With all the talk about Debian installer problems in this thread, I'm surprised no one has mentioned that a new Debian installer is coming along. From what I hear, it should rock pretty hard when it's done (no, it's not based on the Progeny installer, and for good reasons).
Most of the time, the solution to lower back pain is pretty straightforward, even if not easy--proper exercise.
Something like 90% of lower back pain is ultimately related to poor abdominal muscle tone. The immediate cause of the pain is most often some "trauma," as it is called--something that causes one of your muscles to strain too hard (for example, poor posture in your office chair). But generally, this trauma happens because the back muscles are not getting the support they need from the abs and are hence being overstrained.
Now, if your muscles hurt real bad right now, this is not the time for exercise, but for rest. There are some good exercises that stretch out your back muscles and help with pain--one of the best is to lie on the floor and put your calves up on a chair or something so that your body makes two 90% angles (hence called the 90-90 position).
Oh, as far as posture goes, learn how to adjust your chair and arrange your workspace for maximum support for your back and take a break every 30 minutes to get up, walk a few paces, and then sit back down. That is very important . . . I believe it stretches out some muscles that get progressively tenser the longer you use them for sitting.
Here is a handy reference chart for determining the type of back strain you have.
Here is a google cache of some exercises for your lower back. There is a lot more out there on the internet--you can get pages and pages of good exercises to do with a few minutes search.
If Microsoft claims ownership rights over everything emailed through Hotmail, does that mean I can sue them for all the unsolicited email that I can't stop getting?
A number of posters have objected to the results of Amazon's poll of the top ten books of the millenium. I would like to point out that the book as an art form is a comparitively new invention. The Illiad is not a book, it is an epic poem, meant to be recited, not read silently. Shakespear never wrote a book, he wrote plays (much better when seen acted then when read, by the way) and poems.
Novel writing is an art that gradually developed out of these forms, and in my opinion peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (before television and movies shifted the artistic emphasis). England in particular had a literary renaissance in the early twentieth centuries, and produced books of a quality that I don't feel has been equalled since.
Of course, you may still disagree that The Lord of the Rings is the greatest book of the millenium, but I don't think that opinion is out of the question.
Lest we forget, technical superiority is only a very small part of the battle, you must also win Mind share
Well, that depends on what you mean by "win." Open source is not a popularity contest. In the past, it may have been true that to ensure the continued existence of a cool project, it needed to have a chance of dominating the market at large. But nowadays, as long as there are enough developers interested in a project--oftentimes only because of its "technical superiority"--it can stay alive, grow and improve. If a project can attain real technical superiority in this way, I call this winning.
That being said, I think it should be remembered that for many simple web sites, MySQL was the right choice because its superior performance with a read-oriented setup. Of course, Postgresql people claim a read-oriented setup isn't a real database application at all, but having designed several such small sites, I really wouldn't use anything else. (Flat files?? What an unnecessary pain!)
Just my two cents . . .
Of course the big problem with Internet ballots...
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
is what to do when they get hacked. Not if, when. Anybody who understands internet security in the least knows that for any sufficiently attractive target, no measure of security will keep a malicious genius from meddling.
In this particular election, it has happened that less than 1% of the results of one county has taken on an enormous significance, making the natural margin of error in physical methods a problem. And, of course, the normal margin of error for electronic systems would be nearer to zero (not quite zero--packets are dropped all the time, you know). But such systems raise the real possibility that cannot be discounted of massive and systemic error.
This is not to say that I oppose your general point that more error-free balloting methods are desireable. I just don't think that the internet is a viable means, certainly not now and probably not in the near future.
I don't follow the election campaigns that well--having already decided who to vote for even though I don't particularly like him:(--but even so, I know that the defence of Al Gore linked to here is fishy. Here's how:
1) It only included a subset of the "lies" that Gore is claimed to have made. Given the tone of the article, I surmise the author probably picked those "lies" that are most conveniently disproved. But even these instances of "assasination" struck me as pretty mild. For example, the false claim that Gore said the words "inventing the internet." No, he said, "creating the internet," as a matter of fact. Huh. What a vicious campaign of character assasination. . . not. But if these examples are the best the author can come up with, I'm just not impressed.
2) The author completely ignored the obvious question of what counts as a lie. Of course Gore didn't say he came up with the idea of the internet, or actually created it himself. But equally obviously, he worded his phrase to make it seem as if his contribution was much greater than it actually was. Polititians do these sorts of things all the time--does this count as lying? Hm. And if someone calls a politician to account for dishonesty, and calls it lying, is that character assasination? Well, hardly.
So, I would say that this rather inflammatory and obviously skewed piece is worth something to show how Republicans fight dirty, but is worth almost nothing as an indication of media bias (which, by the way, is universally recognized to have been stronger in favor of the Democratic party). In fact, it seems to me to be proof that the Democrats fight dirty too. Shock! Disbelief!
This is something I ask myself everytime I see a new, slick, beautiful, incredibly boring game come out. Then I start pining for my old Atari 800--those were some fun games. Anyone ever play "Whistler's Brother"? That was an intense, reflex demanding game that I really enjoyed. I can't think of a 3-D based game that has ever come out that has challenged and engrossed me as much. Oh, with the exception of Deathmatching. Now that was a genuine breakthrough . ..
Apparently Windows95 still had a lot of old 16-bit code in it...
I didn't understand this part of the article--isn't Microsoft known for it's innovative, leading-edge products? How could their products get to be burdened with legacy code?;)
Hey, I would think that Transmeta's unique design would make it easy to transition it from being a 32 bit platform to being a 64 bit platform. Does anyone think this is going to allow them to come out with a product that will compete with the IA64?
IMHO, the greatest problem in achieving true AI is understanding what intelligence is. This is a problem that I haven't seen addressed very well. In a post above, for example, the model for intelligence postulated was "necessities for biological function (eating, drinking, excreting, reproducing)", as thrashed out in a quasi-evolutionary framework. But assuming these people meet their goal of little robots that dynamically figure out how to eat, drink and be merry, have they reached intelligence? What about the ability to abstract meaning from any sort of various experiences? I have never even seen attempted a good definition of what sort of process abstraction of meaning is.
Although some people disagree, it seems clear to me that if you don't understand how to do something yourself, you can't program a computer to do it. And I am firmly convinced that nobody yet understands how to properly describe intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
With all the talk about Debian installer problems in this thread, I'm surprised no one has mentioned that a new Debian installer is coming along. From what I hear, it should rock pretty hard when it's done (no, it's not based on the Progeny installer, and for good reasons).
Something like 90% of lower back pain is ultimately related to poor abdominal muscle tone. The immediate cause of the pain is most often some "trauma," as it is called--something that causes one of your muscles to strain too hard (for example, poor posture in your office chair). But generally, this trauma happens because the back muscles are not getting the support they need from the abs and are hence being overstrained.
Now, if your muscles hurt real bad right now, this is not the time for exercise, but for rest. There are some good exercises that stretch out your back muscles and help with pain--one of the best is to lie on the floor and put your calves up on a chair or something so that your body makes two 90% angles (hence called the 90-90 position).
Oh, as far as posture goes, learn how to adjust your chair and arrange your workspace for maximum support for your back and take a break every 30 minutes to get up, walk a few paces, and then sit back down. That is very important . . . I believe it stretches out some muscles that get progressively tenser the longer you use them for sitting.
Here is a handy reference chart for determining the type of back strain you have.
Here is a google cache of some exercises for your lower back. There is a lot more out there on the internet--you can get pages and pages of good exercises to do with a few minutes search.
Hope this helps!
If Microsoft claims ownership rights over everything emailed through Hotmail, does that mean I can sue them for all the unsolicited email that I can't stop getting?
is the Choral Public Domain Library. This has been going on for years now (I was one of the early contributors), and has an impressive collection.
I have it on MPEG, but I don't remember where I got it . . . I'd post it but my shared hoster doesn't give me enough space :(
A number of posters have objected to the results of Amazon's poll of the top ten books of the millenium. I would like to point out that the book as an art form is a comparitively new invention. The Illiad is not a book, it is an epic poem, meant to be recited, not read silently. Shakespear never wrote a book, he wrote plays (much better when seen acted then when read, by the way) and poems.
Novel writing is an art that gradually developed out of these forms, and in my opinion peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (before television and movies shifted the artistic emphasis). England in particular had a literary renaissance in the early twentieth centuries, and produced books of a quality that I don't feel has been equalled since.
Of course, you may still disagree that The Lord of the Rings is the greatest book of the millenium, but I don't think that opinion is out of the question.
Lest we forget, technical superiority is only a very small part of the battle, you must also win Mind share
Well, that depends on what you mean by "win." Open source is not a popularity contest. In the past, it may have been true that to ensure the continued existence of a cool project, it needed to have a chance of dominating the market at large. But nowadays, as long as there are enough developers interested in a project--oftentimes only because of its "technical superiority"--it can stay alive, grow and improve. If a project can attain real technical superiority in this way, I call this winning.
That being said, I think it should be remembered that for many simple web sites, MySQL was the right choice because its superior performance with a read-oriented setup. Of course, Postgresql people claim a read-oriented setup isn't a real database application at all, but having designed several such small sites, I really wouldn't use anything else. (Flat files?? What an unnecessary pain!)
Just my two cents . . .
is what to do when they get hacked. Not if, when. Anybody who understands internet security in the least knows that for any sufficiently attractive target, no measure of security will keep a malicious genius from meddling.
In this particular election, it has happened that less than 1% of the results of one county has taken on an enormous significance, making the natural margin of error in physical methods a problem. And, of course, the normal margin of error for electronic systems would be nearer to zero (not quite zero--packets are dropped all the time, you know). But such systems raise the real possibility that cannot be discounted of massive and systemic error.
This is not to say that I oppose your general point that more error-free balloting methods are desireable. I just don't think that the internet is a viable means, certainly not now and probably not in the near future.
I don't follow the election campaigns that well--having already decided who to vote for even though I don't particularly like him :(--but even so, I know that the defence of Al Gore linked to here is fishy. Here's how:
1) It only included a subset of the "lies" that Gore is claimed to have made. Given the tone of the article, I surmise the author probably picked those "lies" that are most conveniently disproved. But even these instances of "assasination" struck me as pretty mild. For example, the false claim that Gore said the words "inventing the internet." No, he said, "creating the internet," as a matter of fact. Huh. What a vicious campaign of character assasination. . . not. But if these examples are the best the author can come up with, I'm just not impressed.
2) The author completely ignored the obvious question of what counts as a lie. Of course Gore didn't say he came up with the idea of the internet, or actually created it himself. But equally obviously, he worded his phrase to make it seem as if his contribution was much greater than it actually was. Polititians do these sorts of things all the time--does this count as lying? Hm. And if someone calls a politician to account for dishonesty, and calls it lying, is that character assasination? Well, hardly.
So, I would say that this rather inflammatory and obviously skewed piece is worth something to show how Republicans fight dirty, but is worth almost nothing as an indication of media bias (which, by the way, is universally recognized to have been stronger in favor of the Democratic party). In fact, it seems to me to be proof that the Democrats fight dirty too. Shock! Disbelief!
This is something I ask myself everytime I see a new, slick, beautiful, incredibly boring game come out. Then I start pining for my old Atari 800--those were some fun games. Anyone ever play "Whistler's Brother"? That was an intense, reflex demanding game that I really enjoyed. I can't think of a 3-D based game that has ever come out that has challenged and engrossed me as much. Oh, with the exception of Deathmatching. Now that was a genuine breakthrough . . .
Sources please?
Apparently Windows95 still had a lot of old 16-bit code in it...
;)
I didn't understand this part of the article--isn't Microsoft known for it's innovative, leading-edge products? How could their products get to be burdened with legacy code?
Hey, I would think that Transmeta's unique design would make it easy to transition it from being a 32 bit platform to being a 64 bit platform. Does anyone think this is going to allow them to come out with a product that will compete with the IA64?
IMHO, the greatest problem in achieving true AI is understanding what intelligence is. This is a problem that I haven't seen addressed very well. In a post above, for example, the model for intelligence postulated was "necessities for biological function (eating, drinking, excreting, reproducing)", as thrashed out in a quasi-evolutionary framework. But assuming these people meet their goal of little robots that dynamically figure out how to eat, drink and be merry, have they reached intelligence? What about the ability to abstract meaning from any sort of various experiences? I have never even seen attempted a good definition of what sort of process abstraction of meaning is.
Although some people disagree, it seems clear to me that if you don't understand how to do something yourself, you can't program a computer to do it. And I am firmly convinced that nobody yet understands how to properly describe intelligence.