastically faster (10 to 1? 100 to 1? it was pretty extreme). But this had nothing to do with changes in compression formats. The problem was that SEA had this naive notion of C portability. They wanted source that would compile on every machine in existence. What they didn't count on was some fucked-up buffering in the C library that they used for the DOS version. Easy to work around with a simple buffering routine -- but that would have broken portability!
So Phil Katz, in typical hacker fashion, jumped in and "fixed" ARC. Like most hackers, he considered himself an expert on computing law, and convinced himself that any IP claims by SEA were bogus. Which left him free to sell his modified ARC software as shareware. Which was quickly adopted by 99% of the DOS BBS community because of the speed difference. It might have ended there, given SEA's laid-back attitude, except, Katz indulged in another classic hacker blunder: he started tweaking the format.
The result was a fractional gain in compression speed and quality, at the expense of incompatibility with the original format. But since when do hackers care about that kind of issue? Problem is, the BBS's were soon flooded with ARC archives the original software couldn't grok. Now SEA started paying attention.
Neither side behaved maturely. SEA had every right to sue, of course, but they still refused to admit what every BBS user knew -- that the DOS version of their software was so slow as to be unusable. Instead, they insisted that people were switching to the PK products because of the incompatibilities that Katz "maliciously" introduced. For his part, Katz refused to admit that he'd done anything wrong by pirating the code. He was self righteous about the whole thing to the very end. (He died in 2000 at 37.) When the courts made him hand over all the rights to and income from his software, he went out and published his own archive format, accompanied by rants that would have made Stallman blush.
He did do one thing right: in his burst of self-righteousness, he renounced any control over his format, and documented it in nit-picking detail. A far more effective way to popularize a format than publishing source code.
I forgot to mention the http://www.instantweb.com/foldoc/>Free Online Dictionary Of Computing (FOLDOC). Lots of good material. Seems to be a little undersupported right now though.
Except BN.com has inventory problems and incompetant customer service. And besides, if you're going to boycott anybody who holds software patents, you'll never be able to buy software again -- every major firm hold them or relies on them. If you want to make a difference, write your congressperson, be politically active, join a movement, all the Citizen of a Democracy stuff. It's time consuming and hard work, but a lot more effective than this kneejerk boycott crap.
You ever hear of deadlines? Let's see you create a universe in six days and not have any reliability issues!
But most people aren't physicists or classical scholars. So they use "fluid" as a synonym for "liquid". That's not a sign of rampant stupidity, it's just the way imprecise usages creep into any language.