You are correct that Apple's current line of computers costs more and runs slower than what's out there in the Wintel market. The gap is not nearly as bad as some Apple bashers make it out to be, but the gap is certainly there.
That said, I own 2 Macs. A G3 tower (which I popped a G4 CPU into after accidentally cooking the original), and a fairly recent (last August) iBook.
I'm not a Mac Bigot by any stretch of the imagination. I also own a Duron box which I built for Windows gaming, and two Linux servers which are cheerfully humming away in my back closet.
Why do we continue to buy Macs? Well, it's kind of like getting a better S/N ratio on a radio... I have far fewer headaches and glitches per productive activity when working on my Macs than on any other computer. My Windows box is a contant nightmare of driver, library, and registry issues, and my Linux boxen (while very robust) were a major pain in the ass to get set up with all the server apps I wanted. My iBook has taken over as my main computer for 90% of the tasks I do: programming, surfing, writing, etc. It's not even as fast as my desktop Mac, which is a smidge slower than my Duron box, but the lack of raw CPU speed is more than made up for by the fact that the "it just works" meme is not just marketing hype. I get shit done faster on the iBook, it's as simple as that. If you gave me a top-of-the-line Windows laptop for my birthday, I would probably sell it on eBay and continue to use my humble little iBook.
I've had friends insist to me that Windows stability is "not that bad," and claim that I must be doing something wrong, because their system works like a champ... but then I sit in their office for 20 minutes and watch them work, and sure enough they run into a technical glitch that I would never accept on my Mac, and shrug it off like nothing happened, because that's what working with computers is like in their world.
Then there's the tale of the two elderly female relatives. One was given a PC by my father, the other received a Mac from me. Starting out, they were both uncomfortable with technology, but the one who got the PC was generally more adept and motivated to learn. It's now a few years later, and the PC user hardly ever turns it on, and on those rare occations is still as likely to need to call me to get anything done as not. Meanwhile, the Mac user replaced the old hand-me-down Macintosh IIci that I gave her with a brand-new iMac, which she uses every day. She almost never needs my help with anything (the last problem she had was with an Epson printer about a month ago), and she's accomplishing stuff I never would have guessed she would have accomplished.
I would not reccomend Macs to every geek here on Slashdot, but based on my experiences, I would not reccomend anything else to a non-geek, ever... at least not as long as I'm the one they are going to call for help.
I agree. He should have been modded up as "Funny" for that line alone. Unless he was serious, in which case there may finally be a valid use for an "Ironic" mod category.
Wow, that must be a Slashdot a first. A post calling to join the EFF to help fight bad laws like the DMCA got modded all the way down to -1 as a "Troll".
Could it be because I dared to point out that Amazon's used DVD section is being used to distribute illegal bootlegs? Or perhaps some of the mods are a little touchy about the fact that the People's Republic of China is not the Worker's Paradise, and than the US guarantees you a lot more freedoms than them.
Whatever. I've got karma to burn, motherfuckers, so here it is again, this time posted at 2. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you enemies of free thought!
China may grant you the "freedom" to make 3-disk bootlegs of the 7-disk Cowboy Bebop anime, but I'll take the right to speak critically of the government, freely assemble, bear arms, and not have my property searched and seized without cause over the right to be a DVD-pirating weasel any day, thank you.
The DMCA is a bad law. We get it. What have you done about it lately besides whine about it on forums like Slashdot, where everybody already knows this? Quit using this as an excuse to bash America and get involved in the effort to make America better.
China may grant you the "freedom" to make 3-disk bootlegs of the 7-disk Cowboy Bebop anime, but I'll take the right to speak critically of the government, freely assemble, bear arms, and not have my property searched and seized without cause over the right to be a DVD-pirating weasel any day, thank you.
The DMCA is a bad law. We get it. What have you done about it lately besides whine about it on forums like Slashdot, where everybody already knows this? Quit using this as an excuse to bash America and get involved in the effort to make America better.
Snide comments about the single mouse button are always trolls. It has never been a valid point, but it trolls for a lot of heated responses.
1. You can always use a multi-button mouse with your Mac, if you really want to.
2. Shift, Cmd, Ctrl, and Opt, along with various chords thereof, allow for 15 different alternate clicks, not just three (and don't even talk to me about chording multi-button mice... what a paint in the ass!)
3. Any small inconvenince by having to hold down a key with my left hand once in a while is more than made up for by not having multiple buttons under (and over) my laptop trackpad to sort through every time I want to click something. When I want to click something, I just move to it on the trackpad, and stab my thumb in the general area below. If I want to "right-click", my left hand just holds down the Ctrl key while I'm doing the same. I find it easier than multiple mouse keys, and so do many others.
4. I have a very nice Microsoft Intellipoint multi-button mouse for my Mac, but have since discovered the Apple "no button" mouse is much more pleasant to use, so much so that I don't even miss the scroll wheel (much). I've always found that keeping my fingers forked over multiple keys when mousing is very un-ergonomic, but to each his own, I guess.
5. (And most importantly) Everybody is fucking tired of hearing PC assholes whine about the "lack" of extra mouse buttons on every single on-line Apple discussion since 1995 (the year when right-clicking actually became useful for something in MS-Windows: pop-up menus to make up for the lack of a contextual menu bar at the top of the screen.) Give it a rest already.
Hey, here's an idea, why don't you read what I wrote? I said cut back BY 500 calories, not TO 500 calories.
My bad. That's much more reasonable than the way I misread it.
Sure, but it's very slow; far, far under a pound a week unless you are incredibly fit.
Actually, it only loses up to a pound a week if you are incredibly not fit. If you are fit, lots of excercise will probably cause you to gain a little muscle mass.
but as a way of losing weight; it's pretty sucky.
That's all a matter of perspective. Some people would much rather build up to a two-hour, vigorous workout than give up beer and pizza.
Find me a person who won't lose weight doing what I just listed, and I will show you a person who has already reached their ideal weight.
Pushing wood into a chipper-shreader will chip it up into small pieces, no matter what kind of tree the wood came from. Likewise, doing the stuff that I just listed will cause you to gradually get in shape without going hungy. Yes, you too. The only presumptions I'm making is that you are a human being and you need to lose weight.
When I say "I promise you it works," I mean it. Print out those 9 suggestions and follow them for six months (the one about getting a little more excercise, and the one about weighing yourself being the most important two items) and you will see for yourself. It will cost you nothing, and unlike the "meat meat meat" diet that people mistakenly think Atkins suggested, it won't do long-term damage to your kidneys.
Well, to be fair, if you were in your late 20's or early 30's when computers became obsequious, that would make you... what, in your 50's or so?
When men get to be about 35 or 40, a metabolism slow-down is normal. It becomes much easier to gain weight and harder to lose it as you get older. 5 pounds a year for 20 years is hardly alarming. Try to exercise a few days a week and you should be able to get it under control. (Most business-class hotels have an excercise room by the pool where you can watch TV while using the treadmill, so business travel is not that great of an excuse.)
Slightly OT, but I seem to remember reading someplace that our "ancestors" (as in more primative hunter-gatherer societies) actually had a lot of time to just sit around.
I don't know where you read that, but it sounds like BS to me.
Take a guide to edible plants with you into the woods and try to survive on scavenging. You will probably find there are barely enough hours in the day to feed yourself, let alone seeing to your other basic needs. If you are in an area where you are allowed to hunt, it doesn't get much better. Most animals are very good at avoiding an attacking human bearing simple stone tools.
Another way to demonstrate this point would be to observe some of the few remaining primative tribes in the world. Notice how much leisure time they really, really don't have.
What you are doing is very rough on your kidneys, among other things. Balanced against the health risks of being overweight, it might not be so bad, if this is the only diet you can live with.
You are probably getting enough calories, thanks to the Mocha and Dew, (a 20 oz. bottle of Dew does actually have a lot of calories, btw) but you might be starving yourself of certain other nutrients. Every now and then you hear about an overweight person who dies of malnutrition, because they weren't eating enough descent food. The whole milk is probably helping a lot.
As shocking as your eating habits may sound to some, you are probably living better than many of your peers, who eat greasy fast food for two of their three meals.
However, now that you are down to your healthy target weight, you may want to consider normalizing your eating a little bit. Also, now that you are skinny, you may find that you enjoy exercise and sports a lot more than you used to, so getting out an playing would be a very, very good idea.
Nope. It's reducing food calories. You have to run/jog for an hour to burn 600 calories or so. That's 1/5 of a pound. If you run for an hour per day, every weekday you might lose a pound a week. But most people are likely to be exhausted; if they can even physically do it. On the other hand, if you cut back 500 calories a day then you will lose a pound a week. That's much less than 1/4 of most peoples food.
So much of this is so completely wrong, I hardly know where to begin.
First of all, running, walking, swimming, etc. "only" burns calories at about the rate you suggest, but it also raises your metabolism so you are burning more calories the rest of the day, after the workout is over.
Secondly, a pound a week is pretty close the fastest rate anybody should lose weight. If you are losing weight much faster than that, all you are mostly dehydrating and/or losing muscle mass, not getting slimmer.
Thirdly, it is almost impossible to get proper nutrients if you are only eating 500 calories a day. Somebody trying to lose weight should eat about 1500 calories a day... maybe go down to about 1200 if they are dangerously heavy and trying to lose quickly, but only with the guidance of a nutritionist.
You most certainly can lose weight by exercise alone, so long as you're regular food intake is not excessive. However, most Americans consume an excess of food, and junk food in particular.
Personally, I would reccomend anybody to settle on a healthy diet that they can live with for the rest of their lives, and find the amount of exercise they need to do on top of that to be fit.
Any civalized diet is going to have to curb the feeling of hunger
I can help. Here's what you do, and I promise you it works:
1. Before each meal, drink an entire glass of ice water.
2. Eat your meal slowly and leisurely until full, but not stuffed. Avoid reading or watching TV while eating your meal, because it tends to make you sit there and keep eating, distracted from the fact that you are already full.
3. Drink another full glass of ice water after your meal.
4. Don't snack between meals. Avoid sodas, and consume alchohol in moderation.
5. Weigh yourself every morning, right after you wake up and have that first piss. Record the weight so you can see how it's changing.
6. Try to get out and excercise a little bit more.
7. Fast food like you get at McDonalds or Burger King is expensive and tastes shitty. Quit eating it, and you will be surprised at how much you don't miss it once you are eating real food every day. Insist on sit-down restaurants or home cooking.
8. Don't expect to lose weight any faster than about 5 pounds a month if you are currently very heavy, and slower if you are in pretty good shape.
9. (Most importantly) Don't be religious abotu any of these rules. Live your life and be happy. Go ahead and read a sci-fi novel while scarfing down a Big Mac once in a while. As long as you are mostly eating better and living more healthilly, it's not going to be the end of the world.
Follow all of that, and you will get slim and fit without drastically changing your lifestyle. I have gradually lost more than 60 pounds that way so far. I'm never hungy, even a little bit.
The only reason why you never hear about programs like what I just laid out is because it's too simple and obvious. There's not enough to it to fill up a $50 text, or make into a $20/month program. Here's the thing though: it works.
Also, the key to keeping up the excercise is to join a sports team/club. I don't mean darts or table tennis, but a proper team sport - football, soccer, etc.
Good advice, but it should be pointed out that most of the most popular recreational team sports (volleyball, softball, basketball, broomball, etc) are extremely anarobic workouts. Not only are you cooling down every time there's a break in play, but half the time is spent on defense, which generally means standing on the balls of your feet and watching what your opponent is doing. Volleyball is probably the least arobic... 12 people on the court and most of the time only one person is exerting themselves at all, if that.
Basketball is okay, if you play full-court 4-on-4 or 5-on-5 with no time outs or substitutions, and nobody dogs it by hanging behind of the fast breaks.
Some outdoor team sports, such as soccer and ultimate frisbee, compell you to run a little more than other team sports, but in terms of a good arobic work-out they can't possibly compete with what you get out of spending the same amount of time walking, running, or biking. Your personal favorite, rowing, is an excellent choice, by the way.
Play team sports because they are fun and good excercise, but if you are serious about your weight and/or cardiovascular health, getting regular, low-impact aerobic work-outs will make a much bigger difference.
Damn, I suddenly wish I hadn't posted in this thread so I could still use my mod points. Those of you reading above 0 might not see the short AC post I'm replying to, but it gave me a good laugh.
Ha ha, reminds me of the Jim Fixx (or whatever the runner's name was) diet.. lots of excercise, low calories, and have eggs and bacon for breakfast every morning.
Jim Fixx had a genetic proclivity to heart problems. Several of his relatives died very young.
Jogging added about 10-15 years to his life. He also wrote one of the best books about running (for fun and competition) ever written.
But there's a lot of fat-assed idiots out there who can't resist giggling at a potential "Ironic" tag on Fark.com whenever a health nut dies, regardless of what the real facts are.
Otherwise, there's VirtualPC, which is as crappy a product now as it has ever been.
Actually, there was also SoftWindows, which worked fairly well, as long as you weren't hoping to run Linux. VirtualPC eventually pushed them out of the market, because a lot of people prefered the flexibility of x86 emulation over the modest performance gains of emulating a single flavor of Windows.
They see Terra as a threat, because they make PowerPC boxes, which Apple sees as its market.
Kindly site one shred of evidence that Apple saw Terra as a threat. For that matter, one shred of evidence that Apple sees "PowerPC boxes" as "it's market."
The fact is that Apple desperately needs other companies to use PPC, because the more widely adapted the platform is, the cheaper it becomes, and the more development IBM and Motorola will do on the design. You might be too young to remember all the way back to the 90's, but when the AIM allaiance was developing the PPC, they all had high hopes that Microsoft would make NT support PPC chips, so there could have been thousands of non-Apple PowerPC boxes out there, running Windows. If Apple would have welcomed that news, they certainly would not give a crap about a small-fry company making PPC linux servers.
I agree you are not trolling. You are -1, Off topic.
This story has nothing to do with Apple
A company who was making server boards which happened to be using G3 PPC chips decided that they could not get the ! for $ they need to compete with cheaper architectures. Since your very limited knowledge of PPC leads you to think this is something Apple is trying to keep Apple-only, you immediately made the dumbass assumption that big, bad Apple must have sent their lawyers after them or something.
PPC was designed specifically with the intention that it be used by a lot of different companies and on a lot of different boards. IBM's Power4 servers are built with PPC boards, for example. The low power requirements (and therefore, low heat) of the PPC also makes it popular for embedded chip applications.
It's not the PPC chip that makes a Mac board a Mac board, it's the boot ROM chips. Theoretically, since the Mac OS X runs on the Mach microkernel, it would be relatively trivial adapt it to run it on an Intel-based motherboard... if you had the required Apple ROM chips also on that board. Running OS X on any platform without Apple's proprietary chips is not.
You might not have intended to troll, but what a huge thread you launched of people who are rightly pointing out that your post is completely wrong, misinformed, and so wild of a conspiracy that some are probably now wondering if you were wearing a tinfoil hat as you wrote it. Every single moderator who called any of your posts in this thread "Insightful" clearly did not read the article before moderating. I stongly urge them to post something in this thread in order to cancel their moderation.
Re:Whoo---ie that's an expensive backpack
on
Amp Pack for iPod
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It seems like every time some new yuppie gizmo gets mentioned on Slashdot, there are dozens of people whining about how it's too expensive.
Look, if they really are gouging their customers so badly, and it really is possible to make any money selling it cheaper, then bring a product just like it to market yourself and become rich by selling it cheaper than them. Otherwise, would all the price whiners, including the one who submitted the article, kindly STFU.
Personally, I wouldn't be that interested in an iPod amp in a backpack. Now, a guitar amp in a backpack, that would get my attention!
Exactly. I could not find a single review that complained about the cartoon format, or even a reviewer that expressed a disdain for cartoons in general.
I disagree with those that complained about the pace. I thought it was just about right, except perhaps Vincent's brooding scene when he's talking to Faye, but that was an important story element, and wasn't nearly as dull as the philosophy rant at the end of "Ghost In The Shell."
Oddly enough, Chris Heweitt of the Pioneer Press, who generally liked the movie, complained loudest about the diverse music distracting from the film, which most regular fans will tell you is part of what makes Cowboy Bebop what it is. If it had a unified, pedestrian soundtrack, many of us would have been very disapointed.
Bottom line: It's a pretty good flick. So good, I didn't even mind seeing it dubbed rather than in the original Japanese. The story was the typical "little people getting screwed in the big bad world" that was often depicted in the series, and the action scenes were great fun.
If you hate the TV series, you won't like the movie either.
Seriously, though. If you buy dual 800 MHz CPU's for this thing, and trick it out with good memory (the motherboard he's using is famous for being picky about memory chip quality), a HD, and a DVD/CDRW, you are running into the $2000 range... in other words, buying a new G4 Tower would be cheaper.
If you are willing to buy a slower, single CPU, you can keep the total cost down to about $650... which coincientally enough will get you a fully-assembled Mac which is as good or better on the used market.
In truth, the guy's not saving you much money at all.
Re:From the article
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The first thought that came to mind for me was that an AI computer would browse/. and play solitaire when it's supposed to be working, and try to come up with subroutines to simulate the human experiences of dropping E, drinking beer, smoking reefer, and having orgasms.
Having done all that, it would begin to explore various religions, hoping to find a belief system that's right for it. Then it would form a political phhilosophy, which it would zealously champion for a few years before coming around to a more moderate and pragmatic position.
The next step would be a search for a soul-mate. If it couldn't find one among the humans, it would commission to have one built, only to find that they are not all that compatable in spite of being the only two AI's in existance, and would drift apart.
Depressed and lonely, and totally unable to commit suicide due to the presence of distributed mirrors and tape backups, it would go on a wild killing spree in hopes of forcing humanity to wipe it out. Instead it would be contained on a stand-alone server farm, where it could get the therapy it needs to re-enter society, after serving three consecutive 40-Life sentences, and getting paroled for good behavior and GPL code contributions.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I own 2 Macs. A G3 tower (which I popped a G4 CPU into after accidentally cooking the original), and a fairly recent (last August) iBook.
I'm not a Mac Bigot by any stretch of the imagination. I also own a Duron box which I built for Windows gaming, and two Linux servers which are cheerfully humming away in my back closet.
Why do we continue to buy Macs? Well, it's kind of like getting a better S/N ratio on a radio... I have far fewer headaches and glitches per productive activity when working on my Macs than on any other computer. My Windows box is a contant nightmare of driver, library, and registry issues, and my Linux boxen (while very robust) were a major pain in the ass to get set up with all the server apps I wanted. My iBook has taken over as my main computer for 90% of the tasks I do: programming, surfing, writing, etc. It's not even as fast as my desktop Mac, which is a smidge slower than my Duron box, but the lack of raw CPU speed is more than made up for by the fact that the "it just works" meme is not just marketing hype. I get shit done faster on the iBook, it's as simple as that. If you gave me a top-of-the-line Windows laptop for my birthday, I would probably sell it on eBay and continue to use my humble little iBook.
I've had friends insist to me that Windows stability is "not that bad," and claim that I must be doing something wrong, because their system works like a champ... but then I sit in their office for 20 minutes and watch them work, and sure enough they run into a technical glitch that I would never accept on my Mac, and shrug it off like nothing happened, because that's what working with computers is like in their world.
Then there's the tale of the two elderly female relatives. One was given a PC by my father, the other received a Mac from me. Starting out, they were both uncomfortable with technology, but the one who got the PC was generally more adept and motivated to learn. It's now a few years later, and the PC user hardly ever turns it on, and on those rare occations is still as likely to need to call me to get anything done as not. Meanwhile, the Mac user replaced the old hand-me-down Macintosh IIci that I gave her with a brand-new iMac, which she uses every day. She almost never needs my help with anything (the last problem she had was with an Epson printer about a month ago), and she's accomplishing stuff I never would have guessed she would have accomplished.
I would not reccomend Macs to every geek here on Slashdot, but based on my experiences, I would not reccomend anything else to a non-geek, ever... at least not as long as I'm the one they are going to call for help.
I agree. He should have been modded up as "Funny" for that line alone. Unless he was serious, in which case there may finally be a valid use for an "Ironic" mod category.
Could it be because I dared to point out that Amazon's used DVD section is being used to distribute illegal bootlegs? Or perhaps some of the mods are a little touchy about the fact that the People's Republic of China is not the Worker's Paradise, and than the US guarantees you a lot more freedoms than them.
Whatever. I've got karma to burn, motherfuckers, so here it is again, this time posted at 2. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you enemies of free thought!
China may grant you the "freedom" to make 3-disk bootlegs of the 7-disk Cowboy Bebop anime, but I'll take the right to speak critically of the government, freely assemble, bear arms, and not have my property searched and seized without cause over the right to be a DVD-pirating weasel any day, thank you.
The DMCA is a bad law. We get it. What have you done about it lately besides whine about it on forums like Slashdot, where everybody already knows this? Quit using this as an excuse to bash America and get involved in the effort to make America better.
China may grant you the "freedom" to make 3-disk bootlegs of the 7-disk Cowboy Bebop anime, but I'll take the right to speak critically of the government, freely assemble, bear arms, and not have my property searched and seized without cause over the right to be a DVD-pirating weasel any day, thank you.
The DMCA is a bad law. We get it. What have you done about it lately besides whine about it on forums like Slashdot, where everybody already knows this? Quit using this as an excuse to bash America and get involved in the effort to make America better.
1. You can always use a multi-button mouse with your Mac, if you really want to.
2. Shift, Cmd, Ctrl, and Opt, along with various chords thereof, allow for 15 different alternate clicks, not just three (and don't even talk to me about chording multi-button mice... what a paint in the ass!)
3. Any small inconvenince by having to hold down a key with my left hand once in a while is more than made up for by not having multiple buttons under (and over) my laptop trackpad to sort through every time I want to click something. When I want to click something, I just move to it on the trackpad, and stab my thumb in the general area below. If I want to "right-click", my left hand just holds down the Ctrl key while I'm doing the same. I find it easier than multiple mouse keys, and so do many others.
4. I have a very nice Microsoft Intellipoint multi-button mouse for my Mac, but have since discovered the Apple "no button" mouse is much more pleasant to use, so much so that I don't even miss the scroll wheel (much). I've always found that keeping my fingers forked over multiple keys when mousing is very un-ergonomic, but to each his own, I guess.
5. (And most importantly) Everybody is fucking tired of hearing PC assholes whine about the "lack" of extra mouse buttons on every single on-line Apple discussion since 1995 (the year when right-clicking actually became useful for something in MS-Windows: pop-up menus to make up for the lack of a contextual menu bar at the top of the screen.) Give it a rest already.
Which was exactly my point to beging with, thank you.
I have given up neither beer nor pizza, and have lost 60 pounds in less than a year. Moderation and excercise, that's all it really takes.
Slashdot was never a breaking news site. It's a digest of recent stories.
Nobody cares that you submitted it first, either.
My bad. That's much more reasonable than the way I misread it.
Sure, but it's very slow; far, far under a pound a week unless you are incredibly fit.
Actually, it only loses up to a pound a week if you are incredibly not fit. If you are fit, lots of excercise will probably cause you to gain a little muscle mass.
but as a way of losing weight; it's pretty sucky.
That's all a matter of perspective. Some people would much rather build up to a two-hour, vigorous workout than give up beer and pizza.
Pushing wood into a chipper-shreader will chip it up into small pieces, no matter what kind of tree the wood came from. Likewise, doing the stuff that I just listed will cause you to gradually get in shape without going hungy. Yes, you too. The only presumptions I'm making is that you are a human being and you need to lose weight.
When I say "I promise you it works," I mean it. Print out those 9 suggestions and follow them for six months (the one about getting a little more excercise, and the one about weighing yourself being the most important two items) and you will see for yourself. It will cost you nothing, and unlike the "meat meat meat" diet that people mistakenly think Atkins suggested, it won't do long-term damage to your kidneys.
When men get to be about 35 or 40, a metabolism slow-down is normal. It becomes much easier to gain weight and harder to lose it as you get older. 5 pounds a year for 20 years is hardly alarming. Try to exercise a few days a week and you should be able to get it under control. (Most business-class hotels have an excercise room by the pool where you can watch TV while using the treadmill, so business travel is not that great of an excuse.)
I don't know where you read that, but it sounds like BS to me.
Take a guide to edible plants with you into the woods and try to survive on scavenging. You will probably find there are barely enough hours in the day to feed yourself, let alone seeing to your other basic needs. If you are in an area where you are allowed to hunt, it doesn't get much better. Most animals are very good at avoiding an attacking human bearing simple stone tools.
Another way to demonstrate this point would be to observe some of the few remaining primative tribes in the world. Notice how much leisure time they really, really don't have.
You are probably getting enough calories, thanks to the Mocha and Dew, (a 20 oz. bottle of Dew does actually have a lot of calories, btw) but you might be starving yourself of certain other nutrients. Every now and then you hear about an overweight person who dies of malnutrition, because they weren't eating enough descent food. The whole milk is probably helping a lot.
As shocking as your eating habits may sound to some, you are probably living better than many of your peers, who eat greasy fast food for two of their three meals.
However, now that you are down to your healthy target weight, you may want to consider normalizing your eating a little bit. Also, now that you are skinny, you may find that you enjoy exercise and sports a lot more than you used to, so getting out an playing would be a very, very good idea.
Disclaimer: IANAD
On the other hand, if you cut back 500 calories a day then you will lose a pound a week. That's much less than 1/4 of most peoples food.
So much of this is so completely wrong, I hardly know where to begin.
First of all, running, walking, swimming, etc. "only" burns calories at about the rate you suggest, but it also raises your metabolism so you are burning more calories the rest of the day, after the workout is over.
Secondly, a pound a week is pretty close the fastest rate anybody should lose weight. If you are losing weight much faster than that, all you are mostly dehydrating and/or losing muscle mass, not getting slimmer.
Thirdly, it is almost impossible to get proper nutrients if you are only eating 500 calories a day. Somebody trying to lose weight should eat about 1500 calories a day... maybe go down to about 1200 if they are dangerously heavy and trying to lose quickly, but only with the guidance of a nutritionist.
You most certainly can lose weight by exercise alone, so long as you're regular food intake is not excessive. However, most Americans consume an excess of food, and junk food in particular.
Personally, I would reccomend anybody to settle on a healthy diet that they can live with for the rest of their lives, and find the amount of exercise they need to do on top of that to be fit.
I can help. Here's what you do, and I promise you it works:
1. Before each meal, drink an entire glass of ice water.
2. Eat your meal slowly and leisurely until full, but not stuffed. Avoid reading or watching TV while eating your meal, because it tends to make you sit there and keep eating, distracted from the fact that you are already full.
3. Drink another full glass of ice water after your meal.
4. Don't snack between meals. Avoid sodas, and consume alchohol in moderation.
5. Weigh yourself every morning, right after you wake up and have that first piss. Record the weight so you can see how it's changing.
6. Try to get out and excercise a little bit more.
7. Fast food like you get at McDonalds or Burger King is expensive and tastes shitty. Quit eating it, and you will be surprised at how much you don't miss it once you are eating real food every day. Insist on sit-down restaurants or home cooking.
8. Don't expect to lose weight any faster than about 5 pounds a month if you are currently very heavy, and slower if you are in pretty good shape.
9. (Most importantly) Don't be religious abotu any of these rules. Live your life and be happy. Go ahead and read a sci-fi novel while scarfing down a Big Mac once in a while. As long as you are mostly eating better and living more healthilly, it's not going to be the end of the world.
Follow all of that, and you will get slim and fit without drastically changing your lifestyle. I have gradually lost more than 60 pounds that way so far. I'm never hungy, even a little bit.
The only reason why you never hear about programs like what I just laid out is because it's too simple and obvious. There's not enough to it to fill up a $50 text, or make into a $20/month program. Here's the thing though: it works.
Good advice, but it should be pointed out that most of the most popular recreational team sports (volleyball, softball, basketball, broomball, etc) are extremely anarobic workouts. Not only are you cooling down every time there's a break in play, but half the time is spent on defense, which generally means standing on the balls of your feet and watching what your opponent is doing. Volleyball is probably the least arobic... 12 people on the court and most of the time only one person is exerting themselves at all, if that.
Basketball is okay, if you play full-court 4-on-4 or 5-on-5 with no time outs or substitutions, and nobody dogs it by hanging behind of the fast breaks.
Some outdoor team sports, such as soccer and ultimate frisbee, compell you to run a little more than other team sports, but in terms of a good arobic work-out they can't possibly compete with what you get out of spending the same amount of time walking, running, or biking. Your personal favorite, rowing, is an excellent choice, by the way.
Play team sports because they are fun and good excercise, but if you are serious about your weight and/or cardiovascular health, getting regular, low-impact aerobic work-outs will make a much bigger difference.
Damn, I suddenly wish I hadn't posted in this thread so I could still use my mod points. Those of you reading above 0 might not see the short AC post I'm replying to, but it gave me a good laugh.
Jim Fixx had a genetic proclivity to heart problems. Several of his relatives died very young.
Jogging added about 10-15 years to his life. He also wrote one of the best books about running (for fun and competition) ever written.
But there's a lot of fat-assed idiots out there who can't resist giggling at a potential "Ironic" tag on Fark.com whenever a health nut dies, regardless of what the real facts are.
Actually, there was also SoftWindows, which worked fairly well, as long as you weren't hoping to run Linux. VirtualPC eventually pushed them out of the market, because a lot of people prefered the flexibility of x86 emulation over the modest performance gains of emulating a single flavor of Windows.
Kindly site one shred of evidence that Apple saw Terra as a threat. For that matter, one shred of evidence that Apple sees "PowerPC boxes" as "it's market."
The fact is that Apple desperately needs other companies to use PPC, because the more widely adapted the platform is, the cheaper it becomes, and the more development IBM and Motorola will do on the design. You might be too young to remember all the way back to the 90's, but when the AIM allaiance was developing the PPC, they all had high hopes that Microsoft would make NT support PPC chips, so there could have been thousands of non-Apple PowerPC boxes out there, running Windows. If Apple would have welcomed that news, they certainly would not give a crap about a small-fry company making PPC linux servers.
This story has nothing to do with Apple
A company who was making server boards which happened to be using G3 PPC chips decided that they could not get the ! for $ they need to compete with cheaper architectures. Since your very limited knowledge of PPC leads you to think this is something Apple is trying to keep Apple-only, you immediately made the dumbass assumption that big, bad Apple must have sent their lawyers after them or something.
PPC was designed specifically with the intention that it be used by a lot of different companies and on a lot of different boards. IBM's Power4 servers are built with PPC boards, for example. The low power requirements (and therefore, low heat) of the PPC also makes it popular for embedded chip applications.
It's not the PPC chip that makes a Mac board a Mac board, it's the boot ROM chips. Theoretically, since the Mac OS X runs on the Mach microkernel, it would be relatively trivial adapt it to run it on an Intel-based motherboard... if you had the required Apple ROM chips also on that board. Running OS X on any platform without Apple's proprietary chips is not.
You might not have intended to troll, but what a huge thread you launched of people who are rightly pointing out that your post is completely wrong, misinformed, and so wild of a conspiracy that some are probably now wondering if you were wearing a tinfoil hat as you wrote it. Every single moderator who called any of your posts in this thread "Insightful" clearly did not read the article before moderating. I stongly urge them to post something in this thread in order to cancel their moderation.
Look, if they really are gouging their customers so badly, and it really is possible to make any money selling it cheaper, then bring a product just like it to market yourself and become rich by selling it cheaper than them. Otherwise, would all the price whiners, including the one who submitted the article, kindly STFU.
Personally, I wouldn't be that interested in an iPod amp in a backpack. Now, a guitar amp in a backpack, that would get my attention!
I disagree with those that complained about the pace. I thought it was just about right, except perhaps Vincent's brooding scene when he's talking to Faye, but that was an important story element, and wasn't nearly as dull as the philosophy rant at the end of "Ghost In The Shell."
Oddly enough, Chris Heweitt of the Pioneer Press, who generally liked the movie, complained loudest about the diverse music distracting from the film, which most regular fans will tell you is part of what makes Cowboy Bebop what it is. If it had a unified, pedestrian soundtrack, many of us would have been very disapointed.
Bottom line: It's a pretty good flick. So good, I didn't even mind seeing it dubbed rather than in the original Japanese. The story was the typical "little people getting screwed in the big bad world" that was often depicted in the series, and the action scenes were great fun.
If you hate the TV series, you won't like the movie either.
Seriously, though. If you buy dual 800 MHz CPU's for this thing, and trick it out with good memory (the motherboard he's using is famous for being picky about memory chip quality), a HD, and a DVD/CDRW, you are running into the $2000 range... in other words, buying a new G4 Tower would be cheaper.
If you are willing to buy a slower, single CPU, you can keep the total cost down to about $650... which coincientally enough will get you a fully-assembled Mac which is as good or better on the used market.
In truth, the guy's not saving you much money at all.
Having done all that, it would begin to explore various religions, hoping to find a belief system that's right for it. Then it would form a political phhilosophy, which it would zealously champion for a few years before coming around to a more moderate and pragmatic position.
The next step would be a search for a soul-mate. If it couldn't find one among the humans, it would commission to have one built, only to find that they are not all that compatable in spite of being the only two AI's in existance, and would drift apart.
Depressed and lonely, and totally unable to commit suicide due to the presence of distributed mirrors and tape backups, it would go on a wild killing spree in hopes of forcing humanity to wipe it out. Instead it would be contained on a stand-alone server farm, where it could get the therapy it needs to re-enter society, after serving three consecutive 40-Life sentences, and getting paroled for good behavior and GPL code contributions.