Re:What about the dangers?
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But if you're so weak-willed that you'd rather damage your body than make an effort
Ah, here we go, the "moral superiority" of the metabolically skinny.
Some people -- for whatever reason -- just don't like to eat as much as some others. For them, maintaining their weight isn't really a matter of "strong will", any more than it's a matter of strong will for me not to be an alcoholic. Did the partying and getting drunk in college, decided the negatives outweighed the positives, and just don't do that any more (not that I'm a teetotaler by any means). Does that mean that an alcoholic is just "weak willed"? Probably not, just means they've got a metabolic (or psychological) difference such that the urge to drink is a lot stronger in them than it is in me.
The trick, then, is (in either case), determining what combination of diet and lifestyle reduces those urges (whether to eat or drink) in the first place. Sure, sticking with that requires a certain amount of willpower. But you're making a mistake in assuming that this is something that would "damage your body". Popping diet pills or starving yourself will damage your body, but there's no indication that the Atkins (properly followed) would.
On top of all of that, diets high in proteins and fats (Like the Atkins diet) predispose folks to heart disease, strokes and diabetes.
That turns out not to be the case.
That is certainly not true for diabetes, which is aggravated by high carbo (especially simple carbs -- sugars) diets which put blood sugar levels through wild swings. Atkins-type diets reduce the risks of diabetes.
It also doesn't seem to be true of heart disease or strokes. The Atkins improves the HDL-LDL cholesterol ratio, and can reduce blood pressure (some of this is probably mechanically due to fat loss meaning a shorter circulatory system to push the blood through).
Fruits and veggies are certainly part of the Atkins diet, although they're more severely restricted during the two-week "induction" phase to get your metabolism kicked over to fat-burning. What is excluded (not totally) is refined sugars and high-starch foods, particularly grains and cereals. Makes sense, the latter have only been available for the last 5000 years or so of several million years of hominid evolution.
This has probably been said already but the most effective way to lose weight is good ol' fashioned healthy eating and regular exercise.
And like many oft-repeated platitudes, it contains a lot of falsehood around a little bit of truth.
First of "healthy eating" is meaningless without context. For many, the Atkins is healthy eating. Metabolism differs, what is healthy for some may not be for others. Sure, there are some things that are clearly unhealthy: excessive refined sugars, vitamin deficient diets, diets lacking in certain essential amino acids. Certain vegetarian diets can be very unhealthy. A good guideline here is "what did humans eat during the course of their evolution?" -- diets rather low on agricultural crops (grains and cereals - high carbo) and high on meats, fish, fruits (which is why we've lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C) and some vegetables.
Diets are just a way to quickly lose weight then to (just as quickly) gain it again. For the most part they're not effective in keeping pounds off permanently.
True of short term dieting, not true of permanent changes to dietary habits -- the latter is what Atkins recommends, after a short term "induction phase" to shift the metabolism. Of course, like many other diets, some people are happy with the weight lost during the induction phase then lapse back to old eating habits instead of staying in the "maintenance phase".
Alternatively (what some doctors suggest) is to do the Atkins short term to lose enough weight that regular exercise becomes an option. (If you're too overweight, anything beyond a bit of walking puts too much stress on knees, circulatory system, etc. and you physically cannot exercise enough to make much difference at first -- leading to discouragement and quitting the program. The Atkins gives positive feedback quickly.)
A general way to think about this is that what you get out is proportional to what you put in.
Proportional, yes, but that proportion varies according to the various metabolic pathways taken. Different people have different metabolisms. Conventional (and wrong through oversimplification) dietary wisdom is that caloric intake must equal caloric expenditure through exercise to maintain weight. This ignores a couple of factors: one, that food takes energy to digest, ie some calories are expended just converting food calories to a form expendable as exercise calories; and two, that the measurement technique for food calories is vastly oversimplified and doesn't take digestion effort into account. (Basically, they burn the food in a calorimetry bomb and measure the heat given off. This is not how the body utilizes food energy, obviously! Some foods -- celery, for example -- actually take more energy to eat and digest than they yield calorically.)
It also ignores the fact that exercise isn't the only way to use calories -- it's just the easiest to measure. In fact, the brain uses a lot of calories just thinking, and thinking hard (problem solving, etc) takes more than passive observation. (Although it appears that in high IQ people the brain is somewhat more efficient at using energy to solve a given problem.) That's probably the reason why many hackers aren't fatter than they are, given the food intake and exercise levels.
There are no free lunches.
And if there were, they'd probably be fattening.
Re:What about the dangers?
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It can be harsh on your kidneys if you consume a lot of protein without drinking enough water (as in straight H2O, not mixed with caffeine, coloring and sweetener). A high protein diet puts means more nitrogen (urea) to be excreted.
But, drinking plenty of water both negates the problem and also lowers your hunger level in the first place. If you're getting the kind of side effects you're talking about, you're doing some other high protein, low everything else diet, not Atkins (at least, not properly).
Oh, and there's a difference between "getting thin" and "reducing your weight" for a lot of people -- for many, the risk of kidney damage from an Atkins-like diet is far lower than the risks of not losing that weight (high blood pressure, cardiovascular damage, heart disease, back and knee problems from the extra weight, etc, etc).
What's with this "predators like warmth" crap everyone is spouting? Predators are a technological species, for cryin' out loud, if it's cold out they just turn up the heat on their clothing.
Sheesh. Humans like warmth too, and they're all over Antarctica.
Re:EJB is REALLY Bitter
on
Bitter EJB
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· Score: 1
Well, if you want to get minimalist:
#!/bin/sh echo "Hello World!"
I'll grant that for small projects, a language like Perl or Python can take less code and be superficially easier to understand that the equivalent Java. Right tool for the job, and all that.
The original poster's point, though, was that you had to understand all of Java before you could understand "Hello World", which is obviously not true.
At the other end of the scale, however, if I had a multi-hundred thousand lines of code, 30 programmer-year project to develop, I'd damn sure steer clear of Perl or Python for the bulk of it (though those might have some use for parts -- particularly Python as an embedded scripting language via Jython.)
I'll admit that I've shared your thoughts about the real raison d'etre for some of the more baroque parts of Java. Way back when I was learning on mainframes -- an IBM and a Burroughs -- with IBM's recommendation to most system problems being "buy more memory" or "upgrade", it occurred to me to always be suspicious of system software written by a hardware vendor. I have to admit to letting my guard down on that lately.
Re:Does it tell you when NOT to use EJB?
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 1
Hear, hear!
Yes, too many people see J2EE as synonymous with EJB and vice versa. Of course, that's where the bulk of Sun and nearly everbody else's focus is, but strictly speaking just doing JSP and servlets with Tomcat is also J2EE.
(And of course for small, non-critical systems you might well be better off going with something lighter weight like PHP.)
Re:EJB is REALLY Bitter
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 1
The problem with Java in general (not just EJB) is that you really need to grok the whole in order to understand a simple "Hello World" program
Oh, nonsense.
$ ls hello.java $ cat hello.java
class hello {
public static void main(String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello there!");
} }
The only thing different over a gcc or g++ compile is telling it which class's "main" you want to use.
Okay, granted, that's generating native code and not using javac, but that's not really any harder:
$ ls a.out hello.java $ javac hello.java $ ls a.out hello.class hello.java $ java hello Hello there! $
Stuff like CLASSPATH is no more complex than any other PATH concept, and from there it's easy to take a step at a time.
Sure, you're not going to understand an EJB implementation of "Hello World" (or even "Hello there!") at first glance any more than you are for any other complex app framework (Windows MFC, say), but that's not the language.
Re:EJB is REALLY Bitter
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 1
It is too huge for you.
I agree it can seem this way at first -- especially if you don't have previous exposure to some of associated technologies or you're trying to understand the concept in a vacuum without some concrete examples to work on.
I found "The J2EE Tutorial" (Bodoff et al, published by Adison Wesley but the content is also available on the web from Sun) very helpful by working through the simple examples.
Sure, it's still big, but you're not expected to remember all the details any more than anyone is expected to remember all the details of the various 'nix libraries. You get the basic concepts and common stuff down and you're most of the way there.
One of the benefits of being a republic rather than a democracy. We can hire representatives we trust (cough) to oversee things like this rather than exposing the details to all and sundry -- including our enemies.
The problem is just trying to hire good help these days.
Yarro, the CEO of Canopy, sits on trolltech's BOD.
That's hardly surprising. A 5% share will usually buy you a seat on the board, if you want it.
Trolltech owns 1.5% of scox, and trolltech refuses to divest themselves
Perhaps there are restrictions on what TT can do with that stock? Sounds like it might have been part of the investment deal in which Canopy bought their 5% of TT. Pointers to relevant docs, pls?
You misunderstood my point. It's because of the crypto regs that companies (or open source projects) that want to sell/give away strong crypto set themselves up in Canada rather than the US.
Not really, no. Canopy only owns about 5% of Troll Tech. There are other investors. Most of Troll Tech is owned by the employees (whom I'm sure would love to find a way to force Canopy to dump its shares).
No, there's No Such Agency. Move along, nothing to see here.
(Actually, for many years even the existence of the Agency was officially not acknowledged. AFAIK most if not all of its budget is still "black", ie doesn't show up in detail in the budget bills.)
It's probably a Canadian company because of the bizarre laws governing crypto in the US (although they're not as bad as they used to be). Same reason that a lot of OSS crypto projects, OpenBSD, etc are nominally HQ'd in Canada or other places outside the US.
The sudden quiet would instantly wake me up from a deep sleep.
Yeah, I read something once about the whole town of Niagara Falls suddenly waking up in the middle of the night because an ice dam upstream had cut off water flow to the Falls, and they went quiet.
Of course the usual exchange then goes something like:
I have a Coleman Peltier cooler big enough to put a computer in, but it's probably not worth it. The fan on the cooler (provides airflow over the peltier, the cooled air goes into the cooler, warm air out) is just as noisy as a computer fan, so you're not gaining much.
Oh, and be sure to get the polarity correct on the power plug. Hook it up backwards and it turns into a heater.
In the end, we didn't see sales drop off that much. Customers still wanted to order old-fashioned books.
That's exactly the idea behind Jim Baen's (Baen Books) Baen Free Library, where you can read online or download many of the books (SF and fantasy) he publishes.
From my understanding, no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form.
Then your understanding is incorrect. Amazon makes available the page where the search hit is found, plus the previous and subsequent two pages each, for a total of five pages per hit. In many cases (examples are given as cookbooks and travel books) this may be all the viewer cares about.
In other cases, it doesn't take much ingenuity to figure a way to get the whole book. (The Guild did 100-page sections, as proof.)
I had one of the old Apex DVD players with the IDE-compatible DVD drive in it. One day I put in a rental DVD that was perhaps a bit more scratched than usual. The player started OK then went slightly crazy, jumping to random blocks then just refusing to recognize that there was a disc.
Okay, no big deal (I thought). Eject, cycle the power, try again. Didn't recognize the disc. Tried another disc. Didn't recognize it, either. I finally pulled the drive out of the Apex and tried it in my computer. Still dead.
I know for a fact that the firmware on that player is upgradeable via a specially formatted disc. I don't imagine the random data from the bad DVD happened to match a "start programming" sequence, (which in any case upgrades the processor firmware, not the drive's) but it obviously triggered something bad. Or it could have just been coincidence that the drive died with that particular bad disk.
Sigh.
(I went out an bought another (different model) player and, since the new one was under warrantee, tried the bad DVD again. Didn't fry the player but wouldn't play properly either, too badly scratched.)
You're an idiot. The only control Sun has over Java is the use of "Java" as a trademark. A "copyrighted specification" just means you can copy verbatim the spec, not that you can't implement it.
Your opinion of Java is pretty obvious. But given your equally obvious lack of intelligence, that's probably a compliment.
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But if you're so weak-willed that you'd rather damage your body than make an effort
Ah, here we go, the "moral superiority" of the metabolically skinny.
Some people -- for whatever reason -- just don't like to eat as much as some others. For them, maintaining their weight isn't really a matter of "strong will", any more than it's a matter of strong will for me not to be an alcoholic. Did the partying and getting drunk in college, decided the negatives outweighed the positives, and just don't do that any more (not that I'm a teetotaler by any means). Does that mean that an alcoholic is just "weak willed"? Probably not, just means they've got a metabolic (or psychological) difference such that the urge to drink is a lot stronger in them than it is in me.
The trick, then, is (in either case), determining what combination of diet and lifestyle reduces those urges (whether to eat or drink) in the first place. Sure, sticking with that requires a certain amount of willpower. But you're making a mistake in assuming that this is something that would "damage your body". Popping diet pills or starving yourself will damage your body, but there's no indication that the Atkins (properly followed) would.
On top of all of that, diets high in proteins and fats (Like the Atkins diet) predispose folks to heart disease, strokes and diabetes.
That turns out not to be the case.
That is certainly not true for diabetes, which is aggravated by high carbo (especially simple carbs -- sugars) diets which put blood sugar levels through wild swings. Atkins-type diets reduce the risks of diabetes.
It also doesn't seem to be true of heart disease or strokes. The Atkins improves the HDL-LDL cholesterol ratio, and can reduce blood pressure (some of this is probably mechanically due to fat loss meaning a shorter circulatory system to push the blood through).
Fruits and veggies are certainly part of the Atkins diet, although they're more severely restricted during the two-week "induction" phase to get your metabolism kicked over to fat-burning. What is excluded (not totally) is refined sugars and high-starch foods, particularly grains and cereals. Makes sense, the latter have only been available for the last 5000 years or so of several million years of hominid evolution.
This has probably been said already but the most effective way to lose weight is good ol' fashioned healthy eating and regular exercise.
And like many oft-repeated platitudes, it contains a lot of falsehood around a little bit of truth.
First of "healthy eating" is meaningless without context. For many, the Atkins is healthy eating. Metabolism differs, what is healthy for some may not be for others. Sure, there are some things that are clearly unhealthy: excessive refined sugars, vitamin deficient diets, diets lacking in certain essential amino acids. Certain vegetarian diets can be very unhealthy. A good guideline here is "what did humans eat during the course of their evolution?" -- diets rather low on agricultural crops (grains and cereals - high carbo) and high on meats, fish, fruits (which is why we've lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C) and some vegetables.
Diets are just a way to quickly lose weight then to (just as quickly) gain it again. For the most part they're not effective in keeping pounds off permanently.
True of short term dieting, not true of permanent changes to dietary habits -- the latter is what Atkins recommends, after a short term "induction phase" to shift the metabolism. Of course, like many other diets, some people are happy with the weight lost during the induction phase then lapse back to old eating habits instead of staying in the "maintenance phase".
Alternatively (what some doctors suggest) is to do the Atkins short term to lose enough weight that regular exercise becomes an option. (If you're too overweight, anything beyond a bit of walking puts too much stress on knees, circulatory system, etc. and you physically cannot exercise enough to make much difference at first -- leading to discouragement and quitting the program. The Atkins gives positive feedback quickly.)
A general way to think about this is that what you get out is proportional to what you put in.
Proportional, yes, but that proportion varies according to the various metabolic pathways taken. Different people have different metabolisms. Conventional (and wrong through oversimplification) dietary wisdom is that caloric intake must equal caloric expenditure through exercise to maintain weight. This ignores a couple of factors: one, that food takes energy to digest, ie some calories are expended just converting food calories to a form expendable as exercise calories; and two, that the measurement technique for food calories is vastly oversimplified and doesn't take digestion effort into account. (Basically, they burn the food in a calorimetry bomb and measure the heat given off. This is not how the body utilizes food energy, obviously! Some foods -- celery, for example -- actually take more energy to eat and digest than they yield calorically.)
It also ignores the fact that exercise isn't the only way to use calories -- it's just the easiest to measure. In fact, the brain uses a lot of calories just thinking, and thinking hard (problem solving, etc) takes more than passive observation. (Although it appears that in high IQ people the brain is somewhat more efficient at using energy to solve a given problem.) That's probably the reason why many hackers aren't fatter than they are, given the food intake and exercise levels.
There are no free lunches.
And if there were, they'd probably be fattening.
It can be harsh on your kidneys if you consume a lot of protein without drinking enough water (as in straight H2O, not mixed with caffeine, coloring and sweetener). A high protein diet puts means more nitrogen (urea) to be excreted.
But, drinking plenty of water both negates the problem and also lowers your hunger level in the first place. If you're getting the kind of side effects you're talking about, you're doing some other high protein, low everything else diet, not Atkins (at least, not properly).
Oh, and there's a difference between "getting thin" and "reducing your weight" for a lot of people -- for many, the risk of kidney damage from an Atkins-like diet is far lower than the risks of not losing that weight (high blood pressure, cardiovascular damage, heart disease, back and knee problems from the extra weight, etc, etc).
What's with this "predators like warmth" crap everyone is spouting? Predators are a technological species, for cryin' out loud, if it's cold out they just turn up the heat on their clothing.
Sheesh. Humans like warmth too, and they're all over Antarctica.
The original poster's point, though, was that you had to understand all of Java before you could understand "Hello World", which is obviously not true.
At the other end of the scale, however, if I had a multi-hundred thousand lines of code, 30 programmer-year project to develop, I'd damn sure steer clear of Perl or Python for the bulk of it (though those might have some use for parts -- particularly Python as an embedded scripting language via Jython.)
I'll admit that I've shared your thoughts about the real raison d'etre for some of the more baroque parts of Java. Way back when I was learning on mainframes -- an IBM and a Burroughs -- with IBM's recommendation to most system problems being "buy more memory" or "upgrade", it occurred to me to always be suspicious of system software written by a hardware vendor. I have to admit to letting my guard down on that lately.
Hear, hear!
Yes, too many people see J2EE as synonymous with EJB and vice versa. Of course, that's where the bulk of Sun and nearly everbody else's focus is, but strictly speaking just doing JSP and servlets with Tomcat is also J2EE.
(And of course for small, non-critical systems you might well be better off going with something lighter weight like PHP.)
Oh, nonsense.The only thing different over a gcc or g++ compile is telling it which class's "main" you want to use.
Okay, granted, that's generating native code and not using javac, but that's not really any harder:Stuff like CLASSPATH is no more complex than any other PATH concept, and from there it's easy to take a step at a time.
Sure, you're not going to understand an EJB implementation of "Hello World" (or even "Hello there!") at first glance any more than you are for any other complex app framework (Windows MFC, say), but that's not the language.
It is too huge for you.
I agree it can seem this way at first -- especially if you don't have previous exposure to some of associated technologies or you're trying to understand the concept in a vacuum without some concrete examples to work on.
I found "The J2EE Tutorial" (Bodoff et al, published by Adison Wesley but the content is also available on the web from Sun) very helpful by working through the simple examples.
Sure, it's still big, but you're not expected to remember all the details any more than anyone is expected to remember all the details of the various 'nix libraries. You get the basic concepts and common stuff down and you're most of the way there.
One of the benefits of being a republic rather than a democracy. We can hire representatives we trust (cough) to oversee things like this rather than exposing the details to all and sundry -- including our enemies.
The problem is just trying to hire good help these days.
Yarro, the CEO of Canopy, sits on trolltech's BOD.
That's hardly surprising. A 5% share will usually buy you a seat on the board, if you want it.
Trolltech owns 1.5% of scox, and trolltech refuses to divest themselves
Perhaps there are restrictions on what TT can do with that stock? Sounds like it might have been part of the investment deal in which Canopy bought their 5% of TT. Pointers to relevant docs, pls?
You misunderstood my point. It's because of the crypto regs that companies (or open source projects) that want to sell/give away strong crypto set themselves up in Canada rather than the US.
Not really, no. Canopy only owns about 5% of Troll Tech. There are other investors. Most of Troll Tech is owned by the employees (whom I'm sure would love to find a way to force Canopy to dump its shares).
They have a monopoly of operating systems running on Macintosh comuputer.
Um, no, they don't.
There actually is an NSA?
No, there's No Such Agency. Move along, nothing to see here.
(Actually, for many years even the existence of the Agency was officially not acknowledged. AFAIK most if not all of its budget is still "black", ie doesn't show up in detail in the budget bills.)
It's probably a Canadian company because of the bizarre laws governing crypto in the US (although they're not as bad as they used to be). Same reason that a lot of OSS crypto projects, OpenBSD, etc are nominally HQ'd in Canada or other places outside the US.
The sudden quiet would instantly wake me up from a deep sleep.
Yeah, I read something once about the whole town of Niagara Falls suddenly waking up in the middle of the night because an ice dam upstream had cut off water flow to the Falls, and they went quiet.
Of course the usual exchange then goes something like:
"What was that?"
"Huh? I don't hear anything."
"Hmm, neither do I. Oh, wait..."
I have a Coleman Peltier cooler big enough to put a computer in, but it's probably not worth it. The fan on the cooler (provides airflow over the peltier, the cooled air goes into the cooler, warm air out) is just as noisy as a computer fan, so you're not gaining much.
Oh, and be sure to get the polarity correct on the power plug. Hook it up backwards and it turns into a heater.
It's really C-Hash.
Or as Microsoft execs like to pronounce it amongst themselves, cash.
In the end, we didn't see sales drop off that much. Customers still wanted to order old-fashioned books.
That's exactly the idea behind Jim Baen's (Baen Books) Baen Free Library, where you can read online or download many of the books (SF and fantasy) he publishes.
From my understanding, no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form.
Then your understanding is incorrect. Amazon makes available the page where the search hit is found, plus the previous and subsequent two pages each, for a total of five pages per hit. In many cases (examples are given as cookbooks and travel books) this may be all the viewer cares about.
In other cases, it doesn't take much ingenuity to figure a way to get the whole book. (The Guild did 100-page sections, as proof.)
No wonder authors are annoyed.
Okay, slightly OT, but...
I had one of the old Apex DVD players with the IDE-compatible DVD drive in it. One day I put in a rental DVD that was perhaps a bit more scratched than usual. The player started OK then went slightly crazy, jumping to random blocks then just refusing to recognize that there was a disc.
Okay, no big deal (I thought). Eject, cycle the power, try again. Didn't recognize the disc. Tried another disc. Didn't recognize it, either. I finally pulled the drive out of the Apex and tried it in my computer. Still dead.
I know for a fact that the firmware on that player is upgradeable via a specially formatted disc. I don't imagine the random data from the bad DVD happened to match a "start programming" sequence, (which in any case upgrades the processor firmware, not the drive's) but it obviously triggered something bad. Or it could have just been coincidence that the drive died with that particular bad disk.
Sigh.
(I went out an bought another (different model) player and, since the new one was under warrantee, tried the bad DVD again. Didn't fry the player but wouldn't play properly either, too badly scratched.)
PET - Personal Electronic Transactor.
Hence the name of the (long gone) magazine for Commodore owners, The Transactor.
My wife's dad had one, complete with small keyboard and built-in cassette tape drive.
You're an idiot. The only control Sun has over Java is the use of "Java" as a trademark. A "copyrighted specification" just means you can copy verbatim the spec, not that you can't implement it.
Your opinion of Java is pretty obvious. But given your equally obvious lack of intelligence, that's probably a compliment.
Lol, I'd be willing to bet if Sun went under there would be some major difficulties in the industry.
How much money are you willing to lose on that bet?
There are plenty of free or open source and third party sources for Java compilers, JVMs, bytecode compilers, class libraries and related apps.
Sun could disappear tomorrow and Java would continue.